We are accustomed to say that God is One, and, by parity, that his truth is one; yet, within this verity another is contained, that man and his affairs are given to change.

To-day you are not in the same frame you were yesterday, much less a week ago. Your spirits are different, events are different, experience is different, and you have either lapsed or gained, advanced or fallen back, gathered strength or struggled with fear and weakness in the spiritual life, even in the short periods which separate between one assembling of yourselves together and another. Either "vain thoughts" or good thoughts, or thoughts partly one and partly the other, have been exercising and influencing you from day to day, and from week to week. Some have been in the fear of the Lord, "loving his law," and searching his will. Some have been in bondage to the world, studying its law, and living for its will. And some in a purely neutral state, apathetic, unconcerned, of no original or self-determining force, and never very much concerned under what Lord they serve, or under what influence they live.

We must think for all these sections of our mixed community; and, as opportunity and power shall admit, speak to them the words of life, and bring to them the message of truth.

The words of the Psalmist bring before us two states of the mind, aversion and affection, a recoiling from and an inclining to; and the corresponding objects which stimulate respectively those opposite emotions. He "hates" vain, foolish, delusive and unworthy thoughts. But he "loves" and cherishes, embraces and clings to, what truth approves, what God ordains, and the best experience confirms and commends: which is, after all, but a faithful exposition of the religious life of all, in whatever age of the world, and under whatever dispensation of the truth of God, a thoughtful and faithful heart may happen to be placed.

The depths of devotion, the spiritual experiences, the inward searchings, and the upward strivings, set forth in that wonder

ful production of the Jewish mind, the 119th Psalm, are but the manifestation and type of what every true and earnest soul passes through and understands, under the unobscured light which falls upon its path, straight from the throne of God, and rich with the truth of Christ.

There are various senses in which the thoughts of men may be justly described by the epithet "vain." But from the apposition in which they are placed in the passage of Scripture to which we refer, we may conclude that the term was meant to imply something very much worse than merely foolish, wandering thoughts. "I hate vain thoughts; but thy law," God's law, "I love." So that they were something directly opposed to God's law,-worldly, wicked, impious thoughts, and not merely empty ones, but positively evil ones.

It is not easy to calculate the evil that is in the world; there is, undoubtedly a great deal of good; enough, perhaps, to keep the evil in check, but quiet withal, and patient,— "believing, hoping, bearing," like the Charity described by Paul; therefore not apt to strike the eye, arrest the attention, or affect the imagination. It exists, and even widely exists; but we pass on scarce conscious of its presence, and but rarely very sensible of its power.

The evil which is in the world is of another sort. It is terribly and keenly felt! In high places and in low, in public and in private, in humble homes, in courts, in cabinets, in palaces, its works are manifest, its spirit never sleeps, and its power never flags. And yet, paradoxical as it might seem, we are led to say, that this is well. There is something more powerful than evil, and that is God. And if evil was to be, under His control, and for purposes of ultimately greater good, we may be the easier reconciled not only to its being, but to the often grievous and painful evidence of its sharpness and its strength.

Like the maladies of the body, it is well that the symptoms be decisive, that the peccant humours come well out, whereby the resources of human skill, and the repairing energies of a

wise and loving care, will have the freer and fuller scope for retrieving the system, and imparting to it a new and unwonted vigour. It is the subtlety, not the pungency, of the poison we have most to dread. For example; if Despotism never ripened into tyranny, we should have fainter hope for freedom among the nations. If Ambition never betrayed itself in open wrong and overbearing violence, its smooth diplomacy would subdue the unalarmed and unsuspecting world into meek submission to its inordinate schemes. If Drunkenness only punished itself, and never beleaguered our benches of justice with tales of famished children, of bleeding and mangled wives, and distracted and ruined homes, the universal horror would be less intense, and the labours of philanthropy be less devoted to lessen or extirpate a cause of so much suffering, sin, and degradation! Or,-to sum up all that can be said or thought of human crime and woe,-if Slavery could only contrive to be always pious, plausible, parental, patriarchal, merciful, meek, considerate, gentle, generous (qualities claimed for it by not a few of its infatuated supporters!)—the wondering world might be more quiescent, and the prodigy of absolute power in the hands of one man over the body, will and life of another, might comparatively escape the detestation and scorn of the soberer and juster portion of mankind. But it consists with the wisdom of Providence to let this horror come out in all the nakedness of its character. It buys and sells, and mutilates and tortures, just at its pleasure and at the impulse of its hideous passions, millions of fellow-creatures, one whole race of God's unoffending children; while, in the rampancy of its hitherto unchecked excesses, yearning for wider domains, it would spread its pollution over regions the richest and fairest of the earth, by policy the most insidious, or pretensions the most audacious! But, thanks to Providence, the monstrous thing begins to work its own cure. It bursts by its own plethory. Its associate communities begin to be shocked, and prepare to resist. While the spirit of the elder world, no longer restrained by the ordinary "comity of nations," gives

