beyond its own high impulse may be needed. The law of life will be its own executive. There will be no inducements to a pure spirit to struggle out of its heavenly harnessings. All perils and subtle antagonisms from without will be impossible. We shall be like Him.' We shall be with Him where He is. But in a mixed state such as the present, where forms and forces of evil not only set in against us, but are actively at work within us, we need the impulse that comes from incentive, from check and defence. And this the Christian teaching impressively furnishes.

The principle on which it proceeds is, That in the government of God the life of the individual man, as that is voluntarily chosen in the present, gets its counterpart in the future: that in the choices we here make, and in the character we manufacture out of these, we necessitate the consequences that we must encounter there: that, in fact and substance, this transitory present is the rehearsal and prologue of the part we are each to sustain in the finality of the future. Men like Paul and Plato, Bacon and Locke, Shakespeare and Milton, Arkwright and Watt, the great thinkers, inventors and discoverers of the past, have left brave words and grand deeds safe in the world's keeping for all time. Such men live to-day because they cannot die. They are immortal in the life of the race. But in writing their books, or making their discoveries, they were constructing their own characters also. They were the architects and builders of individual fortunes, of which they are the conscious inheritors to-day. Beside the Paradise Lost which the great poet left behind him, there was a Paradise Gained which grew up in the silent majesty of his own consciousness, and which he took away with him when he unclothed himself of mortality; or he was undone. That, or the life of the foremost thinkers, sages, poets, statesmen, philosophers, must be pronounced a stupendous failure.

'Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' That, and all that. That, and nothing more, and nothing diverse from that. So the righteous man in Time gets the fruit of his righteousness in Eternity; and the unrighteous man in Time gets the fruit of his unrighteousness in Eternity. And there is nothing arbitrary or accidental in this arrangement. It hinges nothing on the foreordainment of any decretal purpose with God. It is the sole resultant of a free will in each man electing his own choice, and walking therein. 'Whatsoever a man soweth,' be it little or much, good or evil, that shall he 'reap.' We make our future outcrop in our present choice.

And you will observe that, in laying down this law, nothing of the final award is anticipated in the present. The predicate is not, that if a man sow to the Spirit, if he live a pure and noble life, he shall reap the fruit of his righteousness here; the reverse of that is sometimes apparently and painfully true. Nor that if a man 'sow to the flesh' he shall, as a consequence, reap a harvest of shame and sorrow in the present world: although that is sometimes wholly true, and always partially so; for penalty is a part of the evil sowing. All sin is trafficking with poison. It contains its own punishment, as the seed

contains the fruit. But the balance of destiny is to be struck after the deposit has been wholly paid, and according to that deposit. We ourselves are the sowers of the seed, and in ourselves we are to reap the harvest of our own sowing. 'If we live after the flesh, we shall die; but if we through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, we shall live.'

Let us now take one further step. Having sown to the flesh, a man reaps corruption. What now of the reaping? Is the corruption-itself a loathsome, leprous, subjective defilement: the disintegration of all the mental and moral powers: the fierce eruption of unclean, implacable, unsated passion: the very core of the soul steeped in the dye, and embittered by the self-inflicted rage of inexpiable sin: the unbending justice, the felt displeasure of a holy God, surging and seething through every pore of the quivering consciousness, torturing to madness, and begetting the agony of unmitigated despair-is that the penalty, the lurid 'crop into which the flesh when sown develops'? Or is it a state of retributive abandonment in which a habit of necessitated sinning reproduces the guilt, and so perpetuates the self-inflicted punishment of sin? Both-tremblingly, we think both. There is a potentiality in sin, which, so far as experience or analogy can help us, knows nothing of selfarrest, self-amendment, self-exhaustion. Its teeming womb, therefore, may populate the endless future with its hideous births. 'It may be questioned,' says a living writer,' whether the sinner left to himself will ever seek or find repentance and self-recovery. So far as we know anything of sin, it is self-perpetuating. It may be a law of man's being which, though not of fate, is yet inevitable as fate, that every free agent, who sins against the restraints imposed by his own moral sense and the will of God, overleaps a barrier along the pathway of goodness and of life which he will never effectually desire to recross. Every principle which we call sinful may, in its very nature, be permanent and eternal.' To this invincible persistency in the habit of sinning, following, as we believe it does, on the irreversible finality of moral condition at death, let there be added the positive inflictions of avenging justice, indicated with such fearful significance in Scripture: the 'indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish,' the 'drinking of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation,' and the outlook of an unpurged, suffering and immortal intelligence is sufficiently appalling.

Let us understand, then, to what issues we are each here and now committing ourselves. You are not, we will suppose, in any distinctively Christian sense, a godly man. While you utterly disclaim, and would be. affronted at the imputation of being counted an infidel, you are still not unwilling to forego the blessedness of being a Christian. You are well contented to be considered by others, what only you consider yourself, a well-to-do, strictly honest and moral man. That is your choice: and when the transitory interests of Time give place to the retributive awards of Eternity, you will reap the consequences of what you have chosen. That, and only that. You cannot lay up treasure in heaven for the future, while your attention, in

its most passionate assiduities, is given only to laying up treasures on earth for the present. You cannot serve both God and mammon. Find out, therefore, just what is your proper self all through life, and in that self you have the schedule of all that you will carry away with you at death.

