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and butter, this adding of shilling to shilling, and pound to pound; this besting your fellows and winning a victory which does not ensure you from the conflict of to-morrow.

Sometimes it would seem as though life had no meaning at all; it is only, a chaos, and the best that you can do is not to think about it; and it may be that you have never paused to reflect concerning your reaction upon it all or the reaction of the eternal upon you. But you must do it, for the question is put to you. Do you know what your life means? It may mean, as some people tell us, that this is a school, and God has put us here to learn lessons for eternity, and all that has befallen you is fitting you to be a noble man in days to come. That is true, but it is not all, and it is not half. If all that you and I have been summoned to endure and to do means no more than that we are being made good by it, that could be done without our being sent to school. But that is not it. Man is an end in himself, but he is not the whole. God has something to do in His wonderful universe about which He does not consult us. We are put here to live something for God, and I venture to say that the highest satisfactions you ever had, my worldly friend, were those in which you lost sight of your puny personality, and lived for humanity, lived for your kind. Cannot you come to believe that that is the meaning of the whole thing? You are not to be an end to yourself, although you are an end to God. You may trust your destiny to Him by whom the very hairs of your head are all numbered. And take you care of nothing less than this-to play the man and live for the highest. Leave the rest to God. Sure it is that the most blight

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ing thing in manhood is the influence of fear. Some may feel a dread of what is to be within the next hour, or to-morrow, or the day after; you just shiver in anticipation of an evil that is impending. Put it from you; fear is the last thing which should ever have any place in the heart of a child of God. Shake it from you. Come over. Sometimes we are asked why God permits so much that is evil. "Permits"? Why, He sends it. That old mystic was right who said: There is no doer but God." Not one of the ills of life could ever touch you if He did not open the door. No matter how malignant your assailant might be, when anything has come to you which your soul pronounces unwelcome, praise God, and then you have come over. The evils, as we call them, of life are often not evils at all. We mix up evil with sin, and talk as if the two were one. They are not; evil is the larger term, and pain may be included in it. You cannot say that your sufferings were good, but they make it; and I would not have pain expelled from life for all the glory that imagination may give. That is what makes man great, and somehow we feel it when we cannot prove it. An American writer, Professor James, in his Gifford Lectures, lately delivered in this country, says:

"It is indeed a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not as a rule abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give to it a keener zest; and the sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire. Our hour of triumph is what brings the void."

There is a deep truth there, and I do not wish any Christian in thinking about it to feel the slightest mis

giving concerning it. You are called to come over, to

come up.

I stood on the Cornish coast a while, and on one day of storm I saw something which taught me something. A great sea-bird—I could not give a name to it-rose on white wings athwart the stormy sky, and a little group of us watched for a long time his progress against the fury of the elements. Every now and then it seemed as if Boreas gripped that frail thing and hurled it downwards to the earth. Had it been a man, it would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks fifty times. Then it seemed whirled upside down, but always it turned and rose again, and came up and came over, spreading its wings to the attacking winds; it rose and rose and rose, until it was a speck in the sky. Like the sea-bird, so are the sons of God. On the wings of faith and hope we are meant to rise. Be glad of your conflicts; put on the whole armour of God; fight the good fight of faith; call nothing common or unclean. You have won your victory when you have estimated that they that be with you are more than all they that are against you. Consider that in the common things of life there is something that we have to do for God. Why, it makes the horizon illimitably vaster to think it is not for ourselves, but for God, and He will take care of you. As George Macdonald says in "Robert Falconer": This is a healthy, a practical, a working faith. First, that a man's business is to do the will of God. Second, that God takes upon Himself the care of that man. Third, and, therefore, that a man ought never to be afraid of anything."

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Some of the grandest things that have been done in

this world by heroes of God have been done by those who were feebly endowed, as the world judges, for the task which was before them; but they were done. Not from the seen, but from the unseen, did they draw their strength. It may be that my texts, if not my sermon, shall reach someone who was just about to give up, who felt that the problem of life was too terrible, our experience of life too dread, to enable us hopefully to take heart of grace and try again. Put away from you all self-ward feelings; you are just a soldier on the battlefield, and by-and-bye you shall receive the victor's crown, and sit down upon the throne with the Saviour of mankind. But the test and condition before the winning of the guerdon are: Can you come over? "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne." And hour by hour, and moment by moment, in the very midst of the conflict there is rest. You have no business to be miserable. There is peace in the conflict, the peace of the heroes of God. Listen to the voice of our Teacher, in whose words I address you this morning. The Master of mankind speaks: "These things I have spoken unto you, that in Me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation," of course, "but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. . . . My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

XII

CONSCIENCE IN COMMON LIFE

What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God?

-Micah vi, 8.

GOOD deal of time has been occupied in aca

A

demic discussions as to the origin of that fac

ulty of human nature which we call conscience. The theories advanced, and which, it goes without saying, often conflict with each other, and none of which, perhaps, is precisely adequate, may be ultimately reduced to two. We have, on the one hand, that familiar view, which may best, perhaps, be expressed in the words of that pagan philosopher who is quoted in Pusey's "Spiritual Letters":"To all mankind conscience is God. The judgment of each will be how he has listened to that voice." Without committing myself to that view, I may state the extremes thus. The naturalistic view of the origin of conscience is that it represents the deposit of social sanctions which have come down to us from bygone ages. In that view conscience is just one of Nature's expedients for the preservation of her handiwork; the whole human race is but one of Nature's instruments-the faculty of conscience implanted within the human soul-ah !—perhaps I had better not say so-within the human mind is one of Nature's expedients to keep the race from

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