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indescribable melancholy brooding over the place, and Justin paused in the darkness with his face turned towards it.

to himself, and hold the estate in his own hand till he saw how Richard would turn out. | It was quite dark by the time he came to this conclusion, and he could no longer see He knew very well it would look little less the narrow and dangerous track he was fol- desolate and jail-like by daylight. The lowing over the cliffs. The tide had turned, grounds and gardens about Rillage Grange and was now booming like the roar of distant were overgrown with nettles and docks; the artillery against the black rocks strewn with gates were hanging upon rust-eaten hinges; seaweed five hundred feet below him. It there were breaches in all the moss-covered would scarcely be safe even for him to return walls; even the outbuildings of the house by the path he had come. He had left Her- were falling into ruins, and no man's hand ford Bay far behind him, and was nearing had done a stroke of repairs to the dreary the edge of another and narrower valley, spot for years past. Squire Lynn was the stretching inward from its own little cove. reprobate of the neighbourhood; a hard He could already see the lights scattered drinker, a gambler, and a scoundrel, who had about the front of a large and wandering been the destruction of Justin's younger habitation, almost as familiar to him as Her- brother, and the ruin of most of the men who ford Court. With the exception of three or had associated with him. Yet as he stood four servants' cottages, there was no other there in the darkness a smile stole across his house in the little valley. Tenfold more face, though he sighed with a strong feeling lonely and still than Herford, these few home- of troubled tenderness rising in his heart. steads must be surpassingly dreary and solitary "Would to God!" he said to himself, "that in the night. The deep, hoarse baying of Diana was my wife at this moment. It would a ferocious watch-dog echoed through the be good for her as well as for myself; and I silence, and was answered only by the mono- could tell her what I can tell to no one tonous thunder of the waves. There was an else."

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THE WILL OF THE FATHER.

BY THE REV. DR. BUTLER, HEAD-MASTER OF HARROW.

THE
HERE are two thoughts brought before
us here. The one is the will of God;
the other is one of the objects of that will,
that none of those whom Christ calls "little.
ones" should perish.

that

"It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish."-ST. MATT. xviii. 14. did a single speech of man work such extraordinary and lasting results as of Urban II. at the Council of Clermont. . . The Pontiff could scarcely conclude his speech; he was interrupted by ill-suppressed murmurs of grief and indignation. At its close one loud and simultaneous cry broke forth: It is the will of God! It is the will of God!"

I would speak to you of the will of God, not as a mystery, but as a power. I do not ask you to enter on the speculation what the will of God is, whether it might also be justly named the law of the universe; whether it is absolute, acting independently of all conditions; whether a thing is right because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is right. All these are profound mysteries on which I have no call to speak, and you, perhaps, would be but little disposed to listen.

No! I speak of the will of God as a power, acting upon men's hearts. We all need power from on high, and there is no power so mighty, whether to stir or to soothe the heart of man, as the thought of the will of God.

I say whether to stir or to soothe. Let me throw light on both these parts of its power by two anecdotes. Many of those whom I address must at some time of their lives have made the journey to Paris. Some of them, in going or returning, will have spent a few quiet hours under the shadow of the cathedral of Amiens, one of the spots which more than most others recalls the past history of ancient France in what are called, sometimes in regret, sometimes in derision, the Ages of Faith. Close to the east end of that glorious cathedral, in the centre of a small open space, stands the statue of an orator, holding in his hand a crucifix, and speaking with impassioned voice and gesture. Below his feet, on the massive pedestal, are inscribed the words, Dieu le veut. It is the will of God!

Who, do you suppose, is that orator, and what is the historical event to which those words refer? The orator is Peter the Hermit, a native of Amiens, and the event is the first csade. In the year 1094 a council was held at Clermont by Pope Urban II. He spoke to an audience already charged to fever heat by the fiery eloquence of Peter. It has been written by a sober, sometimes almost a cold, historian,* " Never, perhaps,

* Milman's " History of Latin Christianity," Book vii., Chap. vi. VII. N.S.

The thought of the will of God is, as I said, mighty to stir. It is also mighty to soothe. Fourteen years ago the aged Archbishop of Dublin lay on what proved to be his dying bed. He was a man, as many here must know, unmatched for keenness and hardness of intellect, for physical energy, and for sharpness of wit. He was now in his seventy-seventh year, suffering intense physical pain, and well knowing that this pain must follow him even to the end. "His uselessness," as he calls it, was the especial trial to his active spirit. "One day," writes his chaplain, "when I went to see him, on my entering his study he looked up, and said, with tears in his eyes, 'Have you ever preached a sermon on the text, "Thy will be done?" How do you explain it ?' When I replied, 'Just so,' he said, that is the meaning;' and added, in a voice choked with tears, 'But it is hard-very hard sometimes-to say it.'"

