is free from worldliness. He thinks not of himself. He breathes a serener atmosphere than other men. He is nearer to God.

The difference between sanctity and mere dutifulness was seen, it is said, in the hospitals of Paris, when the Sisters of Mercy yielded their place to secular nurses. The duty done was the same, yet not the same; it missed the special charm of devotion, of piety. What, then, was the secret of this charm? It is told that the Sisters whose task is hardest and most painful, such as they who spend their lives in ministering to the fallen abandoned women in the great cities, sometimes feel their hearts sinking within them at the contact with so great and terrible impurity; then they retire into the little chapel set apart for them and pray awhile before the altar, and when their prayer is finished, they are strengthened again for their ministry.

It was even so with the Master Himself, Who "continued all night in prayer to God."

This, or such as this, is indeed the flower of sanctity. It is not the avoidance only, but the abhorrence of evil. It is not the practice only, but the joy of devotion. Yet it is in the power of loving souls, however weak. It is delicacy, refinement, purity,

yet sacrifice too. In it is something that is unearthly, something Divine. For it issues chiefly or solely from the example of Him Who, being in the world, was yet not of it, but lived above it in the perfectness of an immaculate purity; for Him alone among the children of men evil could not approach or defile, and from the cradle to the Cross there rested not upon His soul even the passing shadow of sin. This it is that the world will lose, if it loses religion.

Yet is there no greater sorrow than the loss of an ideal. For though the ideal be never realised, it has the power of attracting thoughts and hopes and desires upwards to itself.

Sanctity is rare among men. The saints are few; but the world is saved by its saints. They alone, it may be, ascend to the highest height, and their feet are set on the untrodden snow; but others struggling heavenwards from the lowlands take hope from the vision of the saints. The beliefs and habits of religion constitute the saintly life. Apart from them there would in the end be no saints. And it may be feared that, when the supreme attainment of virtue is done away, the moral standard of the world would gradually be lowered.

And not only would the moral standard be lowered, but morality itself would suffer a change. Morality is a word of various meaning; it did not mean the same thing in the ancient classical as in the modern world; it would not mean the same thing in an infidel as in a religious society. For the virtues which relate to or depend on Immortality, such as the reverence for human life, the habit of worship, the culture of purity, would languish, if Immortality were no longer a faith. Every religion has its own morality, and the morality approved, if not always practised, in Christian society, is the morality which Jesus Christ taught.

Thus the value of the belief in Immortality is a conclusion arising from a just estimate of human nature.

While it is admitted that the virtuous tendencies of Humanity are the ground upon which the hope of human progress rests, it remains true that the moral dignity of man is less positive and stable than it is sometimes imagined to be. Human virtue cannot yet make boast of itself. immutable fact. The best of men are not far removed from the worst sins. Humanity stands, as it were, on the slope of a high mountain, it

It is not an

breathes the pure and bracing air of Heaven, but it may soon and easily lose its footing and sink backwards into the depths which lie below.

Great and awful, then, is the responsibility of those who would cut away any sanction or support of the moral life. But the chief of these sanctions and supports is Immortality.

The faith in Immortality, then, if it be lost, is irreplaceable.

But it is not only the morality of individuals which is at stake in the battle of belief; it is also the morality, and with it the felicity, of nations.

And here it is perhaps worth while to notice that it is not so much the wealthy or privileged or cultivated classes who are so dependent upon a faith in Immortality; it is, however little they may themselves know it, the poor, the ignorant, the unhappy, the debased. The faith of these classes may be tacit or inarticulate or concealed, as their faith in God is often; but if it exists, though lying ever so deep within them, it is a check upon wild action and a solace in the sufferings of life. It cannot, I think, be proved, but neither can it be denied, that the social and political movements, indicating in many European countries a discontent

and an impatience which are dangerous signs of the time, are largely the outcome of the speculations which have taught men, in the name of Philosophy or Science or any other name, to cast away the restraining power of belief in God. Certainly it is remarkable that that discontent or impatience in its most pronounced form, when it calls itself anarchism, is equally intolerant and contemptuous of authority, human and Divine; it treats the laws of men with as little respect as the laws of God. And, indeed, if the faith of the people in God and Immortality is done away, and their privations, their labours, their sufferings remain, is it reasonable to think that they will acquiesce in an inequality which was always hard to bear and is now felt to be hopeless, because it fills the whole space of their existence ?

The faith in Immortality where it exists is always a motive-the strongest of all motives-to a patient self-restraint. And not only so, but that faith, whether among individuals or among nations, is a spur to moral action. He who possesses it, however often he may have failed, yet possesses in himself the potency of better things. For human life, if it be complete within itself, does not authorise an absolute morality. It is the doctrine of Im