of its kingdom. We, in our conceit, imagine that it is because religious truth and Christian faith are afraid of our knowledge and criticism, and shrewdness, and knowledge of the world, that it asks us to lay them aside when we come into its presence. It is not afraid of what these will do to its prejudice, but what they will do to our injury. It does not want them dazzling our eyes, and dangling their superficial impertinence before our higher and holier powers. It wants to speak to our deep moral instincts, our permanent and sacred affections, our spiritual nature; and therefore it bids our noisy logic and lip-wisdom, our intellectual attainments, all be quiet, that our souls may receive its simple and sublime communications, and feel its glorious power. After we have caught its lesson, and drunk in its spirit, we may try it as we please, by history, science, philosophy, and it shall stand every test; but none of these shall help us in advance. There is no denying that this is precisely the course which superstition and imposture, delusion and folly, would take, if they were seeking possession of the human soul. They would say: Unless you believe before you examine, you cannot receive the testimonies we have to offer; unless you will exclude the prying, curious, suspicious temper you bring for your protection against imposture, you will see and hear nothing, you will learn and know nothing. And the reason why they say this, and why this counsel has dangerous influence in the case of superstition, is because it has lawful power in the case of genuine truth. Superstition addresses a sound principle when she makes this appeal, but uses it in a perilous way. Let me illustrate the distinction. An exquisite pictureMurillo's Madonna, if you please—is to be exhibited, and you are taken into a room to see it, in which the light is carefully shut out from all quarters but one, and from that only just so much admitted as the artist knows to be suited to the revelation of its highest beauty. In this precise light you see its wondrous loveliness, and feel its charming and exalting truth. You recognise the painter's claim to his great reputation. Again: a picture-dealer wishes to give a fictitious appearance of age, merit, value, to a pretended original. But he, too, wants the light excluded, the special quantity only admitted, and the picture looked at only in a very carefully arranged way. He aims to deceive, and succeeds. Are you, therefore, to deny that a special light and a carefully-directed light is

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essential to the perception and enjoyment of the picture of real merit? And so it is plain enough that the spirit of confidence, frankness, and simplicity, in which alone the highest truths are to be seen, is the spirit most open to abuse, and of which error takes most advantage. But until a rich soil is undervalued because it is favourable to weeds, or a sweet disposition because it is easily betrayed, or a believing spirit because it is taken in with facility, we must not deny that a childlike docility is a proper condition for the reception of the gospel, because it is an equally natural condition for the reception of that which is only imaginary and unreal. In an age of light and thought and criticism, of shrewdness and common sense, the best results of worldly experience and intellectual culture are those which teach us not to rely upon such experience and culture for our deepest and most saving convictions. It is very certain that wisdom, which is the bright, consummate flower of knowledge, is very like, in its tastes and even its conclusions, to that unconscious simplicity or docility of mind which precedes all knowledge. The wise old man is again a child. He has the humility, teachableness, modesty, and faith of a child. How beautiful and touching it is to see the soul, which has been strained out of its place by worldly experience, the biasses of party and the pride of opinion, settling back, with the relaxed efforts of a weakened bodily vigour, into the more natural feelings and childlike opinions of youth! I know that we are sometimes accustomed to attribute this return to early tastes and feelings to a decline of the faculties, to the loss of intellectual vigour, to weariness and weakness of mind. But what is that strength of mind worth which merely sustains us in unnatural and eccentric postures of thought? what that originality which separates us from homely and universal truths? what that brilliancy. which is due to the sparks struck out by our conflict with wisdom? How plain is it to riper souls, that half the smart and noisy and striking thought of the world is false and hollow, while the unshowy, sober, and substantial sense dwells with the unpretending and the unobserved! Moral qualities are infinitely more essential to the perception and estimate of facts, than intellectual qualities. It is desirable, indeed, to have acuteness, sagacity, discrimination, in the observer; but how much more to have candour, the love of truth, and the strictest scrupulosity in stating it. What philosophers, or men

