The age of faith is never past. the earth" now, and always.

There is "faith on

We have in our generation a triumphant science of material things. We have with that, the thrilling consciousness of life, which fills whole nations with eager hopes, and which pours itself out in our passionate literatures. But all this new knowledge and these "fair humanities" are not a substitute for religion. They lead up to it. They make it necessary. And, therefore, we have our prophets, who can look at "law" in Nature and see the "throne of God" above the law; who can look at our civilization with its roaring wheels, its forceful, masterful energy, and see in it and above it the presence of the Divine Life.

The troubles and unbelief of our modern time do not mean that God has hid himself. They mean that men are feeling, more than formerly, the difficulty of reconciling this intense and complicated modern life with the sublime, simple faith in God. We see Babylon, so mighty and strange. We see God's throne over all. But we need some Ezekiel, it may be, to show the connection, so that we may see both the earthly and heavenly fact in one simultaneous vision.

Is not this the "burden" of all modern prophecy? Is it not the central concern of every religious life? You believe in God. You cannot help it. You see the great forces of Nature and the great passions of humanity laboring, like chariot and cherub, in their mysterious courses. The only kind of religion that can meet your spiritual needs is a faith which can lift

up the world to God, and which can see God coming down into the world to rule it in righteousness.

More and more this is the message of Christianity to-day: that all the world, even Babylon, is under God's throne, that his law, his life, his victorious love, overrules all.

NOVEMBER.

HE bare November, like a stern divine,

THE

Frowned on my soul, discoursing of decay, Of time, flesh, dust, and pleasure's hasty day,

Reiterating, weary line on line,

Death's threadbare homily. "O Nature mine,”

I cried in wrath, "thou who didst breathe last May
The spirit of gladness in young lambs at play,
Show thyself potent yet, by one sure sign."

Then the moon rose. I saw her full and calm,
Move through the large clouds, as a mother might
From room to room where sleeping children lie:
"My son," she said to me, "since yesternight
I made my blissful round through Italy,
From far Cathay, and silvered isles of palm."

THE REDEMPTION OF THE BODY.

"Ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body."— Rom. viii. 23.

THIS eighth chapter of Romans is one of the most sublime passages in the Bible. The struggle of thought is too powerful for the language to express. It bears every mark of being the utterance of a great soul, in a great spiritual crisis. As we read its heroic strain, we have the satisfaction of knowing that it was no theory or ideal merely, but the living creed of a man who was at that moment exposed to all manner of trial and persecution, and who not long after sacrificed his life to his faith. It has to an eminent degree this secret of the Bible's power, that it is the living faith of a living man. The writer has not said, "Let us now express a beautiful moral idea." He says: : "See, my brothers, I have struggled, I have conquered; and this was the faith that made me strong, and which I shall trust in till I die."

Let us try to discover the apostle's meaning in this chapter, and then in the text. He has been speaking of the spirit and the flesh, of man's spirit and man's flesh as contrasted, as antagonistic, the one being

the life of life, the other bearing in it a law of death. Whatever is only of the flesh shall fail: what is of the spirit is full of joy and eternity. The life of the spirit is a divine life, and they who share it are called the sons of God.

But this scene of conflict in man's own being, of life with death, of the perishable with the eternal, of the carthly and the divine, carries his thought forward to a wider range. This contrast between flesh and

spirit is contemplated as the law of the whole universe. There is a material and a spiritual creation. The apostle sees man and man's nature as the crowning wonder of the whole creation. In him begins a new and higher order of being. The old creation was in the "bondage of corruption": it was "made subject to vanity"; i.e., it consisted of perishable things. But this perishable creation is always groaning and aspiring for something higher. All the things of time are prophetic and partial. The new creation in Christ fulfils the hope of all Nature, and is the "divine event to which the whole creation has hitherto been moving.

And every man to whom Paul speaks, even Paul himself, belongs to both these orders of being,- to the old order which is carnal and perishable, to the new which is spiritual and eternal.

The spiritual creation is yet unfinished. We have only the "first-fruits" of it. As all Nature for so many ages has been "groaning and travailing,” even so "we ourselves groan within ourselves." Our spiritual life (and this he says of men who have touched