befall us in the coming time; we ask what new friendships shall we make, what fortunes shall we encounter, what new sorrow or happiness shall crush or brighten us?"

And as we look forward to see, lo! the veil of mist closes in, and shuts out the future and the downward path.

Whether I who speak to you, or you who sit before me, will be alive in a year's time, what our fortunes will be, what our troubles, God alone can tell! But this we do know, that whether clouds or sunshine chequer the path of our pilgrimage, we need fear no evil if we take Christ for our Guide.

See! we are all of us voyagers on the ocean of life. What will be the fate of you, and you, and you, in the coming year? Some of us have had as yet naught but cloudless skies above, and the ripple of pleasure. Others of us are farther on, for we see the rocks of temptation, the dangerous reefs of doubt, the tempest of adversity and remorse. Who is your pilot? Is it Christ? Where is your destiny? Is it in the home beyond the foaming waters, or a death in the fury of the storm? Where is your soul drifting? Is it towards the haven of eternity, or towards the ironbound shores of self-caused misery?

If to any of you I am speaking for the last time this Sunday evening, I pray you to bear this in mind, that our kneeling together at that Holy Table this

morning is the sacred pledge by which you and I have agreed together that we are working in a common cause, that we shall continue united in a common brotherhood, in common nobleness of life here and in common hopes of life hereafter.

So when parting, which is the lot of humanity, comes to us one by one, we may feel that we are still linked together in one holy cause, and are fighting in the same great battle-field of life side by side; and though death or circumstance may sever us here, we shall yet be united at the last in that heavenly land which shall be our common and eternal home.

SERMON II.

The Inner Life.

PREACHED AT BRADFIELD, FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT, 1882.

“ And He said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while."-MARK vi. 31.

Ar the other end of the world there reigns a religion which numbers infinitely more adherents than the creed of Christianity has ever gained-a religion which to all human appearance suits the dreamy idealism of the Oriental mind far better than the more practical tenets of Christianity—a religion which teaches that the highest life is to rest on the pure intellectual contemplation of the Divine Being, and that to that end men must annihilate in themselves all human emotions, all family affections, all social ambitions, all loves.

Buddhism-the religion of loneliness, the religion of unsociability, the religion of mystery-appears vague and unmeaning to the minds of Western nations; it seems to us to cut, as indeed it does, at the root of all social life, and, if followed out

to its logical consequence, would end in the annihilation of the human race; each man and woman standing completely alone, as it were, before the face of God, and at the end of life gaining as their exceeding great reward the loss of all personality, all consciousness, and the absorption into the Eternal Mind from which they sprang.

Now, every religion which has gained any hold at all over the human mind must, as it seems to me, contain within itself the seeds of truth; otherwise, by an inexorable law of nature, it would, like everything else which has no intrinsic worth, infallibly have died out and perished long ago.

What then is this kernel of truth underlying the false religion of Buddha, which has appealed successfully to a vast mass of mankind, and which appeals in a certain sense to us as Christians? It consists, I think, in this, that it is a great attempt to satisfy one side of human longing-the longing of all noble souls to get nearer to God; and that, secondly, we can never get nearer to God so easily, so truly, so consciously, as when we are alone.

And though it may seem a strange thing to you to be told that the season of Lent, founded as it is on an historical episode in the life of the Man-God, Christ Jesus, has any similarity to or connection with the system of a false religion such as that of Buddha, yet it is absolutely true, and forms indeed one of the

strongest proofs of its divine origin, that Christianity from its very beginning seized on whatever there was of truth in the system of every other creed, and absorbed into itself the solitary grandeur and contemplative force of Buddhism, just as it absorbed into itself the philosophy of the Greek and the legal ordinances of the Roman, shaping them all to its own high ends.

It has been maintained indeed, and maintained with truth, that of all religions which have taken hold of men's minds, Christianity is the only one that has had much bearing on practical life; and that it is for this reason, humanly speaking, that it has been so potent a factor in the world's progress. Now this statement is no doubt absolutely and entirely true. It is because of its social character; it is because it addresses itself to men as members of a community; it is because it lays down rules for our guidance in dealing with our fellows; it is because nothing is unclean that comes into its net, Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free; it is because it adapts itself to all social organisms, whether republican or monarchical, whether democratic or socialistic, without for one moment losing its own individuality, but exercising its own mighty power outside of them all; it is because, in one word, it is practical, that, humanly speaking, it has come or is coming to be universal.

But when we insist so much on the fact that