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to this other fact, that the residuum of character left behind in that great process of composition and decomposition ever going forward in the chemistry of life-is decisive of their eternity. But as Gulliver was bound down to the earth by an indefinite number of Lilliputian ropes and pegs, so are men held in the grasp of an earthy and purposeless life by the multitudinous littlenesses in which they allow themselves' to be absorbed. They are slow to rouse themselves to an effort for freedom. The inert spirit is unwilling to breast the hill that leads to the summit of high purpose, whence all things are clearly seen in true order and fair proportion. Now and then a calamity awakens them, and they hear with terrible distinctness the great questions of life, through all their gloom and misery. When pleasure palls upon the favourites of fortune and the golden apple turns to bitterness and ashes in the eating the sense of wasted life brings up these questionsperhaps, too late. When gratified ambition brings no quiet to the spirit, but leaves it still the prey to the fear of losing that which has been gained, or to a craving for greater acquisitions-do these questions never press upon the empty soul, unsatisfied still, even in the attainment of its life-long objects? And if, in the eager pursuit of wealth, the successful man feels that at the moment when the fruits of his long labour are matured, health and appetite for their enjoyment have departed— he, too, may find it difficult to evade the importunity of such questions. And he who, with powers of outward enjoyment unimpaired, finds that the millenium of idleness and luxurious living to which work was but the dreary pathway, is itself indefinitely more dreary than the path he trod to reach it, he may begin to glimmer into the consciousness that he has not fitly answered the great questions of life.

But in some sort it may be said that the lives of all men are an answer to the question-"Why am I here?" The answers given by some, indeed, are uttered in a very illogical and stammering way, and are wholly a mistake. Others proceed at first in a clear and distinct manner to give their reply with the promise of accuracy and force, but anon leaps forth some gross non-sequitur, and the whole edifice that promised so fair in its foundation falls down into chaotic ruin. Some, again, grow out of confusion and utter darkness into all order, beauty, and light, and their answer to the problem is a fair thing to see on earth, and brighter yet, when seen in heaven. In answering other questions which take less than the whole of life for the development of a full reply,—we may correct the errors of a first effort by a second. But in our life-answer to this question the reply is final and decisive; the lesson of life is not twice learned-the answer which life gives

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to the question which the mere fact of life propounds, never can be repeated. And, again, life devours those who answer its question wrongly. The total destruction of the humanity of man is the penalty of error; and hell is the outcome of the mistakes of all those who, from perversely evil hearts, have wrongly read the meaning of their life. No: the wasted years come not back. The hours and days given up to the pleasures of sin have left their indelible record on the soul, their part of the answer to the question which life propounds. Those acts of life in which justice, truth, and what is noble and pure in humanity, have been sacrificed that so the love of power, wealth, and position may be gratified, all leave their deeply graven lines upon the character, and help to answer the question of life. And the reply which heart, mind, and life have given, when read off, is judgment, and fixes our eternity. This life-reply is, in truth, our character-what we are, as the outcome of what we have been, and have done. For character is left behind, after the evanescent and fleeting things of life have passed away, and remains essentially immutable through a boundless future.

The great question of life, then, is one that admits of no evasions. We cannot postpone our answer; it accumulates line upon line every day we live. It may be with some, perhaps with many, that life in its purposeless vacuity has given no place for honest and sincere in-looking. It may be that the mere fact of being alive here, with an immortal life, has never forced itself upon the thought as one involving responsibilities almost overwhelming. But their ignorance or indifference does not alter things. The inevitable consequences are marching on with a slow and regular movement, just the same as though they knew and felt all the weight of life. If the angels have been allowed no room for action within the spirit, infernals have been none the less busy in weaving the web and woof of life. And even in Christendom-where, alas! the Christian spirit owns limits indefinitely narrower than the Christian name-how many are crying out with all the energy of heart, mind, and life, their response to the problem of existence in the words-Money, Power, Social Distinction, Luxurious Ease,-telling us in acts, more than words, that beyond these life has no purpose. When they lose these, how they go moping through the world as though the blue sky were covered with sackcloth, the green earth with sand and ashes,-as though the sunshine had gone utterly away,-as though the soul, its goodness, truth, and purity, heaven with its ceaseless happiness, and God, infinitely good and wise, did not remain to them still! Had they risen to a conception of the true end of their lives, neither would the acquisition of these things make them giddy, nor the loss of them sad; they would at

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all times, with equable spirit, thank God that the best things are at all times accessible to all, and remain for ever inalienable. But as things go, he who stands on that summit occupies a very exceptional position, and one not easily intelligible to his cotemporaries, for "the general" rejoice in their devotion to "solid advantages," and with ill-disguised contempt leave the Utopian to his dreams.

And is it too much to say that sordid and material estimates of life are very widely prevalent in our time? Looking at the way men live, and what they do about us here, it would almost seem that they send a great number of Bibles and preachers abroad as a sort of mean attempt at compromise with heaven for paying so little attention to them at home. Society may be politely voluble in its disclaimers as to any large section of its members thus estimating the aims and objects of life; and, doubtless, if phrases had the force of facts, and if action were of no greater value than, very unctuous words, these disclaimers would be worth more attention than they at present deserve. That we do live so much on the surface of things, and depend so much on the senses and their enjoyments to make life tolerable, is, perhaps, in some measure due to the rapid development in our time of the means and appliances of an easy, luxurious, and varied way of living. For if modern civilisation has, on the one hand, made special privileges common benefits,-given to all the activities of life, increased facilities, and greatly multiplied the working value of individual men,-it has, on the other, given to the mind an outward tendency, led to the attachment of an undue value to the external advantages so richly accumulated about us; and has induced men to measure success in life more exclusively by the extent to which the means of commanding these advantages have been secured. Luxurious and elegant surroundings have certainly lost none of their attractions since so much taste and skill has been applied to the origination of so many forms of use and beauty for the comfort and adornment of the outer life.

