see" Jesus. One least spoken of among the Apostles influenced the one who took the foremost place among them, as if to shew that such power is independent of personal superiority. Again, the latest Apostle, St. Paul, is employed by God to correct St. Peter, even as to his inspired teaching.

The honours of life fall to the lot of the great and the gifted. The race of fame is to the swift. But the very feeblest in a family, in a college, or religious community,

may raise the tone and purify the spiritual life of the whole body, even as, alas! on the other hand, the abuse of this power may in any one degrade the character, and defile the conscience of all the other members. But a yet greater evil lies in an insensibility, a heedlessness to the power of this influence. There is hope for the agent of an unholy influence, so long as he is conscious of the power that he wields. As God hates and casts far from Him the lukewarm, as worse than what is either hot or cold, so one dead to the consciousness of spiritual powers and responsibilities towards others' lives, is the more hopelessly reprobate. There is hope so long as the sense of the evil communicated to others makes one sensitive to the evil which exists in oneself. The sight of ruin wrought by one's own evil agency, may awaken the conscience to the deadly power which sin exerts. But if to being a murderer of another's life we add the utter disregard of such consequences of our acts, where is the possibility of remorse? In the cold recklessness of the thought, "Am I my brother's keeper," one has all the more fatally closed the door against the hope of a return to God. The sight of one's own sin, in the loss of another's purity, is one of the influences which God has mercifully willed

to be the awakening of the slumbering conscience. If oneself is guilty of having caused that sin, or of having failed to remedy it when the opportunity offered, the sight of evil in another, as one's own work, is the most powerful reflection of one's own character. To be dead to such an influence is to be twice dead, as, on the other hand, to be conscious of one's power for good is to raise oneself to a higher level of spiritual life. To care for another's soul is to rise in one's estimate of one's own. We rise in raising others, even as we are raised in their rising. Thus men act and re-act on each other unceasingly. Human society was intended by God to be the sphere wherein each individual member might strive with another in the manifestation of His grace, as a means of furthering His own glory; and blessed is the lot of any one, however lowly, however feeble, who, standing it may be alone, abides stedfast in his own heart, bearing witness for the truth and sanctity of the law of his God; and thus becomes in the midst of his brethren the centre of an ever-widening influence of a pure and holy conversation.

Before closing, a few practical suggestions may be added.

1. Recognise the many links which bind one man to another as a distinct purpose of God, fulfilling a material part of our probation,-not a constraint hampering our independence and thwarting our will, but a ceaseless discipline of the utmost moment, counteracting the fatal selfishness of our nature.

2. Consider how much we owe to the example of others. Call up from the past the manifold forms of influence exerted by a parent, a sister, a brother, a friend, it may be a dependant, one, it may be, least

honoured among men. Think of the recompense of everlasting honour which that teaching, that living witness for God, may be now inheriting.

3. Weigh the consequences of all expressions, whether in word or deed, which take their outward shape from your inner life; feel how they live and work on, extending themselves, it may be, far and wide. A single word boldly spoken for God, even a silence that has reproved some miserable boast; a suggestion; a hint; a high principle firmly asserted, may be, in its eventual consequences, the saving of many souls; may commence a revolution in the society in which you move, even as, on the contrary, an evil witness will bear its fruit, to rise up against him who bore it, before the judgment-seat of God.

4. We are all taking our parts in the battle-field, in which Satan is ever striving against God, and each one of us is either leagued with the Evil one, and furthering the ruin of his many victims, or, united with Christ, is becoming more and more in his daily conversation a saviour, a healer of the degradation and pollution "which is in the world through lust.”

5. Yet let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth. Guard all the while the yet greater grace on which thy own inward life hangs, the grace of lowliness and self-forgetting love. Self does not become more prominent as we enter into the life of others, rather it is more and more lost as the spirit of selfsacrifice extends. To be oneself hidden, is really to promote the truest influence, as leaven works secretly in the meal. Our Lord emptied Himself, as He entered into the life of humanity, and "took upon Him the form of a servant, and became obedient unto death, even the

death of the cross;" and yet, in making Himself “of no reputation," He restored the lost world. So dying in Him, we live. So living no longer to ourselves, but to Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us, we pass into the higher fellowship with all who in God are daily more and more becoming lost to themselves, that they may possess His fulness, and share His perfect joy.

SERMON IX.

Personal Responsibility of Man, in the
Great Account.

HEBREWS ix. 27.

"To die, but after this the judgment."

TEP by step, in the course of sermons now drawing

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to a close, we have seen the responsibility of man developed, expanded, growing and accumulating before our eyes. We have seen it enforced on this side and on that; in all a man's relations, in all his privileges, in every gift, in every opportunity of using a gift. Every relation creates a duty; every gift requires that we put it to use. It were enough to say that God has revealed to us that He will require us to give account for all. But we may go further back than this. Man's gift of reason, which makes responsibility possible, makes it also inevitable. He may brutify himself: but even thus he cannot become as a brute unknowing of good or evil; for he has chosen the evil and refused the good. He may deface the image in which he was created; but he cannot unmake himself. He may live the grovelling life of the beasts; but he cannot share their innocent unconsciousness. For that which he was made, he is responsible to Him who made him.

And when we pass from those who, even among

I