elements which enter into the mystery of true worship. Moses says,- "What doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways . . . and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord?" The word love is found in this company. Recite the names that you may the more clearly understand the society of love. "Fear," "walk," "serve," "keep," -it is in that society that love shines like the queenliest of the stars. Love is not a mere sentiment, a quality that evaporates in sighing or that fades into invisibleness by mystic contemplation; love calls fear, walking, serving, keeping, to its side, and they all together, in happy harmonic co-operation, constitute the divine life and the divine sonship of the soul. We, too, have mystery; we have miracles; we have ceremonies; we have tabernacles and temples;-what is the meaning of them all? They cannot end in themselves; read the riddle; tell us in some short word which may be kept in a child's memory-the meaning of all the cumbrous machinery-the gorgeous ritual of the olden time, and even the simpler worship of the passing day. What is the meaning of prayer, and faith, and gift, and service, and outward profession? Would we learn the word? We find it in the Old Testament and in the New: Moses speaks it, Christ speaks it, Paul speaks it, John speaks it,—they are all trying to say it— "Love." Love keeps nothing back; love is cruel as fire in the testing of qualities; love is genial as Heaven in the blessing of goodness. Though we have all knowledge, all prophecy, and are marvels in gifts of eloquence, and though we give our goods to feed the poor and our body to be burned, and outrun ancient Israel in costly and continuous ceremony, if we have not love— pure, simple, childlike, beautiful love-our music is noise, and our sacrifice is vanity. PRAYER. THOU wilt not show us thy glory now. Thou hast promised to show us thy goodness, and to make it pass before us: this thou art doing day by day; all things show the mercy of God. As for ourselves, goodness and mercy have followed us all the days of our life. We know this: our life speaks to this truth strongly and lovingly; therefore, we fear no evil: we smile upon the threatened darkness: the valley of the shadow of death is part of the way home. We have no real fear, no intense terror of heart; we are subject to passing dreads and alarms and foolish excitements, but all these do not touch the soul seated in the solemnity of an eternal covenant. Thou wilt accomplish all things; thou wilt not fail to bring on the topstone; having spent the ages in building the temple, the pinnacle shall not be wanting. Thou didst see the end from the beginning, and almightiness cannot fail. We stand in this security as within the munition of rocks; the wind cannot overturn our retreat; the tempest wastes its fury upon that stone; we are shut in by the hand of God. Help us to see the great beyond,-not to be too curious about it, but to use it as an allurement, a silent persuasion, a mighty compulsion towards stronger work, nobler purpose, larger prayer; thus the heavens shall help the earth; the sun shall be our light all day, and above it shall there be a brightness which the soul can understand. We bless thee for a sense of sin forgiven. Continue thy daily pardon. We feel as if we must be pardoned every moment, for since we have been pardoned and our eyes have been enlightened, we see more clearly, and we discern more critically: the things which once wore no face of offence now burn before us as if filled with all horribleness and as if carrying all shame. We would be pure as God is pure, perfect with the perfectness of God; but this end who can attain except through long ages, by the way of the Cross, by the ministry of blood, by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost? But our hope is in God: we shall yet be perfected; we shall stand before him without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, without a tear of shame in the eyes, without a flutter of misgiving or fear in the uplifted hands. The Lord have us in his holy keeping; the Lord build for us a pavilion in which our souls may daily trust; and when the end comes may we find it but a beginning; when the shadow falls may it be the background of many an unsuspected star; and when we stand before thee may we have on the robe of Christ-be clothed with him, not having on our own righteousness, which is of the law, but the righteousness of Christ, the purity of the Cross. If this prayer may be answered now we shall not know but that we are already in heaven. Amen. Deut. xi. 26-32. 26. Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; 27. A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day: 28. And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known. 29. And it shall come to pass, when the Lord thy God hath brought thee in unto the land whither thou goest to possess it, that thou shalt put the blessing upon mount Gerizim, and the curse upon mount Ebal. 30. Are they not on the other side Jordan, by the way where the sun goeth down, in the land of the Canaanites, which dwell in the champaign over against Gilgal, beside the plains of Moreh? 31. For ye shall pass over Jordan to go in to possess the land which the Lord your God giveth you, and ye shall possess it, and dwell therein. 