verse is misinterpreted and misapplied when it is made as it were the priest
or minister to celebrate a marriage-union between a secular duty and spiri-
tual devotion. Doubtless it is most desirable that such an alliance should
be effected. In the case of a true Chrtstian, there will be no divorce or sepa-
ration between the ordinary every-day work of his worldly calling and the
worship of his closet and his heart. He may not, indeed, be willing to iden-
tify the two, or to speak as if he could fall in with the favourite formula of
some, that work is worship. But he will not forbid the banns when it is
proposed to join them in a holy and happy matrimony. He will have the
twain to be one spirit. That diligence in the common business of life
should be joined to fervency of spirit in religion is a proposition, therefore,
which he will admit and maintain. But if he is intelligent, he will look
somewhere else than to this verse for his proof-text in support of it. The
word 'business' here is the same in the original as the word 'diligence'
in the eighth verse of the chapter: 'He that ruleth, with diligence.' So here:
Not slothful as regards diligence.' The term indicates, not the kind of
work to be done, but simply the manner of doing it. It does not point to
men's worldly callings and occupations, as in contradistinction to their
spiritual exercises or spiritual frames. It is not the Apostle's present ob-
ject to harmonise and reconcile, and blend the two in one.
has in view, not what you have to do in your common character and capa
city, as members of society in general, but what you have to do in your
special calling, as members of the Christian society.
. . You may
say that your working for yourselves and for society, in a new spirit, is
your working for Christ. It may be so. But in any sense relevant to the
Apostle's present appeal, it can be so only when, in your so working for
yourselves and for society, you not merely cherish devout Christian feelings
in your own heart, but expressly aim at a Christian object; the Christian
object, namely, of commending Christ to others, and shutting them up into
him."-(P. 151.)

He

Yet it should be remembered that Dr Caird is not the only preacher who has taken this view of the text. It may be sufficient to state that Dr Barrow does the same, and extends his elucidation of the subject over three discourses.

In the discourse from the text, "Rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with them that weep," there is a beautiful discrimination between sympathy regarded as a natural principle, and as a Christian virtue. Nothing is more amiable in the human heart than sympathy, when directed aright. "Graceful in youth is the tear of sympathy, and the heart that melts at the tale of woe," but sympathy, to be a trustworthy guide, must itself be guided; and from want of proper training it drives many on shoals and quicksands where escape from destruction is all but inevitable. "It becomes a dazzling and bewildering earthly meteor, rather than a fixed heavenly star." It seeks, or creates a world of its own, which has no connection with, and but little semblance to, that in which of necessity it is forced to dwell. We gladly quote the following extract on the "delicious but dangerous" tendency of works of fiction, in the hope that coming from such high authority, it may have a beneficial influence upon youthful minds who may chance to scan the present page :

"Such works make their appeal to your social and sympathetic sensibility; they stir the deep fountains of emotion within you; they cast you by turns

into all those moods of mind which, in their almost infinitely varied compass, only smiles and tears can express. The excessive study of them,and any study of them, unless very carefully guarded, tends to become excessive, may cause such a strain on this sensitive part of your nature as shall render it either impotent or morbid. The faculty of self-control is lost, and a sickly, soft, and sentimental tenderness relaxes and unnerves the soul. It must be so. For the sphere in which you are accustoming yourselves sympathizingly to rejoice and to weep, is purely ideal; its scenes and incidents are altogether imaginary. They carry you away from the stern realities of life, which call for sober action as well as strong passion, into regions of fairyland in which, with nothing practical to chasten or subdue your spirits, the thrilling pathos of pity and fierce power of terror may be intensified to any pitch to which inventive genius can aspire; and the burning tear and the wild laugh may alternate with each other, as the vivid page presents the picture, by turns, of unheard of woe and unnatural mirth, with which the heated and fantastic brain is expected to throb in unison." -(P. 243.)

Sympathy as a Christian virtue must be social not selfish. It must seek the good of others as well as the gratification of self. It may cast aside the world of fancy for the world of fact, and may go in and out and be apparently contributive of great good to mankind, but yet it may not have attained the excellence of being a Christian virtue :

"All the while it may be a merely natural sensibility that I am indulg. ing; and I may be indulging it after a merely natural and selfish fashion. It may still be in a world of its own that my sympathy is really exercising itself; selecting its own congenial materials, or investing with its own colour the materials presented to it; so as to suit them to its refinement and delicacy of taste, and insure that nothing too coarse shall come betwixt the wind and its nobility.' . . But now let the merely natural instinct of sympathy become, through grace, a Christian virtue; let it be the discharge of a Christian duty; and what a change is wrought! Now all is real. I deal with a real world, and with real men and women in it. I have to do with things as they are, and take people as I find them.

