have a garden. There is no man so poor that he cannot afford to have some flowers; and every man who takes the pains to sow the seeds, and avails himself of light and warmth from the sun, and of moisture from the clouds, may confidently expect to have flowers and fruits. And yet, not more certain is the wise husbandman of his harvests, than is the honest-minded man of going right, if he wants to be right, and puts himself into the conditions which the Scripture recommends.

Far be it from me to revile the memory of godly men who stood as pillars in the past; but I bear in mind some instances of men who preached the Gospel with such dolorous caution that you would think the bell inviting you to the marriage supper of the Lamb was a funeral bell, and that the paan of victory sounding afar off through the air was a requiem. They were good men. They were splendid old fellows in many respects. If they had been husbandmen or mechanics or soldiers or professional men outside of theology and preaching, they would have adorned their business. They were grand specimens of their time. And yet, when men ventured to go to them, saying, "I think I am moved to converse on the subject of religion, and ask guidance," they looked solemn, and in a sepulchral tone said, "O my friend, if God's spirit is striving with you, you are in a very danger ous place. Now, my advice is that you go home, and look well into this matter. It is an awful thing to be self-deceived. It is an awful thing to grieve the spirit of God." I, too, think that self-deception and grieving the spirit of God are awful things; and it is not necessary caution that I object to: it is representing to the young mind that the characteristic element of religion is danger, whereas the characteristic element of religion is hope.

If the truer spirit of the Gospel should speak, what would it say? "O ye, that know how to love father and mother, there has begun in you that divine quality which can teach you to love God. O ye, who have nourished virtue and who know what it is to deny yourselves on every side that virtue may flourish, you have the germinant form of that which may, by the light of God's countenance, be ripened into better forms.

O ye, that have rays of hope now and then gleaming through 0 fear and caution, you are in the line of unfolding." This is what God's spirit says.

Hope, then, is the characteristic element of the Gospel of Christ. There are temptations, there are obstacles, there are difficulties, and there are, in special cases, reasons in the constitutions of men, why they should be held to caution as a means of inciting and stimulating them; but no man preaches the Gospel by putting out the light of hope, and saying, "When you have done so much, and so much, and so much, and gone so far, and so far, and so far, then I will kindle that light again." It ought to shine from the beginning, and all the while.

And I say to every person, It is a dismal thing to be without God; it is a joyful thing to live in the hope of the Lord Jesus Christ; and there is no reason why any young man or maiden, or any old man or matron, should not be a follower of the Saviour. To yield him allegiance is in accordance with your right nature. God designed that you should be religious. Every man who is without religion has left a large part, and the best part, of himself unopened and unused. All the forces of your constitution, all the elements of God's law and scheme, all the tendencies of divine providence, and all those things which enable a man to work out his own salvation with fear and trembling because it is God that works in him, should inspire hope.

All those nice analyses which men make of themselves, and all that sitting of the court in which the conscience is justice, to determine whether a man may or may not rejoice, is not in accordance with the true spirit of the Gospel. Conscience is a very good faculty, but it has been wrongly estimated. It has generally been considered chief-just ce; but no, it is not chief-justice, for a great many reasons. No other one faculty can be tampered with and bribed as the conscience can; and a man who calls conscience to the chiefjustice's chair, and says, "That will determine right and wrong for me," commits a great mistake. There is nothing that conscience works more with than will; and there is no court in which the chief-justice should be under the domin

ion of the will. Conscience is one of the most fiery, sensitive, nervous, and fault-finding of the faculties. It led Paul to

clear to Damascus and persecute the people of God; and he thought that he was doing right. Conscience has kindled more fires, turned more breaking-wheels, put more men on racks, extinguished more humanities and equities, and filled the world fuller of mournings, than any other one faculty of the human soul.

Now, nothing is worthy to be chief-justice that can be tampered with as the conscience can. There is one thing that cannot be tampered with, and that is the spirit of divinely inspired love. The easiest men in the world to manage are those who are combative and obstinate and conscientious. You know exactly how to deal with them. If a man is obstinate, and you want him to go one way, you push him the other way, and then you have him. Men of hard knotty temperaments are not difficult to manage if you have the time, and think it worth while to manage them.