be

a freer scope to criticism whose fervent tone and indignant meaning must help on that issue of a sure, though it may distant future, when every living man shall have the right to himself, to his own body, and his own soul, and justice, law, liberty, knowledge, shall be the security and the privilege of every tribe and colour of God's reasoning creatures!

Thus it would seem that, in regard to these and other unnumbered agencies of woe, of which moral evil is the seat and source,―or, to call it by its simple scriptural name, of which Sin is the ever-teeming mother, the individual conscience would take the less account, and the heart of society would be less actively and remedially cognizant, were their evidences less impressive and their consequences less appalling. In the face of so much moral evil as we see in the world, with all its direful sequences, it appears to me to be of the last importance that we should be well built up in the reasonings and principles whereby we would arrive at some satisfactory, or at least acquiescent, conclusion in regard to its permission by an allwise and over-ruling Power: and that not for the sake of speculation only, or to appease a curiosity, however natural, in the attempted solution of a dark and intricate problem; but rather for direct practice' sake; for the very life of virtue itself; and for the growth, and strength, and spread, of the highest Christian holiness. God, truly, could have averted, or could now remove, all evil, moral or physical, Himself: but He chooses that we should do it for Him; or rather, in so doing, should be workers together with Him.

Now, in the moral world, as in the physical, there can be no effort where there is nothing to draw it out; no success, without its previous struggle; no victory, without its subdued temptation; no satisfaction and serenity, without some sense of difficulty overcome, and danger which had yielded to faithfulness and courage.

Let us illustrate what we mean. A distinguished visitor to our shores, on crossing the Atlantic, came within view of that part of the Irish coast where a frightful catastrophe had hap

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pened some years before, in the loss of a passenger ship which had been dashed in a storm against its pitiless rocks. impression of this dreadful event had fixed itself deeply on her mind while she was yet a child; and now, on beholding the scene, far on in life, the reflection rose up in her mind, "What an infinite deal of misery results from man's helplessness and nature's inflexibility in this one matter of crossing the ocean! What agonies of prayer there were during all the long hours that this ship was driving straight on to these fatal rocks, all to no purpose! It struck and crushed, just the same! Surely, without the revelation of God in Jesus, who could believe in the Divine goodness? I do not wonder that the old Greeks so often spoke of their gods as cruel, and believed that the universe was governed by a remorseless and inexorable fate."*

Now, much as we are indebted for admirable and evermemorable services, in another direction, to this rarely gifted writer, we must be allowed to say that a greater mistake than this could not have been put in words; the only unimpeachable thought in those ill-considered lines being the mercy and glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, who came to confirm the traces of a goodness already known, of a wisdom already visible, and to open up, enlarge and crown that wisdom and goodness, by promises sure and steadfast of their consummation and completion in a world without suffering, without sin, and without end! For the question arises, Had God saved that ship, and, in answer to those prayers, stilled that sea and hushed that storm, why should any other ship ever perish; and why should any other prayer fail to baffle nature's laws, and by its impassioned wailings supersede the necessity of human effort, human science, human heroism; and, may we not add, too, the sublimest Christian fortitude and Christian piety?

Let us thank God, the order of nature, "inflexible" though

* Mrs. Stowe's "Sunny Memories," ch. ii.