interested in, to sympathize with, the fatherless and the widow; another solemn memento of the shortness of life, and a reminder that this world passeth away. Another proof of the nearness of this world to the next: another warning not to love this world, not to be entangled with its pleasures, or cheated with its wiles, or engrossed with its cares, or defiled by its practices: another invitation to side with Him who has bidden us be of good cheer, because He has overcome the world, and that at the cost of His blood.

Another great warning, another great responsibility, -if yet another come to any of us, where will the rest of us be? how shall we then wish that we had used this?

VI.

THE MORAL EFFECT OF ALMSGIVING.

S. LUKE xi. 41.

But rather give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you.

OUR Lord uses language very similar to that out of which my text is taken on another very different occasion. S. Matthew records much that is said here, and a great deal more, in his twenty-third chapter. There our Lord is delivering His last, grandest, most awful message of heart-searching rebuke to the Pharisaic Jews. He is closing His ministry with a sublimity of denunciation that seems almost a prelude, and certainly a similitude, of the stern condemnation of the last day, when the ministry of reconciliation shall itself be closed; and hypocrisy, which always seemed to receive the most terrible of all censures at our Lord's hands-perhaps because the essence of it is to clothe what is in itself base and devilish with the attitudes and appearances of what is divine-shall be finally unseated from its throne in the world, and the actor's mask and disguise stripped off, and all things be seen, at last and forever, as they are.

But on the occasion which S. Luke brings before us, and which I would bring before you this morning, the same warning is spoken to the same class of hearers, but on a different scale, and under widely different circumstances. Our Lord is asked to dine, and He goes. Where, S. Luke does not inform us— he is remarkably indefinite as to locality in this passage. Even Bethany is only noticed in the preceding chapter as "a certain village," but it would seem to be not at Jerusalem. He had been preaching one of His most stirring sermons; He had been casting out a devil, He had been opening the lips of the dumb and unstopping the ears of the deaf. He had been giving not only to the Apostles, but to the whole Church, the holy form of words which embodies the prayer of the Church's children. He had been drawing the attention of multitudes, He had touched the sympathies and elicited the admiration of the rich and the poor; then a certain Pharisee asked Him to dine. He went, and with His presence hallowed the occasion, and at the same time seized the opportunity of introducing His own teaching with an appropriateness and a power which might have been wanting had He not had the circumstances as they were before Him and His hearers. It is marvellous, this lesson of our Lord's mixing in the world. We read frequently of His joining in the entertainments of different classes about Him. We see always on these occasions that

He made use of them either to work a miracle or to touch the heart. Yet this was the same Lord who denounced the unrighteous mammon; who inculcated,

nay, set the example of strictest self-denial; who withdrew Himself into the wilderness and prayed, and whose chosen, miraculously chosen, herald was the sternest preacher of repentance that ever startled a guilty soul. Little wonder that the world-always Christ's enemy, always ready to find fault, condemned S. John for moroseness, and said he was possessed, and always inconsistent―said of Christ, "Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." And great need, with the same spirit still at work, to remember that Jesus' commentary on this was, that "Wisdom is justified of all her children."

But I am specially concerned with the special point of our Lord's address. That same denunciation of hypocrisy which He spoke with such public solemnity at the close of His ministry in the temple to the multitude breathes in His language here, at a private social festivity, showing not only, as I have already intimated, the duty of Christians, who are leaven, to mix in the world, at proper times and under proper circumstances, but also that, in public and in private, the teaching of the Christian ministry, the conduct of the individual Christian, is to be the same; never aiming in public at a pitch of unreal excellence, never laying aside, on the week-day and in private, the character of the public teaching of the sanctuary.

But I say there is a special point in our Lord's address, and towards this I am borne by various concurrent circumstances.

In the first place, the season and the services remind

us of it. Last Sunday, the Epistle and the Collect told us what is God's revelation, and expressed what ought to be our desires with regard to charity. A season is dawning upon us which, like everything that God gives us dowered with remarkable graces, is encumbered by our enemy with extraordinary hindrances. Those who do wish to follow Christ's example on this side of the question, and fast, are exposed, as sad experience shows us, to the perils of self-exaltation in their very process of self-humiliation, and to pride, and contempt of others who fail to reach the same standard as themselves. How needful their charity— charity of feeling; and that charity of feeling needs opportunities of fit expression in act.

Again, one particular form of charity is brought before us here very often, I admit. But I do not admit that I am open to reproach for it. Every Sunday for general purposes, and now and then for special ones, your aid is asked. Every Sunday therefore you are invited to participate in the blessings which Christ attaches to this special development of charity; and there are great blessings and great benefits belonging to it which we will consider presently. But a practice which has grown into a habit here certainly does not deserve, whatever be its tendency, to be passed over without consideration from this place, not simply on the grounds of the special objects on which that habit is at any time to exercise itself, but generally as a principle affecting, as all habits do, your whole life here and hereafter.

But yet once more; there is to-day a special object,