the presence of a development which irresistibly recalls the primæval command, 'Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it.' How can we, who take that command as a part of the divine impulse communicated from the first to mankind, refuse to recognise this important form of human activity as a function of the Christian Church? If, further, we are right in viewing human relations as the special object for which Christian Society and the Church exist, we shall recognise as Christian achievements the reforms of the criminal law, the successive acts by which one class after another has been brought within the pale of the constitution, still more the great movements of national education and of public philanthropy which more recent years have witnessed. We are conscious of a grand progress in our national history, and we gain the conviction that our commonwealth is able, through the whole range of its functions, to discharge the duties of a Christian Church. And this should be an imperative call of the divine voice to us, to put away the discords which arise from religion in its narrower sense, and to embrace the wider and more truly Christian religion, which has for its object the hallowing of the whole life of the nation.

It is sometimes said that the consideration of these larger questions and the optimistic hopes which they inspire blunts the sense of sin, with which the Church has primarily to deal, and without which there can be no adequate sense of redemption. But the treatment of the nation as a Christian Church also opens out a fuller view of our shortcomings; and this induces a

sense of sin as poignant as that which the Hebrew prophets sought to arouse when they spoke of Israel as the bride of Jehovah, and upbraided her for her unfaithfulness. That the effort for freedom in the seventeenth century should have eventuated in a military tyranny; that our Church should have been so blind as to drift into the senseless wars of the eighteenth century, and take part in its shameless greed of territory; that it should have grasped at the hateful Assiento', which made England the chief slave-carrier of the world; that Ireland should have been tyrannically treated to gratify the jealousy of English traders, and that Protestantism should there have been linked to persecution and oppression; that we should, through our light-minded injustice, have parted from America with bloodshed and mutual wrath; that we should have had no wisdom to discern the true meaning of the French Revolution ; that our poetry and art should have been so often degraded by impurity and by mercenary motives; that the blessed discoveries of natural science should so often have been resisted in the name of religion; that our vast empire should bear in so many places the marks of covetousness and of violence; that the free public life of the last century should have been disgraced by the most cynical corruption; that, while wealth was increasing amazingly, pauperism should have advanced with almost equal strides; that drunkenness should have become a national habit still requiring a special organisation to overcome it; all this is the reproach

1 The Assiento, or agreement for the carrying of slaves, was granted to England for thirty years by the treaty of Utrecht.

which we have to bear, and which, if we had the spirit of the prophets, would make us cry aloud and spare not, and summon the nation to the lamentation of bitter repentance.

But the times of that ignorance, we may say, God winked at. He now calls us to a new life. It is not our duty to reproach our fathers, but to take care that we with fuller light do not fall into a like condemnation. We may trace a great part of the evils of the past generations to the fact that the general life of the nation was not recognised as the life of a Christian Church. It was thereby deprived of Christian sanctions, and treated by the clergy and many of the most religious men as secular and profane. Experience everywhere shows that, where any set of persons and any sphere of life is degraded in the estimation of mankind, as the occupation of the tax-gatherers in Judæa in the time of Christ, it is almost sure to become irreligious, and to fulfil the evil prophecy which has gone out against it. But, as it was the special aim of Christ to seek out and to save that very class of men, so it should be the office of all who sincerely follow Him to redeem those spheres of life which have been specially supposed to lie outside the range of His influence, and to raise them, His spirit, to dignity and holiness. They have done much for themselves; but, owing to the false limitations of the Church, they have sometimes exaggerated their own importance, sometimes drawn away the interests and the worship of men, so as to break the unity of our common Christian life. It must be the aim of the Church of our day to widen itself out so as

to embrace them, and to raise them to their highest honour and use by bringing them into direct contact with the Saviour of the world.

Our

There is no more animating thought in the whole range of spiritual aspirations, than that of a nation in which one spirit should rule, in which all classes of men should move with a common and a righteous impulse. All popular enthusiasms have a charm which is little short of irresistible; and we are so made that the love of our country and devotion to its interests is a natural instinct as well as a Christian virtue. country demands us; and we are, in any but our worst moods, ready to yield ourselves to its service. The defence of Greece against the Persians, of England and Holland against Spain in the 16th century, of France in 1793 against united Europe, the uprising of Germany against Napoleon in 1813-what a grand spectacle does each give us of a nation strong through enthusiastic union. Yet these present but a feeble image of that which would be seen were a whole nation to be possessed with the love of God and of Christ as their acknowledged national bond, and each citizen to take for the quickening purpose of his own life the determination to build up, so far as his influence extends, the life of the great brotherhood to which he belongs, and of every sphere of action which it contains, and of each of his fellow-citizens, in justice and the fear of God.

LECTURE VII.

THE CHRISTIAN BASIS OF HUMAN SOCIETIES.

EZEKIEL i. 15-20. Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl; and they four had one likeness; and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides; and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.

THE genius of Christianity requires us to conceive of the spiritual not as separate from, but as interpenetrating and vivifying the material; of God, not as separate, but as a spirit pervading the universe; of the human soul, not as separate, but as penetrating and transforming the body; of redemption, not as making men separate by removing the redeemed into a different