disease; to secure that good food is sold; to have everywhere pure water in plenty.

You may not be able to apply yourselves directly to these things, and probably you would do them badly. But there are many young men among you who in one way at least may help towards work of this kind. By writing, by influence in and out of Parliament and in your business relations, you may work in many ways towards placing international relations on such a basis as will set, as I said, a large quantity of our military and naval money free for practical improvement of the country's welfare. The number who are doing that now might be counted in two minutes. I am sure no more Christian work than that can exist, and if it is done heartily and with a genuine desire to help the race, it is wellpleasing to God. You will not see results now; but what is man worth unless he has faith in the future, belief in principles, and sufficient courage to labour without always wanting like a child to grasp his result at once?

Another thing we may do. We may avoid all expenditure for the sake of show, or for the sake of pushing our way into higher circles. We may deny ourselves the wretched pleasure of being pointed at as men and women who spend more than others in food, and dress, and luxuries. We may resolve to waste no more money on things which have no intrinsic value, whose value passes away in smoke. We may hate all gambling, betting, and all other ways of that kind in which wealth is consumed, avoiding all places where this unhallowed robbery of the country is carried

on. A few men and women in society who should mark their contempt and hatred of this waste, with the firmness of good taste, would begin the formation of a strong public opinion against these things, and render them in the end as shameful as they are. That is one way at least of serving God and following Christ, which is in the power of many among you.

If these things were done, a quantity of capital would be set free which might be employed in practical and reproductive work. And the outward and visible wants being supplied, there will be room for well-educated expenditure on beautiful things which have a lasting value, and we may call upon the rich to spend large sums in promoting the higher educational wants of the country. I do not know what a man is a millionaire for, unless it is that he should undertake great public works for the nation. Once that was the case in England, it is continually the case in America. Here and there among our merchants there are men who found large libraries and public institutions. But one does not hear of men possessing almost fabulous property and who have a fashion of calling themselves poor, because they needlessly support a number of establishments, expending, as they ought to do, a year's income in the space of three or four years, and that not once but often in their lives, on some great public work. It is our colossal and hereditary fortunes who ought to build the National Gallery, who ought to endow science, who ought to establish libraries and art schools in every part of England; who ought to found new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge for the poorer students; who

ought to feel that overweening wealth can only be endured in the hands of private persons when a large public use is made of it. This would be the way to make a noble reputation, to hand down one's name, not as a by-word for extravagance or for parsimony, but blazoned with the gold of honour and bright with the tears of gratitude.

And there are numberless things which men of lesser wealth, but with more than they have the right to spend upon themselves and their estates, may do which will help on the world far better than giving of alms. They ought to find out men who only want some help to make them useful to the world, and to put them forward in life. A few hundreds a year would have saved Keats for us as Calvert saved Wordsworth. It ought to be understood that money would be forthcoming whenever in the National Schools a boy rises so plainly above his fellows as to make it plain that the world would be the better for his liberal education. It should be part of the duties of the rich to search for such men. It should be part of their duty to buy valuable things for the national collections, and they ought to be educated, as they are not, to know a first-rate thing when they see it. Why should public money be spent on a great picture, when there are five hundred men in England who could buy it and not know that they had bought it? There are fifty other ways in which private purses can do public duties, but I cannot dwell upon them now. Let these things suffice.

And to conclude all, it is not unfitting for a Christian minister to say that the work of artist and poet of

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which we have been speaking, and the work of those who, not being themselves prophets of the beautiful, yet labour to help those who are, is, as well as that of charitable giving, Christian work; not unpleasing to the Father of all Light and the King in His Beauty, when its aim is not private ostentation but the desire to give men a noble pleasure and the welfare which comes through that. Be sure that expenditure for this purpose, though it may seem unproductive, is not unproductive; nor will the Great Judge at the end support the accuser who may say, like Judas, Why were not these things sold for much, and given to the poor?

CHILD LIFE.

'Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the Kingdom of God.'-Luke xviii. 16.

It is a happy thought that the children who climb upon our knees are fresh from the hand of God, living blessings which have drifted down to us from the imperial palace of the love of God, that they still hear some of the faint notes of the music of God's life, still bear upon their faces traces of the uncreated light. Heathen sage and Christian poet have enshrined the thought, each according to his knowledge, and though there is no proof of its truth, yet we cannot neglect as quite fruitless in wisdom so wide-spread an intuition. It is vain to sneer at it as poetry, in vain at least for some of us. He cannot scorn this thought who feels, as his children's faces light up at his coming, not pleasure only, but an inner sense of gratitude that things so pure, so close to God, should give to him, with the sense of his unworthiness deep within, so much and so unsuspectingly. Their trust seems to carry with it something of the forgiveness of Heaven. The man sees the tolerant tenderness of God his Father in the child whom He has sent him-that his little one believes in him, bestows on him the blessing of an ever-renewed hope.