and will. For us at this hour the world is just as practical a topic, just as serious an opponent, as it was in the days of the Apostles. It commonly presents itself to us at successive periods of life in different guises. It comes to us in early life as an attraction, I may almost say as a fascination. All the faculties of our minds and bodies are still fresh and on the alert; it toys with them one after another, addressing itself to the character of each of us with singular adroitness. Here it holds out the prospect of gratifying ambition, and there it discovers large opportunities of pleasure or amusement; and away yonder it veils what is really vicious or degraded beneath the conventional drapery which puts us off our guard, and in doing this it is so skilful and so persistent that we may easily forget what is due to that unseen Friend and Master Whose name we learnt in infancy from our mother, and Who, up till now, has always had a secret place in our heart. All looks so fair that it is difficult even to suspect the precipice that is near at hand, and on the brink of which we may find ourselves without a previous warning. In early life the world stands before us, as the smiling landlord at the door of his hotel meets the traveller, assuring us of a good entertainment and of a hearty welcome, and making no allusion to any less agreeable topic beyond; but in time the pleasantest visit comes to an end, and the bill must be paid.

The Bible is more frank at the outset. "Rejoice," it says, "young man in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart and in the sight of thine eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment." And then the world comes to us in middle life less as an attraction than as a tyranny. It brings with it a code of conduct, a body of maxims, which are often opposed to the precepts of the Gospel, but are nevertheless regarded as imperative. To stand on one's own rights, to resent injuries and insults, to make everything give way to getting on in life, to value others not by the real standard of character, but by the superficial standard of wealth or station, to make general acceptableness, and not truth, the rule of our opinions-these are some of its maxims. And it will not be trifled with. When it has once

got us in its power, it keeps its eye on us. It reports any symptoms of disaffection, any lapse into high principle, with an implacable regularity; it keeps its votaries well under

the despotism of ridicule; it sneers down all generous enthusiasm the moment it shows itself; it makes men who desire better things ashamed of their duties, ashamed of their principles; it makes them not seldom insincere and false in their relations with others; it betrays them even into acts of inconsiderateness and of cruelty; it even penetrates into the sanctuary, and it bids the Christian kneeling there consider, not what befits God's presence as the Almighty and the Eternal, not what true and simple devotion would dictate, but what other people are thinking of him, and what will be said of him if he abandon himself to the better guidance of his conscience and his heart. And in later life it often happens that the world no longer attracts or tyrannizes over us from without, not because we have seen through it and bid it begone, but because it has taken possession of us and is now not without but within us. We only do not feel its power as an attractive or an oppressive force because we breathe it as an atmosphere, because, without our knowing it, we are already and altogether controlled by it.

At each of these stages faith is the victory that overcometh the world. As St. John's language implies, to possess real faith is to be already victorious. Faith matches the world's attractiveness in early life because it can offer a real, and much more powerful, attraction. There is more to fascinate the human soul in the eternal beauty than in any form or ideal of earthly mould, more to interest the mind and the affections in the contemplation of the love of God than in any earthly occupation, however pleasurable or engrossing. And faith overthrows the worldly spirit in middle life. It achieves this by opening and fixing the eye of the soul upon the one Being Who has a right to rule it because He is what He is, holy, just and good. As we see Him more clearly the world loses its power; its most cherished maxims are placed in the light of His countenance, and we see how little they can really do for the improvement and happiness either of ourselves or others.

And, once more, faith is equal to the hardest task of all, -that of expelling the worldly spirit when, like a London fog, it has penetrated into all the recesses of our spiritual home; for faith takes us by the hand, points us to a height from which, as from the outside gallery of this church above our heads on some winter day, it can look down upon the

mists in which life is buried below, and determine that it shall no longer be so. To see our Lord, the Sun of Righteousness, as He is seen by a Christian's faith is to have taken the world's measure, is to have parted company with it here and for ever.

THE CHRISTIAN'S MODEL

(Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday afternoon, the 20th April, being the Second Sunday after Easter, 1890)

EPHESIANS IV. 15.

"That we may grow up unto Him in all things which is the Head, even Christ."

HERE is a statement of the object, or of one of the objects, for which the Church of Christ received her spiritual endowments from her ascended Lord. "He gave some Apostles,. and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.' His purpose, the Apostle tells us, was to bring Christians to moral and spiritual perfection,-" for the perfecting of the saints; to advance the work for the sake of which the ministry had been instituted,-" for the work of the ministry"; to build up the fabric of the Christian life in the Church and in the soul,-" for the edifying of the body of Christ." A time should be looked forward to when in the unity of the faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God Christians would reach a perfection which is described as "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." That perfection would contrast sharply with the old Pagan life which had preceded it, when uncertainty and division. had been the order of the day, when they had been as "children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine." This new and higher life would be prompted by sincerity, governed by love, and its vital principle would be "to grow up unto Him in all things, which is the Head, even Christ."

So St. Paul wrote thirty years, or more than thirty years, after the Ascension; but the aspiration, the hope, the effort which he thus described would have taken at least some shape in Christian souls at a much earlier time, nay, we may be bold to say, immediately after the great events, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, even during those forty days which we are now traversing in memory. During those days our Lord

was still lingering on the earth; He was seen from time to time, by a few or by many of His faithful followers, but the old period of intimate and unbroken companionship, which had preceded the Crucifixion, had passed away.

Memory can sometimes interpret events more accurately than present experience. It sees them in their true proportion, as the traveller sees the higher Alps in their real grandeur, not from the valley at their feet, but from the distant plain. In those forty days the disciples of Christ would have understood the meaning of their Master's life better than when they were with Him day after day in the villages and fields of Galilee. And now that He was preparing for His triumphal departure they would have discerned with increasing clearness, as to-day's Collect says, that He had been given by the Eternal Father, not merely to die as a Sacrifice for sin, but also to live as an Ensample of Godly life, a Model of what human life should be. They would have anticipated St. Paul's desire to "grow up unto Him in all things, which is the Head, even Christ," and the prayer which we have offered to-day "that we may daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of His most holy life."

Now, the most obvious truths are often the most overlooked. They do not provoke opposition and the defence which opposition calls forth, and as a consequence they are apt to be less before the minds of men than other truths which are much more disputable. If this were not the case it would be unnecessary to observe that the first requisite for all good work is a good model. If a model does not exist, it must be projected by the artist before he touches his brush, or his chisel. He must have clearly placed before his mind's eye, and perhaps outlined in pencil, or shaped in clay, the conception to which he hopes to give a lasting embodiment. Not to have a model is to waste time, skill, temper, material, in efforts which have no promise of even moderate success, or of anything other or better than pathetic failure and confusion. Even the Almighty Artist when He made the worlds beheld the archetypal forms of things to which He was giving existence, traced out in His co-equal Wisdom, or Word, or Son. And no human workman, be he on a higher or a lower level in the school of production, can dispense with this first requisite-a model of that which he desires to achieve. When from this it is inferred that the moral or