Genesis of the quiet, and eminently conceptive lawgiver of the great patriarch's descendants. Ask yourselves, how could it have been preserved otherwise than as it is, say as an analysed spiritual phenomenon, such as I have shown you? And if it, and all the world-old ark of faith of which it is only one beautiful gem, had not been transmitted from age to age, where had Moses and the Prophets been with their indignant defiance of idolatry; where, with reverent admiration of the good providence of God be it asked, the ever-blessed Christ and his crowning gospel; Paul and his adaptation of that gospel to the human mind grown analytical; the partial regeneration of the Roman empire for the wisest of purposes; the impregnation of Europe with an inextinguishable germ of Christianism before the roaring torrent of barbaric hosts could come and sweep it away for ever; and the Genesis of our growing Christendom, with its restless energies unconsciously struggling towards repose, like a giant in troubled sleep, who will awake, wonder at his garish agonies, and walk forth in indomitable strength? Moreover, but for this riverlike spiritual history of our marvellous age (for every age is its own greatest miracle, as every man is his), there had been no need of translating the language of unconscious faith, employed thirty centuries ago by a desert legislator, in telling his wandering people how their valiant ancestry had stood to the fight of life, into the phraseology of analytical fidianism, in order to fill the aching void which now yawns in many an earnest heart between the scepticism of the last century and the ultra-fidianism just opening on the present. Such manner of translation is the next thing theologians have to do to meet the hungry necessities of an army of inquirers, fearfully dead to the irrefragable reality of religious duty, though

it has given over infidelity, and wanders about in dreadful uncertainty, not knowing what to believe and do, as well it may, in the midst of such spiritless interpretations almost everywhere. Let the example of Saint Paul be strenuously imitated by the leaders of the host, whose high and bounden duty it is, like him, to adapt the doctrine of the gospel to the accumulating results of general investigation in the successive times in which they teach; and that not by any kind of trimming of the everlasting word, but by so producing it as to satisfy every ear that it is in the divinest harmony with every other true word that has been spoken. The apostolic leader did this for Jerusalem and Rome in his day; let them try to do it for Europe in theirs. He has shown the way, having gone as far as there was any need for when he lived; but they must not ignobly stop where he has left them, seeing everything else has advanced so far, and so many new spiritual appetencies have sprung up to be appeased. No! cased in his invincible breastplate of faith, and armed with his two-edged sword of spiritual discernment, let them bravely stand to every danger, and grapple with every difficulty like the ministers of salvation: So accoutred, it is not in man to dare enough. Alas! cowardice in this task was the proximate cause of the withering unbelief which even yet broods over the face of British society, though it has unquestionably begun to pass away: And I tremble to see the same cowardice now becoming the source of a diluted universal fidianism; a new misbelief, which is almost as different from the specific faith of Christianity, and the clear faithphilosophy of Saint Paul, as infidelity itself. Ay! and it has produced a more fatal curse than even these; a kind of mole-eyed half-belief among the multitude, who have not strength enough to fling themselves off the rock

on which they were born, clung to by them not in fear or empyrean hope, but solely because they cannot venture away. This is the worst state of all. Why, Infidelity and universal fidianism both meet Christianity half way; the former asserting the right of analysis which Christianity admits, and its failure in discovering either God or salvation, which Saint Paul pointed out long ago, though with a very different conclusion; and the latter proclaiming the supremacy of faith, which is the foundation of the universe, and on which Christianity is reared. Take even poor thirsty Materialism, spite of all the contempt which has been heaped upon it by half-believers of every grade, and I will say it is better than such religion. Does it not ennoble matter more than it degrades spirit, and deify the visible universe more than it unthrones God? Reply charitably. What is matter? An aggregation of atoms and what is an atom? A centralised force of repulsion and what is force? Can you see, any more than poor Materialism with its one eye? But, be that unfathomable mystery as it may, the Materialist has, at least, thought about things; and the spiritual and physical phenomena of the universe are the same to him as to you; so that if he feelingly assign them all to matter, what a Divine-seeming power must MATTER be to him! and how superior to the drivel of complacent half-belief, which has never thought at all, but assigns these phenomena to a name. Yes, brothers! half-belief in the blessed Bible, especially when mistaken for full faith, is worse than either infidelity or general fidianism; and, from a somewhat copious experience in different countries as well as in many different classes of society, I infer, and believe, that among the younger men there is almost no other than such sleek half-belief now extant in Great Britain. Catechise them about God's dealings with the Jews,

prophecy, miracles, salvation by faith, or the incarnation,

and you will see.

They neither believe nor disbelieve in the very devil: but how can it be otherwise, if no one will tell them what the book of books wholly means, that they may know what they are to believe and do with all their might? This is the urgent problem for the Church to try. For the sake of the glory of the Everlasting, and the wellbeing of man, let it be solved.

We must always deduce some useful rule of life for the hour of trial from our Sabbath-evening themes. Such instruction is not far to seek to-night.

It is a serious thing to die: ay, but it is more serious still to live. This world of ours is no opera-house for lightsome plays of many-coloured life, or battle-field for crowns, or hunting-ground for wild sports, or warehouse for merchandise, or arena for shows and games of competition, or university in the commonwealth of stars for all kinds of study, or even a pleasant land of homes for domestic quietude; nor yet is it a sink in the galaxy of sun and planets for loathsome frolic, nor an hospital for the diseases of the universe, nor a treadmill to grind poor man in nay! it may be all these together by sufferance of the Creator, but it is a myriadfold more by His grace. Here we are but whence have we hastened hither? and whither are we hurrying away so fast? Analysis cannot tell. Faith can only say, From God to God again. How shall we best return to Him from whom we have come forth? By the path of duty, according to the universal faith of mankind: but where is that narrow way, that we may know to enter? That, the specific faith of Christianity alone can teach, few and simple though the details be; but the subject in hand relates to only one of these. The religion of Abraham was the religion of boundless

allegiance to infinite Godhood, as revealed by indwelling conscience; the written law having not yet arrived.

Believe in God, not by mock evidences and dead demonstrations, but by faith; believe in the infinitude of duty, and that, too, by living faith; and I defy you not to strive with agonies as great as Abraham's to discharge the obligation, even as you fly from devouring fires in the existence of which, and their destructive power over your shrinking flesh, you believe by faith too, as we have seen already, and shall illustrate at length some other evening. All the difference between Abraham and you, on the one hand, and between yourselves as conscious creatures living in an inward world, and yourselves as sentient inhabitants of a solid external world, is one of faith. Believe in the incomputable obligation of moral duty, say the duty of doing justice, as earnestly as the shipwrecked mariner believes the raving sea around him to be a hungry grave; and you will either struggle to do justly, or give it over in despair, and be lost. It is not enough that, upon occasional reflection, or in transient moments of insight, you say, I believe in God and duty: you must believe without reflection, and as instinctively, unfailingly, and irresistibly, as you believe in the thirst by which you are consumed, and in the healing waters by which alone your thirst can be assuaged. This is living faith.

This threefold object of faith-God, conscience, and duty, which unites them-is the first stone of our most holy religion; we shall afterwards see how the second and third were successively added; till the chief cornerstone itself was laid. Nor is it ever superseded, but shall be at the bottom of every Christian life till the end of time. WHATSOEVER A MAN KNOWS TO BE HIS DUTY AND YET REFRAINS FROM DOING, BE THE THING EVER SO LITTLE