"For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead."

WHEN I spoke from this place last Sunday on the question, "Is life worth living?" when I preached three Sundays ago on Heaven, some of you may possibly have thought, This is all very well for true Christians; all very well if in this world there were only saints; but the saints are few in number, and this world is full of sinners. See what a spectacle it presents! Look at the coarseness and foulness exhibited at every turn in the streets around us. Walk at night in squalid purlieus, not

1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Nov. 11.

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a stone's throw from this Abbey, where glaring gin-palaces are busy, and amid the reek of alcohol you may hear snatches of foul oaths and odious songs; where women sit shuddering in wretched garrets, to think of the brutal hands which will strike, at the brutal feet that will kick them, when the drunkard staggers home; where the young lads of the schools over which we spend so many millions of money are being daily ruined and depraved by being allured into low haunts of gambling and degradation. Or walk in the thronged haunts of commerce, where myriads are utterly and recklessly absorbed in that hasting to be rich which shall not be innocent; or judge from the vile phases of the stage and the opera, that vice in higher places is none the less dangerous from being gilded and perfumed; note all these facts-you may say and then tell us, not in an ideal world, but in this world, which looks too often as though it were a world without souls--in this world where there is so much of cruel selfishness, of degraded

purpose, of serpentine malice, of insane desire ;-tell us, in such a world as this, how does all that you have said apply? Alas! the vast majority of men and women whom we see are not saints but sinners, and contented with their sins, and living in their sins; and covetousness, and drunkenness, and lust, and lying, and dishonesty, and hatred, claim each their multitude of votaries and of victims. Have you then any right to paint the world in rosecolour? Is it not mere insincerity, mere clericalism, to shut your eyes to patent facts? We, who, by our very presence here, show that we do not belong to classes openly and flagrantly irreligious, are yet, many of us, great sinners. Even when there is no dread crime upon our consciences, many of us are far from God; our hearts are stained through and through by evil passions; we are tied and bound with the chain of our sins. You bid us repent; but how many do repent? You the clergy, who stand. often by the bedsides of the dying; you who know how men live, and know that in nine cases

out of ten they die as they have lived-if your theory of life is to be complete,—if it is not to be a mere hollow professional sham-what do

you think

about the future? Tell us about the lost!

2. My brethren, you have the fullest right to ask these questions, and it is our bounden duty to answer them and I for one-in all deep humility -yet, now and always asking God for fearless courage and perfect honesty-will try to give you such answer as I can. If it be but the fragment of an answer, it is because I believe it to be God's will that no other should be possible; but at least I shall strive to speak such truth as is given me to see, and to answer no man according to his idols. Those who take loose conjectures for established certainties; those who care more for authority than for reason and conscience; those who pretend to dignify with the name of Scriptural argument the

ever-widening spirals" of dim and attenuated inference out of "the narrow aperture of single texts"; those who talk with the self-complacency

of an ignorance that takes itself for knowledge, as though they alone had been admitted into whatwith unconscious heresy and unintentional irreverence they call "the council-chambers of the Trinity," they may be ready with glaring and abhorrent pictures of fire and brimstone; and those of them who are not tender, and not true, may feel the consolatory glow of personal security, as they dilate upon the awfulness and the finality of the sufferings of the damned. But those whose faith. must have a broader basis than the halting reconciliation of ambiguous and opposing texts; they who grieve at the dark shadows flung by human theologians athwart God's light; they who believe that reason, and conscience, and experience, as well as Scripture, are books of God, which must have a direct voice in these great decisions;11 they will not be so ready to snatch God's thunder into

1 Luke xii. 57, "Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?" Prov. xx. 27, "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." Rom. ii. 14, 15. "Reason is the only faculty whereby

we have to judge of anything, even revelation itself.”—Bp. Butler.