of despair; but the words which in his mouth were a wail of scepticism, may be in ours the joyful cry of faith and hope. It is possible that with you and with me the moment of insight and revelation, when God seemed real and duty plain, has passed away; and we are left with a memory which is too dim to have any inspiring power. If this be so let us say, boldly, "The thing that has been shall be; the hour of unveiling will come again if I only wait in steadfast patience; the dawn will again break upon me if I keep my face towards the East !" and in so saying we shall be strengthened and blessed. We cannot always be on the mount of transfiguration; but we shall have with us in the valley the inspiration of the transfiguring moment if we will only believe that from that very valley Tabor rises, and that the thing which has been, is and shall be, though our eyes can only at times behold its glory.

No English poet has taught a deeper lesson than that to be found in one verse of Matthew Arnold's :

"We cannot kindle when we will

The fire that in the heart resides;

The spirit bloweth and is still,

In mystery the soul abides:

But tasks in hours of insight willed,

May be through hours of gloom fulfilled."

This is true,-grandly, nobly true; but our difficulty will always be to maintain the conviction that there really has been an hour of insight at all, for the profaneness of the

present discredits the sacredness of the past. It can, I am sure, be maintained in no other way than by casting on the dim colours of memory the light of a persistent hope. Sad as is George Eliot's picture of the last days of the great Florentine reformer, there are few things in history or fiction which are to me so stimulating as that account of how, when Savonarola's consciousness of Divine presence and approval and guidance lost its constancy and became painfully intermittent," he lived on the faith of yesterday, waiting for the faith of to-morrow." Such strenuous persistence is never without its reward. If we, like Savonarola, will only resolve to live on the faith of yesterday, we shall not always be left to wait for the faith of to-morrow; for a new vision will arise with every dawn; each day will bring its own revelation; in doing the will we shall know the doctrine.

But if we are thus to utilise the insight of the past, we must first take care to utilise the insight of the present. Our holy tasks must be "in hours of insight willed.” There are, in every man's life, certain supreme moments, in which the soul seems capable of the noblest passion, the mind of the loftiest thought, the body of the most courageous action. This is how God often visits us; and the loss is infinite if either we do not recognise, or neglect when recognised, the day of our visitation. What we want is the instant resolution to seize the highest opportunity by rising to the highest duty; to wrestle with the angel who appears at some new Penuel, and not let him depart with

an unbestowed blessing. If this resolution be absent, the angel will each time approach us with diminished glory, until the day come when he stands by us in sadness and we know it not; but if we accept the inspiration and claim the blessing, the one will become nobler, the other ineffably grander with each succeeding visitation; and those angel visits, which were once few and far between, will become more and more constant, until we waken every morning to behold the gleaming of their faces, and every night sink into slumber beneath the shadow of their wings.

There are those who, after doing their best to make Christianity repellent and incredible, turn round upon the heretics they have themselves made, and denounce them as men who believe a thing, not because it is true, but because they wish to believe it. This is regarded as a terrible accusation by both parties; but it seems to me that such belief is, in some degree, a necessity; and that, as a matter of fact, no man ever believes any doctrine from which his whole nature revolts, however strong the evidence for it may be. Even more than this might be said. Is not our instinctive desire to believe a certain proposition, in itself as weighty an evidence of its truth, as the craving of our palate for a certain article of diet is of its wholesomeness? Of course, as in the latter case the body, so in the former case the soul, must be assumed to be in a healthy condition; but we dare not consign our brother to a spiritual lazar-house, because he finds

food in what we fling from us as refuse. Christianity presents itself to us as the fulfilment of desire; as the satisfaction of a craving which is, at times, in the heart of every man ; and proclaims, in the most glorious of all its benedictions, "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." If God be with a man, making him one with Himself, he need not be afraid of believing in what he desires.

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The man who really prays often feels that he has no thoughts and no words, for all his wants are summed up in one supreme want-a want of God Himself. The world draws us away from God and keeps Him out of our affections; not because the world has really more attractions for the human heart, but because of the defect in us which hinders us from seeing God as He is,-which blinds our eyes to the King in His beauty, and makes His kingdom a land which is very far off. If we long to be holy, strive to be holy, and are still not holy, our failure is owing to defective vision. It would be easy always to live God's life if we could always see God's face. Then, not holiness but sin would become the impossible thing. When God becomes unreal, when He is seen but as a dim shadow on the background of infinity, then indeed does duty become hard to us; and the hardness is just in proportion to the religiousness of our nature; that is, to the conscious need of Divine presence and sympathy. It seems, therefore, probable that the

man whose motive power is found in his consciousness of certain relations to God, may, when that consciousness becomes dim, fall into sins from which the man who lives by mere rules of conduct is free; he may, like David and Peter, expose himself to open shame; but so long as the Divine affection within him is not dead, but only for the time overpowered, there is a capacity of immediate recovery from, and of final victory over, sin, which the mere mechanical moralist neither possesses nor understands. In one moment of conscious face-to-face communion with the All Holy, there is found a power which years of virtuous habit cannot give; and it is the recognition of this fact which, in all ages, has driven pious souls into solitude, to seek for some spot where God and they might hold uninterrupted converse. The biographies of such men are both examples and warnings, but the teachers of this age give us the warnings alone. We must not forget that in these consecrated lives there have been results achieved as well as failures suffered; and for ourselves we must learn that we too may sometimes wisely seek the mountain, not only to feed hungry multitudes, but to be fed ourselves with God's word spoken in our ear; that if there is glory in serving the Master, there is strength, and stimulation, and bliss in sitting at His feet and looking up into His face.

Those who, with all the powers of their soul, hold to the great doctrine of the final and complete triumph of