Or you are, we will assume, a thoroughly worldly man. By the deliberate preference of sense over reason, the world, in its breezy honours, its glittering wealth, its nectared sweetness, is the object of your pursuit: and you succeed in winning its caresses, and at length die a moral bankrupt in the midst of the possessions which you sold yourself to purchase. Very well. You have sown the wind, and you must reap the whirlwind. The purchase and the possession are yours. 'God is not mocked.' The entail abides, that

is all.

Or, once again, you are a dissipated and a vicious man. Life is a voluptuous thing, and the fiery joy with which you quaff its pleasures has its spring in passion. The old epicurean maxim, condensing life's sweetness into one luscious drop, is the basis on which you traffic in this stupendous folly. 'You freshen your garlands in the wine cup, and hang them dripping round your brow,' with the bacchanalian shout upon your lips, 'Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die.' Very well. That is your choice; and there are consequences following that choice from which you can no more escape than you can unmake or escape from yourself. The end of these things is death.' And if God will not thrust His hand through this concatenation of cause and effect to cut off the entail of sequences hereafter; and if you have neither the will nor the power to do it, then you must encounter, in all their unmitigated severity, the avenging rights of Him against Whom your choice has gone.

6

Or, finally, you are a scoffer, making mouths at God, and laughing to scorn the reality of supernatural things. And there is no mockery like that which tilts its coarse or finely feathered shafts at the sanctity of religion. The bloated sensualism that plunges a man into the mire, and leaves him there, wallowing in its hideous feculency, horrible as that is, is not to be compared with the sardonic leer that scoffs at the things of God. To look out on the solemn grandeur of a world of sense, spangled as it is all over with a celestial glory, and call it emptiness, carpentry, a mockery and a sham, is bad enough, offensive enough. But to put 'the print of a sooty finger' on the Book of God, and call it an imposture and a cheat; to re-examine and torture its witnesses only to condemn them; to crucify afresh 'the Son of God' and 'put Him to an open shame' as a Name no longer large enough to fill the vaulting intellect of the age, that is a bravery which devils might envy, but cannot emulate. But it can be done. It is being done. And God permits it to be done. Not a blow is struck to avenge Him of His adversaries. It is to the future that He looks. The law which relegates this present to that future is silent in its action, because resistless and sure in its assertion. The doom of relentless consequences is in its vindication. That is sufficient. That can wait. 'God is not mocked.' 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' The settlement comes at the end.

Let, then, the struggling Christian man sit down and think. Let the worldly man, and the self-righteous man, and the scoffing man, sit down and think. The life we are now living in the flesh is a fact; the future life we are yet to live is not less a fact. The bond of relationship set up between these two we ourselves determine. We are each building up into his present personal life the substance of a character which we shall hereafter continue endlessly to possess. Our birth, our home, our training; our faculties, opportunities and occupations; our pleasures and pains; our conditions of wealth and poverty, of hardship and ease, these are all the instruments with which we are now constructing the fabric of our endless selves. They are the scaffolding, the working powers, the tools with which we work. And when the work is done, and the scaffolding removed, the work itself, in the fixedness of its results, will abide for ever. 'Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.'

Let no man, then, delude himself by any intellectual juggling into the belief that, in some inexplicable way, he can win his seed-time of riotous living on earth, and escape its consequences in Eternity. God is not mocked. Nature is never cheated. The eternal laws of destiny cannot be evaded. Giventhe central fact of what we are now, and in what we shall find ourselves summed up at death, and a thousand years hence, or a thousand million— without the interpolation of some machinery, new, miraculous and unimaginable, into the plan and purpose of God, which shall not supplement but surrender the whole time economy of the Divine Thought-we shall be found each one eating the fruit of his own doings. The seedlings of time root themselves, with more than the grasp of omnipotence, into the issues of eternity -for not even the almighty power of God can uncommit an act once committed. And if that act be a life of wilful, unpurged evil, its punishment is sure as death, and, it would seem, unending as eternity.

NEO-CATHOLICISM AND MORALITY:

BY AN EX-ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST.
(Concluded from page 602.)

MOURN over the youth who learns
science and truth and justice under
the leaden sceptre of the infallible
Papacy. One man reveals the
heavens, and he is accursed; another
man reveals the round earth, and he
is accursed; another man reveals
man's body, and even he is accursed.
Andrew Vesalius did not teach the
system of Galen: to dogmatism, he
opposed experience; he garnered the

VOL. II.-SIXTH SERIES.

harvest of science, taking his pupils to examine the bodies of the dead criminals on the highways; he gathered the spoils of knowledge from the tombs and from the gallows; he unfolded the conformation of our body, so 'fearfully and wonderfully made' he discovered thus a new world in man. . Of course, he fell under the censure of the Roman Church; he had to make a pilgrimage 2 U