ing the affairs of his own most intimate, most real being, can make no amends for this ignorance by a familiarity with all besides, by any frequency of outward devotion or any multiplication of ostensible exertion. In quietness, not in excitement, shall be your strength.

2. In quietness, not in excitement; in confidence, not in mistrust.

I use the word mistrust, rather than doubt, as the opposite of that confidence which is spoken of in the text. For my purpose now is not to touch upon any of those distressing topics of religious speculation which have been the anxiety and the torment of these latter days. I would rather speak of that spirit of repose and comfort which our Church Liturgy breathes so persuasively, and which a work already referred to has described as the soothing tendency of the PrayerBook'. In confidence, not in mistrust.

The whole life of many persons, so far as it has any religious aspect, is spent in the 1 Preface to The Christian Year.

enquiry, How do I know that I am accepted? What assurance have I in trying to worship? What right have I to lead a Christian life? Must there not be some preliminary experience, some conscious transaction within me, before I can call God my Father, or presume to approach Him through the Son? And thus it comes to pass that the first step is never decisively taken, through a long lifetime, into the region of faith and promise; into the comfort of hope, or into the power of service.

And I venture to think that this hesitation has, in some cases, been the result of a misstatement, or rather a misapplication, of Evangelical doctrine. At a time when long torpor had turned the Church itself into something most unlike its Divine original, and the Christianity of most Christians was a mere form of godliness', it was natural that holy men of God, roused by His grace into heralds of a soul-stirring Gospel, should address their Congregations on the presumption of a prac

1 2 Tim. iii. 5.

tical heathenism, and apply without limitation or correction to the nominally Christian Community the very words of an inspired Apostle to the philosophers of Athens or the idolaters of Lystra. That was no time, they felt, for drawing careful distinctions between conditions practically identical. Here, as there, were souls sunk in sin, and lives steeped in worldliness. Here, as there, the proclamation of the Cross was the one, the only remedy; and the theoretical position of the baptized must be overlooked for the time in the actual position of the godless and the sinful. God Himself set His seal to their testimony. That was the pressing want of the time then present. A loud, a solemn, a stirring call to repent and believe the Gospel, was the necessity of the generation: and Theology might wait till Religion was listened to. A large revival and a large extension of the Church of Christ has been the fruit of that truly Evangelical Ministry.

But how was it to be with the children of these converts? What was the state of a

son or a daughter nurtured from infancy in one of these awakened and evangelized homes? Were they to look forward to a time, not yet come, of conversion and transformation? Were they to regard themselves, were they to be dealt with, as standing precisely where the Parent stood before his vital change? The question was evaded-was vaguely answered-was met one way in doctrine, and the other way in practice. A marked period of conversion was spoken of as the necessity of every heir of salvation. Till that time

came, there might be hopeful indications; but there could be no reality of safety, and no acceptableness of service. Here and there was found a Parent who sacrificed even the instincts of nature to the logical exigencies of his doctrine. If God was pleased to work, none could let: if God had not so willed, it was idle to influence. God could call here as well as there; in the theatre or the ballroom, as well as in the congregation. This fearful recklessness was to be found, thank God, seldom; and only in those who had

embraced with a terrible greediness the worst perversions and distortions of a degenerate and debased Calvinism. Far more often, instinct was too strong for Theology; and a Parent who could not in theory dispense with a tangible conversion, was found in practice to regard his child as already within the pale of the Kingdom. The nursery contradicted the pulpit. The child was taught in the nursery that God was his Father, even while he was taught from the pulpit that God was the Father only of the converted.

This vacillation, this conflict between practice and doctrine, could not fail to produce an effect upon minds thus trained. It was the common feeling of the young, that their place within Christ's Church was an ambiguous, if not, a usurped one. They never knew how to work, and they never knew how to worship. The strength of confidence was denied them. Whether they were accepted, or could only hope to be so-whether they were Christians, when they felt that they were not converts were questions which