whether his creed be simple or complex, above all things let him be true to himself, and loyal to his deepest convictions. Any salvation which has no foundation of sincerity and transparency is not salvation at all.

CHARITY.

We shall never be able to understand fully just what Christian charity is, much less to fully exercise it, until we recognize the principles by which the human race is bound together in one great fellowship in life and destiny. We judge and criticise our fellow-men on a basis of individualism—as if they alone were to be blamed for their faults of character and transgressions in conduct. Without denying individual responsibility, it yet remains true that each individual soul comes into life handicapped with a variety of defects and with the germs of a whole fruitage of evils of which other persons have sown the seeds in the past. They struggle against misfortunes and vicious tendencies inherited from those who preceded them in the chain of life, and carry burdens, some of which perhaps crushed out the lives of which theirs is the continuation. We have often shown that there is a benevolent as well as a retributive feature in this arrangement, and that it is part of that redemptive mystery by which the overcomers among these burden-bearers become partakers of Christ in His bearing away the sin of the world. And the love that is like His, that stoops to bear the iniquities and carry the sorrows of others, that forgives men their trespasses, that goes out to seek and to save the lost, that scorns not the publican and the harlot, but sees in every human

being something that may be won back to God; the love that is patient and unwearying, that thinketh no evil, that even lays down its life for the brethren, is one that refuses to charge upon men the whole weight of the evils that inflame and debase them, and which measures all the past that lies behind them and the future possibilities stored within them, and so knows that through all this painful and perilous pilgrimage there is a hidden child in God's image in search of the Father.

EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY.

"The aim of the system of evolution is held to be the annihilation of the individual. More and more as the drama of life develops, it is said to be revealed that man is but the fragment of a mighty whole. The nothingness of the individual is declared to be a truth that grows in prominence in proportion to the advance in scientific knowledge, and the duty of man is said to be to yield up his own petty life to the great life of the universe. This is the origin of that doctrine which in modern times has become increasingly popular-that the only future state which man ought to look for is the state called corporate immortality-the state in which the individual loses his individuality, and is submerged in the life of the whole. He himself as a personal being will not live, but his influence shall. He shall live in the hearts of those whom he has left behind, shall live in the lives he has inspired, in the memories he has endeared, in the imaginations he has kindled, in the thoughts he has stimulated. This, we are

told, is a far nobler view of immortality than the search for an individual future, a view which lifts the mind out of its own selfishness, and ushers it into the glorious liberty of the life that has ceased to regard itself. In reaching this belief we have reached the highest motive to philanthropy, the purest stimulus to duty, the loftiest incentive to benevolence, and the most imperishable source of personal blessedness.

"Now we admit that the doctrine of evolution has increasingly revealed the organic unity of the universe, has increasingly brought to view the fact that the individual man is only a fragment of the whole. We admit, moreover, that it is the duty of the individual man above all things to realize this fact, to lose sight of his own individuality in the recognition of that great corporate community of which he forms but a single member. We hold, further, that the inculcation of this duty has been the special glory of Christianity considered as a moral system, that it was the religion of Christ and not the philosophy of Auguste Comte which first said, 'He that loveth his life shall lose it.' In that aphorism Christianity itself declared that exclusive individual contemplation constituted a waste of being. Yet strange to say, it is just here that Christianity has vindicated the claims of the individual. Why does it hold that exclusive self-contemplation is a waste of being? Simply because it holds that exclusive self-contemplation is a weakening of the individual, that the love of life is the loss of life. Christianity, like Comtism, would teach men to contemplate the welfare of that universal body of which each is but a member, but it would teach them that lesson by a precisely opposite

method. Comtism would say that the doctrine of individual immortality must be sacrificed that a man may cease to live for himself; Christianity says, on the other hand, that it is only by ceasing to live for himself that a man can ever realize the strength of his own personality and the ground of his own immortal hope. And experience has amply verified this Christian doctrine. All life has proved, all consciousness has testified, that the individual only really begins to live when he lives in the race. It is in the recognition of the truth of our membership in a corporate body that each of us rises into a sense of personal dignity, into a perception of individual power. As long as the life feels itself to be a unit separated from other lives, it must inevitably feel itself to be personally weak and insignificant; its personal strength only comes when its enthusiasm comes, and its enthusiasm only comes when it is lifted out of itself. On this ground also, therefore, we hold that the doctrine of evolution has rendered service to the doctrine of immortality. In opening up to man a view of his individual fragmentariness, it has revealed to him the best method in which his fragmentariness can be redeemed. In teaching him to lose sight of himself, it has caused him to find himself; in awakening him to the interests of that mighty whole of which his life forms a part, it has given to that life itself a strength which it knew not before."—Rev. G. Matheson, D. D.

It was a MAXIM of Empedocles that "Like can only be known by like." Man can know God only because he has a nature kindred to God.

WHEN ST. PAUL teaches that death is the last enemy that shall be conquered, evidently in this death he comprehends the second death, else there would still be an enemy to conquer.-Martensen.

REINCARNATION seems to be a natural method of restoration for the unjust, and to bring with it just the kind of further judgment and discipline they need. For men

must needs suffer in the flesh to cease from sin. This method is free from the assumptions of most restorationists, who ask us to believe that this class of the dead will be restored to Adamic perfection in some future age by some marvelous exercise of divine power foreign to the methods of God's working in the realms of life so far as we are able to explore them. This view also gives added dignity to the processes of life going on in the world around us, and brings God very close within the whole circle of human life and of human affairs.

THE IDEA OF REINCARNATION was much more familiar to the Jews than to us, and more accordant with their conceptions of the future. It was taught in the Cabbala. Traces of it appear in the New Testament, as, for instance, in the answer of the disciples to Jesus' question, "Whom do men say that I am ?" They reply, "Some say Elijah, others Jeremiah, and others, one of the old prophets."

The Jews never derived from the Old Testament the definite ideas of a future life with which we are familiar. Individual hope for the future was largely bound up with hope for the nation. Their future was in someway to be