a face reveals a life that moves on in harmony with God, the infinite source of all life. The features are sharpened with grief or pain, or else degraded by sensuality, or they bear the marks of disease or of some vice of the mind, such as avarice or pride or conceit or selfishness. Every person you meet bears some burden of ancestral evil, left to them as a legacy by those who preceded them in the line of life.

It is manifest then that human nature, as we find it here and now, is in great need of cure. Seldom do we see a perfect specimen of it. There is imperfection in body and mind, in form and feature, in character and conduct, in health and vigor.

Any system of religion, suited to the condition of mankind, must be one adequate to the removal of the evils under which it suffers. It must be one, therefore, which lays hold of evil at its sources, one that can act with energy at the sources of man's life and control all its development.

Now, Christianity makes precisely this claim. Its very purpose, as announced by Jesus and His apostles, was to subdue all excessive and abnormal activities of mind and body. Sin it defined to be lawlessness-the uncontrolled activity of man's energies operating out of harmony with the Infinite and Eternal Energy in whom we live and move and have our being. Jesus came to impart peace, a new power of self-control, an inward purity of heart which would make men conscious of God and bring them into fellowship with Him. And to the same end He healed their disordered bodies. We read as a summary description of His ministry that "He went about doing

good, and healing all who were oppressed of the devil; for God was with Him."

It is sadly manifest that the religion which bears His name does not now fulfill His mission. We are by no means unobservant of the immense good which Christianity accomplishes in the world and would not disparage in the least these results. But it has been given too much the direction of a scheme devised to benefit men in the future life, to the neglect of the ills of this present life. The power of beneficent healing which first attended it is no longer present in it. It has come to be regarded as bestowed only for a temporary purpose, and as being altogether subordinate to its main purpose. And yet there is nothing in its early records or in the faith of its primitive disciples which justifies this view.

And its practical workings among mankind abundantly show that a religion that does not bless man in body as well as soul only half meets his case. True piety is just as impossible in a disordered and ill-humored body as in a distempered soul. In fact, man is so constituted that these two things always go together. The body must be under the control and regulation of the divine Spirit as well as the soul. And where one is subdued the other must be. The body is only the material expression of the state of the soul-it is its ruling thoughts and desires and motives crystallized and condensed. And back of these, also, it is a depository of the ruling propensities of the ancestral lives from which it sprang.

One reason why modern Christianity has failed to meet the wants of the human race in this region of physical culture and improvement has been its failure to fully com

prehend the Bible teaching that the human race is an organism, and that there is a solidarity of interest between all its members which not even death can interrupt. The dead are still interested in the struggles and triumphs of the living. From this point of view it is seen that the deliverance of the living generation from the burden of its evils carries with it the deliverance of the generations that preceded it. It is because of this principle that the whole creation is groaning and waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God. Their ultimate and complete deliverance must bring the whole out into liberty. Every earnest suffering soul is in his measure even now being baptized for the dead.

If these views were better understood, they would certainly issue in a revival in the Church of attention to this matter of casting out the evil spirits that here and now vitiate and deform and defile the bodies of our fellow-men. There would be more careful instruction in the mysteries of life that meet us at its origin and attend all its progress. There would be more anxiety that these bodies of ours should not become the harbors of vile thoughts and noxious influences, And above all there would be a revived faith in the power of Christianity, and in the office work of the Spirit of its ascended Christ, to regulate and remove these disorders from the bodies as well as the souls of men. In fact, it would be seen that its salvation cannot be wrought in any case in this partial way, leaving half of man's nature under the dominion of evil and emancipating the other half. The two parts of this wonderful nature of ours stand and fall together. The body has been redeemed as well as the soul of which it is the instrument.

Both, indeed, must be "changed." But we are told that the body may be yielded in living sacrifice to God and become a temple of the Holy Ghost in the same process by which we become renewed in the spirit and temper of the mind (Rom. xii, 1, 2).

It ought therefore to be a matter of faith and prayer with the Christian, for himself and his children and for his fellow-men, that God would so regulate and harmonize their physical development as to make their bodies the channels of His grace and power. His Spirit must bring new life and healing wherever this water of life flows. It must renovate men in body as well as soul. This we all admit must be its ultimate aim: "Who shall change the bodies of our humiliation." But this grand renovation of our manhood, which we all recognize as beginning now in the soul, can begin to show its effects also in the body. If we were laying hold of this power of God and wisdom of God for our salvation according to its true nature and adaptation to all man's present as well as future needs, we should witness surprising results in the transformation of the humanity around us, which still goes groaning under its many woes, its insanities and diseases, its torturing abnormities and distortions which make of so many human bodies a prison and even a hell upon earth.

UNITY IN DIVERSITY.

That which makes of the whole company of Christians one body is the possession of a common life derived from the one Head. The mistake is often made of supposing that

this life is imparted only through certain prescribed channels; whereas it is ready to pour itself into the soul of man through whatever avenues it may find open to receive it. This accounts for the fact that the evidences of that life appear in such diverse religionists as the sacramentarian, who regards the sacraments as the indispensable vehicles of it, and the Quaker who discards all such aids.

The object of all means of grace is to beget and nurture in the human soul the consciousness of God. This is the one thing indispensable to salvation. This is the same thing that is spoken of in the New Testament as the mystery of "Christ in you." For Christ is the true Son of Man in whom God was fully manifested, and as His nature is formed in us we grow into the consciousness that He had of an indwelling God. In some Christians this · consciousness is developed through the sacraments which speak to them especially of our being made partakers of the divine nature. Through them they "eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood." Other Christians apprehend the same Christ through the Word, and by that direct communion with Him in spirit which comes through meditation upon His truth, and through the subjection of the heart to His control. Such persons also enter into this state of God-consciousness, being baptized by His Spirit into the one body and partaking of the same spiritual food-of His body and blood.

It is a mistake, therefore, for either of these classes to denounce the other as despisers or rejecters of the grace of God in the gospel of His Son. One of them is sometimes

stigmatized as formalists, from whom the essence of Chris