from the eyes of His own, He will wipe away, also, those noblest, and perhaps hottest tears that are shed on earth-tears over the lost.

The Christian theory of work can be expressed in a few words, yet its full exposition and illustration were one of the most sublime pages in sacred poetry. "Faith that worketh

by love;" it is all here. The basis is faith; we need scarce say it must lie at the root of all action; whatever truth the age may have forgotten, there is one truth which has been uttered in strains of eloquence, so earnest and overpowering, that it bids fair to be for some time remembered; that a man or nation is mighty in work, precisely as he or it believes. Give a people faith, and though its tribes lie scattered and powerless over its desert domain, like the dismembered limbs of a giant, it will gather itself together, and arise and stride forth along the shaking earth, till every nation trembles at the name of Islam; give a man faith, and though his heart be narrow and his brain confined, and what he believes an absurdity and dream, he will pass by hundreds of abler men who occasionally doubt, and, trampling them in their gore, will control a fiery nation, and reign in terror, till the name of Robespierre is a trembling and abhorrence over the whole earth. But, if all belief is powerful in action, if even belief in an idea make a man resistless, of what nature will that work be, whose hidden root only is faith, but all whose bloom and outgoing is love? And thus it is in Christianity. We enter not at all upon discussion of the nature of saving faith ; but this is, at least and beyond doubt, implied in it, that the believer is certain that God loves him, that in Christ He is his reconciled Father. For one moment ponder this thought. The man has faith that God loves him; with all the emphasis of that strongest of human words, he lays it to his heart that

an affection is in the bosom of the Eternal for him. What will be the instant result, by all we know even of fallen man? We suspect it is not possible for a human heart altogether to resist the attraction even of human love; the blind and selfish affection of passion which impiously arrogates the name may be scorned and hated, but deep, unselfish, spiritual love can not surely be known to exist toward us in any bosom, without awakening some responsive thrill. And if it is possible between man and man, it is assuredly impossible between man and God. It is not given to the human being to resist the attraction of infinite tenderness, when once faith has seen the eye of God looking down upon His accepted child; after long waiting, when at last the balmy drops descend, the fountains must spring. And what is the relief, the joy, the blessedness, of him that loves? Is it not the pouring forth of this love, the urging of it into every channel where it is possible for it to flow? Yes: and this is the Christian scheme of work; that he, whose breast swells with the irrepressible love of God, finds duty transmuted actually into its own reward, and every labor but fuel to enable the flame of his joy to go up toward heaven. The psychological verity of this whole scheme is perfect. Why is it that when the heart of the youth or maiden has once been filled with love, when its whole compass has been occupied as with molten gold by affection for some beloved fellow-creature, if this beloved proves false or dies, it is no very uncommon circumstance that madness or death ensue? Is it not because the outgoing of love is prevented, and instead of issuing forth to wrap its object, instead of welling out in streams of joy, in offices of affection to that object, it must struggle in its fountain, and burn the heart that harbors it? And may we not, in the face of Stephen, radiant in death, in the triumph-song of Paul when about to be

offered, in the ecstatic hymns on the lips of the early martyrs as they went to the stake, find reliable evidence that there may be a love in the human breast for a Father God which will seek, as in an agony, for some channel in which to flow forth? And never can it have to seek in vain; in the inner kingdom of the soul, in the outer kingdom of the world, there is ever work to be done for God, ever some commandment to be fulfilled by which the Christian may prove that he loves his Saviour.

Of this last duty and joy as permitted to the Christian, we must say one word. It were certainly a strange mistake, it would indicate an interesting, almost enviable freshness and spring verdure of intellect, to imagine that the refutation of an error would prove its destruction. Even at this day, and in publications by theological professors, you may find it declared that Calvinism circumscribes the freedom and fullness of the offer of redemption. Singular! If you gather all the human race into one congregation, be I the most rigid of intelligent Calvinists, I will put to my lips the trumpet of the Gospel, and proclaim that whatsoever will may come and drink of the water of life freely. If you bring me to a hoary sinner, who has defied God for a lifetime, and who now shakes with the palsy of death, I will tell him that God yet waits to be gracious, and willeth not his death. And will my pleading with this dying transgressor be the less earnest and hopeful, because I have not to trust to the feeble efficacy of my words, or the grasp of his expiring faculties, but may look and pray for the extension of a Divine arm to seize and rescue his soul? Because God has not taken me into His confidence, has not unfolded to me the Book of Life, and showed me the names of those chosen before the foundation of the world, will I not design to be His instrument, to save whom

He pleases? You dispatch a thousand vessels from this harbor, yet you know certain of them will be the prey of the tempest. You ship your compass; how does it act? You fix the lightning-rod on the mast; why, and in what precise manner, does it call down the fire of heaven? Calvinism makes it a duty to proclaim the Gospel freely: but, in accordance with the whole analogy of nature, it covers up in mystery God's creative work.

In speaking of work, have we not already come to speak of heaven? We have. By beginning with work, we arrived at joy; we shall now, beginning from joy, see whether it will not lead us to work. Butler defines happiness to consist in "a faculty's having its proper object." "Pleasure," says Sir William Hamilton, "is the reflex of unimpeded energy." The two expressions explain and agree with each other: the latter, indeed, embraces the former. We doubt not they are substantially true, and would enable us to classify every degree and order of happiness from the highest to the lowest ; it always remaining true that, however base or diluted might be the joy of activity, and though, relatively, even painful, it might yet be named pleasure, in contrast with the state of compulsory inactivity: the pleasure of revenge is poor and contemptible, yet it is a joy compared with its unsatisfied gnawing. And whatever might be the lowest and feeblest form of joy, it can not admit of question what would be the highest. It would assuredly be the activity of love. We have no sooner uttered the word than we are at the gate of the Christian heaven. When the heart begins to go out in love to God, heaven has commenced within it, and the certitude of an eternal heaven is found in this, that it is toward an Infinite God that it goes out. Provision is thus made at once for endless activity and endless love. There has been much

written in our day about the worship of sorrow, and a great truth lies under the words; this truth, freed of its encumbering falsehood, Christianity embraces; it speaks of tribulation as that through which we enter into the kingdom of heaven, and gives sorrow the high office of breaking the soul to humility and contriteness, that it may kneel at the feet of Jesus. But, if there is any one instinctive utterance of the human soul to which we would accord consent, it is the declaration that sorrow, whatever it may subserve, is a blot upon God's universe, is the fang of the snake sin, is the shadow cast by the wings of the great dragon that has come up from the bottomless pit to prey on man; and that, if well interpreted, the worship of joy is higher than the worship of sorrow. But how completely is all that insinuation about Christianity being allied to a selfish theory of morals now seen to vanish! The Christian does not serve God for happiness, but God by a sublime necessity has attached happiness to His service. Along the ranks of His army goes the command to rejoice; above it floats the banner of love. Felicity is the light which rests over it all. From the helmets of the seraphim that light is flashed back in full unclouded blaze; on us of the human race who, as Isaac Taylor says beautifully, "seem to stand almost on the extreme confines of happiness," its first rays are even now descending. Happiness is the spheral music in which a God, whose name is Love, has ordained that holiness must voice itself; His light, as it sweeps over the Eolean harp of immensity, kindling every dead world into beauty, breaks forth in the Memnonian anthem of joy.

And have we no distinctive character to assign to that state and that locality which, in common discourse, receive the special name of heaven? In the essential character of the happiness of the future heaven, we can point to no change,