his sin!

That they can do so is evidence, that in

their hearts they do not believe it.

And, lastly, the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God when employed as an instrument of controversy. Wrath has no effect on the understanding; it has an effect on the temper and the will most unfavourable to persuasion. The justifying plea for controversial anger is that error is wilful. Here are two assumptions: first, that there is an error; secondly, that it is wilful. It is not possible. A man cannot choose to believe wrong, whatever he may choose to profess. He may indeed be led into error by voluntary neglect of the means of knowledge; but God punishes that wilfulness by inflicting its natural penalty-the error and blindness to which it leads. Persecuted opinion indeed may summon to its aid a false pride, and as a matter of honour refuse even to listen till every weapon is removed, every wall of separation thrown down; but that is Persecution's unrighteous work. When man's wrath is brought to bear upon error, its effect is to raise the spirit of a martyr, and a martyr on the wrong side. It is the unrighteous working of the controversial temper that it renders natural conversion to what is true almost impossible, and makes resistance almost a virtue, or casily mistaken for one. There is also an undue degree of favour attracted towards cruelly treated opinion. The persecuted error is far more sympa

thized with than the persecuting truth. I suppose that often large-hearted men in this country have felt too favourably towards Roman Catholicism as a religious system, through detestation of its civil

wrongs.

But the most unrighteous effect of man's wrath in controversy is when it obscures or distorts the ground. of God's love for all His children, through the selfregarding fears and rage of unspiritual men, who think you would rob them of their assured amulet of everlasting safety. For what is all this war about? About a right belief-the right belief being regarded as the means of salvation. Are we to be in doubt about our having God's Love, until we are certain that we are in possession of God's Truth? How small are all these things, all honest differences, in the sight of our Heavenly Father! What must be thought above of the presumption of a man claiming to have God's Truth--and holding himself safe, and others unsafe, because he has it, and they have missed it!

There is only one answer with which we are concerned to the question-"Master, what shall I do that I may have eternal life?-Thou shalt love God with heart, mind, soul and strength-and thy neighbour as thyself."

XVI.

Self-denial.

LUKE ix. 23:

"If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me."

THE measure of our spiritual health is in the strength of our conformity to the highest law of our beingin our effectual desire to have our life in Him in whom is no darkness at all-in the filial assurance that, inasmuch as our souls are not wilfully separated from the fountain of Righteousness, we cannot lose a Heavenly guidance. And since there is no limit to a blessedness that is thus derived, a child of God must desire at cach moment to overstep the facilities of past habit, and reach forth to things before. Spiritual life, in all its carnest aspects, is a constant approach towards the Perfect, not without new effort and aspiration at each. step. It is not Christian Goodness to obey constitutional impulses, and by a happy original conformation to be affectionate, gentle, guileless or devotional. is not Christian Goodness to shed tears of sensibility, or in the ready glow of instinctive piety to feel the

It

breath of God wafted to us from earth and sky. It is not Christian Goodness to do what we take instant pleasure in doing, but rather to carry out our higher desires to that point at which what is delightful and uplifting in contemplation becomes laborious in execution. Christian Goodness, the goodness of aspiration and the cross, cannot assist in actions which cost the performer no sacrifice, or in emotions which end in their own indulgence. There is in every true life, and in every true hour of life, something of the martyr spirit of a higher testimony, given at a cost, to the Spirit of God working in us. Spiritual life is life on the scale of immortality, for it has to make continual approach towards God, and God is inexhaustible. Such a conviction would seem to be inseparable from any real feeling of God: it is the root of growth, the spirit of life in Christ Jesus; and all that falls short of this thirst for more, is but the amiableness of temperament or the fixedness of habit.

Such unqualified statement may provoke the question: "Are, then, all our prompt and extemporaneous acts, impelled by the very spirit of Love moving freely in the heart, not distinctively Christian in their character? Are all the delightful charities of life, which it would be pain to place under restraint, not of the nature of Virtue? Are the springings of natural affection, and the emotions of piety that visit us with unworldly peace, not of the essence of Goodness?" That

all these things are good and beautiful, testimonies to the purity of our past, full of promise for the future, is not disputed; but whether they are essentially Christian as distinguished from what is simply naturalwhether they have a root of growth in them-whether they are merely complexional, or belong to the ever quickening life of God in us—may be a different question. In the natural moods of unspoiled childhood there is an affectionateness as beautiful, a tenderness as irrepressible, a purity as attractive, imaged in the clear, unabashed eye that is lighted from an inward fount which no conscious passion has yet stirred-in the silver voice which has yet caught no discord-in the look of repose, of a life drawn from far-off springs, which suggested the angel's whisper-in the smile of gladness which reveals the harmony of the faculties when first adjusted by the Divine Hand; and yet we ascribe no moral character, we do not attribute virtue to the sensibility, the involuntary affections breaking. into joy, the dauntless innocence of earliest childhood. The involuntary nature that is in the child we attribute to its Creator: the goodness which belongs to the spirit under trial does not yet exist.

It will be no reply to this to say, that the constitutional graces of infancy and the confirmed propensities. of riper years are not parallel cases, because that the latter have outlived the wear of the world and withstood the causes that kill natrual feelings; for so far