lust of getting.

be borne with:

If wealth comes, it must let it remember its 'strict

and solemn account at the judgment-seat of Christ.'

Chivalry had its faults, had its snares, had its sins. Yet we owe it something-owe it something still. It consolidated, if it did not originate, the qualities which make up the gentleman. That consideration, which makes room for others' feelings, others' opinions, others' interests; that value for the esteem, that sensitiveness to the disregard, of fellow-men, which alone makes social life possible; that confidence in another's word, that tenacity of one's own honour, which together make the very condition of human dealing; that personal independence, which prevents courtesy from degenerating into servility, and man from being the mere echo and copy of surrounding men; that truth without insolence, and courage without ferocity, which is at once so beautiful and so strong-these virtues, as Christian as they are human, were the prerogatives and specialities of knighthood; and ill can we exchange them for that other thing, which may call itself bluntness or call itself business,' but which belongs to the race and age of the barbarian, and would drive into exile, if it should ever gain predominance amongst us, all that has hitherto made the charm and the grace of the national existence.

་

Yet one thing strikes us, in this momentary glance at the seventh century behind us, and it is the firm hold which the Gospel itself had on the minds and hearts of men.

Whence that intense interest in the land hallowed by Christ's footsteps? Whence that burning shame, that fierce resentment, at the occupation of that spot of earth by the Infidel? It was an ignorant and a superstitious feeling, you say, and it showed itself in uncharitable speech and unchristian action. We may grant all this, and yet wish that there were amongst us one spark of the same loyalty, even in its ignorance, to the Name and the Person of Jesus Christ. It is not that we feel as they felt, but restrain and coerce the feeling within bounds more reasonable and more Christian. Alas, the feeling itself is less zealous and less ardent in the same kind and class of men Exceptions there are grand and magnificent exceptions-soldiers and sailors filled with the love of Christ, and animated by that love to deeds of heroic daring. One such exception is in all hearts to-day. If I name not the name, it is because I need not. All that is heroic in the age of Chivalry, all that is enlightened in our own, there met and were at one. But this refutes not the saying, That which would have been impossible in the old days of knighthood is possible now. Men

can blaspheme Christ aloud now, and be scatheless and blameless and respectable still.

2. But I must hasten onwards to my goal. While we thus interrogate the past, let us be faithful in occupying the present. Great opportunities are ours. The past has come down to us with its wealth of names and deeds to be the possessions and treasures of the present. It has come to us modified and moulded by Providence into a shape manageable and usable by ourselves. The figures and forms of antiquity, whether of speech or thought, have been laid aside with their weapons and their vestments, having served their purpose, and belonging essentially to the transitory and the perishable. But that which was real in them has not perished. Habits of hardihood, principles of virtue, fidelity to engagements, the counting all things loss for duty, reverence for the weak, self-sacrifice for conscience-these things survive of them, to be the models and the incentives of all generations. 'Other men laboured, and we have entered into their labours.' Other men endured, other men witnessed, and we have entered upon the inheritance of their sacrifices and their martyrdoms. The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground; yea, I have a goodly heritage'—not more in the ancestral homes and glorious institutions of England, than in the lives which have

contributed to form her character, and the voices which speak to us from immortal graves.

Nor is this occupancy of the present a thing for feeling only. There is work for it too. Never was there so large a field, never so free a choice, for Christian activity, as in this age and at this point in it. I will dare to say that the chivalrous idea of Protection never had so large a scope as to-day. What are all these new efforts of Christian charity in eastern and southern London, whatever their particular shape or name —whether they aim specially at the rescue from beggary, or the rescue from intemperance, or the rescue from vice, or the rescue from heathenism -but so many Crusades of soldiers of Christ, banded and sworn together for the protection of weakness against strength, if it be but the weakness of goodness itself in the heart of a man amidst the overmastering strength of self and the Fall?

The Temple of this day contributes many gallant champions to this holy war; many of its younger members, not yet finding full employment in the Profession which is to be their life— some even of the busiest and most successful. This was the work of our lost hero-true knight 'without fear and without reproach '—during the only time of his life when he can be said to have had a home, and when he gave himself to the seeking and saving of the waifs and strays of

London, as he would fain have given himself afterwards to the protection of the poor sheep (as he called them) of the Soudan. Sons of the New Temple, be ye followers of him, in this occupying of the present, even as he was of Christ.

3. The commemoration which now draws to its close has yet one last word for us-it bids us to trust the future. There is much in our present national circumstances to suggest thoughts of anxiety, thoughts even of fear. Far be it from us to counsel blindness, to counsel presumption, or to counsel levity. If these had been the characteristics of England on the corresponding day of three centuries or of one century ago, she would never have been the England of our pride and of our affection to-day. Yet I cannot think the reasonable estimate of our position at this moment really graver or darker than it was at either of the periods just enumerated. The Spain of 1585 was at least as menacing in proportion as the Russia of to-day. The first French Revolution, the first French Empire, were more frightfully alarming, were it but by their nearer neighbourhood to this country, than anything that at present threatens her in Africa or in Asia.

Trust the future. For ourselves the limits of one generation mercifully forbid the full developement