contributed towards meliorating the condition of man? Yes. Still we insist that for the reformation of society to be thorough and complete, it must include the reformation of the inner man. It must regard and treat man not only as a sufferer, but as a sinner; not simply as unfortunate, but as guilty. Again, do any ask, will you let man's outer miseries work on till you have regenerated his soul? No. If a dyspeptic should break his leg, we would go to work and set it, but would not consider him a sound man till his inner malady was healed. Bad men may work at the surface of society; may heal over some of the ulcers on the body politic; but ere long they will break out again. The volcano of human passions is not so easily capped. As well might you extinguish Vesuvius by playing upon it with a fire-engine. But you say, Reforms profess to deal only with outward evils. We reply, even these they cannot effectually cure, except by remedies which embrace the reformation of the inner man. "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false-witness, blasphemies." Suppose you go to work and quash intemperance, profanity, licentiousness, slavery, and all the evil which afflict society; will they stay quashed? Not at all. A nest of serpents come forth and attack you. You fire a blank cartridge among them. They retreat in dismay to their dens. In a few moments their glistening eyes and forked tongues appear again at a thousand points. Quell all the evils in society, yet if the moral character remain unchanged, they will soon break out again, in the same or in new forms. You are like a man tending a coal-pit. He must watch it by day and by night, else the internal fires will burst out and all is lost.

Still, Reforms are legitimate. Although they are superficial and incomplete so long as they do not regulate the moving principle within, yet there is an advantage in working in both ways-from the circumference inward, and from the centre outward. Indeed, it is sometimes necessary to begin with the outer man, before you can reach the inner. For instance, here is a debased drunkard. Preach to him a homily on his duty to God and man! As well might you preach to the dead. But if by some sort of suasion, moral, physical, or legal, you can take him from his cups, and make him a sober man; then you have prepared the way to gain his ear, and may present the claims of God and man upon him with hope of success. So is it often necessary to break up the crust of bodily suffering and mental degradation, in order to open an avenue to the soul for spiritual influences. On this principle our Saviour proceeded. He listened to the cry of pain; he touched the blind

eye, the deaf ear, the withered hand; and through the channel of these physical benefits, he reached the soul. The opened eye turned to him, and saw in him more than a temporal deliverer. The cured leper, smitten with gratitude, returned to praise his Benefactor. Relieving the poor, ignorant and downtrodden from pressing temporal sufferings, may pave the way for the reformation of the moral man. But if any exaggerate the claims of Reform, if they urge it as an improvement upon, or as a substitute for, Christianity, they attribute to the stream the virtues of the fountain; they ascribe to the arteries the central functions of the heart; for from Christianity beats the great pulse of this world's hope. The whole of Christianity is not expressed in social duty. We have responsibilities Godward, as well as man-ward. The first great commandment, "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart; the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

Piety and Humanity are two lovely sisters, the one heavenborn, the other earth-born, but both of Divine parentage, and commissioned of their Father to execute good offices on earth. Though alike, they are yet unlike. The former retiring from the busy haunts of men, with clasped hands and up-turned eyes, holds communion with the great "I Am." The latter chooses to mingle in the bustling crowd, and minister to the wants and woes of the suffering. With the beauty of the one or the other of them is every heart ravished, but what is remarkable, very few love them both. Sometimes they separate from each other; and under the guidance of the former, men retire to caves and cloisters, and cut themselves off from all sympathy with humanity; while those who are led captive by the latter, become earthly and groveling. Thus divorced from each other, they fail to execute their heavenly mission; but when joined hand in hand they go forth successfully on their errand of love, singing as they go, "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to men.'

Perhaps there is a tendency in modern Reforms to make Piety and Humanity convertible terms; to make the whole of Christianity but a manual of benevolent deeds. But the true Reformer must first be baptized from the font of heavenly love. The world cannot be reformed by conventions. The individual must not be swallowed up in the mass. Charity must begin at home. John the Baptist mused in the desert before he went into the crowd. Reform is not all of religion. Reform would bind man to man; religion would also bind him to God. Reform would adjust man to the world; religion would also lift him above it. Man's prescription for his fellow is to alter his

circumstances; God's, to change his heart. Man's plan is to give the patient a new bed; God's, to give him health. Man begins at the circumference, and by first civilizing, would Christianize. God begins at the centre, and by first Christianizing, civilizes. Man's plan is to give us something we have not; God's, to make us something we are not. In the language of the profound Cudworth, "If we desire a true reformation, let us begin by reforming our hearts. All outward forms of reformation, though never so good in kind, are of little worth, without this inward reformation of the heart. Tin, or lead, or any other baser metal, if it be cast in never so good a mould, and made up in never so elegant a figure, is but tin or lead still. We must be reformed within; then shall we be reformed truly, and not before."

