the world at this period, there will come moments of bewilderment at the fearful contrasts which meet him in the conditions under which the various classes of mankind exist.

To make up the great human stream of life, which now rushes on with an impetus never known before, there are many tributaries each different and distinct. There is the calm and noble river of order, intellect, spiritual light, and worldly comfort, which glides peacefully along, with plenty and beauty on its banks; there is the wild, roaring, flood of worldly ambition and self-seeking, making its way rougher, and its waters more turbid and muddy, in its own heedless activity, swallowing up, in its impetuous haste, the gently gliding rivulets of innocent credulity that confidingly seek its course; there are, again, the foul and blackened waters of human depravity, disappointment and despair, gathering their power and replenishment from a thousand tortuous ditches and sewers, while all along the surface, and even down to the depths of the one great aggregate stream, the poisonous course of these polluted waters is traced, deforming and debasing, till all reach the Eternal Ocean and vanish from our view.

To sweeten and purify these innumerable corrupted tributaries is the great problem of our time. We are justly proud of the everswelling stream of order, intelligence, benevolence, and virtue, which, undoubtedly, increases generation after generation, and never more rapidly than in our time; but we were never before more vividly reminded of the deadly character of the wide-spreading sin and ignorance in our midst, and the fearful privations and misery to which thousands of our fellow-creatures, many of them innocent and virtuous, are made to suffer.

To mitigate evil and its consequences, we believe an all-wise Providence has given us the means, by revelation and the direct operation of His Spirit, through intelligence, into the heart of man, establishing there a constant communion with Himself. This inner bond constitutes an alliance between God and man, and by it all men may become truly members of the Lord's only real Church: a church never visible to us in this world in any other form than through the life and actions of its members. To typify and represent this inner bond between God and man, which our Lord so clearly defined during His sojourn amongst men in the body, the ingenuity of man has very properly and necessarily devised an outward form of a Church, suited to human requirements, for the purpose of binding men together in common efforts toward spreading and establishing in the hearts of

men the real bond of union with God which we call the "Invisible Church." Hence, religious associations sprang, and from the time of the simple fishermen who followed Christ, up to the present day, they have extended and flourished under the names of churches, chapels, societies, congregations, and meetings, all professing the one purpose of uniting the members with the inner Church of the Lord.

Unhappily, these associations, like all other human institutions, necessarily partake of human vanities and weaknesses; and, instead of multiplying to the glory of God, one of the distinctive features of them in our time, is to teach formularies, creeds, and doctrines wide as the poles asunder, and without accepting which, some of them proclaim there is no salvation. Thus, so long as strife and debate divide the professed pioneers as to the distinctive route to heaven, the foul streams of evil and ignorance flow on and increase, too often deriving not a little of their force from the malice and uncharitableness shown by the so-called religious world.

Apart, however, from the neutralizing effect of religious associations wasting their strength in disputes, a still more serious evil arises from the common belief that this world and the future life are separated by a great gulf. Hence arise all the "schemes of salvation" by which the simple are perplexed. "To get to heaven" is a prescribed process, and many are so busy in following the directions of their respective churches, that by them the great duties of this life are overlooked or neglected. Yet, we pray daily that God's will "may be done on earth as it is in heaven." Now, where God's will is done, there heaven must prevail; and if men pray that on earth this may be accomplished, does it not follow that the possibility is admitted, and that only an antagonism in ourselves prevents the heavenly condition being realised on earth?

Would it not be well if religious teachers were to change their phraseology, and say, "Don't think about getting to heaven at all; let us be bound together for the purpose of establishing heaven upon earth?" The future life is only the sequence of this. There cannot be one set of laws for this life and a different set for the next. We commence our existence for all eternity from the day of our birth into this world, and all our thought, effort, and energy, should be devoted to the duties of the state into which we are born. If there are progressive states in heaven, surely the higher states there are not achieved by its angels who are in the lower devising schemes by which they may enter into the higher. It must be unconscious progression, realized by the continual performance, from the love of it, of every duty in the lower

So also on earth. There

states, that the higher states shall be reached. is not a duty here which is not heavenly, and in the full performance of which we can acquire a condition which can never be taken from us. Unfortunately, the religious associations of our day place heaven in the abstract, and by various complicated machinery and rules, the future life is promised to us, as a recompense for certain sacrifices which we are to make here. By this kind of teaching men are divided; one holds to one set of regulations, another to others, and sects are multiplied. The loyal attachment shown, and the sacrifices made, for their respective churches, stand to too many in the place of obedience to the law of heaven, which is, that we should be ministering helpmates to the good and evil alike, seeking only the doing of the will of God.

