to prop her up with political power and influence, her enemies desire to strip her naked. If the Scriptures are true, each of them, if they had their desire, would be mistaken in their calculation.

"The Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil."

It is eighteen hundred years since He was manifested. Eighteen hundred years since He was crucified through weakness that He might destroy the power of sin. Eighteen hundred years since He sent down the Spirit and founded His Church. It is more than eighteen hundred years since all these things were accomplished, and yet the works of the devil are not yet destroyed. Look at the drunkenness of some Christian races, the lying and fraud and deceit which seem inrooted in the national character of others. Look at the immoralities of all Christian lands, Romish and Protestant alike. Look at the luxury of the squares and suburbs of any great city, and the vice, filth, and wretchedness and penury of its courts and alleys. Look at the universal adulteration of what is sold for food. Look, too, at the fact that the Church has lost the fairest portions of the earth. How hard is it now to realise that the whole of the north of Africa, from the Atlas to the Nile, was once Christian. There once flourished the Churches of Cyprian, Augustine, and Athanasius. Its bishopricks alone were, I

believe, above eight hundred. Tracts far larger than all Christian Europe have been overrun and desolated by Mahometan superstition. How comes it that after the Remedy has been so long known its reign is yet so partial, and the disease of human nature is still so deadly?

There can be, I think, but one answer. The Church has not worked according to His working, Who worketh in her mightily. She has not seconded His working. She has not faithfully apprehended that for which she had been apprehended by her Lord. It were treason to Him to assign any other cause for her failures. Christ has done His work, but what He has done has in our degree to be accomplished in each one of us. Had He to humble Himself on behalf of His Church, His Church has to humble herself both for herself and for Him. And the Church is, after all, but an aggregate of individual souls, each of whom must individually humble itself. As Christ died for our sins, so must each soul amongst us abase itself for its own sin in His sight; and if we each one of us have not done so-that is, if we have not undergone that spiritual process so often, so persistently insisted on in the Scriptures under the name of repentance, we have not as yet taken the first step. Now what is this repentance but the soul realising and confessing, and acting upon its utter weakness and unprofitableness; shewing forth before God

and men, not its strength and sufficiency and independence, but its feebleness, its insufficiency, its dependence? Every Sunday evening we sing to the music of the Church words of very deep meaning: "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent empty away." He was the mightiest of the mighty. He put Himself down from His seat in the heaven of heavens, and because of this His surpassing humility and meekness God exalted Him. And all this has to take place in us; and repentance, that is, sorrow for sin and shame at our having lived without God, and a new mind and heart towards God, is the beginning, in almost every soul, of that work of God in it by which Satan's reign is destroyed.

"The Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil." What are the works of the devil in each of us?Enmity to God and alienation from Him; and this Christ came to cast out of us, so that we should be the friends, nay, rather the loving children, of God Himself.

Selfishness is a work of Satan, and the Son of God came that He might destroy this by opening our hearts to one another, as His heart was opened towards us. Impurity in all its forms is a work of the devil; and St. John writes that every man that hath this hope in him, the

hope, that is, of seeing Christ for ever, purifieth Himself even as He is pure.

Malice, envy, ill-will, slander, party spirit, factiousness, all these are works of the devil; and the Son of God came to cast them out of us. Shall we cherish within us the evil things which the Son of God Himself came to destroy?

And as we must not for Christ's sake suffer these evil things within us, so neither must we acquiesce in their existing around us: we must not be content to see them in our neighbours, in our brethren, in the church, in the world.

Let us by our prayers, by our example, by our influence, by our good conversation, fight determinedly against them and all other evil things; and so, and only so, shall we be assured that we are on the side of Christ.

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XXII.

HOSPITALS AND INFIRMARIES.

ACTS iii. 6.

"Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise walk."

up and

LET us, in thought, transport ourselves back to the time when these words were spoken. We should be within the precincts of a magnificent temple, of which the foundations, or rather substructions only, remain to this day; but these are on such a scale of vastness as to strike the beholder with amazement. Only within the last few months have discoveries been made among the débris and rubbish which surround the base of the elevation on which this temple stood, which prove to us that the walls of the platform or terrace on which it was erected were above one hundred and fifty feet high, and according to all accounts which have come down to us the superstructure must have been worthy of such foundations. But the vastness of this fane and the magnificence of its decorations were as nothing when put in comparison with the associations connected with it; for this very temple had been for above one thou

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