Lord, I am coming as fast as I can. I know I must pass through the shadow of death, before I can come to see Thee. But it is but Umbra Mortis, a mere shadow of death, a little darkness upon nature. But Thou, through Thy merits and Passion, hast broken through the jaws of death."—Archbishop Laud's last words on the scaffold. OUR INDEBTEDNESS. Preached in St. James's, Winnipeg, August 12, 1887. "I am debtor."-ROM. i. 14. FAIRLY, I think, and not cynically, the world may be divided into two classes. One is of those who are constantly occupied with considering what society owes to them; the other is of those who are even more anxious to discover what they owe to society. We need not pause to inquire which of these two classes is the more numerous, or the nobler, or to which mankind owes more of truth and virtue, or to which of them St. Paul belonged. For it is, of course, quite fair to remark that as a Hebrew, and an apostle, he must have felt this sense of indebtedness in an especial degree. As a member of an essentially missionary race, chosen by God to be salt and light amidst corruption and darkness, and to be the depository of the divine oracles until, in the fulness of time, Christ should come in the flesh to explain and fulfil them, he was a debtor from, and even by reason of, his birth. Then, as an apostle, to whom the Lord Himself gave the commission to declare the glad tidings of reconciliation to the Gentiles, he apparently felt the blessed necessity of preaching the gospel as perhaps no man ever felt it before or since. "Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel!" Now, from the particular duty I want instantly to pass to the universal obligation. The Church's conscience is stirred by an unspeakable gratitude to her great task of evangelizing the nations. Let each of us, in the solitary and invisible region of his own conscience, ponder for himself the meaning of this sentence, "I am debtor;" apply to his own soul the wide obligation of it, "How much owe I unto my Lord?" try to weigh its blessedness, "I owe Thee my life;" and to conceive its mighty reward for him, if ever so feebly, yet consistently and resolutely, it shall have coloured and shaped his years. "I am debtor." Observe here the secret of God, the burden of the Church, the safety of the nation, the enthusiasm of the Christian. What is the debt? It is, superficially to speak of it, threefold, and I can only indicate, not pretend to expound, its substance. Truth, example, and charity. That man owes truth to man; and that just in proportion to his own apprehension of the value of it, and his personal appropriation of the substance of it, and his recognition of the need of it for all, to cheer, elevate, dignify, develop, and complete human nature, will be his readiness, even at personal cost, to dispense it to others. A university is, of course, the most majestic embodiment of the idea that truth is the inheritance of the race-that only the learner can claim to be the teacher-and that the best and noblest hospitality is the hospitality of the mind, joyfully welcoming all men into its temple of knowledge. But any elementary school for the humblest and poorest is but the development of that principle to its final logical issues. Then, if the great truths of physics, and mathematics, and philosophy, and history, |