and who have revisited Cambridge or Oxford, or their old schools, and they will tell you that they are perfectly astonished at what they see. But these things are but symptoms of an inner change. What is the meaning of it? It fronts us; it judges us; it is a fact. And the question is this-Is it to be sneered down as a passing whim of boys and undergraduates? or is it part of the life of God? Or, again, take the movement in the Church from which has sprung the Christian Social Union. To judge from some recent correspondence, there seems an idea that the Christian Social Union is a band of Socialists arrogating to themselves the Christian name. Nothing can be further from the truth. They are a band of Christians gathered into a union to help one another to put into practice in their social life the elementary principles of love and brotherhood. They are quite aware that it is no new commandment they are trying to fulfil, but an old one they have had from the beginning. What is the meaning, then, again I ask, of this new spirit pervading the Church of which this is an outcome, and which is touching thousands who either know nothing of or do not care to join the Christian Social Union? Is it a passing sentiment? or is it part of the life of God? And in upholding that it is part of the life of God which has again found its way through the mists of human selfishness, we may take our stand on three grounds. 1. First, it was time for it to come. What we have to learn now is how to use our freedom, and we learn this, not by looking forward, but by looking back. too, was there for us all the time in the life of Christ. "No new commandment

It,

stands written in the story to-day, "but an old commandment which we had from the beginning." 2. Secondly, it is too strong to be a whim. The true diamond and the diamond of paste are like enough to look at; but you can cut with the one and not with the other. This diamond cuts. It is no passing feeling of weak sentimentality; it is at the back of the best work doing in the Church. 3. And thirdly, the colour of the light bears witness to its source. We all may mistake many things at times and many colours, but when we see it in action there is no mistaking the white light of love.

And so, in conclusion, we have to ask ourselves what is to be our own attitude towards this brightening and ever brightening light. And surely, then, at any rate, not an attitude of simple opposition. But secondly, the very words of Gamaliel show us that we cannot stop there; if it is of God, and we as Christians are fellow-workers with God, then God expects us-He must expect us-to help it on. If this new commandment is really a word which we heard from the beginning, then it will be one of "the words we have heard, which," we are told, "will judge us at the last day." How to help it on stands between a man and his own conscience, but help it on in some way we must ; "for he that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me, scattereth." And notice, such a conclusion is quite independent of varying views upon the social problem. And so, if we are wise, we shall let this heightening revelation flood and flush our own lives; it is one thing to stand in a dark cave and admire the sunrise, it is another to stand in the glory of it as it pours down on the snow-slope, and gather in great heartfuls of its heat. Let not the great rush of the spirit of brotherhood leave any one of us behind!-REV. A. F. WINNINGTON-INGRAM, M.A., in the Church Times.

STRAINED PIETY.

"Be not righteous overmuch."-ECCLES. vii. 16.

WITH Commentators this is a much controverted text; it may, however, fairly be taken as a warning against strained piety. Not that a man can ever be too righteous, but he may strive after a righteousness that is false and injurious. The other sentence

in this passage may help us to understand what the sacred writer meant by "overmuch" righteousness: Neither make thyself overwise." Some people are known as being "too clever too clever by half." We all know what this means; we know such people. Men cannot be too wise, too gifted, too skilful; but they can be too clever -too clever by half. So goodness sometimes finds a similarly false, irritating, and dangerous expression. It has in it a superfluity that makes it objectionable and injurious. It may be thought that this excess in piety, excess in any direction, is rare, and hardly calls for express consideration. But this is a mistake. It is a common thing for religion to run wild; for goodness to be pushed on wrong lines; for it to be strained, arbitrary, inharmonious, and exaggerated. Let me give a few illustrations of what I mean by strained piety.

