production, that that is the great evil, and that it must be avoided in future. I do not say, for I do not know, and if I did this would hardly be the place to express an opinion, whether this has been the great evil or not. But this I do venture to say, that if this has been the evil, it will probably not be avoided in future. And why, you ask?

Because there is an evil beneath the evil alleged; and that is an excessive desire for property, an eager passion for making a fortune," as it is called, in a few years.

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"Ah!" perhaps you say, "that is an old pulpit cry! We who are sensible business men have often had to listen to wholesale denunciations of wealth and riches, and so far from always accepting them as just, we have very often felt ourselves right in resenting them as the mere conventional tirades of ignorance and inexperience."

No doubt you have often been right in this respect.

No teacher-still to discriminate-who was wise would have any right to indulge in any such denunciation of riches. He ought to know how necessary the accumulation of wealth has been to the progress of civilization. He ought to know that so far from that accumulation being necessarily the root of all evil, it has been something very much the reverse. In fact, many of the virtues of which Christianity makes her boast are in reality quite as much owing to the development of commerce and industry as to the direct teaching of Christianity.

Truthfulness, veracity, fidelity to engagements, thrift, order, sobriety, moderation, self-restraint, patient industry, are all forms of virtue, fostered and promoted by the trading or industrial spirit.

But although the Christian teacher may grant all this and more, he cannot blind himself to the terrible influences which the abundance and love of earthly possession exercise too often in enervating the soul, and incapacitating it for all high enterprise and self-denying effort.

Is not the Christian teacher bound to denounce quite as unmercifully as Christ Himself the rich man whose riches "blind him to the far higher value of spiritual aims and intellectual enjoyments: whose luxury and lavish expenditure make life difficult for all around him: whose ostentation is an evil and a temptation to those who take him for their model: to whom wealth is not a grand means, a solemn trust, and a grave responsibility, but merely a source of sensual indulgence and vacant worthlessness"?

Can the Christian teacher in these days be said to be doing his duty when in face of the daily revelations of our courts of law, fastening their stigma on names hitherto held in honour, the crooked balance sheets, the cruel adulteration, the lying advertisement, he is silent on the undue passion for wealth? He may not know much perhaps of business life, and what are technically called commercial transactions, but I daresay he knows enough to be able to say that at a certain point speculation ought to be called by another namethat it should be called theft, and theft of the most evil sort. For it has been truly said: "Theft involving deliberative intellect and absence of passion is the purest type of wilful iniquity."

Now don't you think it would make some difference to the conduct of the business man if, as he read the money articles in his newspaper to-morrow morning, something of Caleb Garth's spirit could come over his breakfast-table meditations: if he had learnt to say to himself now and then "This business of mine is a great gift of God, it brings with it great material gains, but also do not let me forget great moral responsibilities-it is a means not merely of laying up a store of wealth for my own selfish enjoyment, but a means of helping on God's plan for the general wealth of the world. He has appointed industry, action, effort, to be the spring of improvement; let me strive therefore to gain this end with wisdom and moderation. For others, business may be a mere expedient to gain a fortune, a race run for a prize-a game played for a great stake when success hangs upon the cast of a die; for me may it rather be a training ground of virtue, a school where lessons are to be learned for eternity"?

Don't you think, I say, that such meditations as these would make themselves felt in the subsequent transactions of the week?

And not only the immediate future, but the whole course of life, and its end, would, I venture to think, gain a new character under the inspiration of such thoughts.

Strive then, I beseech you, to gain this sense of your daily work, as a "great gift of God." Strive to be "downright time-servers, Christian secularists in the best and highest sense, men determined at least that their work, whatever it may be, however humble or however lofty, shall be so done as to help on the world's progress towards the very distant it may be, but never uncertain final victory of good.

Believe me, man can have no higher inspiration than that -to be a fellow-worker with God.

And as to the Reward. Well, perhaps you had better not think too much about that. The best workers are never those, remember, who are always thinking about their wages. Indeed, the best work never was yet done for wages, but for love only, the only true reward after all of work being more work. "Heaven itself is only work to surer issues." You know what the poet sings of a noble man dead :

"How can we doubt that for one so true,

There must be other nobler work to do?".

Live your life then truly and well, not for wages, but for love.

Live for Love.

your Master.

Love of God, love of Christ. Think of You can trust Him. He will not leave you out in the cold and darkness at last but if you live a brave life of righteousness here, He will welcome you to that home beyond with the sweet smile of love and the wreath of immortality.

M

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VIII.

SOCIAL SALVATION.

Thy kingdom come. . on earth!"--MATT vi. 10.

R. RUSKİN, in certain letters to the clergy, which some of you may have very likely read in a late number of the Contemporary Review, has been showing what very mistaken ideas most of us entertain of the true nature of the pastoral office. He tells us that the clergy are far too much occupied in trying "to get wicked poor people to go to church," to the neglect of their real work, which is "to keep wicked rich people out of church."

Great moral teachers, I suppose, are always more or less paradoxical. And so, if we can only profit by the lesson he really desires to teach us, we may afford, I think, to pardon Mr. Ruskin the form in which he has chosen to convey it. At any rate, it may not be altogether waste of time this evening if we try to put Mr. Ruskin's lesson in a somewhat more courteous form, and instead of asking ourselves "Why wicked poor people do not go to church?" we ask, "Why other people, rich or poor, good or bad, do?"

What, after all, is the object of going to church? Why, for example, do you come here to-night?

That is a simple question, and should not be difficult to

answer.

And yet I think it is very doubtful whether the individual members of our Christian congregations often do ask themselves this question, "What is the exact object of the congregation? What is the exact purpose for which I am accustomed to sit in this pew more or less regularly ?”

We have come here to-night to perform what we call Divine service. Now service surely implies hard work. What hard work have you and I been performing toight?

It is true we have joined together in a great many prayers to God, and that no doubt is hard work enough if we have really been in earnest about the matter; for spiritual earnestness implies intense concentration of thought, and concentrated thought is very hard work indeed.

But granted that we have strenuously prayed and sung hymns, and listened to the Lessons, in what true sense can we call that Divine service, serving, working for God? Prayer, at any rate, means, for most people at least, just the opposite of that; means that they want God to work for them, not that they want to work for God. Begging is not serving, and God likes mere beggars, I should fancy, just as little as we do. He wants honest servants, real workers, not beggars; men who have learnt at least that word of their Master, when He said that to serve Godc onsisted not in saying (or even singing, accompanied by the best music), "Lord, Lord! but in doing the will of the Father."

Or suppose I put the question in another form.

What do you consider to be the object of the Christian Church?

If you each answered quite honestly, I expect your answers would be wonderfully diverse. And that question evidently includes the other; for the object of going to church can only be to fulfil the object of the Church. What, then, is the object of the Church of Christ?

For my own part it always seems to me that the best answer to that question is to be found in those words in which the Evangelist sums up the work of Christ in this world: "Jesus went about preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people."

There are those, of course, who prefer speaking of the Gospel which Jesus Christ preached, and the Gospel which the Church of Christ has, therefore, to preach, as the Gospel of "salvation," not as the Gospel of the "kingdom." But what do you mean by salvation?

"To be saved" means one of two things in the popular mind. Either it is to be taken as meaning salvation from future punishment in the world to come, or salvation from sin in the world that is.

Amongst instructed Christians doubtless there may be few nowadays who willingly accept that idea of salvation which should imply the mere saving of our souls from future torment; yet that conception is certainly not entirely absent