demanded truth to the innermost convictions at all costs; so he built upon the granite of his own individuality, and dared to be original when originality meant death. He was, in a word, a strong man, "in whom the light of hope burned when it had gone out in others;" and such men, the Elijahs and the Daniels, the Luthers and the Knoxes, though they be discarded prophets and derided martyrs, are the saviours of the people who spit upon and mock them, and the glory of the lands which spill their blood in sacrifice.

How the pulse quickens as we read the story! In his splendid isolation stands this one man against king, court, and nation. For three years he has been a hunted fugitive; for three years Jezebel has enjoyed her wicked triumph; but this one man is unsubdued and unsubduable. At last he comes forth from his desert, and he comes like a thunderbolt. He bars the way of the king's chariot with a gesture, and silences him with one stern accusation: "Thou and thy father's house have made Israel to sin!" Never was the fearlessness of right so splendidly illustrated, or the impotence of evil so conclusively exposed. The hunter is dumb before his prey; the tyrant quails before his victim. There is a royalty in righteousness before which all other royalty is but tinsel; there is a supremacy in goodness which strikes the wicked dumb. Are you armed with that supremacy? Dare you stand fearless in the right though the heavens fall? Only then is a man invulnerable. No one can defeat a man who is in the right. He may be a wild man of the

desert and stand in tattered garb, but the chariot wrong stop at his signal, and kings fear his f When Elijah says, "Call all Israel together to Carm Ahab knows he must obey. So to Carmel Israe gathered; there the broken altars are rebuilt, and tl the pregnant question of my text is put to the multitude, who at last, when the fire of God desce cry in fearful acquiescence not less than profound viction, "The Lord, He is the God! The Lord, H the God!"

Now, the question of my text is as modern as had only been uttered yesterday; and I propose consider the abiding elements of this subject. transient elements peculiar to the age and people may dismiss. What is the modern Baal set up in trast with God? What are the issues of choice w confront us to-day?

First of all, it is the contrast between the recti of a noble character and the impotence of charac in a state of moral disintegration; it is the cont between righteousness and unrighteousness. Ask f moment, What was Israel in its best and noblest da It was a people permeated with the love of righte The only King was God. His unalterable g was symbolised in the awful splendour of the Shechi His presence in the pillar and the cloud, the far and the fire. He watched His people and rewa them; He punished and pursued; He blessed and blasted; He sent them hornets and angels. Go w they would, God always confronted them, and coul

ness.

little be escaped as the heavens which closed them round or the air from which they drew their life. What He demanded was "truth in the inward parts," righteousness as the soul of public life, the very pulse of daily conduct. Accordingly, every law of Israel was framed to this end. Its land-laws were equitable and just. Its laws for personal conduct crushed vice as with an iron foot, and built up the sanctity of the home and the chastity of the individual. The poor were covered as with the wing of God, and the orphaned and widowed became every man's care. Covetousness and avarice were penal offences, and the sense of God was made so supreme in the national conscience that every man felt God near him as the awful Witness of his life and the swift Avenger of his wrong-doing. Such a people in the hour of battle could not but be supreme; they moved like the glittering sword of God among the demoralised heathen peoples; they were the Ironsides of ancient times; and before their faith, their enthusiasm, their moral energy, the greatest heathen peoples succumbed, and the fairest portions of the earth became their heritage.

Ask what Baal meant to such a people, and the angry voices of Hebrew saint and prophet answer you in many a grim page of history or burning chapter of denunciation. Baal meant the vice, the licentiousness, the moral corruption, which Israel had been raised up to destroy an obscured vision of God, a debased moral sense, the utter loss of faith and spirituality. And Baal means just the same thing to-day. Look

around, and see how far righteousness is the co law of human life. Think of the crowd of mer have no vision of God, because they have thrown His altars, and follow the fatal feet of Mammon whose haste is to be rich, and not to walk in ways, whose fear is to be ill-fed, and not to do whose hope is not to gain the imperishable inher of character, but some perishable spoil snatched the sordid banquet of this world's pleasures. It m little to them that once there was a Cross upo earth, that still it gleams on city dome and spi that others have laid down their lives to win liberty and faith; they live only for themselves. talk loudly of their duty to themselves, and i their responsibilities to others; and for them the is but a legend, and its sacrifice a sacred myth. do not ask, "Is it right?" but "Will it pay?" a the "Thou God seest me," which has been the of a thousand noble lives, their insolent rejoind "Does God indeed know? He sleeps, or H journeying. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, fo morrow we die!" And so, because the noblest thoughts has passed out of their lives, the function of thought is vitiated, and the moral n emasculated. To "get on" and to get pleasur escape the rough places of life, to live out of rea its miseries and out of hearing of its voices of lam tion and appeal, is their all-sufficing aim; and in fo ing it they forget the living God, and serve that who is the prince of the power of the air, the

spirit, the mocker and derider, who was a liar from the beginning, and the relentless murderer of every pure ambition and unselfish impulse which can animate and deify the life of man. Righteousness: it stands embodied in this man, pure, strong, valiant, mightier than kings, invincible because consecrated to the service of the most high God. Unrighteousness: that, too, is embodied in a weak king seduced by an evil woman, in a people who have thrown off the fear of God, who rise up to play and lie down to dream, dazzled by a golden idol and emasculated by its sensual rites. It is the spectacle which every century presents to the youth who stands upon its thresholds and prepares to use the gift of years which God has given him; and from the slopes of Carmel the thunder of that valiant voice rolls across the wastes and voids of time, where the bones of nations which have forgotten God lie piled in tragic warning: "How long halt ye between two opinions?"

It is, again, the contrast between purity and sensuality. It was the sensual pollutions of Baal which awoke the most terrible denunciations of the Hebrew prophets, and sensuality is one of the first results of a life which has lost righteousness of thought. Do not mistake me. I do not say that impurity is the certain or inevitable result of loss of faith; but I do say that the man who loses righteousness of thought at least challenges the demon of sensuality to enter in and possess him. Shali I draw a modern sketch of what this aspect of Baalism means? It is a task I would thankfully evade, but it