I. It sometimes reveals itself in DOCTRINAL FASTIDIOUSNESS. Paul writes to Timothy, "Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus." Hold fast the form, the pattern. The religion of Christ finds expression in the definite, the concrete, the intelligible. But some of us are not content until we have etherealized the great articles of our faith, made our creed vague, intangible, and generally such as it is not possible for à man to utter. De Quincey said of Coleridge, touching the poet's endless refinements and transcendentalisms, "He wants better bread than can be made with wheat." That is rather a common failure in our day, and especially with men of a certain temper. They refine and sublimate their creed until they nearly lose hold of the substantial saving verity. The doctrine of the Incarnation is attenuated until Christ becomes a mere Phantom. In a sense we are obliged to rationalize our creed, penetrate its real meaning, apprehend its reasonableness and consistency; but let us beware lest we hunger because we want better bread than can be made with wheat. The religion of Christ is a religion of history, fact, form, letter, and we must take care how we sky it. The chemist, clever man that he is, can volatilize the diamond; but volatilized diamonds have lost their reality, their beauty, their worth. A precious creed can be rarefied in a similar fashion, and with a similar result. We may strain after pure, metaphysical, absolute truth until we destroy ourselves. The most mystical of the apostles kept fast hold of the definite, the corporeal, the historical: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life." recite the Apostles' Creed, sing the Te Deum. overmuch.

Come down from the thin air, Touch the rock. Be not wise

There is, of course, such a

II. It reveals itself in MORBID INTROSPECTIVENESS. thing as a just introspection, that a man looks closely into his own heart and life. It is, indeed, a solemn duty that we should examine ourselves in the sight of God. And yet this duty is often misconceived and pressed to false issues. Men sometimes get morbid about the state of their health. For example, there are the people who are always weighing themselves. Their feelings go up or down with their weight; they are the sport of their gravity. We all feel that such solicitude is a mistake; it is the sign of a morbid, miserable condition. But good people are, not rarely, victims of a similar morbidity: jealous about their religious state, curious about obscure symptoms, always with beating heart putting themselves into the balances of the sanctuary. This habit may prove most hurtful. Instead of such excessive solicitude being conducive to safety, it is altogether full of peril. It makes men morally weak and craven; it destroys their peace; it robs their life of brightness. Beware of pushing a quiet selfsupervision into unhealthy brooding. Why shouldest thon destroy thyself? On the supreme

III. It reveals itself in AN EXACTING CONSCIENTIOUSNESS.

importance of conscientiousness we are all agreed, but it s easy to push this conscientiousness into scrupulousness. Many Christian people are fertile of ingenious, gratuitous, embarrassing, exasperating distinctions and exclusions. It was said of Grote that "he suffered from a pampered conscience." Many good people do. A fastidious moral sense. It is a legal maxim that "the law concerneth not itself with trifles," and the court is specially impatient of "frivolous and vexatious" charges. But some of us are evermore arraigning ourselves at the bar of conscience about arbitrary, frivolous, vexatious things. It is a great mistake. But it will be said, "There is no special necessity to rebuke extreme nicety of conscience, little need in this callous world to do this; a conscience much exercised about trifles is at least awake and sensitive and faithful." But really, solicitude about trifles is the sign of a defective conscience. Christ shows that the conscience of the Pharisee, exercised by infinite detail and casuistry, was essentially lacking in sensibility and faithfulness. A true and noble conscience is tender, quick, incisive, imperative; but it is also large, majestic, generous, as is the eternal law of which it is the organ. We cannot pretend to go through life with a conscience akin to those delicate balances which are sensitive to a pencil-mark; if we attempt such painful minuteness, we are likely to be incapable of doing justice to the weightier matters of the law.