There is undoubtedly too much patch-work in many of the Reforms of the present day; too many attempts to improve upon the Divine plan. Too often unprincipled persons set themselves up as the lights of the world; too often they become cross and abusive; too often they fret and rail at opposition; too often do they express their love and good-will snappishly; too often is the milk of their philanthropy strongly impregnated with vinegar. They mount a hobby, and Jehu like, "drive furiously." Should they succeed in the pursuit, and outrun and override every evil in society, what would it amount to? They could only impart what they have; they could only bring the world into the positions they themselves occupy; the reformed would still need reforming. With the Bible burned, God and futurity annihilated, the world would be sleeping over a volcano; another French Revolution, or some other awful catastrophe, would be the result. Society is not a thing to be manufactured; it is a growth. It has a vital action; it has a character; and that character is determined by the individuals who compose it. There is no way of reforming it except by reforming individual character; and this can be effected only by purifying the individual from his native corruption. The Bible is the model reform-book, Jesus Christ the true Reformer. And who can have failed to observe with what awful individuality our Saviour addressed himself to the work of Reform. He directed his arrows not so much at the abstract as the concrete; not so much at sin, as the sinner. He said, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; how shall ye escape the damnation of hell!" And with little hope of success can the Reformer hurl his anathemas at sin in the concrete, when the sinner can justly retort, "Physician, heal thyself." A teacher of morality must himself be pure. As the

stream cannot rise higher than the fountain, much cannot be expected from Reformers devoid of moral principle, nor even from those who have but recently been reclaimed from vicious habits. A popular writer has well observed, "We lay it down as a general rule, that commerce with vice works a perpetual disqualification for employment as a teacher of virtue. The idea that a man may debase himself, and then, upon an easy reformation, stand higher than before, yea, put the virtuous aside as disqualified for want of a graduation in the school of vice, is subversive of all sober morals. When such men, with brazen impudence, wander up and down, demanding audience and countenance of good men, resenting a suspicion of their fitness for the highest posts of virtue, simply because they have known the deepest pits of vice, and railing at the hypocrisy of Christians who receive them coldly, and shaking off the mud from their feet as a testimony against them; we cannot but think they were more tolerable before their reformation than after. If we must have such, let it be as beacons to be shunned, not as companions to be consorted with." We would not intimate that all professed Reformers are of this description; yet there is doubtless too much truth in the affirmation of the author of Hints toward Reforms, that "the great majority of those who are ready to embark in undertakings to reform society, have not yet reformed themselves. The motive which impels them, even in this, is at bottom selfish-the hope of ease, of abundance, of consequence, or of fame." It cannot be denied, that there are many Reformers whose first efforts should be upon themselves. "Go teach all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." Home Missions first, then Foreign, is the Divine method. It is, indeed, more agreeable to look at others' sins than our own; it is much easier to make a tilt at some wrong at a distance which we cannot reach, than in our own neighborhood, where we might have some hope of doing good. In all our efforts, our own hearts should be the point of departure. "First cast the beam out of thine own eye; then shalt thou see clearly to pull the mote out of thy brother's eye." We may be thought to insist too strongly upon this feature of Reformatory effort; but it is from a deep conviction that it has been too much overlooked. The divine plan, as contained in the Holy Scriptures, should be both the foundation and the model of all Reformatory operations. Some seem to think the Bible too old and too slow for the present age; but it is a Book which grows not old by age, nor lags behind any who do not outrun Providence. It has never been behind the age, but, like the pillar of fire before Israel, it has always gone before it. It

contains an epitome of this world's history. It alone informs us what was the origin of the world, and what will be its end. From it we may learn just where in the world's great drama we are, and what are the leading events which are to transpire before the final catastrophe. From it too we learn what is to be the world's great regenerating principle; that the gospel leaven is to be cast in, and so leaven the entire lump of human society, that "Holiness to the Lord," shall be written on all the possessions of men. Does skepticism say, this is all well enough in theory, but we want something practical? We present then the practical demonstration. We have seen this religion of Jesus in conflict with Judaism, after the glory had passed from Moses to Messiah; the struggle of a real with a ceremonial righteousness; the idea of God in types and symbols, perishing before the idea of God incarnate. We have seen it in conflict with ancient heathenism; all the Gods enshrined in the Pantheon, and all the Gods supported and adored by the triumphant Cæsars, Lords many and Gods many, throned by the true and living God. We have seen it in conflict with the false prophet of Mecca; the fierce, licentious and warlike religion of the East, withering away before our eyes, as this pure and peaceful system culminates more gloriously. We have seen it in conflict with the Man of Sin; the Bride of the Lord pining for twelve hundred and sixty years, victorious at last, only because the very gates of hell could not prevail against her. We have seen it in conflict with every form of error from within, and every mode of opposition from without; superstition, heresy, idolatry, skepticism, oppression, persecution, seduction, corruption, everywhere confronting all, everywhere resisting all, precisely in proportion to its own vital purity, as determined by the open Bible which it has borne aloft, throughout the earth."

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But do any ask for facts of a later date-evidence that the Bible is able to grapple with the great moral evils of the nineteenth century? We refer them to the history of Modern Missions. We refer them to the fact, that where the Bible has gone, Caste, Polygamy, and Slavery, have faded away before it. Thirty years ago, the whole population of the Sandwich Islands, with the exception of the King and Chiefs, were slaves, as abject as can be found in any part of the world. The Missionaries of the American Board carried them the Gospel; and what is the result? Now there is not a slave in all the Islands. The people hold their lands in fee-simple, have a Representative, Constitutional Government, and are acknowledged by other nations of the earth as an Independent, Chris