his position, and it crowns his authority with blessing. It reveals to us how the concentration of riches, material or spiritual, becomes a social good, fruitful beyond any equality of possession. And it is obvious that the principle has a wider application, through which we may yet hope to see the varieties of external circumstances harmonised in the fulness of one life. For this cause, then, even that we have received the knowledge of the great counsel of God and been called to work in His Church, of which the Family is the type and sacrament, we bow our knees unto the Father from Whom every Family in heaven and earth is named, that He would shew us His will more clearly from day to day, and give us strength to fulfil it. For those who have followed me so far will acknowledge, I trust, that they have actually about them in their Families a revelation of God in which they can find the principles at least of the right answers to many of the most urgent problems of society: they will acknowledge that the loftiest aspirations and the most difficult labours have in the home hearth that which may kindle them with a holier glow and direct them with a steadier light: they will acknowledge sadly—so at least I must acknowledge-that these open mysteries of the Family are too often unhonoured, unread, II. II. unheeded: they will acknowledge that where discipline is most attractive we all seek rather to be ministered unto than to minister: that selfishness troubles and stains the very spring of sacrifice. But, thanks be to God, the teaching of the Family is still left to us in England, rich in gracious lessons of authority and reverence and service. The ties of the Family are still held sacred by popular sentiment. So may we study them, while there is yet time, study them in the light of God's presence, and we shall need no other school of social duty. May we by the Spirit's help labour to fulfil them, and we shall need no other preparation for the greater offices of life, no other pledge that for these also the Father from Whom every Family in heaven and earth is named will give us the strength which we need. The nations shall walk amidst the light [of the city of God] and the kings of the earth do bring their glory into it. APOC. xxi. 24. THE NATION. IT T was my object last Sunday, to point out that the family and not the individual is the true unit of society: that the essential relations of the family marriage, fatherhood, brotherhood— furnish us with the divine conceptions of fellowship, authority, equality which rule and animate the harmonious structure of human life that they are in a true sense the original sacraments of humanity through which we can recognise and receive the blessings of the divine counsel: that we must study them with reverent patience, and yield ourselves to their influence with glad devotion, if we desire to fulfil our part in larger fields of action, when we are called to enter them. For life cannot be completed within the sheltered precincts of the home. As the years go on the child enters naturally into a wider sphere. The friendships of school, the intercourse of business, reveal to the growing boy new obligations, new joys, new temptations, new conflicts, through which the lessons of earlier discipline |