learn and adopt. They may be known; but they are not acknowledged, at least by its life. Can any candid observer of its attitude towards the world-towards the godless at home and abroad, at the present moment, say that it expresses anything like this conviction deeply impressed upon its heart? I have a mission to the world. A glorious embassy and office. A work most pressing to be done; for whose accomplishment the world wails and agonizes, though it knows it not. On whose success depends the adjustment of all that is disordered; the extinction of all that is deplorable; the introduction of all that can be desired in the world;-the demolition of tyrannies, slaveries, injustices, undue inequalities, insolences of power and pride, superstitions, blinding and degrading faiths;-the expulsion of wars and envyings, vices, and their prolific woes: which shall blend the confused jarring din of earth's wrathful strife into harmony, and spread an air of peace and love, like balmy odour, over the world. A mission in whose discharge I have the co-operation of God, and the interested sympathy of all holy watchers of God's rule in the world. For whose performance I have all means and all encouragements, including that greatest of all incitements, the impossibility of failure, the certainty of success.' Is that the spirit that breathes in the Christian activities of our age? Does such a conviction as that indicate itself in each of all our many and multiplying schemes? Is there any sign amongst us of a deep-seated, moving consciousness that we have a mission; that God has gathered us into his Church, not merely to save us, and educate and sanctify us; but that we may, as his agents, save and educate and sanctify the world? Is it apparent to all beyond a doubt (as it should be, if we have any such mission), that we are blending with our cultivation of personal piety, with the working out of our salvation with fear and trembling,' a constant, ceaseless, earnest attempt at the recovery of the world for God, and the regeneration of its disordered, cursed life?

We hesitate not to avow our conviction that there are very few signs that this is one of the Church's great thoughts in the present age; and we fear that the proofs of the truth of this conviction will be but too numerous to all who have anything to do with the direction or the sustenance of the Church's life. What mean the incessant special appeals' of our various religious societies? What, the wide-spread complaints of our Sabbath schools and kindred organizations, of a paucity of labourers? What says that voice which is daily waxing louder in the Church's ear, but which as yet has awakened no adequate response, which has almost bewildered us in the attempt to meet the call;-that voice which, as a confused din, in which the loud tones of atheism and infidelity and materialism make themselves distinctly heard above the inarticulate roar, of the utter irreligiousness of tens of thousands of the working classes, calls upon the Church to acknowledge her supineness, and to arouse herself vigorously to meet and remedy the evil? What light will our prayer-meetings throw upon this most momentous inquiry? Are they so thronged, and is their tone so eloquent of a restless consuming anxiety for the spread of

God's kingdom, that we can augur a speedy and worthy effort for its advance? Is it an uncommon thing for some of our missionary prayer-meetings to be marked by an almost entire absence of supplication for anything beyond immediate personal blessing? Does the Church's prayer reveal that her heart is deeply, sadly pondering the religious state of the millions within reach of her arm, and within hearing of her voice? That she is conscious of her mission to them, and zealous to fulfil it? We may be wrong; we should be happy to be convinced of our error; but our impression is, that we have already more machinery than we have power to work-more benevolent schemes than we have benevolent spirit to sustain. And that the response which is given, on the whole (there are, of course, noble exceptions), to these varied calls, is rather an unwilling submission to a duty, than a glowing, zealous embrace of a glorious mission and privilege. Let this conviction but get itself graven on the consciences of all the real Christians of Britain, that they have in their hands the instruments, and that they themselves constitute the agency by which God will evangelize the world, and, in addition, that they have long ago received the command to do it, that God waits for their action, and will not effect it without them; that they are, therefore, in a great measure, responsible for the condition of their neighbours: let them embrace and welcome this conviction, and modes of agency will soon start themselves. Truth will soon begin to go forth in the midst of men, not as a suppliant for toleration, but with the majestic, graceful mien of a conqueror, whose charms will defy scorn, and whose voice will carry conviction.

