of God says to us, says to thee--Is it nothing

to you, all ye that pass by?

It is a subject

2. Or look at Impurity. which must be lightly handled, for in its very name is contamination, and there is pestilence in its most distant breath. A young man, in the degraded impulse of passions,—which, when uncontrolled, debase man not only to the level, but below the level of the beasts that perish,wrongs the faith, or betrays the weakness which trusted him. It is his pleasure; and what comes of his infamous pleasure thus recklessly and selfishly indulged? For him, if he repent, agonies of shame; and burdens of remorse; and, it may be, years of guilty consequence: if he repent not, and if-which is far worse for him he seems to go unpunished, a callous heart, and a fearful looking for, and a curse. watching his life with hungry eyes, and finally that certain retribution which comes, and must come, now or hereafter, on all unrepented sin. That is the result for him. And what for the victim of his crime? For her, a blighted

life, a ruined home, a seared heart, the anguish of those who loved her, the beginning it may be of such shame as-so far at any rate as this world is concerned-had made it better for her if she had not been born. That is one form of impurity; one only of its many forms. Multiply it by millions, with all its resultant horrors of loathly sickness; of ruined intellect; of sapped strength; of hidden shame; of homes made like hell; of minds smouldering with the inward torture of unhallowed fire; of lives whose root is as rottenness, and their blossom is gone up as dust; and there you see the work of another demon from the abyss, sent forth by the Powers of Darkness to plague mankind. And once more that voice of God says to us, says to thee-Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

3. Or look at Hatred, its rarer active forms of murder, assault, violence, cruelty; its more universal, and in their aggregate hardly less injurious forms of envy, spite, scandal, uncharitableness, innuendo, depreciation, slander,

malice, whispering, backbiting-multiform developments of one base passion, multiform names for one base thing. Thousands of men, for instance, get their living by writing anonymously. The anonymous is to them an invisible ring whereby they can, with impunity, often even unsuspected, speak of others all words that may do hurt. It is as an impregnable shield, from behind whose shelter they can shower arrow-flights of falsehoods, sneers, misrepresentations, disparagements at their defenceless victims. They can tarnish the merits of an opponent. They can obliterate the services of a rival. They can gild the follies of a partisan. They can secretly blight the hopes of a nominal friend. They can give a false aspect to fair reasonings, a foolish appearance to just opinions. They can sneer away honest reputations, and push empty pretensions into prominence. They can abuse the good, and belaud the bad. They can be as false, as hollow, as malignant as many such writers daily show themselves to be. There are, of course, many

who nobly resist these temptations.

They

can wear the mask without using the dagger. But the number is not too large of those who can show the supreme virtue of thus being able to wear this ring of Gyges' and of never abusing it to base purposes. In the London press, and in the local press, and even, alas! in the so-called "religious" press, anonymity is open to the basest of mankind; and even when names are signed there is an ample sphere for conceit and Pharisaism; and malice is relished; and lies are profitable; and bad men can let their tongues "rage like a fire against the noblest names;" and the many-headed beast of credulity, ignorance, and envy accepts what they say. "Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues have they deceived; the poison of asps is under their lips." And thus, alike in public life and in private life, does

2

Plat. Rep. ii. § 3; Herod. i. 8. Hence the proverb Túyou δακτύλιον. "Hunc igitur ipsum annulum si habeat sapiens nihilo plus sibi licere putet peccare, quam si non haberet. Honesta enim bonis viris non occulta quaeruntur."-CIC. de Off. iii. 9

2 Rom. iii. 13, 14; Ps. v. 9; Matt. xv. 18, 19; Ja. v. 2–8 ; i. 26.

the innate baseness and littleness of the corrupted human heart shoot out its arrows-even bitter words. And in a world where David once said in his haste that "All men are liars," and where even good men have been sometimes tempted to say the same thing at their leisure, the voice of God asks us, asks thee-Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by ?

4. Once more, for I shall not attempt to exhaust the catalogue, or fill in the outlines of the unlovely picture-look at the love of money. It is a fiend-this Mammon which tries to wear a more respectable exterior than other fiends. He goes to church, and figures not seldom in the phylacteries of the Pharisee. Yet, this is of the trade

he who taints with falsity so much and commerce of the world. Who that is familiar with all the ins and outs of "business" has not heard of false balances; deceitful weights; sham prices; exorbitant demands;

1 The personification is of course later. The word is a substantive, derived perhaps from 19. "De mammonâ—de nummo scilicet."-TERT. adv. Marc. iv. 33.