32. And ye shall observe to do all the statutes and judgments which I set before you this day. THIS PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVES. HIS is the closing portion of a very long discourse delivered by Moses. The discourse begins in the twenty-second verse of the fifth chapter and extends to the end of the eleventh chapter. Within these points Moses rehearses the Decalogue and its leading principles; beyond the range of principles he has hardly yet gone. The next chapter opens with details, and insists upon special and clear applications of the morals which Moses had heretofore inculcated. The preacher winds up this portion of his discourse with a solemn appeal; he brings the great question to a point. He has not conducted himself merely as a lecturer upon moral philosophy, stating various theories with great learning and skill, and leaving his listeners to come to their own conclusions. There are no such lectures in an inspired book; they are in their right place in strictly human literature— an ample field within which men may indulge their genius and exhibit the results of their investigations. Moses comes with a law. Rightly or wrongly, that is the position which he assumes. He is not an intellectual reasoner merely-an inventor of systems, a critic of extinct ages; he says he has brought two tables written with the finger of God, measurable and intelligible as to letters and applications, but underneath them, and above them, and round about them is the mystery of Eternity. How does this noble preacher conclude his expositions and rehearsals? He does not divide the people into two classes: he sets before them alternative courses :-proceed upon the line of obedience, and you come to blessing; proceed along the line of disobedience, and a curse is the inevitable necessity,—not a threatening, not an exhibition of fretful vengeance, but a spiritual necessity: a curse follows evil-doing, not as an arbitrary punishment, but as the effect, which can never be changed, of a certain, positive, operating cause. This, therefore, takes out the personal element. We are not divided as on the right hand and on the left. Instead of classifying the hearers, Moses classifies the alternatives; and thus grace follows law,-a species of mercy asserts itself in the midst of the severest and most critical of all moral legislation. The dart is not aimed at any particular man, nor is the favour dispensed in any spirit of selection and partiality; but two great courses are indicated, two distinct issues are classified, and it is for us, reasoning upon history and observation, to say whether the prophet of the Lord touched the vital linewhether he trifled with the occasion, or whether he spake that which is to-day confirmed by experience and observation or human development and progress. What if everything round about us be confirming the testimony of Moses? What if the Decalogue be written every day of the week? What if in the operation of moral influence it can be distinctly proved that the Bible is one, that the word of the Lord abideth for ever, and that, whatever changes may have occurred, obedience still leads to blessing, disobedience still leads to cursing, and it is not within the wit or the strength of man to change that outgoing of law and consequence ? A very precious thing it is that we have only to obey. At first it looks as if we were humbled by this course of service, but further inquest into the spiritual meaning of the matter shows us that in the definition of right and wrong, law and righteousness, God has been most tenderly-pitiful towards us, and law is but the practical and more visible and measurable aspect of love. Again and again we have seen that we are not moral inventors. has not propounded a writing to us, to find out which is right and which is wrong; nor has he left to us the wild liberty, which would have been so full of disappointment and pain, of discover God ing for ourselves which way we would take, not knowing the definite issue of either course. There is nothing arbitrary in the revelation of eternal law: by its very nature it is a quantity which lies beyond our vision, and which does not submit itself to the rearrangements of our invention. Things relating to mere convenience, momentary rights, boundaries which are being continually enlarged and contracted as civilisation may require,— with regard to these we are legislators, makers of law, having in our right the gift of reward and the infliction of penalty; but even these things are wrong if they are not built upon rocks we never laid, if they do not express the eternal harmoniousness, the infinite righteousness of God. In so far as they approach the divine thought, they will abide, they will daily vindicate their own justice; and in so far as they do not express the decree of Heaven, all time is against them; not a star in the wide heavens is on their side; they must go down by a pressure as irresistible as it is immeasurable and invisible. Happy is the man who has discovered that he is not meant to be a moral inventor-a maker of morals,—that he has to accept a revealed morality and an offered righteousness: that God has been so kind to him as to arrange the whole way of life, so that the wayfaring man need not lose the path. This down-letting of a moral revelation is an aspect of the grace of God. When we come into fuller grace, clearer apprehension of the divine mind, we call the law an assistant guiding us to school-not so much a schoolmaster, as the English has it, as one who takes us by the hand and guides us to the schoolmaster; but, even then we begin to see that the law, if written on stone, was written by a hand of love; if set forth in letters that seem to burn in the intensity of their purity, yet did those very letters light us into inner meanings, into the very hidden sanctuary of God. When will men learn this? When will they at once and for ever confess it, and so save themselves from endless and profitless trouble? The Christian position is that the whole scheme of righteousness is revealed: whatever is right, true, pure, good, lovely, honest, and of heavenly savour has been given by God, so that the disappointing exercise of invention is superseded or is rendered of non-effect. One who knows the universe, because he made it, and all eternity, because he inhabits it, |