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is the individual alone in his or her own personal contact with the Spirit of the Living God who receives vitalizing faith. The operations of the Spirit should not be discounted by the press of the multitude. He prefers to deal with the man, not the mass. Devices for capturing the one through the many are not sure of His approval. They may be legitimate or again, as not a few are, illegitimate. Meanwhile the modest God delights to dwell in the single heart and there He witnesses of sin, of righteousness, and of a judgment to come. He is the great companion of conscience, memory, and will, and none but He has the passkey to the throne room of the soul. He unveils the bliss, the burden, the rapture, and the affliction of that mind which was in Christ Jesus. Through Him the attributes of human nature are harmonized with the Divine will. If you ask for a token of His indwelling, its chief evidence is in your penitential attitude. Contrition is His hall-mark, and its painfulness is the birth pang of your regenerate being. Those who deem iniquity a trifle, retribution an open question, goodness a matter of environment or of education, and evil habits no more than a reaction from irrestrainable tendencies, may escape the Spirit's searching for a time, but they never escape beggary of soul and moral destitution.

Their ideas of life are altogether too meager for its necessities. Nothing of lasting significance

pivots on them or on what they think. Their capacity for ever enlarging blessedness is nullified by their alliance with the perishable elements of existence. On the other hand, the faith which fosters in us the sense of immortality and constrains us to shape our course accordingly is inevitably triumphant. It is not a speculation, nor a theory, nor a concession to what is seemly. These, if they exist at all, are its accidents. At the core it is the throb in men of the heart of honour and of fire at the center of all things: the divine dynamic which drives life toward its ascertainable and best ends.

Sophistications do not disfigure the mind which seeks, not only knowledge, but wisdom in religious competency and sacrificial duty. Fidelity to God is expressed in the purpose to discover what is truly religious as finally reasonable and to believe that those who deny either are in peril of being neither. In this concord, the transient and segmental experiences of a mutilated trust are unknown. Faith is normal, and habitual because the acts comprised in the sum total of a human life are responsive to one Presence and its rule. Midway between faith's germinal activities and the pure love which crowns them is a good conscience, standardized by the spirit and teaching of the Master. Its most exacting requirements receive their sanction from faith as the receptive faculty of God's illumination. This conscience is not content to be righteous;

commendable as that is; it is also the conscience of pity which modifies the tenets of justice with the precepts of benevolence. It welcomes the highest ethic of sacrificial service and holds to holiness as more desirable even than righteousness. The fruits of holiness cannot but be excellent for the faith unfeigned which makes the Christian conscience alert, discriminative, ready to respond to every impulse, not only of law but of grace. It spurns the compromises which plague moral vigour. As the sun-bathed branch connects the root in the soil beneath with the luscious clusters of the vine above, so conscience connects the tenderest and purest love with the natural affections from which it springs. This truth explains in a measure St. Paul's distinction between the righteous" and the "good" man.

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IV

Lastly, God's purpose is to educe in His children the spiritual abandonment of Christian love. Its chief limitation is imposed upon it by playing off the will against the affections and the intellect against the conscience. St. Paul forewarns us against the chaos in which one faculty hoodwinks another. Their harmony by faith's free, full exercise is the distinctive note of the text. When this is gained, the clouds disperse, the shadows

flee; the whole man rejoices in a divine life and law to which every member of his being yields cheerful obedience.

Mere emotionalism is barred; intellectual effort subserves spiritual liberty, and charity, the lifeblood of creeds and churches, becomes the perfectness of faith. It is needless to remark that much called love is veneered selfishness, covert grossness, masked anarchy. But this love, of which St. Paul's soul was full to overflowing, comes from the nature which God has revealed in Christ. Currents of feeling that assume its title often carry in solution the taint of moral squalor, the subtle poison of spiritual death. It has to be defined by one's experience and demonstrated by one's deeds. These together aim to confer the best upon the worst by bringing all men and women whom that love can reach within its radius. Because it holds the sinner very dear to God it is not likely to be a smiling affability. Politic affinities and honeyed phrases which nourish desire at the cost of character do not become its ministry to mankind. The parading of what is convenient or practicable or materially profitable as Christian love will not mislead those who have bowed at the Cross and there tasted the grace of God. Unfeigned faith is its parent, conscience is its preceptor, a purified heart the center from which it issues to bless its surroundings. None of them is dispensable, and all their springs

are in God. We are here dealing with the discerner of hearts who is intent upon our fitness for His fellowship. We speak of the love He had for us when He sent the Saviour of the world to Bethlehem and to Calvary. "Behold! what manner of love the Father hath toward us that we should be called the sons of God," exclaimed St. John. It should be as altruistic in us as it was in the Master. Then the souls of the believers and the soul of the Church Universal alike shall be as a sea of glass mingled with fire, embracing peace and power, replete of force without waste, and of tranquillity with fervour.

The scenes of earthly circumstance which belonged to the Roman Empire when St. Paul wrote these words have vanished forever. The chariots of gold and silver, the pomp, the warriors, the pageants, the millions of followers drunk with the cup of abominations, have become as though they had not been. Wantonness, insolence and pride have passed with that corrupted world. The avenging gates have closed on them. The Temple at Jerusalem has shared their doom. But the truth of this text continues as an everlasting testimony to the Gospel which ministers to our penitence and our hope. Let us cling to its simplicity as the life of God in the souls of men, made known by faith unfeigned, by intellectual honesty, by the warrant of a conscience void of offense toward God and man, by the love which is faith's coronation.