fear. He too had come to a great city, in which all elements of evil, Jewish malignity, heathen sensuality, seemed to have reached their height. Lust had come to be recognised as almost the law of life. The elements of the Church, which was to be as the first-fruits of a restored humanity, had to be gathered from among those who had been slaves to the foulest forms of it.1 As he walked through the streets of such a city, and looked up and down, seeing the idol-temples and the harlots' houses, his work must have seemed almost hopeless. His experience of the Jews' quarter and its synagogues was hardly more encouraging. If he had been at first 'pressed in spirit,' as he had been at Athens, testifying that Jesus was the Christ, there came afterwards the sense of wasted labours and of his own impotence. There seems to have been for a moment the nearest approach that there ever was in St. Paul's life to timidity and quiescence. The words were needed which came to him from the Lord Jesus in the visions of the night, Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace; for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee, for I have much people in this city.'" The ground of hope and confidence was that the work in which he was engaged was in very deed a Divine work, and

6

11 Cor. vi. II.

2 Acts xviii. 9, 10

therefore could not fail. Christ was with him, though he knew it not, in those crowded streets, among those lawless and sin-stained multitudes. Unseen by the eyes of the flesh, manifested only at intervals to the eye of the spirit in dream and vision, He was yet there, and He could reveal to the heart of His servant the truth which was so greatly needed, 'I have much people in this city.' He, the Light that lighteth every man, who knew what was in man, had seen that there were many even there who had not closed their eyes against that light as it streamed on their souls from within, who would not turn aside from it when it should come more clearly through the preaching of the Word, through the records of His own Divine life. Below the rank growth of weeds there was the good ground. Below the surface of a life that seemed simply frivolous and corrupt, there might be, yes, there was, the honest and good heart, which, when it received the seed, would bring forth fruit abundantly.

The records of that experience of the prophets of the Old Testament and the New connect themselves very closely, I believe, with our work to-day. They have a lesson for us all, from the chief pastor of this million-peopled city down to the youngest among those who, with trembling hearts, and impulses in which they recognise a higher guidance

than their own, are solemnly devoting themselves to the work which is to us what the work of prophets and apostles was to them. To them also the word of the Lord has come, surely not less really than it came to the son of Amittai. To them also the Eternal Spirit, dividing to every man severally as He will, has given gifts or powers, surely not less real, not less fitted for the work of building up the Church in our time, and among our people, than were those of the apostolic Church. In that infinite diversity of operations the form may change, the startling, the preter-natural, the marvellous may have passed away, but the super-natural remains, and still there is the one Lord, who bestows the power, and will call for the account, and all these things worketh that one and the self-same Spirit. You will not wonder, brethren, if, starting from these histories of the past, I speak less of the pastoral office at large, of the blessings, risks, duties, which are the same everywhere, and under all conditions, than of those which belong specially to you, the ministry of great cities, the special calling of the clergy of London, with its blessings and its risks.

(1.) Many among you, I believe, as you have looked forward to your work, or have actually entered on it, must have known something of the

feelings which almost drove the apostle, and actually drove the prophet, to shrink from what seemed so far beyond their strength. Something like a chilling sense of hopelessness must surely come on many a man as he walks through the vast extent of this 'exceeding great city.' If he has not to encounter the terrible ferocity of Nineveh, or the yet more fearful impurity of Corinth, there is yet enough of both to make him tremble. Brutality with its self-multiplying power, fruitful in wretchedness at all times, often exploding into crime,-whole districts peopled by prostitutes and thieves, squalid poverty, made more horrible by its contrast with stateliest pomp and an everincreasing luxury,—dangerous classes, barely repressed in times of order by police control, and ready to emerge, should disorder come, into a reign of terror,—all this is what we see daily. We grow callous to it; we seek to forget its existence; thousands seem to succeed in forgetting it altogether; but there it is, and sometimes at least it forces itself upon our thoughts. And when it does, when you take the measure of the work that lies before you, it brings with it, I am sure, a painful, almost bewildering sense of disappointment. We ask, were there worse scenes than this in the three days' journey through which the prophet passed? Were the streets and lanes of the city

worse in Corinth than they are in London? What are these better for all that we boast of as won by our own right hand, or inherited from our fathers? Civilisation, freedom, Protestantism, the Church of England, Christianity itself, what have they done for these?

Our work to-day in this place is, in part at least, an answer to that question. Year by year for centuries the call has gone forth, and has been answered. The great crusade against darkness and evil, of which the apostle was the foremost preacher, has gone on ever since. It is something that an evil which might otherwise have been paramount and pervading, should be acknowledged, fought against, controlled. You, brethren, are followers in that noble army of the Cross. Some of you, at least, are renouncing prospects of more rapid success, lives of greater ease and comfort, the culture and the tastes of a society in which you have delighted, in order that you may give yourselves to your Master's work, and seek, as He did, to reclaim the lost, and to preach the gospel to the poor. Others there are who have learnt the same lesson, or one yet harder, who have kept that work in view through the many changes of their lives, never forgetting the magnitude of the evil, never ceasing to labour to overcome it. And for both there is the encouragement and the lesson