in all the sorrows of repentance, and all the sharpness of affliction, though without visible friends, we cannot be forsaken. Above all, they who labour for Christ and for His kingdom can never be alone. They are "workers together with God," and He is on the field of their daily toil: "His eyes are upon them all the year long." Angels and men in a wonderful order labour with them: unseen ministries are about them, and the great cloud of witnesses is intent upon their strife. So long as we are within the truth, be we never so lonely, all the kingdom of Christ is with us. Truth unites us with eternity. Outside of the truth, though we be in a multitude, we must be ever alone. But the laws of the kingdom are universal, reaching beyond time and the world, and bringing us into communion with all the servants and saints of the Most High. Sects and schools, individual judgments, private opinions, and the like, are sel fish and solitary. But the faith is the common consciousness and life of the elect; and they who stand for it, although they stand alone against all the world, are never alone, for all the companies of heaven and all the generations of the Church are at their side. Kneel down, and you are with them; lift up your eyes, and the heavenly world, high above all perturbation, hangs serenely over head. Only a thin veil, it may be, floats between.

When the prophet stood with his servant all alone in Dothan compassed with enemies, the whole mountain was full of the chariots of God. So all His holy ones, prophets, apostles, martyrs, saints, all His pure and perfect servants, compass His Church on earth. All whom we loved, and all who loved us; whom we still love no less, while they love us yet more, are ever near, because ever in His presence in whom we live and dwell. Awaken this blessed consciousness. Keep ever open your living fellowship with the Lord Jesus, who is the pledge of all sympathy, the channel of all fellowship, and the head of all communion.

2. And let us learn further, by the reality of this heavenly fellowship, to live less in this divided world. Christ died for the sin of the world; but the hundred and forty and four thousand, a few from among many, are gathered out of it, and "the world lieth in wickedness." Every one of that perfect number, in his day, renounced the world, and died to it. There is an eternal opposition between the world and God. "The friendship of the world is enmity against God;" because the world is the kingdom of the flesh, and "the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject unto the law of God, neither indeed can be." If it became subject, it would cease to exist enmity is its very existence. It matters not

in what forms this may be embodied; whether in sensual or refined sins, in the grosser or the more cultivated forms of atheism; only that the grosser are often less guilty, and the cultivated are often more intense: or in luxury, self-worship, vain-glory, jealousy, wrath, scorn, rivalry, effeminate hardness of heart, and the like: it is all one before God. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." If we live in fellowship with the world, we have no fellowship with Christ. If we love the world, the love of the Father is not in us; and if no love of the Father, then no communion with His kingdom.

Between these two we must make our choice. We are between two cities-the one visible, the other invisible-the one an object of sense, the other of faith-the one garish, splendid, and tumultuous, the other calm, glorious, and serene. On the one side, the world, and this earthly life, with its fair show, luring gifts, bright promises, gilded ambition; on the other, the city of God, the fellowship of saints, the sympathy of Christ, the love of the Father, the Beatific Vision.

11 St. John ii. 15, 16.

Choose one you must. Either you must have a life-not sinful, or gross, or reckless, or profane of these we are not speaking-but in this world, and of this world, loved by it, courted, followed, endowed, gifted, smooth, and fair, without sharpness or cross, without contradiction or shame, without devotion or self-denial, without saintliness or repentance: or you must have a life of striving and suffering, of temptation and weariness, of faith and faintness, of hope and fear, of longing and waiting, of anxious desires and slow tarrying answers; bearing the weight of a conscious immor. tality, with sins remembered in the conscience, and intentions pent up in the heart. One of these two you must choose to be your own. Either in this world "to have your reward," or to have your "life hid with Christ in God." For He has said,

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'I came not to send peace upon earth, but a sword;" and with that sharp two-edged weapon He is severing His own from this perishing world. He has been cutting all round you to set you free by His ministries of truth and grace, by warnings and chastisements, by blessings and visitations, by His words piercing the outward ear, and His presence moving your inward heart.

Look back upon your past life.

Retrospect

will interpret it as a whole, and marshal all its parts in order. Through all your earthly trial He

has had one stedfast intention, to bring you to Himself.

3. And lastly, let us learn from this Communion of Saints to live in hope.

They who are now at rest were once like ourselves. They were once fallen, weak, faulty, sinful; they had their burdens and hindrances, their slumbering and weariness, their failures and their falls. But now they have overcome.

Their life was once homely and commonplace. While on earth they were not arrayed in white raiment, but in apparel like other men, unmarked and plain, worn and stained by time and trial. Their day ran out as ours. Morning and noon and night came and went to them as to us. Their life, too, was as lonely and sad as yours. Little fretful circumstances and frequent disturbing changes wasted away their hours as yours. Many a time their "feet were almost gone," their "treadings had well nigh slipped." They had their professions and business, their works and trades, their cares and burdens; they were fathers, mothers, masters, servants; rich or poor, learned or unlettered, even as you; their life was in a sheltered home, or in the glare of the noonday world; they lived either free from hard cares and toils, or worn down with labours and anxiety. There is nothing in your life that was not in theirs ;