But when you take love (I do not mean the commoner quality; I do not mean shinplasters passing for love: I mean bullion; I mean specie-basis love, such as springs from the inspiration of God, and is in sympathy both ways, toward God and toward men)—when you take such love you cannot bribe it. It controls every one of the other faculties. It tempers the acerbity of anger. It brings pride into its service. It leads the various elements of the soul to give themselves to wholesome uses, as naturally as the sun turus sour to saccharine. Therefore it should be the chief justice in each man's soul.

When a Christian is all the time trying himself by the law of rectitude, he is not free. Paul said that when men were under the law they were in bondage. No man is happy who is subject to a condemning conscience. You never will have peace until you have trust in Jesus Christ, which is a synonym for living in the atmosphere of love.

I wonder how it is that so many precious symbols and emblems are lost to us. Men go through the seventh and eighth of Romans as though there were no interpretation of them, when there is one in every family.

A boy is forbidden by his father and mother to go out in the night. At nine o'clock he quietly slips down stairs, and steals a little money out of his mother's drawer, and runs off to the circus or the theater; and he falls in with some companions; and, wanting to make them think that he is a man, he goes to smoking and drinking. It is not long before he is found out at home. The father and mother say nothing to him, but he somehow feels that their eyes are upon him. He is conscious that he is not at one with them. There is an unusual stillness at the table; he is not sent on such confidential errands as he used to be; he is watched; and he is quite unhappy. By-and-by his father says, "Henry, I want to see you in my study." The whole soul of the boy is stirred, and he begins to chide himself, and say, "I wish I had not gone. What a fool I was! I have not been happy a minute since I went. How silly it was in me to make believe that I enjoyed it, when it made me wretched all the time. The result is that I have got into trouble with my father, and I know what is coming now-I shall get a whipping."

He is a perfect embodiment of the seventh of Romans. He says, "I won't do it again ;" and he goes to his father expecting a discourse-with an application !

The father meets the boy with great love and great gentleness, and tells him what he has heard; and the boy begins to cry—if he has a bit of boy in him he does; and the father says, "Now, my dear boy, I love you as I do myself. I am sorry for all this; but I am not going to scold you. I certainly am not going to punish you. It cuts me to the heart that you betrayed my trust in you; I cannot tell you how it pains me that my boy has not more honor; and I am grieved beyond expression that I cannot lean on you." The boy says to himself, "I wish he would whip me, and stop this talking." Now he would rather have that which before he dreaded.

Finally, the father puts his arm about him, and says, "Now, Henry, is this the end ?" The boy says, "Yes, it is the end." "Very well," says the father, "let it be the end. You are my own dear boy; I am going to trust you just as I always have; and if you feel tempted, come right to me,

If you want to do anything, I would rather you would tell me about it first, than do it and let me find it out afterwards."

When a boy goes out of the presence of his father under such circumstances, I should like to know what he would say of that father, if he had language with which to express his feelings. "Ah! he is the royalest man on earth. What a father I have! How I love him! I am afraid I shall do something that I ought not to. I do not know how I can show myself worthy of such a father. I am going to try to do right; and I will tell him when I do wrong."

Here is the eighth of Romans begun. The boy has been forgiven. He went wrong; he sinned against himself and his parents; he had his little struggle; his father manifested toward him a spirit of love; he confessed his wrong-doing; he received forgiveness; and his father said to him, "Trust me; I am going to help you. Keep loving me; I will keep loving you. You are a boy, you have a boy's weaknesses, very likely you will be tempted; and I am going to stand by you clear to the end." Would it not be a base and vulgar nature that would not be true after such an assurance as that ?

That is the eighth of Romans. That is Christ reconciling us to him, doing it by the power of love, and making us feel that our strength is not in ourselves, that we stand not in our goodness but in the goodness of God, that we shal find rest in communion with the divine, and that our development through providence is made certain by the inevitable law of love, if we persevere to the end.

Wherefore, hope is the distinctive quality of the Gospel. It is the quality which should be inspired by the love of God in Christ Jesus in the human soul. And you are saved by hope-not by fear, nor by conscience, nor by regrets of the past, nor by a realization of the meagerness and barrenness of the present, but by that future which is made radiant by the glow of God's face filled full of gracious promises of mercy, and breathing summer out of the heart of heaver upon the souls of men.

In the love of God in Christ Jesus, which is higher than