are but the scaffold by which the building is to be raised the ladder by which the wall is to be surmounted. They are instruments of Salvation, but instruments only. The great work of sanctification must be keeping pace, and going on within, all the while: its progress really and truly known only to Him who searches the heart, and weighs and measures all things perfectlyknown in a degree to yourselves, as you grow in grace and feel your strength increase-seen, it may be, by a few who are near enough to you to perceive the real improvement which is going on within you.

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JOHN HENRY PARKER, OXFORD AND LONDON.

Sermons for the Christian Seasons.

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

THE LOVE OF CHRIST.

EPH. iii. 17-19. That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye m'ght be filled with all the fulness of God.

ONE of our common sayings tells us that the more closely we become acquainted with anything, the less wonder and admiration we feel towards it. Yet surely this is not always true, even as regards things of earth. For instance, a great traveller thus expresses his wonder at the size of the continent of South America: "I had often," he says, "in years gone by, looked at this part of the world upon a map; and being there given on a different scale from the rest, it seemed to be about the size of any ordinary country; but when I came to sail for

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days and days with a fair wind along its shores, and had only accomplished a distance which upon the map seemed a little speck, then I began to form some idea of the vast extent of the whole continent, and could in some degree imagine how great the whole length of its shores must be, when so small a portion of them had taken us so long a time in a fast vessel, and at so great a speed of sailing."

And as it is with lands, so it is with some buildings; you must all have heard of the pyramids of Egypt; those wondrous piles of brick, and earth, and stone, whose builders were unknown two thousand years ago; and now they stand, as then they stood, the wonder and the mystery of the world; wonderful for their antiquity, but still more wonderful for their immense size, and for the amount of labour which must have been bestowed upon them; and accordingly men of all nations and languages come from afar to behold these mountains which the hand of man has reared: but when travellers first see them they are disappointed, and they wonder more at the fame the pyramids have gained than at the pyramids themselves. The reason of their disappointment is that the pyramids are set in a wide plain of barren sand, and therefore no

houses or trees are near by which the eye can measure them so as to at all take in their real size : but, though disappointed, men do not at once depart; they go round each pyramid, look from one to the other, dwell some hours beneath their shade, attempt perhaps to climb up to some stone which seems the largest one in the few first courses, and looks as if it were close to them : and then, by the time they have done all this, the true greatness of the scene grows upon them; they are astonished that these huge piles ever appeared to them so small; a kind of awe overpowers them; and in the after years of their life these travellers look back to their visit to the pyramids of Egypt as one of the chief events of their lives; it is a sight to which, amidst the busy turmoil of life, they turn back for calmness

and repose.

Once more, to come nearer to ourselves: who has not seen a child look out through a window, and stretch forth its arms and open its little hands, as though it would have the moon placed in them?—for to the child the moon in the sky seems small and close at hand. And then we grow a little older; we look upon the sun and the stars; we would fain climb the hill-top in order to reach the stars; we walk towards

the south in order to come nearer to the sun and feel more of his heat. But when we become men we put away these childish thoughts; we learn, that though we should fly through the air day and night continually, as fast as the swiftest of the birds, we should scarce reach the sun in twice the longest life of man. Then we begin to have some idea of the distance of those heavenly bodies which once seemed so near to us, and we in some degree conceive the real size of the sun, and the moon, and the stars, which once we thought to be no larger than ourselves and yet, when men study the stars more carefully than we have done or can do, when they have spent years and years of hard work in trying to find out the distance of the nearest of the fixed stars, then they confess that their labour is vanity; for the mind of man cannot grasp or conceive numbers so large as would be required to express it.

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Thus then, though many things of daily life seem great at first, but grow less and less in our eyes as we become more familiar with them; yet, on the other hand, there are things whose exceeding vastness 'and immensity leads us at first to pass them by, and to think little of them; but if we have patience to weigh, and to