to diminish the fear of death and to help us to look forward with hope: I mean the soothing and peaceful influence of communion with the dead. This we have forfeited through our superstitious faithlessness. Afraid to think of the departed, we have excluded them from all influence on our actions, from our conversation, from our quiet thoughts, yes, even from our prayers. Thus breaking God's ordinance we receive the penalty of the infraction, losing one chief source and fountain of spiritual strength and peace. The spirit of every good man and good woman, yes, and of every imperfect man and woman genuinely loved, is intended by the divine providence to act upon the surviving friends through an ideal image purified by death; and the words of Shakespeare, slightly modified, hold true of all the dead:

The idea of their life doth sweetly creep
Into our study of imagination;

And every lively organ of their life

Doth come apparelled in more precious habit,
More moving delicate and full of life
Into the eye and prospect of our souls,
Than when they lived indeed.

The man who keeps his mind open to the reception of these heaven-sent guests finds, year by year, an unseen spiritual abode widening before him; which becomes each year more like a home because it is tenanted by some new dear friend, and which gently supplants in his heart the growing

homelessness of the visible world. And what a stimulus to patience and constancy in honourable labour, thus to find oneself surrounded and encouraged by a cloud of ever-present witnesses! What an inducement to self-suppression here and to the steady pursuit of one fixed object, when we know that the pursuit is not limited by the grave, and that self-suppression and the abstinence from distractions here, mean the power to embrace and enfold vast realities hereafter! Again, what a just terror of self-indulgence, what a horror of ignoble luxury and frivolous indolence, not to speak of darker sins, must be inspired by the thought that by such base courses we are making ourselves unfit and unable to be the companions of the Eternal Goodness, and that every act or word or thought stamping itself upon our characters is producing in us a change which will have eternal consequences in separating us from, or uniting us to, those whom we most loved and reverenced upon earth! In our prayers, also, in our secret communion with the Supreme, how great must be the help derived from the mention of the dead. There is no need that you should pray for them with importunate entreaties, as though you would wrest them from God's hands. But to make mention of them by name, to thank God for their past earthly presence, to pray God that you and they may meet hereafter, and to do this with the calm certainty that in some way, and that the best way, and at some time, and that the best time, your prayer will be

fulfilled-what a spiritual freshness and intensity must this simple habit give unto your petitions! How helpful are these prayerful memories to extinguish evil thoughts, to quiet fretful ambitions, and to destroy doubts and misgivings, by bestowing on the soul some present earnest of the future unutterable peace !

May God grant unto each one of you, with growing years and temptations, this growing support and confirmation to your faith. Death should be for Christians not an angel of Satan but a minister of God: and to every Christian, mourning with downcast heart the loss of some dear friend, the Angel of Death should come with a celestial message bidding us look up and seek our friend elsewhere than in the grave :-He is not here; He is risen. May it be so with you. Whensoever message after message comes, reminding you through some new loss that you must set your affection on things above, not on things of the earth, may you find on each occasion the voice of some new helpful memory within your soul, enabling you with all sincerity in answer to the warning, Lift up your hearts, to make reply, We lift them up unto the Lord!

WHAT MANNER OF MAN

IS THIS?1

What manner of man is this?-ST. MARK Iv. 41.

PART I.-THE QUESTION.

LET us suppose that Christianity, having become an extinct religion centuries ago, or never having penetrated Europe, was now for the first time being brought to light in this country. Approaching it in precisely the same dispassionate way in which we should approach any other religion,Buddhism, for example-what should we think of it, and what would be our attitude towards the founder of it?

The scientific method of investigation would, I presume, be very similar to the astronomical method of investigating the cause of a disturbance in the heavenly bodies. Uranus, we will say, does not move in its prescribed orbit. Careless astronomers note the deviation, perhaps, and pass

1 This sermon was originally preached in the chapel of Balliol College; but it has been much altered and amplified.

it by as an inconvenient anomaly. At last comes the astronomer who believes that there is no effect without a cause, and that consequently there must be a cause for this deviation. The direction of the deviation being ascertained, it occurs to him that there must be some hitherto unrecognized attracting body in that direction; and, the amount of the deviation being also ascertained, he finds it possible to ascertain exactly the position and the mass of that attracting body. Nothing now remains but to turn the telescope on the indicated spot; and Neptune is discovered.

Approaching the phenomena of Christianity in the same way, we find that eighteen hundred years ago there was a great disturbance in the Roman Empire. Under a ringleader named Chrestus, says one historian, the Jews raised a tumult. The same author speaks of a persecution directed against the Christians, a race of men devoted to a new and mischievous superstition. Another historian also describes the Christians as a sect hated for its crimes. The founder of it had been executed by the Procurator Pontius Pilate; but the destructive superstition, though suppressed for the time, had burst out afresh, and, in thirty years from the death of the founder, had spread from Judæa to Rome. About forty years afterwards, a governor of Bithynia speaks of the temples in his province as being almost deserted, owing to the prevalence of the new religion. All who persisted in calling themselves Christians he ordered away for instant