IV. This strained piety not rarely reveals itself in THE INORDINATE CULTURE OF SOME SPECIAL VIRTUE. For some reason or other a man conceives a special affection for a particular excellence; it engrosses his attention; it shines in his eye with unique splendour. But this extreme love for any one virtue may easily become a snare. A literary botanist says, "Most of the faults of flowers are only exaggerations of some right tendency." May not the same be said about the faults of some Christians? They have strained after a particular virtue until it has imparted to their character disproportion and disagreeableness. Here is the man of conscientiousness. Righteousness is the cardinal virtue in his eyes; and, indeed, his eyes are so full of the great virtue that he can see little else. In the end he pushes justice to the point of injustice. We need to take a wider view, to cultivate justly and impartially every grace of the Christian character. We want comprehensiveness, fulness, balance, harmony. Aiming at the larger ideal, we shall be saved from extravagance, angularity, and littleness.

V. It reveals itself in STRIVING AFTER IMPRACTICABLE STANDARDS OF CHARACTER. We cannot have too lofty an ideal of character; but we may easily have pretentious, spurious ideals on which the soul may waste its precious energies. It is a fine characteristic of Christianity that it is so sane, reasonable, practical, humane; it never forgets our nature and situation, our relations and duty. But many think to transcend the goodness of Christianity; they are dreaming of loftier types of character, of sublimer principles, of more illustrious lives than Christianity knows. Positivism gives us an illustration of this. It has long been an objection to Christianity that it enjoined a morality so superfine that it was practically inaccessible. Now the Positive philosophy declares that the great principle of Christian ethics is low and selfish. Christianity says, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself;" but the new morality says, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour and ignore thyself." Christianity is discredited by a supposed nobler ideal. Monasticism affords an illustration of this straining. Protestantism has also its false strivings. Some Evangelical Christians have very arbitrary and bizarre notions of holiness. They deny themselves in things that God has not denied them, and pique themselves on virtues of which the New Testament knows nothing. They are too bright and good. The superior people of the Churches, they look superciliously upon ordinary disciples. But this straining after higher ideals than those of Christianity is utterly false and deeply hurtful. Speaking of the monks who fell into

frightful immoralities, Charles Kingsley says, “Aiming to be more than men, they became less than men." It is ever the case. Fanciful ideals exhaust us, distort us, destroy us. What sweet, bright, fragrant flowers God has made to spring on the earth -cowslips in the meadow, daffodils by the pools, primroses in the woods, myrtles, wall-flowers, lavenders, pinks, roses to bloom in the garden, an infinite wealth of colour and sweetness and virtue! But in these days we are tired of God's flowers, and with a strange wantonness we have taken to dyeing them for ourselves: the world is running after queer blossoms that our fathers knew not-yellow asters, green carnations, blue dahlias, red lilacs. And in the moral world we are guilty of similar freaks. "Learn of Me," says the Master. Yes; let us go back to Him who was without excess or defect. Nothing is more wonderful about our Lord than His perfect naturalness, His absolute balance, His reality, reasonableness, artlessness, completeness. With all His mighty enthusiasm He never oversteps the modesty of nature.-REV. W. L. WATKINSON, in the Wesleyan Magazine.

PAUL GATHERING STICKS.

"And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his hand."—ACTS xxviii. 3.

A FIRE is a thing that comes so near to us, and combines itself so closely with our life, that we enjoy it best when we work for it in some way; so that our fuel shall warm us twice-once in the obtaining of it, and again in the burning. And that is the reason why people at a picnic in the open air love to light a fire, and to help in gathering materials for it. Paul had the same feeling. He did not allow the natives to do all the work; he wanted to help them. But he made one mistake which threatened to be very serious; for Paul was not infallible in his ordinary life, and only when he was writing or acting under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Among the sticks which he gathered there was one that looked exactly like the others. You have heard of the curious thing in nature called mimicry, by means of which creatures resemble the places where they are found or the objects near them, or put on the appearance of each other. This disguise is given to creatures for two purposesit conceals the destroyer from its prey, and it enables the innocent creature to get its food in safety. The viper which Paul took up had this power of mimicry.

