which Christ brought from heaven, stamped with God's fourfold seal, of holiness, wisdom, power, and love, and then committed to the safe keeping of a Church for which He shed His blood; that Gospel which is the peace of God, knitting all the scattered fragments of mind and will and soul into one, and bringing all into harmony with that mind and will and spirit above which is the Love and the Life and the Light of men! Let not one day pass without trying the truth of that Gospel in earnest, resolute, importunate prayer. Ask God to lift up His light upon you, and convince you of the being and the power, of the atoning death and the risen life, of Jesus. Ask Him so to reveal His Son in you, that it shall be no guess and no peradventure that He is your Lord and your God. Pray Him to keep you stedfast in this faith, and every day to frame and fashion your whole life, in thought and speech and act, after it. Ask of Him grace to try the strength of the Gospel, here and now, by facing your besetting sin in the name and by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Fight it out with the devil in some definite decisive battle within, after which you shall be able to say, 'I know in whom I have believed ; ' 'He is faithful that promised;' 'I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me!' One such experience is it not to this that St Paul here challenges us?-one such experience is more to the soul that has it than all the books of all the theologians. The habit of such experiences grows at last into an evidence sure and stedfast, strong enough to form a practical

answer to all who would say to you, The Gospel is a fable, Christ is not risen, prayer is a mockery, and God is an abstraction and a name. You answer, Whether He be a name or no, I know not; one thing I know, that, whereas I was tied and bound by the chain of my sins, now I am free and at large and victorious, so long, and only so long, as I live in communion with a Father and Saviour and Comforter, whom I treat as living and hearing and answering, as tender to compassionate, and as strong to save. If it be so if it be indeed so that good and evil, falsehood and holiness, are in league for my ruin; that through a faith which is a delusion I reach a strength which is virtue; that by means of prayer which is idle as the wind I find myself able to become pure and

peaceable and diligent and self-forgetting-if all this be so, then out of this wreck and discord of my being I can but choose the less of two evils, live the better life even in error, and bow myself to the inevitable conditions of a creature the accident of an accident. But if this cannot be-if good and evil cannot thus conspire-if the lie cannot be holy, if the wicked thing cannot be true, then is my evidence sure and

my hope stedfast. If the Gospel of peace gives me the victory, then by that sign I know the Author-God is with it and in it of a truth.

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY,

October 20, 1872.

II.

PRAYER.

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.-DANIEL vi. 10.

A

ND was this superstition? Was this the