of the Advent that is past, and a pledge of the Advent of the perfect kingdom of God that is yet to come, and whose coming may be hastened by every one of us. We pray that God's kingdom may come ; let us do something to make it come.

30th November 1890.

XXX

ADVENT AND FAREWELL

"Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God."-Is. xl. 3.

I HAVE tried to find some one leading and guiding thought for my last sermon in this place. And I find it in this text; one specially suitable also to our Advent Season.

As I pass in review the aims I have had in preaching to you, my desire to teach you to understand and love and serve our Master Jesus Christ, to explain to you the nature of the Bible and its teaching about God, to open your eyes to the immense importance of watchfulness and care in your own lives, of honour, purity, truthfulness, loyalty, and the cardinal virtues of character, I think you will all feel that one aim has rarely been absent from my thoughts-the desire to equip you with principles and motives, so that not as boys only, but as men, you shall be fit and eager to play your proper part in the world. That you shall be God-fearing men, doing something to win the world to Christ, and bring in His kingdom, this has been very often before me. Perhaps I have wearied you by too often harping on your future duty as men.

Perhaps it would have been better to have spoken to you as you are. But so it has been. This chapel always raises in my mind the thought of what you will be. I see you in a vision twenty years hence. School and close and house are the discipline of boys; but the chapel has been in my eyes the seedground for the thoughts which shall spring up in you as men.

So once more I will speak on my old topic, in language and thought that shall be new, but still the old topic, and consider how we, the selected and privileged few, privileged to receive the very best education and influence that England has to offer, how we can play our part in the great national drama; how repay to the world the happiness and benefits it has given us; and that means how can we best contribute to national welfare, and "prepare the way of the Lord."

First, perhaps, by making our greater stores of knowledge-scientific, critical, historical, philosophical, whatever our knowledge may be, indeed our whole influence as educated people-serve to strengthen faith, and increase the national sense of God's presence among us. This is indeed a making straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Those words were first uttered in Babylon, separated from Judæa by the trackless desert; the desert appalling by its silence, its vastness, its barrenness, its death-likeness-and far off, treasured in their child memories, was the land of Judæa, in which every spot had some sacred reminiscences of God's visits to bless and protect His people. The people called up in memory their Bethel, their Hebron, their Jerusalem, and the bygone days in which God seemed

near. Now He was far off; and yet His prophet bids them make a pathway through the desert back to their old land; and more than this, he says it shall blossom as the rose, and fountains of water shall spring up; he tells them that the desert shall be as the Garden of Eden, and that the weakest shall not fail as he treads its path.

It is a sort of parable.

When the world seemed small, and when we were children, we seemed close to God. We had the child-like theology of a tiny world. We could think of Him as overruling everything for our special good; as caring individually for the young ravens that call upon him. But there has grown on the world the vast extent of natural knowledge. We have been taken out of the little Holy Land of our childhood and transplanted into a Babylon far off across the desert, and we look with wistful eyes at its vast and silent sand-ocean that separates us from God. Some of us have even been born in Babylon, and know the sacred land of child-like faith only by tradition of our fathers, a tradition that grows dim. The universe is so vast—man is but the tiny dust on a planet which is an invisible appendage to the sun; and that sun itself is only a second or thirdrate star among countless millions of stars. Can God take care of man across these infinite spaces? And the scale of time is so vast; the earth and sun itself, as it seems, have grown to be what they are out of streams of meteoric dust, involving ages of time, geologic and cosmic, as much beyond our minds to grasp or express in years and centuries as are the distances beyond our scale of miles. Through this vast desert of space and time that

seems to separate us from God it is the duty and the privilege of the educated and faithful thought of our time to make straight a highway for our God. For this very purpose we are stewards of the manifold gifts of God."

It has been my fate often to be asked how in the face of universal law, and continuity, and the vast scale of the universe, it is possible to retain firm my faith in God. My old answer used to be that it only means we must go further back for the Great Cause. The chain is longer, but it hangs at last from the throne of God: that growth in time is as wonderful as sudden creation. An oak sprung from an acorn is as wonderful as a new-created tree. But now it must be that, even if the continuity were complete, if matter grew by chemical forces into life, and life developed into instinct, and instinct into reason, and reason into this power we possess of conscience, of knowing right from wrong, of feeling after God, and knowing and loving him, the only result would be that those chemical forces were the action of God Himself. We look not at the raw materials but at the finished product to judge of the skill of the workman not at the quarry but at the cathedral; not at the block of marble but at the statue that has come out of it.

We who are educated ought to see the whole range of science and knowledge with the eyes of faith; seeing it all, that is, as but the avenue and approaches to the highest and holiest in the temple of God all the wonders of nature from a drop of water to the distant stars, the marvels of life, of the physical forces, are the heralds of the power and wonderfulness of God; and all that one gains from