according to His will, He heareth us. The older we get, and the longer we persevere in loving and following the thing that is right-nay, the more disappointments and rebuffs we meet with-the more will the conviction grow and deepen in our hearts that there is a "rising and increasing purpose running through the ages, and through the affairs of men, and the events of our own personal experience," and that they who trust in God, by trusting in that which is right and good, shall never be confounded.

If, then, any of us are inclined to become languid and wavering in our faith, to sigh for a fresh revelation, or despairingly exclaim, "Who will show us any good?" let the words of the patriarch of old, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" sound in our ears and revive it. Surely, if in what we now regard as the childhood of the human race there was one man found who trusted and loved the right to such an extent, that it was as clear as daylight to him that the Being Who made him must at least equally trust it and love it too, is it not a disgrace to us, the professed followers of the Son of God, the heirs of His strengthening Spirit, and who have witnessed the accomplishment of the things that Abraham desired to see, if our sense of right is so weak and faint that we can hear no answering voice in our hearts, saying, "Fear not: I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward;" "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee"?

I say, is it not a disgrace?-for as men judge of others by themselves, so do they judge of God by what they feel conscious of in their own hearts. If you trust a dearly loved friend, is it not because you feel yourself worthy of a similar trust, and you judge of his love by your love to him? It is not that you think either yourself or him free from faults, but that you have faith in right, you have faith in love. And so we know, if our hearts are in the right place, that the love of God is greater than all our shortcomings, and that "if we, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto our children, how much more shall our Father Which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?'

XVIII.

Es the Love of God and Man Sufficient?

"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man."ECCLES. xii. 13.

"This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments."1 JOHN V. 3.

SOME time ago I met with a remark-I think in a letter to the Times-from some well-known man, that although he did not regard himself as being a very religious person, so soon as he could meet with any section of the Christian Church that taught a religion like that of Him it professed to follow, and which according to Him consisted in love towards God and man, he would be ready to join himself to it with all his heart and soul. But whenever he entered a place of worship he scarcely ever heard the teaching of the great Master Himself inculcated and enforced. It was apparently passed over as something too simple and rudimentary for the instruction of Christian men, and instead of it he had to listen to the enforcement of some eleventh commandment, some ecclesiastical custom, some nineteenth-century fad for the improvement of the human

race, as if men had not yet learned through Christ to find access to the great Father of all, and still required the exhortation of the prophet to ring in their ears, "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, and ten thousands of measures of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

More recently it occurred to me to hear two persons conversing on the same subject, and whilst one of them expressed very similar opinions to those of the man I have already noticed, and wound up by saying that when Christ had said that the sum of all the commandments consisted in the love of God and man-when His beloved Apostle said, "This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments;" and another Apostle, "Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world"—this was quite enough religion for him, and he felt not the want of further teaching. The other, though reverencing at least equally with himself the authority of our Lord and His Apostles,

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exclaimed equally decidedly, and in spite of the language which I have just quoted, "Such teaching is not sufficient." Why it was not sufficient he did not attempt to say. But I have tried to think very frequently since why it was that this particular person considered such plain teaching deficient, and what it was that his mind was craving for, which prevented him from finding his own religious instincts satisfied by the teaching of our Lord and His Apostles, although he would be extremely shocked if any one told him that he was showing no respect to their authority.

That he did crave for religious consolation I know full well, and there must be numbers of people who are more or less like him.

Could we who have to speak Sunday after Sunday on the subject of religion only understand what is passing in the minds of those who have to listen to what we say, could we only discover what the particular deficiency is which this or that person requires to have supplied, it would not only make our task much easier and simpler, but perhaps help to render it somewhat less tedious and uninteresting than it must now appear to be.

There are, of course, people who would answer with much satisfaction to themselves, It is the duty of a clergyman simply to preach the gospel. But if you inquired what they meant by preaching the gospel,