we love him, we shall be like him, we shall serve him with a freedom, a persistency and a fulness of which we have had no conception before; and when all the restraints and shackles of mortality shall be removed, we shall love him purely, perfectly, fervently; and we shall be like him whom we love, for we shall see him as he is.

Brethren, how much have you given to the cause? how much have you contributed to the claims of Christ; during the last three months, six months, nine months, twelve months, during your lifetime? I don't say, how much of money? Some have time as their only capital; some have interest as their capital; others can speak for Christ as their best offering; others, who have no capital of influence, no capital of time, have wealth and treasure at their command. Whatever that be which you can give, if you have love to Christ, that on all proper occasions you will give. It is the working hand and the consistent walk that are the best proofs before men; and the inevitable and inseparable proofs in the sight of God that we love him who so loved us.

This love is the very atmosphere of the blessed—the harmony of happy spirits - the attraction of each and all to God, their common and glorious centre. Were Christians more characterized by love and less ready to indulge in the exactions of law-were the apostolic sketch in 1 Cor. xiii. their study, and the inspiration of it in their hearts their prayer, not only would the church be more sanctified, but the world would be more awakened.

Love is to a Christian what a coronet is to a noblea crown to a monarch a cowl to a monk. It is his badge, the ensign of his greatness, the mark of his birth: the absence of it is fatal to every claim to be a Christian—it is the pulse of life.

WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"MARK Viii. 36, 37.

THIS is a great, central, absorbing question, which every man ought to answer. What is required is not an echo which empty space will give, but an answer which a patient judgment and a living heart may render. "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Let us look at this question in that impartial light in which we ought to look at so momentous an inquiry; let each feel it is not the soul of some one in an assemblage beyond the seas, or the soul of some inhabitant of a distant star, but that very soul whose pulse beats in me-which is myself-which will live when stars have faded and systems have been broken up-which every man has lost by nature, which no man can recover except by grace, and yet, for the safety of which every man is responsible in the sight of that God at whose bar we must all soon be.

"What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world?" Suppose you set out with concentrated and ceaseless energies to gain the world, there is no gua

rantee that you will succeed; does not every closing year teach this? No one can guarantee success in reply to the most strenuous efforts to gain the world, or, what is substantially the world to each man's circle

a large fortune, a great possession. There is not a warehouse in London, nor a ledger in its countinghouses, in which may not be traced the truth of these words, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle always to the strong." How many wrecks are upon every strand! how many memorials of ruin during the past year are in every recollection! Thousands have started, resolute in strength, overflowing with enthusiasm, fully confident they should gain the world, and their career has ended not only in the loss of the world, but in the loss of what is worth ten thousand worlds-their own precious souls.

But suppose I view the passage in its most favourable aspect, and grant that some one a reader of these words-shall succeed in gaining a very large share of the world, what is it worth to him who has gained it? -far less in possession than in anticipation. God has so constructed us, that the restless pursuit of this world's wealth proves by our very constitution a most disappointing thing. When we start to gain a fortune at twenty-one, it seems to us a bright and glorious thing, as it shines from afar, and we feel that we could enjoy it; but as we get older, and the fortune accumulates, the keen susceptibilities of twenty-one, which could have enjoyed it, are superseded by the hard insensibilities of sixty, that cannot enjoy it; so that if we have got the fortune, we have lost the sensibility requisite to make that fortune positive enjoyment. But

suppose we retain all these sensibilities, does the world's gain satisfy? There are depths in the soul that nothing in the world can fathom-great, gigantic capacities, even amid the wrecks of sin, which nothing upon earth can fill. In every step of that terrible progression by which Napoleon rose from being almost a beggar to be the mightiest emperor that ever sat upon a throne, there might be read what he felt,-"This is not your rest; the rest is not here. Whoso drinketh of this water shall thirst again." Alexander's history is reproduced on various scales in every age that has succeeded Alexander's era, - he that gains a whole world still sits down, and weeps because there is not another world to conquer.

The world's gain will not and cannot satisfy the soul. It fails in every instance to answer expectations, and in many it takes wings and leaves us. We are all apt to fancy there is only one way of being separated from what we have in the world. Death takes the landlord from his estate-that is one way; but who does not know that a change in some tariff, a shock of some revolution, takes the estate from the landlord: not only can the landlord be snatched by death from his estate, but the estate may be snatched by violence from the landlord. What we have has in it no guarantee of perpetuity-all is frail, fleeting, evanescent. But the world's gain, when it is the most brilliant, is not worthy to be compared with the salvation of that soul which alone everlastingly interests us. The world is in all its aspects fleeting and unsatisfactory.

Let me look at the other object placed in the other scale-man's soul,