with sacrifices of blood; how the prophets lifted up their voices against such practices, and taught that a God of righteousness could only be served by men who desired to be righteous too. Then came the Perfect Man, the true Son of God, offering His whole life to His Father, and acting over in the sight of men the spiritual sacrifice with which alone a holy God could be well pleased.

If, therefore, you want evidence to show you how the strongest faith in the sympathy of the Almighty could be united with a love of goodness and justice and truth for their own sakes, without fear of consequences, look to the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act over again His conquest of self in your daily conduct, until at last, by persevering in His spirit, you are able to say even with greater depth of meaning and spirituality of thought than the Psalmist ever dreamed of, "Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?"

XVII.

The Majesty of “Right.”

"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”—Gen. xviii. 25.

We know not by whom these words were first written, but they come to us as the words of Abraham, the friend of God; Abraham, the father of the faithful; the great patriarch to whom the promise came that in him all the families of the earth should be blessed. He is said to have lived some nineteen hundred years before the birth of Him in Whom that promise was fulfilled, so that we are carried back in thought to a period of three or four thousand years ago, when the man of faith, the spiritual hero, first lived who could say and feel that, of all the certain things that man may know, the most certain thing of all must be that the Judge of all the earth is sure to do right.

We boast of our civilization and progress, and of the increasing power of man to replenish the earth and subdue it; we boast of our nineteen centuries of Christian teaching, and think with pity on the darkness and ignorance of men who were not blessed with

our opportunities of knowledge; and yet how many are there of us whose faith in the majesty and divinity of right is as firm and decided as that of the patriarch of old, so that like him we can hear God's answering voice, saying, "Fear not: I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward; " or again, in the words to Jacob, "Behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in the way wherein thou goest; for I will not leave thee, nor forsake thee, until I have done that of which I have spoken to thee of"? Here is the very basis of all true religion. "For he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is the Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." And when we have spent years and years in doing our best to draw men to Him. and serve Him, what is our ground of hope but this, that the great Being Who created us--the Power that is moulding our lives-is sure to do right; that He will never leave us nor forsake us until He has fulfilled the promises which He has written on the heart of man, and that, come what may, He is Himself our Shield and exceeding great Reward? And so it was that when a late eminent writer had to lecture on the history of the Jewish Church, he traced its beginnings, not to the time when some stately fane first rose in honour of God, or when a regular order of priests was established to offer a daily sacrifice; but he traced them to the

1

I think I have seen this remark made before somewhere, but do not know where.

time when an Arab sheik first felt himself called to separate himself from the idolatry by which he was surrounded, and which he had himself inherited from his fathers—the idolatry which bowed down in terror before the unseen powers of nature-in order that he might dedicate himself to the service and follow the voice of the one true God, the Lord of heaven and earth, the Judge Who was sure to do right, and in committing himself to Whose guidance he knew that he was committing himself to the guidance of One Who would never leave nor forsake; for it was the guidance of the Being Who had implanted in his heart this strong reverence for right, and Who must, therefore, Himself be right and true and good, beyond anything that he could ask or think. And this reverence for right, I repeat, is the basis of all true religion. We have a life to live-there must be a right and a wrong way of living it. We know that it is due from us to live it as well as we can-due from us to the Power or Being from Whom it came, and from Whom it is consequently due to us that we should reap the appropriate fruit of the lives we have led. When, therefore, a man feels that the path of duty lies clearly before him, and is determined to follow it, he may be said to have faith, which is the answer of a good conscience, the response of the soul to the voice of God within. "No man," saith St. John, "hath seen God at any time;" "Ye have neither heard His voice, nor seen

His shape," said our blessed Lord. But we may hear Him speaking by the inner voice of conscience, saying, "This is the way: walk ye in it;" and those who have faith to obey that voice and follow it whithersoever it may lead, feel in return that God is writing in their hearts-in the very tissues of their being-the promise that He will never leave them nor forsake them, until they have seen of the travail of their souls and are satisfied.

Thus faith is not opposed to reason, as so many people seem to fear, but is itself the very highest exercise of reason.

"For reason says, 'If there's a Power above us-
And that there is, all Nature cries aloud

Through all her works-He must delight in virtue;
And that which He delights in must be happy.""

Whilst faith is the energy of the soul within, which, the moment this thought of the righteousness and love and sympathy of God has become clear to the mind, leaps up joyfully in answer to the revelation, and yields itself trustfully to the guidance of the Power from Whom it came.

Time was when the human mind had not advanced far enough to recognize the unity of God, still less His righteousness and love. Man's reverence was only the reverence of fear with respect to that which he thought could harm him most. So he made idols to represent the powers which seemed to him the