manity stretched upon our path, we are to 'pass by on the other side,' thinking it enough to have

come and seen where it was,'-then I must say that any work, undertaken in this spirit, has failed already. For my own part, I should say that were we even to make no visible progress, were we able to beat back the ills with which we contend by not one hair's breadth;-nay, were they to be seen actually advancing on us, still no retreat, but only the more strenuous aggression, would be admissible. For what purpose can any Christian say that he is here in life, with his divine intimation of what ought to be, and his sorrowing perception of what is, if not to put forth a perpetual endeavour against the downward gravitation of his own and others' nature? And if in the conquest of evil, God can engage himself eternally, is it not a small thing for us to yield up to the struggle our three-score years and ten? Whatever difficulties may baffle us, whatever defeat await us, it is our business to live with resistance in our will, and die with protest on our lips, and make our whole existence, not only in desire and prayer, but in resolve, in speech, in act, a remonstrance against whatever hurts and destroys in all the earth. Did we give heed to the counsels of passiveness and despondency, our Christendom, faithless to the trust consigned to it by

Heaven, must perish by the forces to which it has succumbed. For, between the Christian faith, teaching the Fatherhood of God and the Immortality of men,—between this and the degradation of large portions of the human family, there is an irreconcilable variance, an internecine war, to be interrupted by no parley, and mitigated by no quarter and if faith gives up its aggression upon the evil, the evil must destroy the faith. If the world were all a slave-market or a gin-palace, what possible place could such a thing as the Christian religion find therein? Who, amid a carnival of sin, could believe in any deathless sanctity? or, through the steams of a besotted earth, discern the pure light of an overarching heaven? or, through the moans and dumb anguish of a race, send up a hymn of praise to the All-merciful? And are there not thousands already, so environed and shut in, that their world is little else than this? In proportion as this number is permitted to increase, does Christianity lose its evidence, and become impossible. Sensualism and sin cannot abide the clear angelic look of Christian faith: but if once that serene eye becomes confused and droops abashed, the foe starts up in demoniac triumph, and proclaims man to be a brute, and earth, a grave.

As we love then the religion by which we live,

let us give no heed to doubt and fear. In the spirit of hope and firm endeavour let us go forward with the work we have begun; undismayed by difficulties which God permits us to hold in check, but not to vanquish; and stipulating for no rewards of large success as the conditions of our constancy of service. Our reliance for good results, and our consolation under their postponement, is in the essentially religious elements of this ministry were its methods purely economic, addressing themselves exclusively to the bodily wants of its objects; or intellectual, working at their self-interest and self-will,-I for one should despair of any return worthy of much patience. But going forth as we do with that divine and penetrative religion, to whose subduing energy so many centuries and nations have borne their testimony, and continuing only that evangelizing process, before which so much wretchedness and guilt have already yielded, we take our appointed place in the long history of Christianity, and attempt a work for which, like Providence, we can afford to wait. It is human, indeed, to desire some rich success; and each generation expects to gather and taste the produce of its own toil: but the seasons of God are eternal; he 'giveth the increase,' not for enjoyment only, but for reproduction; and ripens secretly, beneath the

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THE GREAT YEAR OF PROVIDENCE.

thick foliage of events, many a fruit of our moral tillage, for the sake of the little unnoticed seed, which, dropped on the soil of his Providence, shall spread over a future age the shelter of some tree of life. Be it ours in word to proclaim, in deed to make ready, the acceptable year of the Lord.'

XX.

CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD.

LUKE XVIII. 17.

VERILY I SAY UNTO YOU, WHOSOEVER SHALL NOT RECEIVE THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS A LITTLE CHILD, SHALL IN NO WISE ENTER THEREIN.

By the Kingdom of God was meant neither the future state of the righteous, nor the dominion of Christianity in the world; but the personal reign of Messiah over a favoured and faithful people, on a renovated earth. The prospect of this period was, however, to the people of Palestine, nearly what the hope of heaven is to the Christian:-— it embodied all their ideas of divine privilege and happiness, and, coinciding with their conception of religious existence, became their great symbol, by which to express the most blessed system of relations between the human mind and God. Into this system they esteemed it their birth-right to enter; the title and prerogative were in their