not upon the dust, who, because they gaze upon the golden brow of humanity and not upon its feet of clay —who, because they look upon their fellows with the larger, other eyes of sunny, genial, loving natures, speak no words now that are not pure, and sweet, and noble, and charitable, and kind. Oh, may we learn to be like them, for the Saints of God are these, though no visible aureola gleam as yet around their brow! Nay rather, may we be like Him, who, though He loved us so much that for our sakes He emptied Himself of His glory, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross, yet gave His solemn warning that for every idle word that men shall speak, shall they give account at the judgment day.

May, 17, 1871.

SERMON V.

SMOULDERING LAMPS.

MATT. XXV. 8.

"Our lamps are gone out."

THERE is much to say, and but little time to say it in. We must feel that often; we must feel it especially on an occasion such as this, when, besides the ordinary Sabbath quietude and Sabbath prayer, there is triple reason why to-day we should call this Sabbath a delight, holy of the Lord, honourable.

1. In the first place it is Whit-Sunday, the White Sunday, the birthday of the Christian Church. And remember that what we commemorate to-day is not only the sound as of a rushing mighty wind, and the shaken house where the Apostles were assembled, and the saintly foreheads, each mitred with its cloven flame-not only the Gift of Tongues, and the Word of God shining like the lightning from East to West-not only the burning words of Peter and the first great harvest of regenerated souls: historic reminiscences like these may become dim with time and overshadowed with unreality -but we commemorate the deepest and greatest of Christian truths, the presence in our hearts of an indwelling Spirit, to be the eternal aid to an increasing

holiness, to be the eternal witness of an unshaken faith. On other days we thank God for the gift of some special blessing, to-day we thank Him for the imparting of Himself, not only into our nature, as on Christmas Day, not only into our death as on Good Friday, but the gift of Himself into our hearts. This is the very noontide of the Christian day--a noontide without an eveninga day on which no night need ever more descend.

2. But further, this is not only Whit-Sunday, but to many of you also the first Sunday after your confirmation. In infancy, even at the tenderest dawn of life, you were brought to the arms of Christ, and there with "a few calm words of faith and prayer," and "a few bright drops of holy dew," you were signed with the sign of the cross, in token that hereafter you should not be ashamed to fight manfully under Christ's banner, and to be His faithful soldier and servant unto your life's end. In the ancient Church, and even down to the Reformation, another significant ceremony was added; the child was clothed by the minister in a white robe, called the chrisom robe, as a sign that he was washed from sinful defilements and had put on Christ, while the words were used, "Take this white vesture as a token of the innocency which by this Holy Sacrament of Baptism is given unto thee, and as a sign whereby thou art admonished, so long as thou livest, to innocency of living, that after this transitory life thou mayest be a partaker of life everlasting." And though in no earthly vestry, yet amid the eternal treasuries, that chrisom robe of innocence is laid up as a mute witness against you. For then as a river rises, pure as crystal, among the moss of some green mountain side, even so your life began; then were those bright and happy years in the dear old home when you were taken in the arms of God's

holy ones, and knelt in prayer beside His saints; the days of every redeeming grace, of every softening virtue, of every refining and purifying influence, of every sacred and tender memory; the days when your innocent heart was a bright temple, wholly God's, when the child folds his little white hands as he lisps out of stainless lips his holy prayers, and when as night by night he lies down in his little cot, the angels of God close to the doors of his happy heart, and weave under his curtained eye the radiant fantasies of untroubled sleep. Yes that was

1

"Before we knew to fancy aught

But a white celestial thought,

Before we taught our tongues to wound
Our conscience with a guilty sound;
But felt through all this earthly dress
Bright shoots of everlastinguess."

And if indeed the river of your life have been stained since then by any of the bitter soils through which its course has run, yet now once more have you been affectionately urged, gently aided, to calm and cleanse the turbid waves. Surely on the first Sunday after your confirmation you feel, all of you, the richer, the holier, the happier. You have experienced, I trust, already that God's Holy Spirit can indeed, if you rightly seek Him, draw His sevenfold veil between you and the fires of youth; and with the shadow upon your heads of the hand that blessed, you have been strengthened to take your stand boldy and nobly on the side of all that is great and true. Oh, that on this day He would indeed outpour upon each youthful head the crysmal fires of His sevenfold gifts; and if, indeed, any of you have sinned and fallen and desecrated His temple; if in any of your hearts have been the spirit of folly and 1 H. Vaughan.

blindness, the spirit of ignorance and effeminacy, the spirit of forgetfulness and self-indulgence, and the spirit of evil defiance against His law, oh, may He henceforth grant you instead, and grant you richly, according to the prayer we prayed, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the spirit of knowledge and true godliness, and the spirit of His holy fear.

3. And once again, this, not only a Whit-Sunday, not only the first Sunday after your confirmation, is to many of you ever-memorable as the day of your first Communion, the day on which you are first admitted to the highest privilege of the Christian's life. Coming immediately after your confirmation, and henceforth continually, until it be, as it were, the very viaticum at your journey's close, what a blessing, my brethren, may this be to you: at the most solemn crisis of youth a gracious reminder of all that Christ your Saviour has done for you, and all that you have vowed for Him—at the most dangerous period of life a living Sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace when the passions are strongest and pleasure wears its most falsely-destructive smile-a fresh call to repentance and self-devotion, a fresh grace of strength and purity, a fresh stimulus to charity and faith and prayer.

And I doubt not that, all this being so, there is some gleam of brightness in the saddest heart among you all. How shall I aid you to feel it permanently, to feel it increasingly, to feel it even until the end? For alas! warm feelings, though happy, are not religion; and high hopes, though inspiring, are not holiness; and religious excitement, though awakening, is not strength. My brethren, I cannot, for human opportunities are scanty,