These two instances, so different in all else, are alike in this, that they make us think of the will of God. If they teach any lesson at all, they teach us that we may obey the will of God in action, and that we may obey the will of God in suffering. There is a bond, not of mortal framing, which links together the enthusiasm of the crusader and the resignation of the dying. At this point the two extremes meet. Our greatest activity, our greatest feebleness, here come together under the eye of Him who is at once the Almighty, and the Father who doth not afflict willingly. Our energy and our weakness alike seem to say: "Follow the counsel of St. Paul; strive to learn the ore lesson of life-that, in all your work and in all your trials, you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.'"

And let us not imagine, Christian friends, that it is easy to learn that lesson. The best of us learns it very slowly, and amid countless mistakes. The crusaders had not learned

2

it, though they thought they had learned it, though they gave so magnificent a proof of its power, though thousands of them even died in the faith that they were fighting for the will of God.

We who look back on their splendid devotion, we who have learned more of the spirit of our Master, we can see that they mistook the Divine will. To turn Europe loose upon Asia, to unchain in the name of religion every fierce and vengeful passion, to make the streets of Jerusalem run knee-deep in blood to avenge the wrongs done to a crucified Saviour-this was an error, this was fanaticism, this was not the will of the Father in heaven, who willed not that any of His little ones should perish. This assuredly, though an act of passionate faith, was not "the good and acceptable and perfect will of God." For the curbing of ill-tempered zeal, for the "warning of vehement, high, and daring natures," who know what it is to hate sin, but know not yet what it is to love sinners, let us hear the terrible admission of the Christian historian, when recording the capture of Jerusalem by the first crusaders, those devoted champions of the supposed will of God. "No barbarian," he says, "no infidel, no Saracen, ever perpetrated such wanton and cold-blooded atrocities of cruelty as the wearers of the Cross of Christ, who, it is said, had fallen on their knees and burst into a pious hymn at the first view of the Holy City."

Christian brethren, let me tell you what this history says to ourselves. We want the crusading spirit without the crusaders' mistakes. We want strong characters, strong loves, strong hatreds, strong resolutions. Above all, we want the conviction, It is the will of God! Without this conviction nothing great was ever done. Look at the lives of great men. You will see that their greatness is always due, when you pierce to the centre, to this conviction, graven on their inmost conscience, and transfused into their very life-blood, It is the will of God. It is not their tact, or knowledge, or high-breeding, or physical courage-no, nor even their moral courage that has made them remove mountains of loathsome abuses, and hurl them into the sea of contemptuous forgetfulness. It has been their faith, their certain assurance that they were acting not for themselves, but for Another; in a word, their conviction, It is the will of God. Before this conviction all smaller wills have gone down. All mere gentlemanly hesitations, and sham conventionalities, and anxieties not to go too far,

and lookings back to see if any, and who, were following-all such doomed imbecilities have gone down like leaves before the hurricane. The strong men have stormed the kingdom of heaven. Or, in plain English, the right has been done and the evil has been exterminated by the faith of men who laughed to scorn their puny opponents, strong in that unfeigned, that uncompromising, ay at times that pitiless conviction, It is the will of God.

I have said above that it is not always easy to discern the will of God. But there is one object of the will of God which is seldom dark to the Christian eye. God wills the rescue of weakness. "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish."

Let us for the moment try to look upon the world with the eyes of Christ. He came to found a new kingdom. The one ambition was to be righteousness. The one law was to be love. Hard at best would be the struggle of His servants to keep faithful to their troth. Their own inward frailty would too often be taking up rebel arms. But besides this inherent frailty, He saw the world full of offences-full of obstacles of man's planting, full of things making it hard to walk upright, and only too easy to trip and fall. And as He thought of the many weak ones who would be kept from Him by these offences-kept from Him while on their way to Him, stretching out weak hands to Him, calling to Him with feeble voices-His human heart swelled with pity and indignation. He denounced His most awful woe on all who should offend one of His little ones, and all this He based on the will of His heavenly Father, who willed not that one of them should perish.

