work that you are now proposing to devote yourselves, so that I need only say with regard to others that, whatever the line of their ministerial work may take, teaching or writing, their teaching and writing, or whatever else, must be ultimately directed to one and the same end.

Your work is thus a work exhaustive of all your time, powers, energies, and opportunities; it requires an abnegation, an evacuation of self as complete as that which I spoke of yesterday as involved in the idea of the authority that is delegated to you; it is your Lord's work, and to be His work at all, it must be all His. Think of that; if He is to set His mark upon it, to call it His, it must be all His. There is no exception, no limitation to this rule. It affects us in meat and drink, in relaxation and amusement, as well as in earnest labour and concentrated energy of thoughtful purpose. It pervades all, and gives colour to all the life. The clergyman is as always a clergyman as a gentleman ought always to be a gentleman; that is a very external way of putting it, but it is the mere translation into prose of the high poetry of the true life of God's servants. As they are men, with the desires and appetites and needs of men, who have to think of the meat that perisheth and of the wants of to-day and to-morrow, like any others, their work

need not be stated in extravagant terms, as if their ordinary life were to be a counsel of perfection. But in all their needs, and in all their pleasures, and in all possible diversities of their labours, the work of their life is the same and one; not to be set aside for any other, not to be forgotten, not to be contented with, not to be wearied of, not to be forsaken, not to be despaired of: "He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me." The cross that is once taken up can never be laid down.

TWO ADDRESSES ON THINGS NATURAL AND THINGS SPIRITUAL

I

The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name. He shall teach you all things.-ST. JOHN xiv. 26.

At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me and I in you.-ST. JOHN xiv. 20.

Is it too much to say that the life of a Christian minister, his work, his experience, his introspection, and his outlook, does in a way concentrate and accentuate all the problems of the spiritual life; its paradoxes and its perplexities, its realisation of individual identity and corporate unity, its consciousnesses, and its ignorances; the strength and weakness of its faiths and energies of working, its reconciliations of the things that are seen and the things that are not seen, its complex apprehension of either in the other, of things temporal and things spiritual, time and eternity? We might well expect it to be so; a lesson, however, hard to learn, and always growing in the experience of our own and other

men's needs, strengths, and weaknesses. We might well expect it to be so, if we believe that He who made our life His own, and sends us out, as the Father sent Him, to undertake a share in the fulfilment of His plan of the world's salvation, does give us of His Spirit to quicken us in all that He would have us attempt to do, helping us to become all things to all men, qualifying us to enter into the lot and experience of all to whom He sends us.

I would put one of the thoughts that this idea suggests very simply to you and the congregation to-day. The work that we all of us, clergymen and laymen, have to do for God is to be done in relation to the world in which we live, and yet with as distinct relation to the world which is to be revealed; we have but one life: temporal and eternal, natural and spiritual, are not differences that break up identity. The steps of conscious development, change, and reaction, the very crucifixion of the old man, the very passage from death to life, through death to life, does not break a continuity of the old and the new; old things pass away, all things become new, but they are permanent in consciousness, becoming, changing, growing, but intrinsically identical. The life that we now live in the flesh, we live by the faith of the Son of God; it is

a new life we trust, but it is also the old-the fashion changing, but the substantial self enduring; yes, until He makes all things new, and that which has been temporal, eternal. But I am repeating myself, I see.

Our point is, how are we to do our work in the world with our eyes set on that which is out of the world; how are we to manage the things temporal, looking to the things eternal; how is the faith that is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, to grasp the work that lies before us, and is to be apprehended primarily by the outward senses, the experience of every-day life, the doing of the very simplest, humblest, most servile items of manual duty ? How are we to translate the things temporal into the things eternal, and to realise the things eternal through the things temporal the atmosphere, the distances, the comparative scale, the analogies, the proportions, the relations, the substantive identities of either with those of the other?

First, we need to remember that the things spiritual and eternal are not a long way off from us in local distance or in an incalculably remote future. The presence of the Lord Almighty, the Father, sets them all close to us. They are about us and within us; the revelation of them in