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or of the Christian; and in neither case will it be long deferred. "As soon as we were born," says the wise man, "we began to draw to our end." That is true of the highest and lowest forms of natural life. Whatever else human life is, or may imply, it is soon over; "it fades away suddenly like the grass." This is a truth of experience; it is altogether beyond the region of controversy. The world may have made great progress since the days of our fathers and grandfathers. We may have better government, larger and more widely diffused knowledge, better and juster laws, a larger amount of happiness for the greater number. Let us thank God for it. But the frontiers of life do not change with the generations, as do its attendant circumstances. We are born, and we die, just as did our rudest ancestors; and there is no probability, in the mind of any reasonable man, that our science or anything else will, or ever can, alter the fundamental conditions of our existence. We see that, as a matter of fact, death has a universal empire. We follow first one friend, then another, to the grave. We know that we every one of us shall die. "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth." It is not a jet of sentiment; it is a solemn law; true at this moment; always true.

"But the Word of the Lord "-in St. Peter's sense of the term as well as Isaiah's-" endureth for ever." How do we know that? Certainly, not in the same way that we know the universality of death. We know it to be true if we believe two things; first, that God, the Perfect Moral Being, exists; secondly, that He has spoken to man. If He is Eternal, that which He proclaims as His Truth and Will will bear on it the mark of His Eternity; if He is true, that which He speaks will bear the impress of His Faithfulness. It is not possible, in the case of the

a Wisd. v. 13.

Perfect Being, to distinguish between the worth of His Word and His Nature, as it is sometimes in the case of an imperfect being like man. That, having created us, He would speak to us, is an anticipation of the human soul. That He has spoken is a matter of historical fact, and it may be discussed like any other fact of history. He has always spoken, although less clearly, to the human conscience. The distinction between right and wrong is His Word in the soul of man; His unchanging Word. It is eternally true; it stands for ever. Isaiah was

thinking of all that He had said, through many ages, to Israel. But the Life, the teaching, the miracles, above all, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, afford proof to us Christians that God has not left us to ourselves; that we are not in the dark as to the great and awful problems which surround our existence. The Love and Justice of God; the reality of a life to come, and of a future judgment; the Incarnation of the Eternal Son of God, Who was manifested in human form in this sphere of sense and time; His Atoning Death upon the Cross; His Life in Glory at the Right Hand of the Father; the possibility and the reality of communion with Him, through faith, love, prayer, on our part, through the gift of the Divine Spirit and of the Sacraments on His,these are truths which, for Christians, do not decay. When they are not matters of human history, they rest upon the authority of the Unchanging God. "O Lord, Thy Word endureth for ever in Heaven. Thy Truth also remaineth from one generation to another." a

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Depend on it, brethren, while all else is giving way around us, there is one thing that does not alter. It is what it was when we were young; it is what it will be when we are laid in our graves, and when others shall

A Ps. cxix. 89, 90.

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have taken our places. The Word of God, speaking to conscience, speaking in Revelation, is throned, like God Himself, above the water-flood of change. It lasts. Our outward circumstances are continually varying; our friends, our occupations, our interests, may be so altogether new that at times we seem to be living new lives. But the Word of God is what it was; it lasts. The substance of our bodies is said to disappear and be replaced in every seven years, and it is certain that we are constantly entering upon new phases of health or of decrepitude. Meanwhile the Divine Word endures without decay or loss. Our minds are changing yet more rapidly than our bodies; the stock of thought and feeling which they contain is not exactly the same for any two hours consecutively. But the utterance of Him Who changes not, ever remains. Men differ from each other about God's Word; they exaggerate this element in it and forget that; they attribute to their own changes of thought respecting it a permanent and objective value; as though the Divine and Absolute Truth could share the vicissitudes of what is relative and human. But it remains what it was; hidden, it may be, like the sun in December, behind the clouds of speculation, or the clouds of controversy, but in itself ever unchanged, unchangeable. "Thy Word, O Lord, endureth for ever in Heaven."

On the last Sunday in the year, we naturally fall back on such thoughts as these; thoughts which are not cancelled by the exulting joy of the Christmas Festival. We pass to-day one of the milestones on the road of life. Since this occasion last year some of us probably feel, by sensible proof, that the end is nearer than it was. We are conscious that we can do less, or endure less than a Ps. xxix. 9.

we could. We have less vital force to fall back upon. Our faculties are less at command; we cannot depend upon our memories, or see our way through difficulties, or bear the shock of disappointments as we could. "The corruptible body presseth down the soul; "a and the body is evidently giving way. A day comes to thousands of people every year, which brings to them, for the first time, with the force of experimental knowledge, the conviction that their earthly body is on its way to dissolution; that the weakness or disease which will kill it at no distant date is already at work; that they are not far from the hour when the eye of sense will close for ever on all that this world is and contains. To some, probably, who hear me this past year has, for the first time, brought this conviction; to others, it will come in the year which is on the point of opening. "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth."

Those who are young, or hale and strong, and in high spirits, and are not conscious of a sentence of death in themselves, may read this solemn truth in the world around. How many are the names which on this day last year stood high in the public life of England or of Europe, and are now numbered with the dead! Since then the Emperor upon whose lightest words Europe had hung for almost twenty years with breathless anxiety, has died in a Kentish village close to this metropolis, surrounded only by his family and the few friends of his fallen fortunes. Since then the thinker and writer who has made Bentham a popular power, and who, amid whatever errors (and I have no wish to extenuate their seriousness, though I hope and pray that they were a Wisd. ix. 15.

The Emperor Napoleon III. died at Chislehurst, Jan. 9, 1873.

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largely the product of circumstances beyond his control), has contributed much to the mental enterprise of Englishmen, has left us to discover the real limits of a philosophy of experience. Since then the acute judge, whose professional knowledge was only exceeded by his humour, or at least by his general capacity, has gone to his account. On the way he all but met, at the very gate of Eternity, the Prelate to whom he had been so often opposed; the first, at the time of his death, of English Prelates; the man who, by the common consent of men, for the manifoldness of his gifts and his intrepid devotion to work, stood alone among those who filled the high places of the Church, and has left behind him none who even distantly approach him. What a comment was that death upon the Prophet's estimate of life; nay, rather, how does the reality outdo the metaphor! There was no gradual decay, no withering of the physical form, no fading of the mental powers; but in one moment, as if by a flash, he passed, without a sign, from the full energy and interest of this life into the scenes and silence of the next. And many others there are; the novelist, whose works have, with varying results, contributed to stimulate and guide the imaginations of our time; the accomplished traveller in the Levant; the late Speaker of the House of Commons; the eminent architect, so closely connected with this city, and, as I am bound to remember, with the completion of this Cathedral; the

f

a Mr. J. Stuart Mill died May 9, 1873.

b Lord Westbury died July 20, 1873.

Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester, died by a fall from his horse near Guildford, July 19, 1873.

d Lord Lytton died Jan. 18, 1873.

e Lord Zouche, better known as the Hon. R. Curzon, died Aug. 2, 1873. f Viscount Ossington died March 8, 1873.

Sir W. Tite died April 20, 1873.