"Ah! how much am I sure to meet with, that, so far from attracting my fellow-feeling is fitted to disgust and to repel! The persons to whom that fellow-feeling is to be extended are often those with whom I can have little or nothing in common; their characters being uncongenial; their manners distasteful; their very air and appearance perhaps intolerably offensive. And then, the places where I have to seek them; the circumstances with which they are surrounded; the companions with whom they are associ ated, all about them, in short, may be such as to make a delicately nurtured mental and moral frame shrink back in pain or horror. To overcome obstacles like these, or rather to cease from regarding them as obstacles at all; to get through the barrier which a coarse, forbidding derangement or deformity may interpose; to open the door which gives vent only to sounds that shock the ear, and odours loathsome and stifling to the breath; to enter the sordid hovel where, not the elegant refinement of reduced gentility, but the rudest, barest, and most squalid degradation of poverty reigns; to face disorder and disease, quarrelling and strife, and in the midst of all that, to sit down beside the bed on which some poor suff rer is groaning, or listen to the news which some gladdened soul is burning to tell; and, losing all thought of the disagreeable features of the scene, the distastefulness of the things and persons belonging to it, simply and

and

naturally to weep with the weeping, and rejoice with the rejoicing,-that is an attainment, a habit, which nature never owned-which only grace can reach and sustain. Nor is it only when you sound the lowest depths of the social fabric that your sympathy, if it is of the right sort, will be tried. Whenever you go on your errands of kindness and good will,-in whatever circles you move and mingle,-you will have to encounter influences most unfavourable to the genial flow of feeling. The very forms and usages of common-place routine and conventional etiquette are chilling. You inhale an atmosphere of indifference and frivolity; or you are all but stifled by the vapour of mean jealousies and angry passions. The gladness and the grief which appeal to your sensibility exhibit themselves in a strange, uncouth guise, to which you cannot get reconciled. The scene in spite of all its truth and reality, its actual power or pathos, has become so beclouded with the mists of exaggeration and false sentiment,-the din and clamour grow so confusing, and the parties most concerned seem so unamiable and uninviting, that you are fain to make your escape, as best you may, from a circle in which you are so little at home, and seek for more congenial fellowship elsewhere.

But no! Your Christian faith and love forbid. You call to mind that it is not left to your own discretion to say when and where,-in what circumstances and towards what persons,-you shall exercise your sympathy. It is not a matter of taste or of sentiment, but of conscience. The command is universal and unconditional; laying you under an obligation to get the better of all obstacles and embarrassments, all annoyances and dislikes; and requiring you, not for your own pleasure or relief, but for your divine Master's sake, and after his example, always and everywhere to be ready to rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.'"—(Pp. 245-6.)

We very cordially homologate the sound doctrine and the good sense contained in the following extract from the chapter entitled Redress and Retribution. The author is urging the duty of leaving Redress unto God, and we have a very decided opinion that if what is there laid down had been acted upon by professing Christians collectively as a church, as well as individually as members of that church, we would have had less to deplore this day, with regard to the animosities and divisions, which, during the last quarter of a century, have blotted the page of Christianity, and raised such a barrier to religious progress in the hearts and the households of men. says:

He

"You are not to avenge or right yourselves. Rather you are to give place, and, so far as any movement of yours is concerned, simply to suffer the wrong. And you are required to act thus, for this most relevant and sufficient reason,-because your case is taken up by another, to whom you may safely leave it.

But for that reason, it might be almost too much to expect that you should not avenge or vindicate yourselves. In a rude and unsettled state of society, when the authority of law is weak and the administration of it precarious, men will not easily be persuaded to surrender the right of privilege of private justice and personal revenge. Individuals and families will hold themselves entitled to take by force what they consider their due, and to inflict violent retribution and retaliation on any who hurt or injure them. But when the ruler comes to be one whom they can trust, and when he undertakes their cause, they are willing to give place, and to resign the

function of executing judgment to him and to his ministers. On a somewhat similar ground you are asked to abstain from avenging yourselves ;because you know that the Lord, who is your God, reigneth in righteousness. More particularly, you are commanded to give place unto wrath.' Your wrath is to retire, and to make way for his wrath. For in your righting or avenging yourselves, there is apt to be wrath; not merely a calm sense or desire of justice, but an impulse of anger. It may be a holy anger, a justifiable resentment, a feeling of righteous indignation. Still it is a passion which, even at the very best, you must admit to be in you an unsafe motive and guide of conduct. Restrain and regulate it as you may, you cannot trust it, especially in your own cause. Therefore let it retire, and do you, instead of righting yourselves, as your anger might prompt, rather give place to the anger or wrath of God. In his bosom, and there alone, anger is perfectly pure. He, and he alone, in the strictest and most literal sense, can be angry and not sin. Therefore, leave anger and wrath to him.

