you were wrong. Is not this discovery enough to make you think with horror and alarm about your own condition? If a grudge like that lies at the bottom of your heart, then what you pretended to denounce was not the thing that was stirring your indignation at all. Moreover, when we speak about grudges, we speak about a somewhat that can enter by the back door and vitiate all the good to which a man puts his hand. A minor offence we call it. We do not ask a man to resign his church membership because he bears a grudge against someone else, but we would ask him not to be too prominent in Christian service if he failed to meet his creditors; and yet it is certain that the cherishing of a grudge is as much a sin against God as failing to pay twenty shillings in the pound.

"Hard-heartedness dwells not with souls round whom Thine arms are drawn,

And dark thoughts fade away in grace like cloud-spots in the dawn.

I often see in my own thoughts, when they lie nearest Thee, That the worst men I ever knew were better men than me.”

To be like unto our Master, and to be really in joyful communion with Him, to be the possessor of the peace of God, grudges must go. How many there are amongst us who have no real enjoyment of their Christian life! We pray and we sing, we attend much upon the services of the house of God, but we are never at harmony with ourselves; we wonder what is the matter, we speak about it, we ask for guidance of another, it may be.

Go down to the minor offence, the sin which does so easily beset, that which men do not see and do not

know, and perhaps do not reprobate; get rid of it; it means the driving out of one spirit by the incoming of another. Thomas à Kempis says in the "Imitatio," 66 When I consider what I am, then no man hath ever done wrong to me." I think I know what he meant: we have no right to cherish grudges, no right to feel ill-treated, no right to consider ourselves superior to another who has inflicted a wrong. For, when all is told, we have deserved far more of pain than we have ever got. God is merciful, but except we forgive men their trespasses His mercy is stayed from us. As I came up from Brighton one morning, I noted that the sun was shining brightly about halfway up the line. When we got near London it was gone. Am I to suppose that it has ceased to shine on the sea-coast? I do not believe it. I think London has sent up from her great heart greyish, blackish clouds, which obscure the face of the sun. Often when you complain of the absence of the peace of God and the sunlight of heaven in your soul, it is because you have generated affections which will not let the Holy Spirit through, you have placed between yourself and your Master barriers it needs repentance to remove. Let us get low down at the Cross of Christ, humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, and He shall lift us up. See with a new sympathy the kinship of humanity everywhere, feel its heartbeat, get to the undercurrent where we are all divine. Respect the sacredness of another's soul; look with new eyes upon mankind, the eyes of Jesus, for, as Whittier has as sweetly said as the Faber whom I just now quoted:

"He prayeth best who leaves unguessed

The mystery of another's breast.

Why cheeks are pale, why eyes o'erflow,

Or heads are white, thou needst not know.
Enough to note by many a sign

That every heart hath needs like thine."

There is no time surely for adding to the world's pain; life is short at the best, and when the discipline is over we do not want to think as we stand at the parting of the veil that we have made it harder for another to fight his battle and to win his way through. Get the right spirit yourself, and you are working for the Christ, though you do not know it; and if your spirit be wrong you may claim all the virtues in the calendar, but you do not belong to the Master who hath called us to possess the heart of a little child. "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." of the heart proceed the issues of life."

"For out

XXI

VISION AND SERVICE

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.-Isaiah vi. 1, 5, 6, 7, 8.

and said

N this chapter we have the account of the begin

I

nings of a great prophetic ministry which has profoundly influenced the world. Of what nature the vision of Isaiah might have been we are hardly justified in attempting to speculate. That it was mainly subjective and symbolical is perfectly clear from the narrative itself, but it was a vision corresponding to an objective reality, which would have been there, whether Isaiah had known it or not, and which always is, whether the world knows it or not.

"In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord." This vision is by no means unique in religious history, and especially in Christian history. I need hardly bring to your recollection the vision of St. Paul, the vision of St. Francis, the vision of Wesley, the vision of Charles Spurgeon and of Catherine Booth. Men must see before they can say, and in this crisis of an

experience an experience not peculiar to Isaiah-we see something and know something which holds good of prophetic spiritual experience for all time.

This was a time of great national crisis. The king was dead. The prophet-statesman was musing sadly about the future What now? Amid a people, some of them degraded, indisposed for high and holy things, darkness gathering around the national destiny, the great soul of Isaiah was perturbed-and yet, in this moment of deep darkness, the vision comes. How, we are not told, nor how long it stayed; but “in the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord," the King, the Lord of Hosts. But the vision at first brought no comfort; rather was Isaiah trembling and afraid. It becomes no man to rush lightly and irreverently into the presence of God, and no man who has ever had a deep and profound consciousness of that presence Divine ever can speak of it as though it were all sweetness, and there were nothing of which to stand in awe. This is true of the saint, let alone of the sinner; and at that moment, when the vision came, Isaiah was no saint-"Woe is me, for I am undone. . . . For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts. I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." Then comes the symbolical cleansing. I see by your faces as I speak that some of you know well this spiritual pathway, the sense of awe and dread in the presence of God, the discovery of joy and peace and assurance in that same presence Divine, the fruit of a cleansing. However, that cleansing came. Isaiah was sure that it had come, and hence, when the call was given in the moment that followed, he whose iniquity had been taken away, and whose sin purged,