believe, but testify. We must unite ourselves with the people of God; we must build churches and worship in them; our religion must be a palpable and visible reality, not only a private devotion, a mystic, hidden. rapture. I shall say nothing of your private godliness, of which God only and yourselves can judge. But of your public godliness, your testifying to the truth, your example to others-not in commercial integrity and domestic affection and personal culture, but in the direct and open recognition of Almighty God by common prayer and praise, by diligence in receiving religious instruction and the public means of graceof this everybody can judge, and everybody does judge. And what is it that the world sees and says? The very simplest and most rudimentary and easiest of our public religious duties is a regular attendance at the house of God. Churches are open every Sunday—nay, every day of the week—but in how many places scarcely anybody can be induced to enter them? Perhaps on Sunday morning a church may be full, especially if the music be good and the preaching not intolerable; but in the evening Christian men and women are conspicuously absent. The weather makes no difference to merchants and clerks, shopkeepers and schoolteachers, theatres and drinking-saloons; but for hundreds of professing Christians it is nearly always either too hot or too cold, too dusty or too damp, to go to church. And what does the world say of it all? It says that we are miserable hypocrites; that we do not believe what we pretend to believe; that our religion is a mere fashion, one of the proprieties of the set we belong to. The world says that our religion is not a delight, but a dismal necessity; not a willing service,

but a hard bargain; not a food, but a medicine; not a rest, but a fatigue.

Alas! it is only too possible that I am speaking to you in vain that you will not heed me. You will hear my words, but you will not do them. You will let the world go its own way for you, and the epidemic of fraud and violence spread, for you, unchecked. But at least I have done something to unburden my own conscience. And once again I say to you: See! I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil; wherefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live. The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

THE EFFECTS OF AN EXCLUSIVE OR DISPROPORTIONATE STUDY OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES ON RELIGIOUS BELIEF.*

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.-I. JOHN ii. 15.†

I propose, in this sermon, to make a special application of the words of S. John which, at first sight, may seem to many a little too remote. The word here translated world is one which has long since been naturalized in the English language; it is the word Kosmos. It stands, in modern thought, for all the phenomena of the universe regarded as a whole; capable of scientific arrangement by co-ordination or subordination; as coexistent in space or successive in time; as invariable antecedents or invariable consequents; parts of an order and capable of being described metaphorically as subject to laws. This meaning of the word has not, indeed, been altogether stable. But in its latest usage it would exclude anything which cannot be regarded as a phenomenon and accounted for by an antecedent, even though such things might conceivably or really exist in the domain of Being. It takes the universe as already existing, with its matter and movement; and it does not take into account any cause by which that universe may

*This sermon was not preached.

† Μὴ ἀγαπᾶτε τὸν κόσμον μηδὲ τὰ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ. ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ τὸν κόσμον, οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ πατρὸς ἐν αὐτῷ.

have been brought into existence, nor any possible future which may succeed when the existing order of Nature shall have come to an end. It does not deny God, but omits Him; nor can it easily find room, if at all, for the human will or the human conscience. Unspeakably beautiful and wonderful it may be; but it is "without father, without mother, without beginning of days or end of years." It is the object-matter not of theology, or metaphysics, or ethics, but of the physical sciences. Of such a Kosmos it seems to me emphatically true that "if any man," with an exclusive or disproportionate affection, "love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

But there may seem something of irreverence in using a passage of Scripture, as we might use a felicitous quotation from Shakespeare, for the purpose of obtaining a perhaps fictitious sanction for our own speculations. When we are examining the words of an inspired Apostle, our first object should be to ascertain, if we can, their exact and primary meaning. That meaning, however, will not simply be a barren assertion, a proposition or series of propositions from which, when combined with other truths, no further inferences can be drawn. But logical inferences are one thing, and mere artificial attachments are another. If, then, we are justified in affirming of the Kosmos of science what S. John affirms of the "world" which he really had in his mind, we must be able to show that there is a real analogy between the two, and that, by the very nature of the case, the love of the one will exclude the "love of the Father" as really, and in very much the same way, as the love of the other. In other words, the legitimate application of the text must be preceded

by a careful and accurate exegesis. In this way, too, we shall best satisfy the claims not only of reverence, but of logic.

It seems, then, that S. John has in his mind those three real and distinct objects which are the necessary conditions of all genuine religion: God, who is the Object of religion; the spirit of man, which is its subject; and the world, which is at once the sphere of its operations and the tools or implements by which it works. The first we know by conscience, the second by consciousness, the third by observation and experiment. Our primary knowledge of God is complemented by revelation; of ourselves by philosophy; of the world by scientific method. But the three remain ever distinct; they are fundamental facts which cannot be resolved into simpler elements, or combined in a higher unity. In relation to God and man the world is, in itself, morally indifferent, being incapable alike of virtue or vice, right or wrong, order or disorder. It is what it was made. But it has been made so rich and beautiful, its arrangements are so stable and trustworthy, its variety is so incalculable, that "God saw all that He had made, and God said it is very good." If we were not, as we know ourselves in simple fact to be, in a condition of moral and spiritual debasement, we should inhabit this glorious world with innocence, and joy, and ever-deepening gratitude, as God's "dear children." We should never separate it in our thoughts from His generous love; as it would be the sphere, so it would be the perpetual incentive, of our happy and grateful service.

But that union with God which is the highest blessedness for man has been broken and disturbed; nay,