This is one of our answers to the question, 'Why are the working classes estranged from us?' It is because the Church has not only not fulfilled her mission, but has forgotten it-has lost the spirit of it. They have multiplied more rapidly than her zeal has increased. Their voice has waxed, whilst hers has waned, or, at the best, has remained as it was. The pace of their progress has been too rapid for her lagging steps. And now, only a determined, earnest effort can overtake them. Only a new baptism of zeal can put her in their midst, with any hope of materially affecting their position. That that may come it surely behoves her fervently to cry. There is a fire that can kindle us into that zeal. But it will only kindle on hearts that seek it; that seek it in the inner shrine of self-consecration, which is approached through the outer courts of reflection, penitence, and resolve.

That, then, is the thought and spirit which (if such a tone may be allowed us here) we would urge on all who are at all alive to the danger and disgrace which surrounds us, to diffuse about them in their several circles of influence and spheres of labour. Let our pulpits resound with this strain. Let a power go forth from preacher-lips, which shall sometimes forcibly expand with the heat of love the body of Christian life on which they act, and diffuse it into the midst of the ungodly life which teems in thickening crowds on all sides. Not, indeed, to the neglect of its other most important work, the exposition of the truth on which that life depends, and the building up of that

life into a strong, lovely, holy, and divine thing, and the compacting of its beautiful diversities into a closely united body. There need be no antagonism betwixt the two. Nay, they are very closely related to each other, and will reciprocally aid each other; for the zeal will be a powerless, fitful thing, unless it be the emanation of a healthy life. And on the other hand, the life will become a sickly, healthless, joyless thing, unless it have the exercise of an active zeal. And let the Church welcome such teaching. Let the trumpet call to its work, to the fulfilment of its mission lead it, not to rub its heavy eyes, and cry with the sluggard, Yet a little slumber, yet a little folding of the hands to sleep; but to rise with the alacrity of the soldier, eager for the battle, as one whose heart is in his work, and who looks for repose, for joy, for health, for heaven, only there. Let us all remember that whilst we have a choice as to whether we will do our duty or no, we have no choice as to what is our duty. And let all Christians lay well to heart, that their mission is to evangelize the world!

On one great branch of the topic, viz., what can be done directly to gain a hearing for the truth amongst the masses? we have already expressed our thoughts.* Very much depends upon the kind of teaching we offer them, and on the mode in which we approach them. But teaching is not the only mode by which they can be influenced. There is an indirect power which can be applied to them, and, indeed, without which the oral teaching will fall comparatively powerless. The life can teach as well as the lips, and sometimes much more forcibly than they. As we hinted in the article just cited, it is certain that much of the positive antagonism to the gospel, the theoretic infidelity which is found amongst them may be easily traced to anomalies in the Church's position and life. These constitute the staple of their objections to Christianity. These furnish the missiles which they fling with no little zeal and heartiness against all your elaborate argumentative structures in defence of it. And to not a few minds they seem to demolish all those structures. There are hundreds of them not capable of following an elaborate or a spiritual argument, perfectly competent, however, to feel the force of an inconsistency, and to magnify the objection which an incongruity in the life furnishes to the truth of the creed. Indeed, it is one of the laws of man's nature that his life

shall be a teaching power. Every home and every age furnishes examples of the law. There is always a vast class of human beings who are receiving the main of their education from the example of those in whose presence they live. Of what force is the influence which children receive from moral maxims, and oral instruction, compared with that exercised by parental and other example? You may iterate every hour the foolish injunction, 'Do as I say, and not as I do;' but what of it? Does the child heed that? No! nor does the man. The inculcation of the most beautiful virtue by means of the ear, will be unavailing if the eye is drinking in at the same moment an opposite instruction. And for the simple reason, that what strikes the eye has

* Vide Christian Spectator', Dec. 1851; art. The Gospel and the Poor.'

so much more vividness and reality than that which falls on the ear. With uneducated minds-minds that receive their strongest impressions through the senses, and not by purely intellectual means-a true teaching must always be supplemented by a true life, or it can avail nothing. And such are the majority of the minds of whom we now speak. We may carry the simplest gospel, the purest truth to them; but if we carry it with impure hands, and with an unsimple life, they will not receive it, but will point at us in scorn, and say, mockingly, Physician, heal thyself! On the other hand, the strongest and most despotic superstition, a positive creed held for ages and revered as a national tradition, fastened on the minds of the people by a priestly power which has juggled into its own hands the conscience and will of an entire people, cannot bear up against the force of a true Christian life of love. A very remarkable proof of this is furnished in a fact communicated in a recent number of the Eclectic Review,*