of science and learning, could have filled the place of the Apostles in reporting the life of Christ? They would have obtruded their theories and schools of philosophy, and tried to make a fine and striking and coherent story out of the case; and what would have become of that inimitable portrait of Christ and Christianity we now derive from their transparent sketch ?—illiterate, unskilful, broken, and confused, but with the most precious proofs of nature, reality, and genuineness in its very defects. My brethren, it is so with the understanding and reception of the religion of Jesus Christ. If you desire to know what this blessed gospel is, to receive it, understand it, and live in and from it, you must approach it in the spirit of little children. You must lay aside your pride of understanding, your worldly wisdom, and dearly-bought experience. They belong to a quite different class of pursuits—are valuable only in a very different sphere from that of religious experience. If, after eighteen centuries' experience of its fruits, we have not made up our minds to trust Christianity,—if we are disposed to be wary of it, and to stand on our reserved rights, we are practising the same folly that a bright and confident youth would be guilty of, who should go to see the masterpieces of art, architecture, sculpture, painting, and at once set up his raw taste and judgment against the testimony of time,— stand before the Apollo, or the Moses of Michael Angelo, or the Transfiguration, or the Parthenon, not to correct his own ignorance, form his own taste, and drink in the humbling lessons of beauty and truth they embody, but to indulge his self-opinion, criticise their defects, and dispute the verdict of ages. Is it to lay aside reason, to shut the eyes and open the ears, to bow to mere authority, that we are recommending in respect to our religious faith? Not at all. The reason is never so sound and active, the eyes never so clear, the judgment never so reliable, the man never so much in possession of all his powers, as when he says to himself, I am a child before God—an ignorant, dependent child, who feels his profound need of instruction, his inadequacy, by mere self-directed thought, to penetrate the secrets of faith, hope, and charity; and who thankfully, humbly, trustingly opens his soul to the lessons of the Great Master. We do our souls despite, we really disparage and despoil them of their highest worth, when we deny them the sagacity to know and take their humble place in the presence of a Personage

like Christ, their true attitude of love, reverence, and trust, before a religion like that of the Cross. It is a more than earthly faculty, this faith that humbles and exalts the soul. It rests upon a sublimer evidence than that of sense; and because it cannot interpret into propositions intelligible to all minds the grounds of its confidence, do not suppose those grounds to be fanciful or unreasonable. When the soul of the thinking, disciplined, scientific, and all-accomplished man makes itself a little child in the presence of its Maker, sits at the feet of Jesus with an air of waiting and tender discipleship, admits the reproofs of the gospel with an unresisting penitence, and unaffectedly feels that humility, lowliness of mind, love, are profounder acquirements than all that the schools and academies can bestow, then we have a glorious and most instructive union of the highest intelligence with the most childlike faith. How beautiful, how affecting, how suggestive is this spectacle. "Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom; neither let the mighty man glory in his might. Let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me." "Take heed," said our Saviour, in illustrating in the context the necessity of a childlike spirit and temper in the religious inquirer and Christian disciple, referring, doubtless, to the humble origin and poor mental furnishing of His then chosen disciples, which made them objects of contempt to the learned and great,—"take heed, that ye despise not one of these little ones (these children in worldly wisdom and scholastic accomplishments); for I say unto you, that in heaven, their angels do always behold the face of my Father, who is in heaven!" Oh, my brethren, there are diviner and purer sources of wisdom than any within the exclusive control of the educated and the great. Whatever dependence the mind may have on learned teachers and books, the soul has immediate access to its source, and its source has direct communication with it; so that, informed by the spirit of truth, the meanest faculties have bloomed into wisdom, and the most uneducated and unfavoured persons discovered an all-furnished nature. Exactly what our Lord means by saying that their angels always beheld the face of His Father, I know not; but that every man, in a lowly and humble temper of soul, has a messenger from God, waiting to instruct him-an infallible and heaven-inspired teacher-I fully believe. Whether it be that these our angels are our

own souls, which, as they came from God, and indeed have never left Him, may be considered as really still before His throne, gazing into His face, and ready to report to us, in the first lull of passion and wilfulness, at the first moment of humility and teachableness, what they see and know; or, whether we are blessed enough to have each a guardian angel, who is charged with our salvation, and for ever waits for the opportunity to catch our now preoccupied and diverted attention, who shall say? But the practical truth is the same. Every man carries in himself the seeds of eternal truth, the hints and suggestions of a Divine life and character. Would he heed his own heart, would he allow his conscience to be heard, would he obey his better instincts, he would be wiser in one hour than all the learning of schools and the experience of the world can make him. Irreligion, selfishness, inveracity, pride, sensuality, jealousy, hatred, envy,-who ever unlearned these in the world, or in the library, or in society, or the company of the famous and the brilliant? An angel from heaven must teach them; the soul must see their falseness and folly for itself. It is a moral and spiritual light that can alone illumine the path of salvation. All our darkness is a bandage we wilfully bind over our own eyes; all our difficulty is made by our self-will. Were we willing to know and to do the truth, it would flood our souls. Had we the simplicity of apostles, we should share their illumination. And it is this principle which accounts for the wonderful re-creation of the soul, sometimes produced suddenly by powerful religious influences. It takes no more time to open the eyes of the soul than the eyes of the body; and the prospect is always ready. There is no such wonderful change in life possible, as the change from self-conceit to humility, from pride of opinion to utter teachableness, from the attitude of one that turns his back upon Divine truth, to that of an earnest pupil; and that change is a change of will, which may take place in an instant. You do not know, you do not believe, perhaps, my brethren, that there is a veil over the minds of unchristian men, the sudden raising of which would reveal a world as new and lovely and inviting as that which the blind man, restored miraculously to sight, would behold in a summer's day on the fairest spot of earth. You do not see the world the child of faith sees-sees here, sees everywhere. It is not superior intelligence, acuter intellect, longer study, that opens this world. It is only