own condemnation. David, filled with indignation at the cruelty and avarice of the man who robbed his neighbour of his one cherished possession, cries out that the offender shall die. And on the word the flood of light by which he was keen to see the wickedness of another soul is turned suddenly upon his own. "Thou

art the man." Thou hast done this thing. For thy own selfish gratification thou hast robbed and outraged another. And the king saw himself as he was, and was ashamed, and sought a place for repentance. Now, how shall we reason of this strange conversion? People who pride themselves on being worldly-wise will tell you that a man's conscience does not trouble him until he is found out. They will tell you that we are always ready to condemn in others what we are quite capable of committing ourselves; and that repentance is easy when there is no other escape. This is the moral of David's repentance, from the world's standpoint. This base coin, with the inscription of wisdom, is widely current in the world. It has such a ring of shrewdness, and puts men on such good terms with themselves, that no wonder it passes for the true metal. But, my brethren, if these maxims are half-truths, is there any profit in

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them? Was any one ever made really wiser, with new power for raising himself above himself, by such scraps of worldly wisdom? Will they account for the repentance of David-for the real repentance of any man who has ever been converted from darkness to light? No! assuredly not. The wisdom most worth our seeking does not lie on the surface in the path of the thoughtless. It is not so that we learn to understand so complex, so mysterious a power as a conscience. It may be that men have often seen themselves in a true light, for the first time, when that light has been brought by another. A man has sinned, has woven a tangled web of flimsy arguments to justify himself, has withdrawn his eyes from the light, till the power of seeing has become enfeebled. By and by comes the calm and searching inquirer who breaks down the tissue of sophistries, and lets light in upon the darkened eye. The convicted man begins to see as others see-more than that, as God sees. He is brought face to face with truth. He is filled with remorse. this merely another name for humiliation and disappointment? It may be; but it also may not be. When a man's arguments for sin are swept away, and he sees it as it is, he may well

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be filled with horror and disgust. His horror is no subject for a careless sneer, but for awe and

reverence.

We have been of late startled out of our tranquillity by confessions of crimes, as gross it may be (though it is not for us to judge of men's relative guilt before God) as the murder of Uriah the Hittite. As far as human judgment can pronounce, there is not much difference in degree between the crime of compassing the death of a man in order to obtain possession of his wife, and that of following a man about for three days with a noiseless gun, because he holds unpopular views about the interests of the labour-market. My brethren, if it startles us to see, side by side, the assassination of Uriah and that of the Sheffield workman, it is because we do not keep steadily before us the fact that these crimes spring from one and the same source. Avarice, with complete indifference to all laws of God and men, is the origin in each case. And I have put them side by side, not that we should abhor them more or less for this reason, but that we should abhor them equally, and be ready to learn equally from both. We should all acknowledge that David's life is a pattern of every life—one of a mingled yarn,

made up of struggles, victories, defeats. If we have ever emulated him at his best, we may not forget, but at our peril, that we may sink with him to his lowest. Self-seeking and class jealousy are the bane of every man. Indifference to the interests of others in the pursuit of our object is a sin which besets every one of us. And indignation at the grosser fruits of these sins must not conceal from us our own natural gravitation in the same direction. If the thrill of horror which has passed through our land of late be one of indignation at unrighteousness, it is a good sign. If it merely means a thrill of fear-fear at discovering that there are elements at work in society which may at any time break up the ground beneath our feet and engulf us —then it is not a good sign, and we have learned nothing which can serve to a profitable end.

In comparing such crimes as deliberate assassination when committed by King David and by men in our own time, we are inclined to judge them in some reference to the state of civilization of the two periods. In spite of the nearness of intercourse between God and His people in David's reign, we still think of a period 3,000 years distant as being in the dark ages; and we look upon the crime of a man

who lived then as being a part of the general lawlessness and darkness of the time. We are shocked in this our day to hear of such acts as those which have recently been brought to light, because they contrast so sadly and strangely with the boasts in which Englishmen are given. to indulge. It has been asked many thousand times in the last fortnight, "Is this our vaunted civilization?" And I am glad that such questionings should be forced from us, if only to remind us what civilization cannot do, as well as what it can. We use the word lightly, and, worshipping its material results, and its fruits of many kinds, we forget that it is itself a result, and is not a moving power. We forget-though all history sounds the lesson in our ears-that what we call civilization has often been at its height, just when other forces over which it has no control were combining to shiver it to atoms. Rome, Greece, Italy, France teach this lesson. Let us pray that it may not be thrown away upon England! Of all the evils to which human souls are subject, how many are there which civilization can cure? It may do many things, but it has no force to purify the heart of a human being. Christianity can civilize; it is not the fact that civilization Christianizes. Take