philanthropist, in the humble unknown Christian, all quiet endurance of wrong, all patient continuance in well-doing, all intense sincerity, all deep devotion, all self-sacrifice, are beautiful and admirable, because they recal to our minds the spirit and the life of Him who was the perfect man, the Being in whom God and man are no longer two, but one.

Jesus died and rose again from the dead that He might confer His own Spirit upon us, and create within us this new, this divine, this eternal life. Are there any of you, my brethren, who are not smitten with the love of goodness, or with any desire after resemblance to Christ; who would rather live selfish lives, and do as you list; who love sin, and who prefer the pleasures of sin to soaring thus above yourselves into the fellowship of God? Are there others of you who have no notion of quietly bearing an injury; who have no love to God, and no notion of submitting yourselves to His providence? "Like Christ!" It is the last thing such desire, the last thing they pray for. I do not know what to think of, or say to you. But I know this, that you each wear a nature that is capable of great things. Yes, the poor wretched drunkard, the gambler, the cruel father, the selfwilled, obstinate, godless man, and the frivolous, heartless woman too, wear a nature that Jesus has dignified. I will not, dare not, despair of any; no, not of the most desperate fool, the most degraded, miserable man alive. There is hope of him as long as he is a man, and has not become utterly

a devil; for Christ lived for him, and Christ died for him.

But, on the other hand, many of you do long to become like Christ. You yearn to think and feel, and work and suffer, to live and die like the Son of God. You feel rightly, that if you can but do that you attain the highest kind of life. Let me then ask, (2) Have you found out that God is your Father?' The first great discovery that Jesus made, and one which clearly penetrated His whole life, was this, that God was His own Father. It was the Divine declaration which dignified His baptism; it was the burden of the Sermon on the Mount; it is the basis of that all-comprehending prayer in which He taught us to say, "Our Father." He did not renounce His trust in the Father when He hung upon the cross, and the last words He uttered were, "Father, into Thy hands I commit My spirit!" "The business of the Father" was His first word, "the promise of the Father" was His last word on earth. It is in Him that we know that God is our Father. It is through Him that we see that, though we have broken the laws of our Creator, we can be gathered into the paternal arms, and forgiven our iniquity; that, in forsaking our sins, we may, by faith in Him, find mercy; that God loves us, cares for us, will not forsake us; that God is more than a Creator, a moral governor or a judge, infinitely more than the complex of natural laws-that He is our Father.

It

is in Him we see that we shall be treated not as

outcasts, not as dust and ashes, not as creatures, subjects merely, but as children.

If we had come to the knowledge of the strange fact, that in this assembly there were three or four men who were living in poverty and slaving for their daily bread, but who were really the children of a King—the heirs of great provinces and boundless wealth; if we had only to find them out, and shew them the title-deeds of their inheritance to convince them of this their unknown dignity; if here were the parchments and promises which would prove all this beyond the possibility of question,-what an excitement it would be easy to produce among you, -how eager you would be to know upon whom these few perishable honours and possessions were about to fall! But here are the title-deeds of a nobler inheritance the assurances of a grander relationship. Here are the promises of the living God; the proclamation of the King's Son, written in His own life-blood, that He is not "ashamed to call you brethren." I have to announce to you, by God's ordinance of preaching, that you are the offspring of God, the brethren of Jesus. If you will not believe in the pardon of your sins, in the relationship which He has recovered for you, you must suffer the consequences of this wilful ignorance, you must continue outcasts from His family. If those fancied heirs to a kingdom refused to believe in their own title-deeds, they might die on a dunghill. My brethren, if will not believe the Fatherhood of God in Christ, you

you

are condemned already to the second death. Without Christ you can do nothing; you are left to the god of the philosophers, to cold laws, to the miserable creations of priestcraft, superstition, and guilty conscience. "He that believeth not is condemned already, because he believeth not in the only-begotten Son of God."

Has

Some of you say, 'God cannot be my Father, or He would not leave me so poor in the midst of His countless riches, I should not have to slave in the midst of my Father's house.' What! are you resolved to ignore all His mercies; to yield to the tyranny of the senses; to forget all that He has actually done to persuade you of His regard? He not sent you message after message, mercy and trial, warning and rebuke, all with this as its burden? Has He not sent His Eternal Son, this well-beloved of heaven, who went through all the humiliation of life, and all the agony of death, to prove to you that He is your brother? God may not, Christ did not estimate poverty and trial, affliction and sordid care, neither “the thorn in the flesh," nor even the walls of a prison or workhouse, as the signs of His displeasure. He has more poor children than rich ones. He gives to peacocks, and humming-birds, and serpents beautiful dresses; and He gives to the little insect of a day an idle life. But He often clothes His noblest children with rags, and confers upon the peers of His creation the dignity of the hardest toil. The noble army of Christ's martyrs came out of great

tribulation, and His own imperial robe is a vesture dipped in blood. Oh, my brethren, set yourselves to work to find out in Christ this grand, this sublime fact! Think about it a great deal; pore over it; pray over it; consider it to be true. Take it for granted, and try to act and to live upon its truth. There is no higher, no truer, no more comprehensive, no more lasting truth than this, which Jesus taught us in His first words-that we too might say, "Our Father, which art in heaven."

(3) And, in the third place, as some of you have learned this lesson, and have found out that God is your Father, let me press you with this inquiry, Are you, as Christ was, "about your Father's business?"

Some may be disposed to say, 'Here you make a great demand upon us; our hands are very full; we have a great deal of business of our own to get through; let us do one thing at a time. Let us first finish our own affairs, and then, when time and opportunity occur, we will begin to do God's.' 'Let me wait,' says one man, 'till I am settled in life; I mean to be religious by and by. Let me wait until I have scraped a little money together, or till I have seen a little of the world, and then I will attend to the work of God.' Oh, my brethren, if you cannot mix God's business with your own, and do both at one and the same time, one of two things is clear-either you do not understand God's business, or you are mismanaging your own! It may be that your business, your daily work, is not