enough to be recognizable as those of men. and women who know Christ and possess His spirit. That there are some such there can be no doubt. There has never been quite broken the line of men who bear the torch and hand it on, and now in the revolution of the centuries our turn has come to receive it, to suffer it to expire, or to relume it to its ancient splendour. A New Obedience, have I called it? Rather, a return to the old obedience is what the times demand, -the obedience of the days of the Church's faith and triumph.

Yes, they must be put together:-the Church's Obedience and the Church's Triumph. It is idleness to pretend that the Church is to-day anything approaching the power it should be. We may felicitate ourselves that it is awakening to appreciation of its office, to realization of the trend of the great social movement that is passing before its eyes. But we must with shame confess that as yet it is miserably and pitiably impotent. We continue in our harmless and pleasant ways in a complacency like that of the giant who wist not that his

strength was departed. The world's influence upon us is greater than our influence upon the world. We adopt its methods and represent its principles, when we ought to be persuading it to accept the principles and methods of Christ. We can never expect it to do that, until we act as if we ourselves believed in Christ's principles and had confidence in His methods. We can never do in the world the work Christ intended us to do, so long as we are a Church apostate and faithless to His injunctions. Nay, I do not believe the Church can much longer continue to exist, unless it arouses itself to its duty. The temper of the age is not tolerant of ornamental institutions. The world has no need for the Church as an association of congenial ladies and gentlemen who gratify themselves by the weekly use of certain formulas and indulgence in however seemly and beautiful a ceremonial. The Church is not needed as

a purveyour of entertainment. It is not required as a manager of social functions which the world itself knows better how to manage. The world has no room for the Church except as a divine institution with authority

to demand, and persuading charm to win, the submission of society to the Master to whom it has already given obedience. The Church will regain its power when it demonstrates its social efficiency; when it makes it plain that it has in keeping the law which society needs for its salvation. When the

divided household of Christ is reassembled and absolved from its sin of division, redeemed from its present anarchy, which outrages every notion of the unity and love which it pretends to preach; when its people exhibit nothing so much as eagerness in sacrifice and unselfishness in devotion,-then will the Church be strong to wield again her ancient sway over the hearts of men.

The work of the obedient Church will not be to assume direction of every detail of social reform. Her work will be to train her members individually to loyalty to the King, and to make herself an institution more and more conforming to the laws of a world which is not this one. She will carry on with new zeal the corporate acts in which she chiefly witnesses to the reality of that other world.25 She will seek out and bap

tize children, in the Name which reveals the social character, if I may so speak, the essentially and eternally sacrificial character, of God, the Holy Triune; she will teach them as they grow to manhood the tremendous social truths of the Catechism; she will hold up for the perpetual contemplation of men the sacrifice and tragedy of Calvary, and at her altars week by week offer and present the reasonable, holy and living sacrifice of the body and souls of those who confess Christ their King. This will be her work, as it now is, but this must be done with new sense of its awful importance, and new realization of what it imports for our daily lives. This must result in the creation of a distinctive type of man, easily cognizable as a disciple of the Nazarene, until the world sees that Christianity is a thing of meaning and power, and its heart is softened and convinced by the sweet influences that flow from unselfish lives like waves that beat in unexpected music on shores that know nothing of the winds that raised them.26

I cannot hope to persuade you in these

last minutes of what this course of addresses may have failed to make clear. But may I not allow myself to hope that, as we approach the solemn anniversary of the Passion, it will be borne upon some of you, with a force which no human words can carry, that discipleship of Jesus Christ is a serious undertaking, and calls for willingness to follow the Truth into deserts and Gethsemanes and judgment-halls and to the hill of crucifixion; calls for willingness to obey with absolute disregard of consequences, even to the apparently irretrievable defeat of Calvary? You will not contemplate as you should the unexampled obedience which we adore on Good Friday without a juster conception of the duty to which I have felt commissioned to call you. Your hearts ache, I know, for the sorrow of the world, for the joylessness of the lot of the millions who bear the burden of our social injustice. You can do something to bring near the day when that sorrow and joylessness shall cease. Take up of your own will the burden which the unfortunate now of necessity bear. Illustrate and interpret to this day the law of Sacrifice,