man on the lonely watch at sea; there is many a solitary watcher on the land; there is many a one in the recesses of business; there is many a one in the toil and fatigue and vexation of the week-day, or in the broad calm of the Sabbath, that has this soul-communion with Christ. It is the banquet of love. What words can describe it? It is ineffable; it is full of glory-at times, of inexpressible glory.

H. W. BEECHER.

Conscience and Conscientiousness.—IF.

"CONSCIENCE is a manufacture," said my friend to me. True, perfectly true, as to its shape and quality, as any one of us may see, if he will examine his own conscience. Of the many readers of these words within the next few weeks, every one has a conscience in some state or condition, yet no two of us with consciences exactly alike as to the right or wrong of all things with which they may have to deal. We differ immensely on this score-as to torpid or active; as to strong or weak ; as to good or evil. But why do we differ? Simply because our conscience is what it has been made. If we have trifled with it, tampered with it, resisted it, it has grown feeble or false. If we have heeded it, and cherished it indeed, but given it little light, it has become weak. If we have nourished it with continuous and ever-improving supplies of Divine truth, and it has been allied with a devout and loving heart, it has become both happy and strong, as easily performing its proper functions in the spiritual life as the healthy heart in the sound body.

The New Testament writers recognise this difference of conscience in different men. They speak of the "weak conscience," the "defiled conscience," a conscience seared as with a hot iron," "an evil conscience," "a good conscience." It is, as to quality and pattern, a manufacture. We may make it into anything we please.

Let us think of it a moment. Let my reader say to himself, Here, within me, is a faculty which, by wise treatment, I may culture into a grandly regal power over all my life. God has put it there, and given it its place. It will occupy but that one, and do only that one thing which God has given it to do. But its place is regal. It is capable of becoming the absolutely supreme director of my life; so that what it says may be more to me than what anything else says; so that its voice shall silence every opposing voice; so that, if affection or passion be strongly urging me to any course, this voice, with a gentle but majestic 'No!' shall bid me heed them not, or with a loving approval shall let them have their way; so that, when my will is throbbing under some current of selfishness, which it would cost me some of my manhood to yield to, this shall instantly dart its own restraining force, and make me blush even for the momentary thought; so that, at the great crises of life, when I come to

the cross-roads, and there is no finger-post of Providence discernible, I shall be able to ask this monitor, and it shall tell me unhesitatingly and with unerring certainty which is my path. I may so culture this power, with Divine teaching, with delicate care never to injure its action by the smallest resistance, that it shall be as an absolute Divine guide to me in all my course. I may so nourish it into strength that wrong shall become impossible to me under any provocation or temptation, and right a necessity, to be done at all cost; so grandly regal and strong, that flames shall have no terror for me, and my faith shall still be whole, unrent, whilst my body is being mangled on a rack.

All this has been, again and again. The martyrs for conscience' sake hold highest place in the annals of fame. One such hero counts for as much as twenty of those who, under the excitement of war, have rushed into the midst of the carnage, and died of a hundred wounds.

Is it not a glorious endowment of our nature? At what price shall we value it? We prize very highly the faculty of sight: what would life be without these little, mighty orbs, that hold both heaven and earth within their reach? But a blind man-stone blind, born blind, who has never seen the glad light, nor the grand mountains, nor the mighty sea-may be "happy as a king," if he have a healthy conscience and a true heart. If it ever come to this with any of us, that we must part with our eye or with our good conscience, and we would keep that which is most valuable, then let us keep our conscience, and let the other go, for "it is better to enter into life with one eye rather than, having two eyes, to be cast into everlasting fire." Or, if it should ever come to this, that we must part with all our wealth, or with our good conscience, then let the former go; for we can manage to be happy and be poor, but we cannot either live or be happy if we let our good conscience go.

Once more. Conscience is a manufacture-will be what it is made. What is it, then, that determines the quality of conscience? The answer cannot be given in a word. Like all other Divine things, it is dependent on more than one thing for its growth and continued vitality. What makes the corn-seed grow ?-the chemical earth? Yes; but not that alone. The air? Yes; but not only what the earth and the air hold. The rain, the dew, the sunlight, and the darkness? Yes, all these are blessedly conspiring to the great end. And the worm, and the frost, and the wind, all have their part in the work. So is it with all spiritual things. Conscience must pass through many hands ere it can take its final form.

But what, then, are the things that give its quality to conscience? We may answer unhesitatingly, in the first place, that teaching is one of the main elements in its formation. If conscience is not born blind, it knows nothing that it sees. Like mind, it cannot long remain an absolute blank; it will pick up something, and, if not carefully taught, it will be most likely to pick up the wrong things. If Wisdom do not teach it,

Folly will. If Love do not mould it, Selfishness will. If it be not indoctrinated with right, it will tacitly or openly approve the wrong. There is a Divine standard for moral being-unalterable, perfect, the transcript of God's own heart. Just as there is a mould and a fashion for the human form and face, and a Divinely-ordained place and function for every member of the human body, so is there a Divine rule for the action of every human soul, and whatever is not according to this is distortion, deformity, hideousness, abortion. The knowledge of what this Divine rule is, of what true morality and manhood are, is absolutely necessary to the formation of a true conscience. Somehow or other it must get this, or it will get the opposite and be ruined. We must be early familiarised with right and wrong, with God's right and wrong, or we shall be undone. Right and wrong must come to mean more to us than any other words we ever hear. They must move us as no others do. They must be as the bit in the mouth, and the curb under the lip, and the rein on the neck, to which we must be as docile as the trained steed. If this manufacture is to be good, sound stuff, that will bear the daily wear and tear of this world, that will stand the strain and not be the worse for it, that will not split into tatters, nor rub into holes by daily contact with the rough immoral world, aye, and with evil and temptation and trouble of every sort, that is how it must be begun to be made; that is the Divine work which must hold together and give substance to all the rest-God's right and wrong. A great, broad, beautiful, perfect, exact, scrupulous, high-minded righteousness ;—a conviction that the right must be, whatever else is not-that the right is the good, however unlike it it may appear-that there is no escape from right but into the pit of loss and death-that righteousness is life, and every step from it a step in the direction of death.

