life can feel; where the issues are not those of physical growth or catastrophe, but of the culture or decay of character; and whose central sun, the source and fountain of whose life is not a burning globe hung in the heavens, but a personal God who feeds all the souls of His children with His love, and guides them by His wisdom, and blesses or punishes them by His judgment. Those are the components of that spiritual world, the human spirit and God. No man has ever seen either of them. They cannot report themselves through the eye. But Jesus says that the world of which they are the constituents is a real world; and that though the eye cannot give them admission to the intelligence to which all worlds must report themselves before they can become part of the life of man, there is an organ which is to this world of spiritual life what the eye of the body is to a world of trees and lakes.

And what then is that organ? The name by which it is best known is Conscience; and we may freely use the name of Conscience to represent that organ which stands between the intelligence of man and the spiritual world, just as the eye stands between the intelligence of men and the world of physical nature, and brings the two together.

Conscience is the faculty by which we judge of acts as right or wrong. It follows then, of necessity, that all knowledge of the deeper natures of things by which they become possibly the instruments of righteousness or wickedness, and all knowledge of those deeper and higher parts of the universe which are capable of being known only in their moral characters, must of necessity come in through some such organ or faculty as this, which each man knows that he possesses, and by which he says of characters, "This is good or bad," just as by his eye he says of a branch of a tree, "This is straight or crooked.”

Just so it is about God,- -a Being whose essence is morality, a Being who is good and who loves or hates all things in the world according as they are good or bad,-God is here before you; and you have no open conscience. You do not care whether things are right or wrong. You have no perception of the essential difference between right and wrong. By and by, suddenly or gradually, all that changes. Your shut conscience opens. You begin to feel the difference of right and wrong. You begin to try to do right. And then it is, in the pursuance of that effort, that there become gradually impressed upon your intelligence certain things which had found no recognition there before. The spiritual nature of the world; that all this mass of things and events is fitted for and naturally struggles towards the education of character;-the spiritual nature of man; the truth that man is fully satisfied only with what satisfies his spirit, only with character, and with an endless chance for that character to grow; —and God; the existence, behind all standards and laws of righteousness, of a perfectly righteous One, from Whom they all proceed and by Whom those who try to follow them are both judged and helped; -these are the before unseen realities which come pressing into your intelligence, tempting, demanding your recognition when your conscience is once open, when you have once begun to live in the desire and struggle to do right.

In both the cases, in the sight through the eye and the sight through the conscience, the intelligence which waits within, and does not yet see for itself, is not, of course, shut out from testimony. If a man is thoroughly blind and never sees the sun himself, other men who do see it with their open eyes may, no doubt, come and tell him of it; and in his darkened soul, if he believes them, there grows up some

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dim, distorted image of the sun which he has never seen. Nay, other senses have some stray messages to tell him of the world, whose full revelation can come only through the opened eye. feels the sun in its warmth; he smells the rose in its sweetness; he tastes the flavour of the peach. Through these chinks there steal in some tidings of the wondrous world, even while the window through which it can report itself entirely is shut and shuttered. I am impressed by seeing how exactly all this has its correspondent in man's knowledge of the universe of spiritual things. There, too, through testimony and through sideway and accidental intimations, as it were, some knowledge comes even when conscience is shut and no struggle to do right is urging it open to its work.

And there is yet another point in resemblance of this comparison of the eye and the conscience, which is striking. When one declares thus, that through the conscience man arrives at the knowledge of unseen things, and conceptions of God and spiritual force and immortality reveal themselves to the intelligence, at once the suggestion comes from some one who is listening, "Can we be sure of the reality of what thus seems to be made known? How can we be sure that what the conscience sends in to the understanding are not mere creations of its own; things which it thinks exist because it seems to need them; mere forms in which it has been led to clothe with outward and substantial life

its own emotions ?" Everybody knows such questions. They are thrown up, on every side, to the man who, trying to do right, thinks that through his effort he has found God. But now think how exactly they are the same questions which have always haunted man's whole thought about his vision of the world of nature. How often we are told that none of us can

prove that all these things which our eyes see have any real existence outside our sense of sight; that all that we are sure of are certain sensations and impressions in our own brains. Are not then the questions which haunt the conscience the same as those which haunt the eye? And as the eye deals with its questions, so will the conscience always deal with its. At least we may say this, that it would be a very deep confidence indeed if the spirit felt as sure of God as the mind feels of nature. This we feel very deeply in these days, when to so many minds the certainty of nature seems to stand in strong contrast with the uncertainty of God. It is much if we can see that the doubts which are suggested as to the sight of the spirit, are but the same with the doubts which we easily overcome when we are dealing with the sight of the body.

