has been, and ever will be, with each individual. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual." This truth has been very seldom understood, and never sufficiently insisted upon. According to one of the old misrepresentations of Christianity, we used to be told that in order to love God we must cease to love men, that we were to rise to the divine love by crushing out the human, that affection for the infinite was incompatible with affection for the finite, and that the former could only begin when the latter had been altogether annihilated. In the words of the old-fashioned orthodox hymn

"O not to one created thing

Shall our embrace be given,

But all our joy shall be in God,
For only God is heaven."

This doctrine received some plausible support from certain misunderstood passages in the New Testament, such as "If a man hate not his father and his mother, he cannot be my disciple." But at the same time it is a doctrine exactly the opposite of the truth. It is a survival from the

older religions, from religions falsely so called, in which all the frailties of men - amongst others jealousy and greed-were supposed to be characteristics of the Deity. It is a survival that dies but slowly. You remember Tennyson's words— 'Forgive what seemed my sin in me;

Forgive my grief for one removed."

Whatever it may seem, love of a human being is no sin. In reality we shall learn to love God, not by learning to love His creatures less, but by learning to love them more, with a purer, truer, intenser love. This world would be a strange preparation for the next if it were otherwise.

I should advise you all to read the 'Gates Ajar.' The heroine of that little story, Mary Cabot, had just lost her only brother, Roy, who was everything, more than everything in the world, to her. Left in her lonely wretchedness she soliloquises: "I think it must be there never was another like Roy. Then we had lived together so long, we two alone, since father died, that he had grown to me heart of my heart and life of my life. It did not seem as if he could be

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taken and I be left. Besides, I suppose most young women of my age have their dreams, and a future, probable or possible, which makes the very incompleteness of life sweet, because of the symmetry which is waiting somewhere. But that was settled so long ago for me that it makes it very different. Roy was all there was. Roy, away in that dreadful heaven, can have no thought of me, cannot remember how I loved him. The singing and the worshipping must take up all his time. God wants it all. He is a jealous God. I am nothing any more to Roy." Then people come to comfort her with the orthodox platitudes; and an elder of the church pays her a long visit, in which he tries to improve the occasion for her soul's good, insisting on the fact that her bereavement must be a divine dispensation, and that Roy has been taken away because she so loved him. For Roy's sake therefore she hates the God in whom she has been taught to believe. And she does well to hate Him. She will not worship a Being who has given her the capacity to love and then crushes her for loving. She is right. Such worship would be the foulest

blasphemy. So far good. She has got rid of the old and false religion. But at present she knows nothing of the true. She is taught it however, slowly but very surely, by her aunt, a Mrs Fordyce, who is in my judgment one of the sweetest characters in American fiction. From her Mary Cabot learns the lesson which I have been trying to impress upon you to-day,-the lesson, viz., of the evolution of religion from human love.

Happy are we if we learn it too. It is interesting of course as a matter of philosophical theory; but it is even more important in its bearing on practical life. To try and crush the human affections, is not to develop, but to destroy, the divine. "If a man loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" We cannot begin by loving the Infinite. If we ever love God at all, it will be, not by exterminating, but by cherishing and developing our love for the finite. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterwards that which is spiritual."

196

Little Kindnesses.

NE of the best sermons I have read for a long

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time is to be found in last week's 'World.' It was called

Sins of Omission." The writer says: "The majority of us abstain from murder : we neither forge nor do we shoplift; and few of us have ever tried our hands at picking a pocket. For us the whole list of crimes and misdemeanours is fenced off and divided from our ordinary lives in the region of the impossible. With the exception of an occasional inclination to murder, which amidst the manifold provocations of daily life none of us can hope to escape, we can honestly declare that we have never been tempted. And yet we feel, most of us, that we are steeped in sin, and have fallen far away from the standard of an even philosophical Christianity,-ay, even from the