Now, as you will be hereafter by your ordination vows, you are bound to 'forsake all other studies' which in any way come into collision with the one supreme study to which you devote your lives. But, subject to this limitation, the wide field, with all its fair flowers and pleasant fruits, is still open to you, and you do well to walk in it and to gather them. Heart and brain alike demand intervals of rest. There are hours when you cannot work, and these also may be wasted or made fruitful. They are not to be merely filled up with the light reading of the day, the journal, secular or religious, the feeble commonplaces of inferior books-travels, or sermons, or biographies, or fictions — which have nothing but their harmlessness to recommend them. Carry the principle of selection into those leisure hours; make it your purpose to learn something of the best works of the best writers; rise out of the pettiness of newspaper correspondents or sectarian controversies into fellowship with the great masters of those who know. The works of true poets, the lives of great and good men, the writings of true observers of nature or of artthese strengthen while they refresh; they make you the better, not the worse, fitted for your higher work.

What I have said of that higher work has been, I feel it painfully, meagre and unworthy. Let one

At

word, before I end, bring it before you in something of its true and wonderful greatness. The difference of the work to which you are called, and that of the sons of Aaron against whom Malachi bore his protest, may be measured by a single word. Their lips were to keep knowledge; they were to be studious, thoughtful, devout, that men might seek the law at their mouth. They were to proclaim the will of God as a righteous will, a rule of life requiring righteousness in man. Their covenant with God was, indeed, of life and peace; but they were to tell also of the misery and death which followed when the covenant is broken. your lips men are to seek not the law only, in its fulness, its severity, but the gospel. You are messengers of the Lord of Hosts-bearing the same name as the priests of old, as the last of the prophets, as the forerunners of the Lord, yea, even as the Lord himself—that you may beseech men, in Christ's stead, to be reconciled to God. All gifts and powers are to be devoted to the one end of setting forth the glad tidings that Christ has redeemed men from the curse of the Law; that God is calling them to repentance, adopting them as His children. That is the 'good thing committed to your trust,' which you are to guard against attacks; to free from misconceptions; that the truth which you are to proclaim in its fulness. See that

it is really a gospel to yourselves, that you know how blessed a thing it is to find deliverance, pardon, holiness in Christ, or else you will be powerless to make others feel that it is a gospel—a message of good news, for them. This is what you are to labour for; to this end strive, by study, meditation, prayer, not for skill in controversy, or subtle interpretations, or ritualistic refinements, but to make men know and feel that 'God is Love,' and that he who dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God; that God is light,' and that ‘in Him is no darkness at all.'

XIV.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE DEPENDENT

ON OBEDIENCE.

'If any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.'-JAMES I. 23, 24.

F we would measure the force of these words

and the comparison they contain, we must go back to the impressions and feelings of uncivilized men. Our familiarity with the works of art that come into our daily life, makes us forget what novelties they must once have been, what a new world of thought they must have opened to those who for the first time witnessed them. Place a native of some wild island in the Pacific, the wanderer through some African waste, before a mirror; watch its effect even on the opening consciousness of a child, and you will see what will give a new life become so trite. There will be wonder at that which has brought about so strange and startling a result; an eager curiosity to exhaust all the stores of knowledge which the new discovery has

to the words that have

unfolded. There will be also the recognition of his own identity in a way altogether new. Now, for the first time, he will feel that he knows what he looks like; what he is. The new knowledge may be flattering, may be disappointing. He may discover blemishes, deformities of which he was before unconscious, may be startled, as children often are, to see the impress which passion, or care, or fear, has left upon his features, -may be stirred to the resolve that, if only for that reason, that his own image may be more pleasing to himself, he will strive to conquer that passion for the future. We, with our habits of life, and appliances of art around us, have that knowledge perpetuated from day to day, from hour to hour. If we can never enter into the keen sensation of the freshness of such an experience, we are at least free from the danger of forgetting what the experience has taught us. But let that be the only time that the bright surface gleams before the wild wondering eye; think of the savage as going back to his old life, plunging once again into his former barbarism; and how much of that knowledge do you think he would retain? How long would he who had beheld his natural face in a glass remember what manner of man he was, or find in that remembrance anything to curb his rage or raise him out of brutal negligence? As a mere.