It would be a difficult research to ascertain the amount of time, wealth, material, and human exertion, both mental and bodily, which, in our country, is spent in the effort to keep up the many religious establishments of the various sects into which society is divided, before any appreciable effect is produced for good upon the evil existing in. our midst. There are in England about 12,000,000 of persons professing a belief in the Episcopal form of church, and about a like number of persons attached to churches which all dissent from the Episcopalian, and many of them again from each other. There are 12,000 parishes in each of which a church exists; besides the vast number of subscription churches and auxiliary institutions in which Episcopalians are prolific. Dissenters are not outdone in this respect, for the distinctive feature of a new sect is to build chapels and schools in which the new ideas may be proclaimed. Taking the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, it is estimated that there are church and chapel buildings now in existence and in use, in the proportion of one to every five hundred persons. If we add to these the innumerable supplementary institutions of mission halls, meeting rooms, schoolrooms, Christian associations, city missions, Bible societies, Scripture-readers, and the like, we get a conception of the vast machinery at work, in our own country, in the form of religious associations.

Now this would be a sublime spectacle, if it were not for the sad fact that one-half of all this power is concentrated in endeavouring to counteract the supposed falsities and errors of the other half. Society is thus divided into infinitesimal sections. Each section contains men and women who are devoted to their church or chapel; they give money readily to support it: they go regularly to worship; attend the Sunday school, and are counted pious, good persons, whose religious

duties are performed beyond a doubt; for, are they not "seen of men?"

Such association is quite right, and the various religious establishments flourish; but what, I ask, is the effect of all this upon the great questions of our time? How are the masses of poor, sickly, sinful, and depraved of our fellow creatures affected by the multiplying of churches, and chapels, and religious societies, in which the more orderly, intelligent, healthy, and prudent classes of society join for worship? To judge from our newspapers, our streets, our police courts, our jails, our hospitals, our workhouses, and registrars' returns of premature death and decay, the verdict would be, a minimum benefit for a maximum expenditure of zeal." "Religiosity" has supplanted true religion; and the insisting on creeds, and the making of sects, has crushed out the ministering care, patience and love, which proceed from the desire to do God's will on earth as it is done in heaven.

66

The anxiety "to get to heaven" is with many persons much akin to the desire to "get on" in business. The observance of every prescribed sectarian rule is strictly followed, prayers for the poor, sickly, and miserable beings by whom we are surrounded are freely and copiously offered up, and men and women actually imagine that they thereby become pious and religious,-in a word, are "converted, elected, and saved!" Would to God we talked less of our future salvation! If we devoted every effort, thought, and moment, to our present existence-to perfect it, to purify it, to help our fellow-creatures who are less fortunate, either from their own sins or the sins of others, to rescuing innocent children from the blasting effects of their depraved parents, to feeding the hungry, to the breaking of every yoke, to clothing the naked, and letting the oppressed go free-if all religious associations inscribed these principles on their banners, and induced their members to devote their means and lives to such objects, then there would be only one Church outwardly on earth, as there is only one in heaven. Its members would be bound together in the real religion of life and charity, and the kingdom of God would have

come.

The great social problems of our time are appalling and terrible; and for one reason, because there is a great gulf fixed between the religious and irreligious portions of society-a gulf which has its position almost identical with the division between the affluent members of society and the most needy. There are, undoubtedly, good and noble spirits in all sects and creeds, who, because they are above their sects

and creeds, step over the gulf, and toil heartily to carry purity into depravity and light into obscurity: but I say advisedly and fearlessly, that, viewed from the light which illumined the path of our Lord in the world, the general character of religious institutions is that of a huge sham and failure. Some of the greatest and best of men living -who are acting as if they believed God's will can be done on earth as it is in heaven-never attend public worship at all in the recognised places. Yet we know them by their fruits, and can believe that they are members of the invisible Church.

It is true, undoubtedly, that the great anomalies of extreme wealth is extreme poverty, extreme intelligence of extreme ignorance, extreme suffering and almost total immunity from suffering will ever exist till the whole lump of mankind is leavened, by the individual regeneration of each man and woman. But we are bound to make a distinction between the just punishments of the original wrong-doer, and those miseries which afflict vast masses of our fellow-creatures as consequences flowing from the sin. Take, for example, all the children of the lowest class, both morally and socially. Are they not blameless, innocent, and irresponsible for the condition into which they are born? Yet we know that without the help of the ministering spirits of society (and where should they arise if not from our religious associations?) ready to mitigate the evil conditions of their childhood, most, if not all, of these little ones will grow up to perpetuate the misery, degradation, and criminality of their parents. This is actually the case at the present moment. We pray for them, I grant; we say, in fact, that God cares for them and watches over them; so He does! yet it is only by means of human instrumentality that His will concerning them can be worked out. If that human instrumentality fails, we may depend upon it the world must suffer. We often say, "O Lord! supply the wants of others, and give us thankful hearts," forgetting that the Lord does not and will not supply those wants except through the instrumentality of those who have the means to satisfy them.

It may be a low and very external view to take of religious duty, but the more I see of life the more convinced I am that true religion is a practical and tangible activity, first of all in the lowest of human requirements. To help the unfortunate along the road of life, whether he be halt, lame, blind, palsied, possessed of devils, taken in sin, wounded and forsaken, homeless, hungry, or naked, this is the first and special duty of the man who desires to see the will of God done on earth as it is in heaven." Air fit to breathe, homes fit to dwell in,