Before the parallel, which Christ's illustration suggests, is quite completely apprehended, there is one thing more which we ought to observe. We have talked as if all that was necessary, in order that the eye of man should see the world of nature, was that the eye should be open; but we know very well that something else is needed. The world of nature may be there in all its beauty, but the most open eye will not see it, if it be not turned that way. The eye, wide open, turned to the blank wall, will not see the mountain and the meadow. "Open your eyes and look here," we say to a child into whose intelligence we want the wonder of nature to be pourtrayed. And now, is there anything that corresponds to this second necessity in the case of conscience and its perception of spiritual truth? Surely there is. There is an openness of conscience, a desire and struggle to do right, which is distinctly turned away from God and the world of spiritual things, so that, even if they were there, it would not

see them. On the other hand, there is an openness of conscience, a desire and struggle to do right, which is turned towards God and the supernatural, which is expectant of spiritual revelation; and to that conscience the spiritual revelation comes. This does not amount to saying that the conscience sees what it wants to see. It is very different from that. Many things, the conscience, like the eye, wants to see, and does not see them because they do not exist. But those things which do exist, though they be the plainest of realities, -no conscience can see which, with the greatest scrupulousness and faithfulness, is turned the other way and expecting revelation from another quarter.

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What a great truth this is that we have reached? Is it then true that every man carries about with him such a capacity as this? This impulse, the necessity of doing right, of struggling with temptation, which has so often seemed to make life a hard slavery,-see what it really is! It is the opening of the organ through which the whole world of unseen spiritual light and life, all the being and power and love of God, all our untold future in the regions of immortal growth, may flow in on us and become real and influential in our life. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." We praise the hand, the ear, the eye, the brain, for all the knowledge they so wonderfully bring to man. Is there among them all any organ which a man should honour and glorify and enshrine in such reverent obedience as this, the Conscience; if indeed through it, God and the unseen world of God may come to him, and his poor humanity grow rich in knowing them?

And so we are led quietly onward to that which Jesus teaches in the text. "If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light;'

the critical importance of a pure, true conscience, of a steady, selfsacrificing struggle to do right Godward. So only can the channel be kept open, through which the knowledge of God and of the spiritual things which belong to Him, can enter into our spirits.

All this seems to throw so much light upon the nature and purpose of Christ's incarnation. Men say: "He came to show us God." Other men say, "No, but He came to save us from our sins." Are not the two really one? It would be easy to ask whether He who showed men God must not save them from their sins. But-what is more to our purpose now to ask-must not He who saves men from their sins show men God? The work of Jesus was to make men do right Godward; to make men do right not merely that the world might be more quiet and peaceable and decent, but in order that into souls thus open through their consecrated consciences, the knowledge of that God might enter in whose knowledge is eternal life.

Remember how Jesus always found, in His own obedience to His Father, the secret of His Father's perpetual revelation of Himself to Him. "The Father hath not left Me alone, for I do always those things that please Him," He said. Those words are the key to it all. He did right Godward. In Him was neither the abstract meditation and study of divine things which thinks that the knowledge of them is like the knowledge of the rocks or the stars, something quite independent of the moral conditions in the knower; nor, on the other hand, was there in Him that mere slavery to duty on its lower grounds of economy and prudence, which often paralyzes the conscience and shuts it up as a channel for the higher knowledge. He did right Godward. And in the wilderness His strength of resistance must have

been in the certainty that if He yielded and sinned, the door would close through which the perpetual knowledge of His Father was forever flowing into Him and filling Him with rich joy and peace.

And what His own life was, Jesus is always trying to make the lives of His disciples be. He is always trying to lead men to do right with hopes and expectations Godward. Men debate again whether Jesus is a human example and teacher, or a divine Power and Redeemer. Surely He is both, and between the two there is no conflict. They are most congruous. Both are parts of that completeness of life by which He would draw the conscience of man upward and make it clear and pure, so that through it knowledge of God should descend. He taught men holiness by His example and His words; and He declared, in all He was and did, the love of God; and the result of all of it, to John, and Mary, and Nicodemus, and the Magdalen, and countless other unnamed disciples, was that they saw God through consciences made scrupulous and holy, and turned to God by the attraction of His manifested love.

Turn to the consummate act of His life, the act in which His life was all summed up, and see all this in its completeness. Look at Jesus on the cross. See Him there con

victing sin by the sight of its terrific consequence. See Him also drawing men's souls up, away from the earth and from themselves, up to God, by that amazing sign of how God loved them. And turning from looking at the sufferer and looking into the faces of those men and women to whom His suffering has brought its power, see how, in the struggle against sin under the power of the love of God, to which the cross has summoned them, they are knowing God; how, in St. Paul's great words, "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, is giving unto them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of their understanding being enlightened."

There is thus opened up the hope that men may know the things of the spiritual life, the things of God, of which many are telling us now that they are unknowable by man. That we must not believe. So long as man is able to do right Godward, to keep his conscience pure, and true, and reverent, set upon doing the best things on the highest grounds, he carries with him an eye through which the everlasting light may, and assuredly will, shine in upon his soul. Such faithfulness and consecration and hope may God give to all, that we may know Him more and more. PHILLIPS BROOKS.