Who, then, are the "little ones" of whom the Saviour speaks? Let history and human nature and our own experience give the answer. It is a solemn and a pathetic procession that passes before us. It is the company of the wronged, the oppressed, the neglected, the forgotten, the ignorant, the tempted, the corrupted, the fallen. No nation is unrepresented in that obscure army of unrecognised martyrs. Men are there, and women in cruel numbers, and little children. If the question be addressed to the history of the Christian Church, Who have been your "little ones"? one age would reply, "The victims of the imperial persecutions;" and another, "The Albigenses that were massacred by Innocent III. ;" and another, "The countless victims, Christian

and Jewish, of the Spanish Inquisition." These venerable walls,* and the walls of our great metropolitan cathedral, are sacred with the memories of men who would all have a voice in defining Christ's "little ones." Howard would reply, "The hapless dwellers in our gaols." Wilberforce would reply, "The West Indian slaves." Dickens would reply, "The poor children in the workhouse." Burke, whose dust lies at his own home, would say, "The millions of India." Many now would say, "The millions of Bulgaria." Others, who know something of the work that has been done by the best men and women of England during the forty years of this eventful reign, will carry back their thoughts to the factory, and to the mine, and to the agricultural gang, and to the dark chimney, and to the ragged school, and to the training ship, and to the reformatory, and to the penitentiary, and to the migration to Canada. To such persons the mere allusion to these well-known names will summon up troop after troop of Christ's "little ones," all of whom were ready to perish, some of whom have been plucked from the deeps of ruin, not by chance, nor by an enlightened regard for self-interest, nor by abstract pity for suffering, nor even by the sacred passion of patriotism, but by the Christian zeal and Christian devotion of minds haunted by the declaration of their Master, that it was not the will of His Father and theirs that one of His little ones should perish.

And do not imagine, Christian friends, that what was with these good men and women an instinct, is one of the primary instincts of human nature. It is not so. The primary instinct of human nature is to let weakness be sacrificed. In old days of civilised Paganism, if a new-born child seemed weakly, it was exposed and suffered to die. As to slaves, we know what were the instincts of civilised Paganism as interpreted by some of the most exalted intellects that the world has ever seen. And even now it is the priest and the Levite who represent but too faithfully the primary instinct of humanity, which takes suffering and degradation for granted, assumes that there must be waste and ruin, casts upon the fallen an eye of criticism more or less curious, more or less indifferent, and then, with some commonplace on the law of averages or the struggle for existence, "passes by on the other side."

"It must needs be that offences come." The weak and the unsuspecting must trip,

* Preached in Westminster Abbey.

and must fall. So far the spirit of Christ is in agreement with the spirit of the world. Each uses the same words, but with how dif ferent a feeling, and with what different deductions. The commonplace man of the world says it with a shrug of the shoulder, as a conclusive reason for leaving matters as they are, for leaving nations to their fate, men to their fate, weak women to their fate, even little children to their fate. In Western Europe there is no such fatalist as a coldhearted man of the world, entrenched behind the statistics of degradation. The thing must be. There must be waste in the human world as in the world of nature. "Of fifty seeds," so the poet reminds us, nature" brings but one to bear." The general who has to cross a great river in the face of the enemy, makes up his mind beforehand to sacrifice twenty thousand, perhaps thirty thousand, of his soldiers. That is the tribute which ambition pays to waste. There are inferior races, and lower classes, and insignificant members in each race and class, and it is by their necessary, if not voluntary, abasement that the power, the leisure, the refinement, nay, even the purity of the upper is preserved and transmitted. Let us not, then, be too much shocked by "offences." Peace to the world because of offences, for it must needs be that offences come.

So speaks, or thinks, the spirit of the world. But, oh! how different the tone of the spirit of Christ. There is one occasion, only one, recorded on which Jesus rejoiced in spirit. It was at the thought that things hidden from the wise and prudent had been revealed by the common Father unto babes. Does not this joy of the Saviourmay I venture to say, without irreverence, this chivalrous joy?-help us to measure the anguish with which that opposite reference to weakness fell from His lips? "Woe unto the world because of offences, for it must needs be that offences come. . . . It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish."

Where the world sees necessary waste, Jesus sees the material for rescue. Where the world sees the law of the average, Jesus sees the will of the Father. The world sees bodies, instruments, servitude: Jesus sees souls, personal responsibility, the glorious liberty of the children of God. The world reposes in torpid acquiescence: Jesus is fired by a holy impatience. The world says, "Va victis. No hope for the mass of the miserable ones;" Jesus says, "See that ye despise not one of these little ones."

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