but it ought to be described, delineated, and dramatized with utmost reticence.

We shall not overcome evil by legislation. The assumption that a legal or political remedy will extinguish a social malady is arrant quackery. A real evil can only be dealt with effectually through legislation when such legislation expresses the sincere conviction. of a great body of righteous citizens. Statutes do nothing except as they acquire force in the living virtue of the community. Could law have abolished the sins and miseries of mankind, the Mosaic economy would have sufficed; but righteousness does not come by law either with the individual or the

race.

Evil is not overcome by denunciation. It is surprising how much efficacy is supposed to go with denunciation. Real, constructive, aggressive good is of far greater significance than eloquent invective; such invective has its place, but it must be accompanied by active practical effort, or it effects little more than summer lightning. Carlyle, in his review of Elliott the Corn-Law Rhymer, has a most instructive passage. "We could truly wish to see such a mind as his engaged rather in considering what, in his own sphere, could be done, than what, in his own or other spheres, ought to be destroyed; rather in producing or preserving the True, than in mangling and slashing asunder the False." But denunciatory rhetoric is so much easier and cheaper than good works, and proves

a popular temptation. Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.

What this world awaits is personal, positive, constructive goodness. Not by law, legislation, and rhetoric shall we prevail, but by practical righteousness, noble philanthropy, intellectual and spiritual education; by the positive remedy of superior character, action, and institutions do we make it difficult for evil to survive. Whenever the chance offers, let us stamp upon a weed; yet let us be sure that it is only as we chiefly cherish the golden corn that we smother and destroy the tares which afflict society. It is the slow and expensive method, and the only effectual one. When the Church of God goes forth in holy character and action fair as the moon and bright as the sun, to every type of iniquity she will be terrible as an army with banners.

XV

ALTERNATIVE ROUTES*

And Elisha said unto them, This is not the way, neither is this the city: follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek. But he led them to Samaria.-2 KINGS vi. 19.

And he led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation.-Ps. cvii. 7.

WR

E are strangers in a strange world. We have not passed this way before, and some sort of leading is essential to us.

We have put these two passages of Scripture together because they suggest the false and the true in the guidance of human life, for both are possible. May we so consider the subject that we may be led into the way everlasting!

I. THE BLIND ALLEY.

The King of Syria having sent an army to apprehend Elisha, the prophet prays that it may please God to afflict them with illusion, so that they may be confounded; and they are smitten as with blindness. Elisha then boldly ventures amongst them, as did Alfred into the camps of the Danes, and he succeeded in misleading them. "This is not the way, neither is *A sermon to the young.

this the city. . . . But he led them to Samaria," right into the midst of their enemies, into the focus of destruction. As a commentator remarks, There is almost a touch of joyful humour in the way in which Elisha played with the Syrians, eventually acting towards them most magnanimously, as the narrative shows. We now use this ancient story as a striking parable of the misdirection possible in human life. At this very hour multitudes of duped, confused souls are wandering like the Syrians, only with infinitely worse

consequences.

1. Mistaken routes. There must be one path through life that is best for each of us; a thousand false ways are possible, but there is one right way, a path in which we walk with greatest security, efficiency, and satisfaction. Have not some of us consciously got the wrong route? We are dissatisfied with the principles we obey, the habits we follow, the friendships we have formed, the points at which we arrive. We are ever chiding ourselves, "This is not the way, neither is this the city." Thousands simply drift; they are carried hither and thither, according to the accidental set of the current. A ship called Fred. B. Taylor was run down and cut in two off your coast of Massachusetts. After the collision, the two parts of the derelict drifted in different directions. The stern floated almost entirely due north, and finally went ashore on the coast of Maine; whilst the bow drifted in a south-easterly direction, and was reported

nearly two thousand miles away. The two halves, caught by totally different streams of the Atlantic, were thus widely separated. How different is this. from the course of a ship with pilot, chart, and rudder, reaching, with almost infallible precision, the haven whither it would be! Many human lives are reflected in this derelict; the sport of accident, the plaything of wind and wave, they are without power or purpose, and are drifted along by this current or that, never reaching port. Or, to put the matter in another light, life with many is simply wandering. It lacks purpose, programme, and progress. Travellers know that it is not easy to walk or ride in a straight line for a long distance. Nearly every one will turn off quite imperceptibly and gradually from the straight direction— one man to the right, another to the left. It is no rare occurrence in Australia for a traveller to leave one place in the morning, intending to make straight for another the situation of which has been signified to him, and then to find towards the end of the day a settlement appear before him which he hopes to be his destination, but which, however, proves to be the very same point he left in the morning. So in human life, we swerve to the right hand or to the left; we follow our fancy, and end with the miserable conviction that the years have been wasted, that we have walked in a vain show and disquieted ourselves in vain. "They wandered in the wilderness in a desert way." In their disobedience Israel lost the right way, and