Right and wrong! Ah! but it must be the right Right and Wrong; for it is very possible for any one of us to get very deep and defined convictions about these things, and yet for our convictions to be altogether mistaken, and so for our whole moral life to be perverted to false issues. There are almost as many rights and wrongs, so called, as there are consciences. These mistaken convictions have only been as noxious drugs, instead of God's wholesome food to the moral life. It is only God's right and wrong can make the true conscience for us all. But of this more anon.

I said that conscience was dependent on more than one thing for its formation and growth. All human faculties grow together, parallel, in the healthy life. There is a proportion to be maintained between the different parts of the body at each stage of its development. The head, and the trunk, and the limbs, and the inner vital organs, must grow simultaneously and in due proportion, and each must make its own proper amount of progress. It is the same with the moral faculties. We do

not look for wisdom in a little child, because brain is not yet fully developed, any more than muscle; so, neither do you look for great strength in a little child. So, when conscience begins to act in us, when we assume the conduct of our life, and become our own judges, and in some sort our own reward and punishment, it is not enough that we get at the Divine rule of right and wrong; we must get also that general intelligence which shall enable us to apply the rule to the daily concerns of our life. Right and wrong are general principles, which have to be applied every instant to the concerns of life as they arise. The true interpretation and application of those principles is not by any means at all times a simple and easy task. And if there be not a concurrent growth of the other parts of the inner man--of that other equally integral part of the inner man-mind, intelligence, it may happen that we may have a very strong conscience always acting in wrong ways. There are hundreds of people in the world who would not knowingly do wrong for all that they possess, whose life is an incessant effort to do right, who are always doing wrong of a sort because their judgment is crude, their reasoning false and inconsequent, their passion and their prejudices strong. Conscience is stronger than judgment, and will than reason; and so the true balance of Nature is disturbed, and the faculty which has the highest power to make the life beautiful and noble, often makes it unlovely and absurd.

This is the explanation of a great many of the anomalies of Christian character with which the Church of Christ always abounds. The mission of the preachers of the Gospel is chiefly to the conscience of men; with the general culture of the mental faculties of their hearers they have little to do. It is not for them to spend the little time they have for the doing of their work in training their hearers to reason. They have to do with good and evil rather than with consequent and inconsequent— to bring men to God, and hold them there, and help them to abide in God. And so it has often happened that the teaching of the Church has attuned the conscience very sensitively to the Divine law, developed this one faculty to its full proportions when there has been no corresponding development of the intellect to guide its action, and, in consequence, ludicrous, pitiable moral aberration and failure.

One more thing is still necessary to the healthy development of this grand power, and that is action. Life in all its facts is a twofold process, -is absorbent and radiative, recipient and impartive: we inspire and respire; we spend and repair our force. If we will only do the one side of this set of things, no matter which; if we are only recipient, and not impartive; if we will only eat, and not work, or work, and not eat, we shali find that things will get very soon and totally deranged. digestion waits on appetite," but appetite waits on exercise and work. The men who never do anything but learn, never produce nor create

"Good

anything, very soon get to have nothing but a mental mechanism—no mental life. And so, unless conscience pass into deed; unless a man obeys his conscience; unless he allows it free play among all the movements of his daily life, outer and inner; unless he allows it to go in and out of all the chambers of his soul, where his desires are welling, where his purposes are forming, where his affections are commingling, it will itself be very soon impaired or destroyed. It must pass out into the world as the Divine stamp on the human deed, or it will soon cease to play at all. If its every attempt at this be repressed, if it be smitten on the mouth whenever it speaks, if it be mocked and thwarted when it attempts to fulfil its regal function, it will become silent-it will retire into the sanctuary, to wait till God shall bid it forth again, to do and dare-blessed, though it may be sharp and painful work. It will sleep or seem to die till some Divine touch perchance shall one day rouse it, and bid it thunder in our ears some warning, threatening, reproving voice, that shall subvert all the course of our life, and make us happy or miserable for ever. G. W. CONDER.

On Doing Good.

ONE of the first mistakes of which we have to clear our minds in trying to understand the nature of true beneficence, is that great activity is one of its essentials. The popular error is that the more religious bustle a man makes, the more good he must be doing. It seems to be imagined that noise and publicity must evaporate into something, and that something is at once supposed to be good. To make a noise is, therefore, to do good. Advertising in the religious world seems to pay as well as it does in the commercial world. Popularity and publicity are the gods which many well-meaning people worship. Is the circulation of a religious paper uncommonly wide ?-it must be doing good. Is the annual meeting of some society crowded, and its speakers loud in their declamation and forcible in their rhetoric ?—the society must be doing good. Has a public teacher a large following?-his hearers must necessarily obtain spiritual profit.

But doing good is not such an easy or a noisy process as people imagine. Still waters run deep; and the river that comes from God's throne is of this character. The dew falls in silence, though it has to bless every blade of grass; and the gracious God is as the dew unto Israel. Goodness itself is coy and modest, and cannot be planted in a human spirit by the rude, rough hand of him who has no delicacy of touch. Good things are done in silence, or at least in gentleness. It is not for the noisy scythe, with its hissing sharpness, to cut down the cowslips. Let the children pluck them one by one, and, tying them into