grace. Nothing is more severe than duty, nothing is more soothing than sentiment. Many persons

therefore prefer to take their religion in feeling rather than in practice. There are men to whose eyes you can bring tears by a few words, but from whose pocket you could not wring money by the eloquence of Demosthenes: and women who have a becoming enthusiasm for goodness in the drawing-room, but who would not sacrifice their pleasures to deliver a soul from death. If there be no correspondence between emotion and action, then religion is an inflated paper currency with no gold for its redemption, and the issue must be spiritual bankruptcy.

There is a nervous disease in which the blood which ought to nourish the muscles has been withdrawn to the head, so that the muscles are depleted and the brain is congested. The patient can do no work, but he is eager, feverish, restless. The spiritual nature is subject to a similar disease; the energy which should expend itself in action is swallowed up in sentiment; there is an overflow of emotion, and a paralysis of action. Alone in our room with an inspiring book there is nothing which we do not achieve. We nurse

lepers, rescue the fallen, die at the stake, make costly sacrifices, move multitudes, trample sin under foot, and annex the whole kingdom of virtues. We are St. Paul, David Livingstone, Florence Nightingale, and General Gordon all in one. We are in a third heaven of sublime devotion, then we lose our temper because some one recalls us to a household duty, or reminds us of an unanswered letter. We oscillate between imagination and selfishness, between passion and indolence. We are deceiving ourselves daily, counting what we would like to do, the same as what we do. Let us be more faithful with ourselves, and more suspicious of every emotion which has not been reduced to action. Idle excitement destroys the very tissue of the soul, and will leave us impotent for any good work, till at last we walk in a vain show with a profession growing ever higher, and a practice sinking ever lower. The final judgment of life after all is not emotion but action.

Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control
That o'er thee swell and throng;

They will condense within thy soul

And change to purpose strong.

But he who lets his feelings run

In soft lascivious flow

Shrinks when hard service must be done

And faints at every blow.

Faith's meanest deed more favour bears
Where hearts and wills are weighed,
Than brightest transports, choicest prayers,
Which bloom their hour and fade.

V

VISION

"Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams."—Acts of the Apostles ii. 17.

NE cannot quote this high word of Hebrew

ON

prophecy without the danger of prejudice. We are living in a day when the function of vision is depreciated and the faculty itself has almost ceased. The blood of the new century is thin and cold; its hopes are few and dim. The great poets and novelists are gone, or are silent; there is no writer left for whose new book we watch as for the breaking of the day, and whose reading would sustain us through the labour of life. No master is rising in painting or in music to interpret modern life and add new provinces to the kingdom of Art. Science, which last century had a career of such matchless success, is now gathering the fruit of her past discoveries. No wonder that thinking people are cynical, and literature is pessimistic, and that Mr. Pearson in his National Life and

Character declares that there are no more conquests for the race. In this age of prosaic thought and pedestrian morality vision suggests everything that is unreal and ineffective— fanaticism, extravagance, sentimentality. Action is a synonym for everything that is practical and successful-industry, shrewdness, and capacity. We are afraid of a visionary because he is an incalculable element; he will take up with lost causes, propose unprofitable schemes, tamper with ancient institutions, and be indifferent to the motive of money. The practical man, with the multiplication table for his creed and the sphere of sight for his province, inspires you with confidence. Just in proportion as a man is cleansed from the visionary element is he serviceable for the mission of life; just in proportion as he sees visions is he unreliable. If young men. began to see visions and old men to dream dreams it would be perilous both for Church and State. 'Facts," we insist; "give us facts, and we secretly add, "Beware of fancies, for they too often mean vision."

Certainly let us always keep in touch with fact. But what about the chief fact of nature