"Certainly there is something wonderfully fitted to arrest the flow of angry feeling, in this brief and startling summons:-give place to the wrath of God. If his wrath is kindled but a little against the men who hate you for the love you bear to his Son,-what room can there be for yours? You may well stand back,-yourself, and all who have a fellow-feeling with you, in your rising indignation against the workers of iniquity' who eat up the Lord's people as they eat bread.' Do you look upon them as deserving of your resentment? Ah! that is nothing. See! they are exposed to the wrath of God! Contemplate them in that light; and are you not irresistibly impelled to give place, even with fear and trembling? Is not all your wrath changed into solemn awe?

66

Nay, when you contemplate these men in that light, if you yourselves know the power of that anger of God' to which you leave them, will not a sort of terrible compassion begin to possess your souls? The wrath to which you give place is the wrath of the Holy One, the Unchangeable, the Eternal. It is that same wrath which you have felt to be lying upon you; which you have seen to be laid on Christ for you. When you were made to know yourselves as sinners in the hands of an angry God, you were consumed, and became as dead before him. Everything else, your own anger, as in revenge of your guilt and folly, you were even ready to do execution upon yourselves, the anger of all saints, and of all the world,—everything gave place to that wrath of God. The one, solitary thought in your spiritual consciousness was that of an angry God. 'Give place to wrath, real and righteous, inevitable and inexorable;' that was still the cry. Then again, as you heard that cry re-echoed, you looked and saw that it was not now you that was pointed at, but another in your stead. 'Give place,' is the voice from heaven, when men and devils have done their worst, and vented all their rage against the Christ of God,-'give place unto wrath. Let wrath,the holy judicial anger of offended Deity, have its way. Let all in heaven and earth and hell stand apart. Room! Room for wrath! Room for the wrath of the righteous Father to pour its full and fiery flood upon the bleeding head of Him who beareth sin!'

"Do I understand this? Do I really know the power of the anger or wrath of God, in my own miserable case as a sinner, and in the marvellous grace of my Saviour's substitution in my stead? And do I now hear that same voice of awe and terror uttered concerning any poor fellow-sinner who may have wronged me, but not more than I have wronged my Lord,-who may have wronged my Lord even less than I once did,-'Give place unto wrath,leave him to the anger of God? Can that voice reach my ear, quickened by the Spirit, without sending a thrill of mingled fear and pity through my

whole frame? All my longing for redress,--all my resentment, all selfish passion,-is gone. The man is to me no longer my adversary or my persecutor; but simply what I once was myself, and but for grace must still have been, a sinner in the hands of an angry God! As such he is the object of no other feeling on my part but that of earnest sorrow of heart, and intense solicitude for his salvation."-(Pp. 308-10)

These discourses are characterized by great perspicuity and earnestness of style. The author feels the importance of his position as a herald of divine truth, and the great responsibility of the duty comImitted to his care. Hence there is no vapid display of rhetorical ornament—no gathering and clustering of figures or flowers for the mere gratification of the fancy, overloading the page, and tantalizing the reader who is anxiously seeking something more substantial to nourish the immortal spirit within. They are, however, not devoid of ornament, but that ornament is not obtruded upon the reader's notice. He feels as if the sentiments inculcated, and the doctrines enforced, could not have been communicated otherwise than they are, and this is perhaps the highest testimony which can be given to the style. The work will be greatly prized by the earnest Christian for this alone, were it for nothing else, that what he most longs for is easily discovered. Unlike some works we could name, which have attained an immense popularity, the fruit is not concealed beneath an overwhelming mass of foliage, where every branch must be raised, and every broad leaf carefully scrutinized before it can be found. There is much spiritual edification in every paragraph and every page, and we could wish the work were universally adopted as a standard of Christian ethics by every branch of the Christian Church.

LESSING'S NATHAN THE WISE.*

THIS is the first time, we doubt not, that some of our readers ever heard the name of Lessing. It is possible, also, that they are now jotting him down in their mental diary as some Chinese mandarin, whose literary labours have just been introduced into this country in an English garb by some friendly diplomatist or Commissioner. It is not so, however, and we hope they will not be offended if we say to them, in the words of Milton, with a slight alteration-"not to know Lessing argues themselves unknown." Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is known to German scholars and readers, as "the Luther of of German literature," and he has also been characterised as "the German Aristotle." These are titles, however, which, perhaps, ought not to be stretched to their utmost limits of signification, even in their application to such an accomplished and varied scholar as Lessing;

Nathan the Wise. A Dramatic Poem, in Five Acts. by Gotthold Ephraim 'Lessing. Translated from the German by Dr Adolphus Reich. London: A. W. Bennett. 1860.