Art has poured forth all the wealth of its wondrous conceptions to lend to the useful all the grace of beauty, and Science is working ever by many means and agencies to make all the ways of life easy and agreeable. What wonder, then, if in the midst of these many enchantments the eyes should be so dazzled by the gilded surface as to be incapable of looking beyond to the deep and lasting things of life? If man becomes less and the adventitious surroundings of the man more,-nay, if the man altogether goes out beneath the gaud and glitter of his circumstances, and becomes a lay figure round which they hang for exhibition, it is in some part due to the fact that the progress of the

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outer is not compensated by an equal growth of the inner life. Men get crushed beneath the weight of their outward goods, and their human hearts have no room to beat pressed upon by these cumbrous loads. True the age is not wholly to blame for this easy conquest which the material present achieves daily over the spiritual future. Battles between these two, with victory swaying oftenest to the side of the former, are as old as history. Is it not, indeed, the old tale, ten times repeated,meeting us first in Eden, and going with us through all the wanderings of humanity, that old tale which tells of the struggles between the Seeming and the Real, the Superficies and the Centre, Heaven and Earth, Life and Death? It is true this antagonism is no necessityin better days it will not be. For Life should shake hands with Death, and greet it warmly as the pathway to its own loftiest development. Earth should embody the Heaven which is its living soul; and when that which lives within is good, its appearing will all be beautiful. But those better days have not yet arrived. They are, perhaps, slowly approaching. Still our poor humanity, by painting and adorning the body of things into fictitious life and beauty, would cheat itself into the belief that, beneath the outward form, the soul cannot be wholly corrupt and dead. It is not, then, exceptional to our own time, this fall of man from the love of inward to that of outward things,—this fall daily repeated before our eyes, but has been incident to our humanity since its first declension. Still the increased power of attraction possessed by outward things, not duly balanced by increase in the power of higher tendencies, may make it less easy now to prevent life being frittered away in pleasant but purposeless inanities. Indeed, the high purpose of human life is, in such case, greatly in danger of being hidden from view by the fogs and mists that gather round humanity as it pursues the bewildering lights floating and moving over the surface of a depraved society.

If, then, with many life is empty of all definite and earnest purpose,— if, with most, there is great danger of that purpose being wholly hidden or dimly seen amid the intense outward activity of our times, all the more important is it that some distinct idea should be formed of the chief end of life, that so the indifferent may be roused, and the thoughtful guided, by a light that burns steadily amid surrounding darkness. It is not meant, indeed, in thus attempting to clear away the mists from this topic, that life is to proceed at high pressure in a given straight line, on a course all hard and rigid, like an iron road. It is not meant that a clear view of the purpose of existence will exclude all interest in those minor ends and aims which form the common texture of daily life. The small

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events, the cares, duties, and pleasures that meet us day by day will lose none of their significance before an absorbing interest in this highest end. The rather, since this will coördinate and arrange the lower, so as to make them fitly ministerial to itself, will they gather a new worth and lustre from the central purpose they serve. The whole of life, indeed, is always elevated or depressed to the level of its ruling purpose; if that be of God, then is life in a sort divine, and if of hell, infernal. Because life is high in its motives, pure, simple, and wise in all its goings, it is not dead to the sweet and soft things that fall to it unsought. No ascetic hardness as to the graceful and the pleasant is forced upon us by the determination to pursue, through all its details, this highest object. As the earth has a season for flowers, when it offers fragrant thanks to the sun in return for his genial beams, so has the heart not less its hours and days of cheerfulness and joy, in which our smiles and gladness are not ungrateful thanks to Him who opens in us all the springs of happiness. And as our work, directed immediately towards the smaller objects of life, gets an elevation and worth from being infilled with a purpose that looks beyond time and space, so are our pleasures purified by the high aim that, at all moments, consciously or unconsciously pervades our existence.

It is not, then, to the extinction in us of any human interest, of any hearty, genial appreciation of the little things and affairs of life, that this higher purpose looks, even when wholly supreme. For it is in the cares and anxieties, in the labours and the duties of life,-in the affairs which bring men together to differ and concede, to bargain, buy, and sell,-in the social reunion, where the strife of mutually pleasing is the only contest,-it is in these, and not away from them, that devotion to the chief purpose of life should be nurtured and matured. G. P.

MEEKNESS.

MEEKNESS is one of those graces that seem to be of a passive rather than of an active character, one that betokens the absence of evil, as preparatory to the presence of good; one allied more to patient waiting than to active zeal. Not that there is any grace that is merely negative, but among those that enrich and beautify the Christian mind and adorn the Christian character, there will be found a difference similar to that which exists between the masculine and feminine character. Among those which may be called feminine graces, meekness holds a distinguished place. It is a plant that can grow only in a soil that has

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