us with the attraction of their nearness, and of their coarse reality; on the other hand, calling to us as with sweet, far voices from the invisible world, are grace, contentment, trust, duty, thankfulness for undeserved mercies, a desire to give rather than to receive, the holy readiness to spend and be spent for the good of others, not our own.

So shall we indeed have learned the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, the lesson which-that we might learn it the better, that it might the more deeply be graved upon our memory, that it might the more constantly be brought to our recollection-the Lord of our souls wrote in plainest letters on the Book of the Universe, and attached to the commonest sights and sounds of our daily life. He wrote the strong, necessary, simple lesson, and he illuminated with letters of light and loveliness the missal in which it was written down. If we carry it with us, the very world we live on, the very ground we tread, the very air we breathe will be beautiful and vocal with heavenly messages, and

Every bird that sings,

And every flower that stars the elastic sod,
And every breath the radiant summer brings
To the pure spirit, be a word of God."

It will bid us thank God for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; it will bid us thank Him with yet more heartfelt gratitude for our redemption, for our immortality; for Him who said, "I am the bread of life;" for Him who promised, "He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." And that message will fur

ther say to us, "To God, who gives us all, shall we give nothing? To Him, the Lord of our life, shall we have. nothing to offer when death comes but the dust of our mortal bodies and the shipwreck of immortal souls ?'” Ah! let us strive more perfectly to learn this lesson, which Christ taught from the lilies and the sparrows, to those poor, suffering, hungry, thirsty multitudes, in His first great sermon-His Sermon on the Mount. So shall we rise above the fret and faithlessness of worldly anxieties, and the meanness of all those aims which are earthy, of earth alone. So shall we learn His sweet and consoling lesson: "Be not anxious about your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

SERMON II.

DELIVERED IN ST. GEORGE'S, MONTREAL, SEPT. 19, 1885.

Awakenment.

Wherefore he saith, "Awake thou that sleepest.”—EPH. v. 14.

IN the great medieval allegory, he who, having fallen away from innocence into sin, desires, with all his heart, to struggle back from sin to forgiveness, must climb up a steep hill to a narrow wicket-gate. That wicket-gate is approached by three steps:-a step of whitest marble, a step of dark and riven purple, a step of burning red. They are meant to shadow forth the step of sincerity, the step of contrition, and the step of love. Have any of us ever seriously tried to take our stand upon that lowest step-the step of perfect sincerity-the step so white that it mirrors the whole man ?

No eye but a man's own can gaze, almost as with the eye of God, on the unveiled human heart. But when men's eyes are opened, and they have been brought to look fairly and fully on themselves; when they have entered that awful solitude in which the soul is alone with God; when they have been forced, or have brought

themselves, to connect their own personality with the shame and guilt of sin; when the voluble spirit of excuse is at last dumb ;-what follows?

I know no word which will describe the result of selfrevelation so briefly as Awakenment.

The ordinary moral and spiritual condition of most men, in their common life, can only be pictured by the metaphor of sleep. There are many degrees and varieties of this spiritual sleep. There is a sleep of human feebleness, which is a venial, if not an inevitable imperfection, and of which our Lord said to those slumbering Apostles, "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Far deeper and worse is the sleep of those who, though they are not guilty of glaring and flagrant sin, are yet absorbed in the worldly life; given up to dissipations and trivialities; losing, for the sake of living, all that constitutes a true life. Deepest and deadliest of all-like the sleep of a man in a burning houseis the slumber of those who have sold themselves to do evil; who work all uncleanness with greediness; who have steeped themselves up to the lips in the grossness of sensualism; who have given themselves over to a life of falsehood, or avarice, or drink, or crime. But so common is this sleep in one or other of its forms, that the Scripture is constantly striving to arouse men from its fatal torpor.

But, my brethren, the thought which I wish to leave with your consciences this morning is, that, whether we are waking or sleeping now, our sleep cannot and will not last forever. In vain you fold your hands-in vain you say a little more sleep, a little more slumber : you must be awakened. Either in this world or the

next must come the awakenment which results from seeing ourselves as we are. It comes to those who, though they are often drowsy, are yet waiting for their Lord. It comes to those who are living the empty life of selfish worldliness; it comes, worst of all, to the hardened, reckless sinner, who in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, shall some day be forced to judge himself in the light of God, and to see his heart as it is in the view of heaven. Think of it;-to each one of us-either by our repentance, or with penal retribution-either in this world or in the world hereafter-awakenment will come.

It comes in different ways. very The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth. "There are those to whom it comes in storms and tempests; there are those whom it has summoned in hours of revelry and idle vanity; there are those who have heard its still small voice in scenes of leisure and placid contentment; there are others, again, to whom it has come during seasons of sorrow and affliction, and to whom tears have been the softening showers which caused the seed of heaven to spring up and take root in the human heart."* But when it comes penally, and in the way of catastrophe, it is then an awful moment. It is as though we had long wandered in the wintry darkness, and suddenly a flash of lightning reveals to us that chasms yawn on every side of us; or the dim dawn comes, and as we look back, we see that for the long hours of darkness our footsteps have been along the very edge of an abyss.

*Sir Walter Scott.