and that at all events they are known to debauch and demoralize the whole mind and heart of many who patronize this system. One thing you cannot account for naturally, and that one thing is the most important of all. The religious effect of the system is universally that which I now describe. The agents who speak to us through the poor human instruments of whom there is so much talk, differ in details and smaller matters, they will agree in this. They do not, I believe, openly deny God. We have even been told by those who have dealt in the system, and who gave it up on becoming Catholics, that these spirits have been known to profess even to love Jesus Christ and to recommend in many particulars the Catholic religion. But in one thing they are unanimous, and their creed falls in with that of the false science of which I spoke at the beginning. There is no eternal punishment, no ultimate difference between good and bad. Our Lord's words, "He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved, he that believeth not shall be condemned;" His words about the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched-these are not true. Men are not to be judged for what they have done in the flesh, or if they are, the sentences are all favourable, whether for the wickedest sinner or the greatest saint.

Now I say, account for the phenomena of Spiritualism as you like, but give some account of this universal testimony of the adepts of the sect if you can, which does not point to its Satanic origin. By their fruits we know them. If I find the father

of lies in the doctrine, it is not amiss to find him in the evidences of the doctrine. What religion can the mind of man imagine more delightful and more convenient to Satan and his fellows than this! Now this is the growth of the last half century or less. It is true the thing itself, in some shape or other, has always existed. But it has never existed in proportions so full blown as now, and it has never had so many adherents, or so organized a system as now. Dealings with the evil one there have been almost from the beginning of man's history, but dealings on such a scale, and which have been defended by so many persons of high education and fortune, there have never been. Now there are a score of phases of this system, because that particular development which sprang up within our own memory in America has had many sister developments, especially in un-Christian countries. Who can say it is unreasonable for the eye of Christian faith to see in it a beginning of that operation of Satan of which St. Paul speaks, a feature in this nineteenth century in which we live which has only to be intensified, enlarged, developed, in order to bring on the very state of things of which the Apostle speaks in his account of the days of Antichrist? Add this one more element of evil to the others of which I have had to speak, and why should we be surprised if we were to see at once the last great signs in heaven and on earth, which are to herald in the great day of the judgment of the world!

And observe, dear brethren in our Lord, one strange and significant element in the welcome

which this false system has received at the hands of the world. It might have been thought beforehand that a system such as this, which, with all its childishness and turpitude, does still retain the Christian truth of the existence of the soul independently of the body, of the spiritual life, and the future state, would have found on that account its bitterest opponents among the adepts of the false science of which I spoke to you in another of these lectures. Brethren, do not these two systems contradict one the other, almost as forcibly as each of them contradicts the religion of Jesus Christ? Is not Satan divided against Satan, in propagating at the same time these two irreconcilable creeds? No, my brethren, as all the sects in the world find a common ground in their hostility against the Catholic Church, for the sake of which they are content to sink their differences that they may act together against the common enemy, so do we find the very generation which is so fond of that creed of false science of which we have spoken, welcoming at the same time the revelations of Spiritualism. Nay, it would not be too much to say that these revelations have had a kind of attraction for some minds even among men prominent in the development of modern thought, whether in the direction of positive materialism or, at least, of the negation of Christianity; as though it were in order that the words of the Apostle, quoting the language of his Master, Jesus Christ, may be true in them, those who are incredulous to the faith, are, by a certain punishment, credulous of its negation, and

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those who receive not the love of the truth that they may be saved, shall be handed over to the working of falsehood, and believe a lie!

IV.

And now, dear brethren, what are we to gather from all these considerations for ourselves, on whom, as the Apostle says, the ending of the world has come, or may come, and who live in days which are already marked by the features that are to distinguish the close of this world? Many things, indeed, we are to gather, but they cannot be summed up better than in the words of our Lord and His Apostles. "Seeing, then," says St. Peter, "that all these things are to be dissolved, what manner of people ought you to be in holy conversation and godliness? "1 "Take heed to yourselves," says our Lord, "lest perhaps your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this world, and that day come upon you suddenly, for as a snare shall it come upon all that sit on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, praying at all times, that you may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that are to come, and to stand before the Son of Man." Those are great words, "to stand before the Son of Man." We have been thinking during all these Sundays what sort of men those are who will be the victims of all these evil elements of which we have been speaking, but we are bound also to consider what sort of men those must be who are to bear the name of Jesus Christ in the last days and 2 St. Luke xxi. 36.

1 2 St. Peter iii. II.

No common men, my

to suffer in His cause. brethren, no men of careless, indolent lives, no men of imperfect faith, faint hearts, and small courage, no men who have already half capitulated to the world by seeking for its favours in their daily life, though they preserve their faith, no men who are not conquerors first of themselves and the lower parts of their nature, before they are called on to brave all the powers of Antichrist and of Hell let loose on the world! There is surely great reason for us to anticipate that that will be no persecution such as we have read of in the early ages, nor such as our forefathers endured in the days of the penal laws. All the powers and resources and inventions of modern civilization will be at the command of the persecutors, and the exquisite discoveries of science will add the most refined torments, in the case of those who persevere, to the most captivating seductions for those who fall-every seduction to make us yield, every most dreadful penalty if we stand fast! You know what the Israelites were told when they went to war, a proclamation was made that men who had built new houses or planted new vineyards, or who were betrothed, should go away from the battle, and then they were to be warned, "What man is there that is fearful and faint-hearted? Let him go and return to his house, lest he make the hearts of his brethren to fear." No chance, my brethren, in those days, for the fearful or faint-hearted, all will have to be men: and if there are to be men then, we must be men now. For every generation of Christians is more or less what its parents and its

1 Deut. xx. 8.