power to fulfil it, through the proclamation of liberty in Jesus Christ.

"This matter of free-will," wrote one of the most orthodox of theologians, but a few years before his death, "underlies everything. If you bring it to question, it is infinitely more than Calvinism. I believe in Calvinism,

and I say that free-will stands before Calvinism. Everything is gone if free-will is gone; the moral system is gone, if free-will is gone; you cannot escape except by Materialism on the one hand or by Pantheism on the other. Hold hard therefore to the doctrine of freewill."

Yes, and we may say more than this. Not only is the moral system gone, but the great attraction of Christ is gone, the power of his gospel to liberate men is gone, if free-will is gone.

The age has hypnotized itself. It is drifting steadily towards fatalism. It denies freedom, and therefore it is not free. It is in bondage to its own doubt. It is enslaved by its own denial. If there is such a thing as liberty, it can only be developed, as everything else has been developed, by action, by exercise. Life is self-change to meet environment. Liberty is self-exertion to unfold the soul. The law of

natural selection is that those who use a faculty shall expand it, but those who use it not shall lose it. Religion is life, and it must grow under the laws of life. Faith is simply the assertion of spiritual freedom; it is the first adventure of the soul. Make that adventure towards God, make that adventure towards Christ, and the soul will know that it is alive. So it enters upon that upward course which leads through the liberty of the sons of God to the height of heaven,

"Where love is an unerring light

And joy its own security.'

This is the truth with which we are to go out a-gospelling in this age of doubt. We are to tell men that though much has been determined for them by causes beyond their control, —their circumstances, their talents, their faculties, one thing has not been determined, and that is what they will do with them. Much has been ordained before their birth,-their nationality, their family, their station in life,-but one thing has not been ordained, and that is whether they are to move from this startingpoint towards life or towards death. They may be like men sunken in a nightmare dream of helplessness, muttering in their sleep, "If I

am to be saved, I shall be saved; if I am to be lost, I shall be lost,”—but we must cry to them with the voice of the Spirit: "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light."

THE

VII

SOVEREIGNTY

HE questions about the world which science considers and answers, all have to do with secondary causes. Beyond that sphere she does not need to go, and within that sphere her wisdom is sufficient. We come to her like curious children. We "want to see the wheels go round." We want to know what the wheels are made of. She tells us, and there she stops. All that we have a right to ask of her is that she shall be true to facts, and that she shall confine herself to them. When the astronomer Laplace was reproached for not mentioning God in his treatise on the dynamics of the solar system, he answered, "I had no need of that hypothesis." And this reply was just, as Mr. John Fiske has pointed out, because "in order to give a specific explanation of any single group of phenomena, it would not do to appeal to divine action, which is equally the source of all phenomena."

But the moment we take this reasonable

and modest position, we perceive that curiosity in regard to single groups of phenomena by no means satisfies or exhausts the activity of the questioning spirit in man. There is a deeper curiosity in regard to the relation of these single groups of phenomena to each other, and to ourselves, and to the possibility of a meaning, a purpose, an end, underlying all things and all their workings. Out of this deeper curiosity rise the questions which are most urgent and vital,-questions which, when we consider them abstractly, are philosophical, and condition the unity of our intellectual life; but when we consider them personally, they are religious, and upon their answer our spiritual peace and moral action absolutely depend. How are we to think about the things that we know? What are we to believe in regard to the things that science tells us we cannot know, but which we still feel are necessary conditions of all intelligent and right conduct? Is there an invisible unity beneath all the visible diversity of phenomena ? What is the nature of that unity, personal or impersonal, conscious or unconscious? Is there anything behind the mechanical working of the world which corresponds to what there is in us when we make and use a machine or an instrument, when we plant and cultivate a gar