has reached a turning-point in his life; and when he next surveys the past, many things will look clear to him which were before dark. God, be it remembered, is striving with all men-striving against their pride, their selfishness, their hardness of heart. There are many doors against which the Saviour stands knocking: we cannot say which will yield to Him first. Let us only thank Him that He is not content to leave us to ourselves; that He is ever seeking to win us to Him. The knowledge of our immortality is not the knowledge of Him; but it is a point from which men are often led to that higher knowledge which is their true immortality, because eternal life is not life that does not end, but life that knows God.

There are many arguments for our immortality which have weighed with different men and at different times. There are those with which all readers of Plato are familiar; those which Addison in the well-known lines adds as subsidiary to Plato's:

"It must be so :

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread, this inward horror

Of falling back to nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?

'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us—

'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man."

There is, again, the class of what we may call the physiological arguments for our immortality, which Butler treats in the first chapter of his "Analogy;" there is the argument from the necessity of a future retribution, of the good and the wicked receiving hereafter that appropriate compensation which they have not received here. And, without pretending to exhaust all the reasons which the ingenuity of man has discovered in his own constitution and that of nature, it is interesting to note an argument that was adduced some years ago by one of the least sentimental and impulsive of writers, the late historian of civilization. After urging what he considered the impolicy of resting the doctrine of our immortality upon the Christian Scriptures, he insisted that it was a truth resting upon a far broader foundation, the universal instinct of mankind; and in a passage of quite unusual eloquence and passion, he imagined a man in the presence of the death of one he loved, and asked, who in such circumstances, without the certainty of reunion hereafter, could "stand up and live?" Many of Mr.

Buckle's admirers were grievously offended by so sentimental and illogical an outburst: on the other hand, many religious persons were offended at any one venturing to believe in immortality on a basis so unsafe. I confess I sympathise with neither class of opponents. I rather recognize in the logician's momentary forgetfulness of his logic, a proof that God had made him human before he became scientific.

Such arguments as I have been enumerating, my brethren, may be called the non-Christian arguments, so far as this, that the New Testament does not take cognizance of them. But so far as they teach or suggest a great truth, they are God's ministers, and we may not despise them. Nevertheless, the moral perception of this truth, not the intellectual, is what concerns us; is that which, I just said, makes the real difference between one man and another. The resurrection of the body-the continuance of our personal existence—is of no worth to us unless it involves the greater resurrection, the rising from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. Should we be happy, could we bear to live in the presence of God, fettered as we now are with the bonds of self? No! we dare not hope to be with Him unless we are restored

to His image; we dare not contemplate the resurrection of Christ except as following the sacrifice of His death. The two great features of His life are in reality one. We must receive them both or neither. We know that when we see Him we shall be like Him; and therefore "whosoever hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is pure."

SERMON VIII.

IN BONDAGE TO THE FEAR OF DEATH.

(NOVEMBER 7, 1869.)

"Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage."HEB. ii. 14, 15.

THERE are some words of our Lord, recorded both by St. Matthew and by St. Luke, which seem to me both to illustrate, and to receive illustration from, the first of these two verses. A great multitude of people had gathered about Him, and in their hearing He began to warn the disciples against the special sin of the Pharisees, hypocrisy. They, the disciples, must put away all thoughts of concealment; they must go forth prepared to abide the consequences of their words and acts. Doubtless they would meet with persecution. They would carry