regard. No, God has a right to all our service, all our lives through; and it is only His goodness to us which leads Him to reward what we do. We are unprofitable servants, even when we have done all; and no labor of ours, however intense, or however prolonged, can earn a right to eternal salvation. The two things are on different planes entirely; the one does not, and cannot ever, touch the other.

It is true that it is represented in the parable as wages for labor; but that is only because it could not otherwise be brought within the terms of the parable. And it is only in the case of the first set of laborers that it is so called-to all the others it was not wages, but a voluntary sum freely given. "The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord." Through God's grace to us, for our encouragement, He puts before us as a reward, as wages or hire, that which He pledges Himself to bestow; but for our own humility we must remember that it is something which we could never earn as a right, but must thankfully accept as the free and undeserved gift of God. And looking on it thus, we shall have no room in our hearts for envy or grudging complaint; but we shall rejoice in sympathy with all who, whether laboring little or serving long, shall share with us God's gracious love and bounty.

Again, the parable declares to us the ground on which the reward will stand. They who receive it shall do so because they have entered on the service of God. The ground of it is the existence of a right relation between them and God. How long that relationship has continued will not matter so much as the fact of the relationship. That is the essential thing. The question

which Jehu asked of Jehonadab is the one which God will ask of each of us: "Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? If it be, give me thine hand."

God is forever seeking out men who will thus enter into relations with Him. The voice of Jesus speaks to all, "Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, and ye shall find rest unto your souls." What man or woman, aye, or what child is there to whose conscience the call has not come? Who is there in this church, or in this place, that has not heard-falling as it were through the silence of the sky down into the ears of his heart-the words, "Son, go work to-day in My vineyard.” Alas! that so many are so pre-engaged in other service-for the world or for self-that they are not willing to take up the service of God.

O let us hearken to His call, turn to Him, and enter upon His service. He will reward us richly. Even though this be our eleventh hour, we will receive from Him at eventide that gift of Eternal Life with which He more than repays His faithful servants.

And, lastly, let us note that while the reward is the same for all, yet, in truth, it will be infinitely diversified. The equality of reward, and the diversity of reward, in the future life: both these things are taught by this parable. Each will receive the same. To each faithful servant the same gift of eternal life will be imparted. The same to each, yet to each how different. It will be immensely more for some than it will be for others.

But is this not so as well with earthly life? Each will get out of it what he has in him the faculty of getting. Two children are born on the same day. Life, in itself, is the same to each. Yet, as the years go on, what different tributes does life yield to the one, and to the other!

Take an artist and a boor to a gallery where are hung the world's choicest pictures. The eyes of each carry the same colors to the brain; but one is filled with rapt enjoyment of what the other can never behold.

So it will be in the future Eternal Life. Let us study the development of our spiritual faculties, let us exercise them in spiritual things. Every man's life has two sides-the temporary, transient life of sense, and the eternal, abiding concerns of the spirit. Let us cultivate the deeper life; let us live in the spirit. To have entered consciously into living relation with God at all, we must at least have begun to do this.

Then let us go on in the spiritual life, and make it and its laws and habits our great aim. And then, when we are called to receive our hire—the penny of Eternal Life -it will be impossible for us either to calculate the measure of its unending possibilities, or to exhaust the diversity of its infinite satisfactions.

N

SEXAGESIMA.

TEXT: A sower went out to sow his seed.-St. Luke VIII. 5.

By the REV. WM. GARDAM,

Rector of St. Luke's Church, Ypsilanti, Michigan.

OTHING in this world exists with "aimless feet."

Purpose, design, adaptation are written on the face of everything in the wide world. Nothing is haphazard, nothing accidental, nothing the gift of chance. Every blade of grass, every flower that grows, the invisible organism which only the microscope reveals, and the king of the forest, organic life in its lowest forms, and man with his divine intelligence and unmeasured capacities, in all God's world, visible and invisible, the thrones, dominions, principalities and powers, we see but proclamations of His glory and power, and evidences of His wisdom and love; we learn that this is not a chance world, and that no creature came into it by chance or lives in it aimlessly.

The summit and crown of the created universe is man. The Psalmist tells us, "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge." Farther back, the author of the Book of Genesis tells us, "God created man in His own image, and after His own likeness." Man is the highest and most kingly being in God's world, the most sublime setting forth of the wisdom, and power, and love,

of the Creator. God has given man, in creating him, and sending him forth to occupy this world, the kingship over this world, the regal right to government and ownership under Him; and history is but a spelling out and setting forth in detail of this kingship.

So has he been struggling the thousands of years since God first sent him forth on his mission, and so will he continue until the general consummation of all things. History is but the revelation and telling of what he has been doing, and of what God has been doing with him, and by him. It has not to do with the stars, or the planetary system, or with the original elements of matter; but with what man has been doing and saying, how he has been behaving, how he has been carrying out the purposes of his Creator, how he has been carrying forward or retarding the eternal plan of God in this present militant world.

Pope has said, the "proper study of mankind is man;" and, surely it is no misuse of words to say, "the highest study of mankind is man." The education of man, his preparation for life, his physical, mental, and religious outfit for the place he is to fill, in the nature of things, must be the very highest interest that can engage his powers. Did you ever think how much the education of the world seems left to man himself, how largely man seems to be his own providence, how he himself makes his own life, how your life, and mine, and the life of our neighbors and families, make the general quality and average of life? We know that God is in this world, that His Providence "shapes our ends," that the Church is the Kingdom of God for the teaching, educating, saving and governing of men. Yet we know that that Church, on its human side, is made up of you and me