to be enlightened by it, but in order to enlighten and sanctify and bless it. The Bible is written to cheer us, its invitations to draw us, its bright hopes to animate us. Every page of the Bible is fraught with an inexhaustible interest, and enduring motives, urging the Christian still to persevere, still to strive after perfection. Let each and all resolve that we will be the best, the highest, and the most excellent Christians that are. When a man enters upon a profession if he go and walk the hospitals to be a physician, he resolves, and properly resolves, I will be the best physician of the day; and when he serves an apprenticeship to a trade he resolves, and rightly too, to be the most perfect and most accomplished tradesman of the day. And why should we not, in the exercise of a nobler ambition, determine that we will, by grace, shine as the best and most devoted Christians of the age?

But not only does the Bible give us motives, but beautiful examples also. Turn to that chapter so fraught with practical and stimulating thought, the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Paul alludes to the noble army, the goodly fellowship, the glorious company that are there"Seeing we are surrounded, or encompassed, with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run the race set before us." He likens the Christian to the ancient racer, having on each side of him successive rising tiers, on which are seated martyrs and illustrious saints looking down; and he bids him, witnessing the mighty throng who have run where he now runs, and reached the goal, and entered into glory, stimulated by the surrounding and magnificent spectacle, lay aside every weight and run the race that is set before him. The reader may recollect the history of an officer of France who fell upon the field of battle covered with honorable wounds. The soldiers who survived in the regiment had such a thrilling and grateful recollection of his excellence,

that when the regimental roll was called, they insisted that the name of the dead officer should be called with the names of the living. It was, therefore, constantly called from the regimental roll, while a living soldier answered for him, “Dead upon the field of battle." It seems to me, that the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews is the roll call of the soldiers of the cross of Jesus, the record of the names of the illustrious dead; and as we hear each name, it should stir our hearts like a trumpet blast, and lead us to fight the good fight of faith, and lay hold upon eternal life, and enter into that glorious rest, where they have attained perfection, and are in the presence of God and of the Lamb for ever and for ever.

But we have, stimulating us to this great perfection, not only the Bible itself, not only the beautiful examples that are therein put before us, but the promise also - not the promise, but the actual enjoyment-of the presence of the Holy Spirit of God. That Spirit is our life—he nourishes within us every holy hope, every steadfast resolution, every magnanimous and Christian resolve; he is given to aid and strengthen us in prayer, in struggle, in conflict, in our journey, and ultimately in our victory. Let us seek his strength - let us pray that it may be made perfect in our weakness - let us receive from him that Divine inspiration which he is ever waiting, ever willing, ever pledged to bestow; and acquit ourselves like men satisfied with no ordinary struggle in times of approaching conflict, but pressing onward toward the prize of the mark of the high calling of our faith; giving all diligence to add to our faith virtue, and to virtue temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity, till we are perfect, and thoroughly furnished unto every good work.

"In elder days of art,

Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part,

For our God is everywhere.

"Let us do our work as well,

Both the unseen and the seen,

Make the house where God may dwell Beautiful, entire, and clean.

"Build today then strong and sure, With a firm and ample base,

And ascending and secure

Shall to-morrow find its place."

"And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren." GENESIS Xiii. 8.

WHILST it is most important to impress the feelings we are to cherish towards God, it is only secondarily necessary and important to teach the feelings we ought to entertain towards one another. If the first commandment be, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart," the second commandment is like unto it, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor even as thyself."

There is a quarrel between us all and God by nature not that God has changed, but that we have fallen; and in the rebound there is a quarrel incessantly between one another, because between all and the God that made and governs us. And hence, those explosions in the case of the patriarchs, and the herdmen of Abraham and the herdmen of Lot, which have been perpetuated ever since in the history of mankind, indicate that there is a primal wrong in reference to God, and therefore perpetual disorder in relation to one another. Strife which Abraham deprecated

here, is stated by St. Paul to be one of the works of the flesh. In the Epistle to the Corinthians it is said by the apostle again, in a very beautiful passage, to be the evidence of carnality; 1 Cor. iii. 3-8: "For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? For while one saith, I am of Paul, and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labor." Thus it is plain that this strife, which is so rife in the experience and the habits of us all, is one of the fruits of the flesh, and the evidence of great unripeness of Christian character, and of little progress in the way that leads to heaven. If any one open Cruden's Concordance, and look out the word "strife," he will see how often it is deprecated, and how deeply deplored. "Let nothing be done through strife and vainglory." But read the history of nations, and alas! if there be a calm for a few years, it is only that the next explosion of war may be the more terrible. At the same time the way to finish war is not to put away the weapons of it, but to keep them unemployed by the prevalence of a Christian temper. One would wish that every musket were shaped into rails, and that all shot were melted into steam-engines, and that nations would learn war no more. But the way, I am sure, to end war, is not to lay aside those weapons now, which I believe is the very way to provoke it, but to follow that beautiful example of Abraham-bearing, forbearing, firm in asserting what is right and true and dutiful, and yet conceding the largest