and known to us also from private sources. In one of the darkest and most priest-ridden provinces of Ireland, that most priest-ridden of all lands, where the life of a Protestant has never been safe; where the peasantry, under the guidance of the priests, have refused to sell provisions to, and thus consigned to starvation, the holders of that hated faith; the priestly power has utterly given way before the generous conduct of those Protestants in the time of the hunger,' as they emphatically call it. Their children are now in Protestant schools by hundreds, and from themselves a hearing may now be at any time obtained-a thing until now unknown. This is but an illustration of what will be even more readily seen on a wider scale where we have to do not with a positive creed in opposition to us, wielded by a priestly power, and a priestly malignancy of hate, but with a mere negation-infidelity, or with a merely negative attitude towards the truth we would instil.

This principle of the influence of the life of Christians upon the world's reception of Christianity is one which our Lord himself recognised and uttered more than once during his own life. Let your light so shine before men, that they seeing your good works may glorify your Father who is in heaven.' By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.' Again, in that most remarkable and sublime prayer offered by our Lord just before his passion and death, there occurs this most significant petition for his disciples, 'That they all may be one-that the world may know that thou hast sent me.' By the unity of the Church is the grand conviction to be written on the world's heart, that Christ is the Messiah of God; or, in other words, that Christianity is God's remedy for all the world's woes. And for ourselves, we have no doubt that when that prayer is fulfilled, that world-wide triumph of Christianity will speedily follow. For in that desire is included all else that is wanting in the Church's life. Its unity, spiritual and deep, can only be arrived at by the absence of the great evils which are now the fruitful sources of disunion and mutual envy. The unity of the

* See 'Eclectic Review,' Dec. 1851; Art. I. pp. 660, 661.

entire Church will be the fruit of the universal spread of the spirit of love. Nothing else can bring it about. We have proofs numerous and signal of the utter inefficiency of organization and external forms to produce it. What is the unity of Roman Catholicism, which it boastingly offers as an asylum to all troubled and doubting spirits? what but the veriest fiction? The unity of minds not allowed to think; of minds that blindly and tamely submit themselves (or pretend so to do) to the dictates of an infallibility whose impudent presumption is its only evidence and foundation. What is the unity which has been aimed at by the recognition by law of certain human expressions of religious truth and human institutions of worship? Is there any division of the sects at the present moment more serious, more fundamental, more wrathful, than is to be found in the so-called Church of England? What is the unity of the Evangelical Alliancean organization whose origin was owing to the recognition of the duty of love one to another, and a desire to fulfil it—but of whose efficiency from the first we have had our doubts? What is it but a platform unity? A unity which will shake hands with the slaveholder who subscribes its creed, and withholds its brotherly grasp from the Quaker who will not? A unity which is in appearance, and not in heart? The confession of the rightness of a principle which does not exist, or it would not need an organization to kindle it or to give it a palpable expression. None of these are real. They are attempts at unity opposed in principle to the divine method of producing whatever is desirable in man's life. They seek by appliances from without, whose whole mode and principle of action is external, to create an inward and spiritual thing. Their principle is exactly the same as that of the baptismal-regenerationists. Our belief is, that such an unity as our Lord prayed for, and for which the world waits ere it will accept our religion, is that which will naturally and spontaneously accrue from the perfection of the inward and individual life of Christian professors, and that no merely external process can hasten it. You may erect your arched device of wire-work, but the germ-seed of love must be quickened, and begin to grow of its own native power, ere it will cling around it and adorn it with its beautiful petals. If there ever should come a day (and happy will be the eyes on which it shall dawn) when every Christian Church shall send its delegate to the metropolis of the world, to partake of a great symbolic communion, expressive of the glorious fact that the Church now is one, that the voice of mutual discord and envy has for ever ceased, that act will be as the bringing of the top-stone to the temple of God in the earth. The edifice will have been completed, and nothing will remain but with united force to gather in the world. But we are far enough from that yet. It is folly to build the scaffolding for the top-stone whilst as yet the foundations of unity have to be laid.

The Church must direct her attention to other portions of her life; must give herself to the correction of some of the more inward evils which underlie this great and manifest outward wrong; and by so doing, it will remedy itself.

Returning now to that class whom we have specially in view, let us