doctrine, and adding to them the positive exhortations to almsgiving, to free and lavish charity, we see that Christ's conception of practical goodness answers to his ideal of a right state of mind. We observed that he considered the healthy condition of character to be an enthusiastic or inspired condition; we now find that he prescribes just such conduct as would be prompted by such enthusiastic feelings. And this consistency or unity of his teaching will appear still more plainly when we consider what the tenor of his own life was. It may sometimes strike us that the time which he devoted to acts of beneficence and the relief of ordinary physical evils might have been given to works more permanently beneficial to the race. Of his two great gifts, the power over nature and the high moral wisdom and ascendency over men, the former might be the more astonishing, but it is the latter which gives him his everlasting dominion. He might have left to all subsequent ages more instruction if he had bestowed less time upon diminishing slightly the mass of evil around him, and lengthening by a span the short lives of the generation in the midst of which he lived. The whole amount of good done by such works of charity could not be great, compared with Christ's powers of doing good; and if they were intended, as is often supposed, merely as attestations of his divine mission, a few acts of the kind would have served this purpose as well as many. Yet we may see that they were in fact the great work of his life; his biography may be summed up in the words, he went about doing good;' his wise words were secondary to his beneficial deeds; the latter were not introductory to the former, but the former grew occasionally, and, as it were, accidentally out of the latter. The

explanation of this is that Christ merely reduced to practice his own principle. His morality required that the welfare and happiness of others should not merely be remembered as a restraint upon action, but should be made the principal motive of action, and what he preached in words he preached still more impressively and zealously in deeds. He set the first and greatest example of a life wholly governed and guided by the passion of humanity. The very scheme and plan of his life differed from that of other men. He had no personal prospects, no fortune to push, no ambitions. A good man before had been understood to be one who in the pursuit of his own personal happiness is careful to consider also the happiness of those around him, declines all prosperity gained at their expense, employs his leisure in relieving some of their wants, and who, lastly, in some extreme need or danger of those connected with him, his relations or his country, consents to sacrifice his own life or welfare to theirs. In this scheme of life humanity in its rudimentary forms of family feeling or patriotism enters as a restraining or regulating principle; only in the extreme case does it become. the mainspring of action. What with other good men was the extreme case, with Christ was the rule. In many countries and at many different times the lives of heroes had been offered up on the altar of filial or parental or patriotic love. A great impulse had overmastered them; personal interests, the love of life and of the pleasures of life, had yielded to a higher motive; the names of those who had made the great oblation had been held in honour by succeeding ages, the place where it was made pointed out, the circumstances of it proudly recounted. Such a sacrifice, the crowning act of human goodness

when it rises above itself, was made by Christ, not in some moment of elevation, not in some extreme emergency, but habitually; this is meant when it is said, he went about doing good; nor was the sacrifice made for relative or friend or country, but for all everywhere who bear the name of man.

Those who stood by watching his career felt that his teaching, but probably still more his deeds, were creating a revolution in morality and were setting to all previous legislations, Mosaic or Gentile, that seal which is at once ratification and abolition. While they watched, they felt the rules and maxims by which they had hitherto lived die into a higher and larger life. They felt the freedom which is gained by destroying selfishness instead of restraining it, by crucifying the flesh instead of circumcising it. In this new rule they perceived all old rules to be included, but so included as to seem insignificant, axioms of moral science, beggarly elements. It no longer seemed to them necessary to prohibit in detail and with laborious enumeration the different acts by which a man may injure his neighbour. Now that they had at heart as the first of interests the happiness of all with whom they might be brought in contact, they no longer required a law, for they had acquired a quick and sensitive instinct, which restrained them from doing harm. But while the new morality incorporated into itself the old, how much ampler was its compass! A new continent in the moral globe was discovered. Positive morality took its place by the side of Negative. To the duty of not doing harm, which may be called justice, was added the duty of doing good, which may properly receive the distinctively Christian name of Charity.

And this is the meaning of that prediction which certain shepherds reported to have come to them in a mystic song heard under the open sky of night (carmine perfidiæ quod post nulla arguet ætas') proclaiming the commencement of an era of good will to men.'

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CHAPTER XVII.

THE LAW OF PHILANTHROPY.

THUS there rises before us the image of a commonwealth in which a universal enthusiasm not only takes the place of law, but by converting into a motive what was before but a passive restraint, enlarges the compass of morality and calls into existence a number of positive obligations which under the dominion of law had not been acknowledged. It is a commonwealth sustained and governed by the desire existing in the mind of each of its members to do as much good as possible to every other member.

Doubtless, a commonwealth fully answering this description has never existed on the earth, nor can exist. It is an ideal. True that Christ always spoke of the kingdom of God as an actual and present commonwealth into which men were actually introduced by baptism. Nevertheless he fully acknowledged its ideal character, and therefore spoke of it as at the same time future and still waiting to be realized. Those who were already members of God's kingdom were notwithstanding instructed to pray that that kingdom might come.

And

if we look at the facts around us we shall discover that the kingdom of God has always been in this manner at once present and future, at once realized and waiting to be