worldlier life. Soon, too soon, the faint memories of heaven "fade into the light of common day." Soon, too soon, innocence vanishes, and the inevitable cloud of life makes dim the heavenly light.

I want you this Lent to come, as it were, into a desert place and rest a while; to be alone with your God, and meditate on the meaning of your life, whence you are and whither you are going; to gaze, as does the Buddhist, in contemplation of your God; to resolve now, when the young life-blood throbs warmly in your veins, to shake off once for all the slough of idleness, the slough of impurity, the slough of deceitful lips and a lying tongue, the slough of cowardly oaths and vulgar impotence, the slough of all that is base and mean and ignoble; to turn to Jesus, Who now, with outstretched arms, is ready to welcome you to Himself, and Who, though your sins be scarlet, shall make them white as snow, though they be like crimson, shall make them as wool.

The soul that has never looked eternity in the face has been called a vulgar soul. Look into it now; gaze into its depths. For you, my young brothers, for you a few short years may roll, and you, some of you to whom I am talking now, may be with those who sleep within the tomb. The shadow that waits for all men may be waiting for you even now. The reaper, whose name is Death, puts in his sickle, and often takes the fair young life away. Will it then be well

with thee in the unknown future? in the boundless

eternity will it be well? it will be well, very well; He will in no wise cast out. places of this world He shall carry you full lovingly in His everlasting arms, that faint not nor are weary, and take you at the last to that far country whence you came, to the eternal mansions of peace and love.

Oh! if you turn to Christ, and if you come to Him, Over the hills and rough

And if to some here the voice of warning has hitherto fallen on heedless ears; if they still are pandering to sensual appetites, wallowing in the styes of their own contrivance; if there be any here from whose lips the oath falls more easily than the word of prayer; if selfishness, indolence, lying, are crushing Christ out of their heart, I call to such as these, in the warning words of the prophet, this Lenten time, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

66

Why will ye die? I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God."

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Behold, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation."

"The night cometh, when no man can work.”

SERMON III.

Modern Laodiceans.

PREACHED AT BRADFIELD, NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY, 1882.

"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth.”—Rev. iii. 15, 16.

THE vehement and scathing character of these words is, we must suppose, warranted by the character of the Church of Laodicea to which they were addressed.

And I think that on reflection we shall find that it is a type of character which has been not unknown at any period of the world's history, and that the present day may furnish us with examples in no way dissimilar to those Laodiceans, who prompted this bitter castigation in the days of the early Church.

I refer to a class of men, and boys too, who aim at nothing—and hit it-who spend their lives in moral and spiritual vegetation, impressed with no sense of responsibility for their action or inaction, not even inflated with a sense of their own importance, but

dull, passionless, inane; spurred to no single noble act even by the thought of general acclamation; thrilled with no generous sympathy for the interests or sufferings of their fellows; with no pulse beating responsive to class or sectarian insurgence, or to the wider range of patriotism and national ambition; but sapless, soulless, bloodless denizens of God's throbbing universe. The Spirit in the Revelation describes such people as lukewarm, and denounces them with imagery of withering indignation: "I will spue thee out of My mouth."

And the Bible has not been alone in condemning them. Writers of every age and nation have exhausted metaphor and illustration to point the finger of scorn at them. They are as straw drifting along the stream; feathers which float down the gale; waves which seem to the casual observer to move onward, but which a truer philosophy tells us merely move fancifully up and down in the same spot; they do not march onward, but "beat time, until time has beaten them," and laid them in a nameless grave; they are as "statues in some public square or garden, which art has so fashioned into a perennial fountain that through the lips or through the hands the clear water of life runs in a perpetual stream, and the marble stands there passive and cold, making no effort to arrest the gliding water." And Dante, in his description of damned spirits, reserves the outermost circle of

hell for those who have thus toyed and flirted with the

awful realities of life.

"Who nor rebellious proved,

Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves

Were only. From his bounds Heaven drove them forth

Not to impair his lustre, nor the depth

Of hell receives them, lest the accursed tribe
Should glory thence with exultation vain."

Now, I say that this is a type of character which in this age is common, and I venture to think becoming commoner every day; the character of those who live as if they had no souls to be saved, as if they had no past or hereafter even in this world, as if the folding of their hands to sleep were their natural occupation, and the end and sum of their existence-an existence which God gave them and Christ redeemed.

No one who looks out into what is called the world of society can deny that this is so; that there is a class of men whom he can instinctively set down as exactly resembling the Laodiceans-a lotos-eating class who call earnestness vulgarity, and work degradation, and who, if they have any aim at all, aim at taking the slightest possible interest in any current event or burning question of the day, as the surest passport to the reputation of being men of breeding and good taste.

Now, when I say that such a type of character— this indifferentism-is in my opinion infinitely more dangerous to the security of our country and to the