There are two great lessons in connexion with this remarkable incident which I wish to bring before you. The first is that the Apostle Paul did not think it beneath his dignity to gather sticks for a fire. You do not usually think of him engaged in such a homely occupation. He had no false shame, no foolish pride to overcome. He felt that, however lowly the labour, it was labour in the Lord, for the good of his fellowcreatures. He thought only of being useful, as he had been all through the voyage that had ended so disastrously. Your religion is the same as that of the Apostle Paul; and as it taught him, so should it teach you to cherish a spirit of disengagedness and unselfishness, a readiness for any kind of work, however common, by which you can do good. We read of the noble Bishop Patteson, that while he was burdened with the care of all the Churches in Polynesia, he was ever ready to do the humblest work with his own hands to help as a mason and joiner to build a mission station, to row himself backwards and forwards among the islands, and to cook his own food when it was necessary. The other lesson which you learn from the experience of Paul on this occasion is that God will protect you while you are serving Him and your fellowcreatures. The path of duty has its own dangers, like the path of pleasure. You

may be misunderstood, evil spoken of, your very kindness turned against you. You may create enemies by your good work, and sharper than a serpent's tooth may be the ingratitude that you may meet with in your best-meant and kindest services. The frozen viper you have warmed and cherished into life in your bosom may sting you. But He who protected Paul from the fang of the viper that came out of his benevolent work will protect you from the viper that may come out of your flame of love and zeal for others. If you have faith such as Paul possessed, you will be kept safe, as he was, from any real harm. No serpent coming out of your work of faith and labour of love will truly hurt you. The deadly things you touch and cannot help touching in the fulfilment of the duties and in the performance of the kind acts of life, will be robbed of their venom. Physicians tell you that when you are in perfect health, the infection of the epidemic disease around you will not be communicated to you--you will be proof against the myriads of deadly microbes that are lying in wait to assail any weak or wounded surface, by the vigorous exercise of a healthy life. And it is in the same way only that you can be kept safe from spiritual evil. The full active tide of spiritual life in your soul will repel the poison of the disease.-REV. H. MACMILLAN, D.D., LL.D., in the Quiver.

SUNDAY IN
IN CHURCH.

BY REV. CANON HUTCHINGS, M.A.

SUNDAY NEXT BEFORE EASTER.-EVENING SECOND LESSON. "And when He was come near, He beheld the city, and wept over it."-LUKE xix. 41. 1. This is Palm Sunday, the day on which the Church celebrates our Lord's Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. He willed to be acknowledged as the Messiah, as a prelude to His sufferings. By means of this lowly procession He fulfilled the prophecy, "Behold, thy King cometh unto thee: He is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass" (Zech. ix. 9). This was the day of final visitation to the Jews, "a decisive and irrevocable turning-point," when the Lord" came unto His own," giving them an unmistakable sign by His mode of approach, and yet-they rejected Him.

2. It is not to the procession or its import that the text invites our attention, but to an incident on the road to Jerusalem. "As they approached the shoulder of the hill, where the road bends downward to the north, the sparse vegetation of the eastern slope changed, as in a moment, to the rich green of gardens and trees, and Jerusalem in its glory rose before them. It is hard for us now to imagine the splendour of the view. The City of God, seated on her hills, shone at the moment in the morning sun" (Geikie). But as Christ "beheld" the doomed city, He "wept over it."

Let us contemplate this touching occurrence. What do these tears of Jesus teach us about Himself? And what lessons may we draw from them?

I. WHAT DO THESE TEARS OF JESUS TEACH US ABOUT HIMSELF? 1. That He is true Man. He took our nature, not only our nature, but our "infirmities” (Matt. viii. 17). He did not assume human nature as the first Adam possessed it in Eden, but with some of the shadows of the Fall upon it. This scene shows us how Christ could be afflicted with intense sadness. Sorrow was a marked result of the Fall (Gen. iii. 16, 17). Christ was the "Man of sorrows" (Isa. liii. 1). He took our 66 defects both of body and soul, except sin' and such defects as were inconsistent with His sinlessness and personal perfection. In this picture He appears to be overpowered