occupied in intellectual pursuits, he may come to regard intellectual attainments as the great object of life and the ministry as a profession subordinate to this end. In preparing sermons his chief aim may be to produce a finished and able oration, and his highest ambition may be satisfied with the admiration of the more cultivated of his hearers; thus he makes his sermon an end not a means, and his ministry degenerates into a contemptible dilettanteism. This is not the warfare against Satan's kingdom.

Nor is the battle merely against inward corruption, the ghastly conflicts of the cloister and the desert. Religion is not a dream, but an action. It is not meditation, nor excitement, nor emotion, nor worship terminating in itself. It is a fight with the falsehoods and sins of human life. Every Christian is a Hercules slaying monsters.

As Jesus put himself into actual contact with humanity, entered into it, so as to be in quick sympathy with its life and "touched with the feeling of our infirmities," as he bore its sorrows and its sins, and virtue was always going out of him to save, so every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, with whatever knowledge, culture, spiritual power, lives in immediate contact with humanity, touched with the feeling of its infirmities, in sympathy with its sorrows and its joys, meeting its wants, its errors and its sins, and constantly with virtue going out of him to help and save.

The battle is against the kingdom of darkness, not in the abstract, but in the actual sophistries, temptations, and sins, the actual evil opinions, customs, and institutions, by which the powers of darkness are deceiving and destroying men.

It is important to be sure that our warfare is in reality, and not in name only, against the kingdom of darkness. In addressing an assembly of students for the ministry it may not be amiss to say that ministers have usually been sufficiently given to controversy and warfare; but it is often internecine, for differences in philosophy and forms, against faithful servants of Christ; so that there needs to be a moral

parallelogram of forces to determine what small resultant bears on the object to be moved. It has even been urged, to their discredit, that exhausting their strength in these feuds they have exerted no earnest and effectual influences against the rapacity, dishonesty, and oppression, which are corrupting society. It must be added that in the present unsettling of thought and confusion and conflict of opinion respecting reform and progress, when the advocacy of the pope's infal libility and temporal power goes on side by side with the advocacy of woman's suffrage and of agrarian rights for working-men, it demands spiritual discernment to know the truth and to escape being found fighting against God. The security is, that the soul be in fresh and living sympathy with the living Saviour rather than with the hortus siccus of creeds and systems, and in living sympathy with humanity in its actual life. The Saviour says: "My sheep hear my voice." It is only as we are in sympathy with him, receiving through the Spirit his thought and life into our own, and in sympathy like him with man, that we shall know his voice amid the babel of voices in this age: "I understand more than the ancients because I keep thy precepts." Spiritual discernment and far-sightedness come from keeping God's precepts. When statesmen, having no affinity for the law of God and the spiritual life of love, recommend measures for the welfare of the state which assume that selfishness is the only power to be considered in human affairs, and so fatally mistake the drift and movement of human thought and miss the measures needed for the welfare of society, the spiritual mind discerns the spiritual forces which the carnal mind knows not, and proclaims with prophetic far-sightedness the principles of justice in which alone safety can be found. This is the "poor wise man " who delivers the city.

The fact that life is a battle demands of every Christian the spirit of martyrdom. There cannot be a Christian life without it. He who has not learned to value duty, fidelity, the kingdom of Christ, more than property, reputation, or life, has not learned the first lesson of Christian living. He

whose end in life is only to attain ease, comfort, fame, culture, the gratification of taste; he who does not accept life as a warfare, demanding the endurance of hardness for Christ, has not yet accepted the Christian idea of life. But if any Christian sacrifices his ease, or suffers persecution or reproach for Christ, Christ with his own hand writes his name in the glorious catalogue of the martyrs, saying of him: "So persecuted they the prophets." Thus the most common-place soul becomes luminous with heavenly glory, as a lump of coal at the touch of fire bursts into flame, and is glorified with brightness while it is consumed.

Paul animates the suffering Christians of his day by pointing to those who had been faithful to God in preceding ages, who now, a great cloud of witnesses, look down as in an amphitheatre on them in their conflicts. In that assembly of spectators Paul himself and the apostles and innumerable faithful ones in the ages since, have already taken their places. They have transmitted the great conflict to us to hold and extend their victories. In their presence we are fighting the good fight of faith. Their plaudits do not break the silence of eternity and fall on mortal ears; but "there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth." In times of declension when Christ's kingdom is overborne by the world, the ear of faith can hear the cry of the martyrs wailing the triumph of wickedness: "How long, O Lord, faithful and true"? And the great cloud of witnesses exult in the grand and solemn joy of eternity for every instance of fidelity, for every heroic achievement of love, and send to the combatant their words of cheer: "Be thou faithful unto death, and thou shalt receive the crown of life."

PART II.

THE PECULIARITY OF CHRISTIAN VIRTUE INVOLVED IN THE FACT THAT IT ORIGINATES IN REDEMPTION.

AT the banquet in Boston to the Chinese embassy, a distinguished literary man quoted the maxim of Confucius: "Do not to others what you would not that they should do to you." On that remarkable occasion when heathenism and Christianity were confronted before the world, he evidently intended to intimate that the morality taught by heathen philosophy is the same with that taught by Christ. This represents a type of thought which has acquired currency ast an argument against Christianity. The argument is, that all the more profound philosophies and religions of the world. recognize with more or less distinctness the same principles of morality; that therefore Christianity is merely one of the religions of the world and has no pre-eminent claim to a divine origin.

The first reply is that the New Testament explicitly teaches that conscience gives all men a knowledge of moral law, so that they are without excuse for sin. Without this, Christianity would have no basis; a universal religion, and even a universal community of moral sentiment, would be impossible. The defenders of Christianity have been earnest to vindicate this against sceptics, who have endeavored to establish atheism by denying man's moral nature and the universality of moral principles. Christian apologists have cited the common moral sentiments of different literatures; and have met the objection, founded on the conflicting judgments of different peoples respecting the moral character of outward actions, by showing that they all appeal to the same

1 Rom. i. 18-32; ii. 12-16.

principles in justification of these diverse actions. The heathen woman who religiously throws her child into the Ganges, the slaveholder, the despot, if they attempt to justify their actions, appeal to the same principles to which we appeal in condemning them. We welcome the concession of this point by Comte, Buckle, and writers of their school, and rejoice in the research which has established the Christian doctrine beyond further controversy.

A second reply is, that Jesus was not distinctively a teacher of philosophy or of ethics, nor even a lawgiver; but he was the Redeemer of the world. He assumes that God's law is already known and already transgressed. He comes to redeem men from sin and guilt of which they are already conscious. He presupposes and takes up into his teaching the religious and moral truths acknowledged in the religions and philosophies of the world; but he himself is the Redeemer, bringing God's love into human history as an energy of redeeming grace, making propitiation for sin, and quickening sinners into the life of faith and love. He speaks the word of promise and of hope to man, quickens in sinful humanity the germinant forces of a new and spiritual life, establishes his kingdom of righteousness, and sets humanity forth in a progress to realize the ideals of moral and spiritual perfection both in the life of the individual and the civilization of society. To whatever extent it may be possible consistently with historical facts to demonstrate an agreement between Christianity and the religions and philosophies of the world, the demonstration has no force against the distinctive claim of Christianity to divine origin and authority.

The English writers of the last century on the Evidencesof Christianity, in urging the superior morality of the New Testament, sometimes wrote as if they regarded Christianity as simply a system of ethics. They thus unwittingly admitted rationalism into the very defences of Christianity, and betrayed their position to their adversaries; they invited the objection under consideration and others of a similar character, which have no force against Christianity as an historical redemption.