The historic scale to which I referred exhibits the soul only as some high observatory presents to the eye the face of the earth. You see hills lying side by side, like ridges in a new-ploughed field, and mountains embosomed in mountains, and some Himalaya overcapping the whole. The valleys, the brooks, the sunny slopes, are hidden. So history only gives us the tops of the highest things; and any historic view of the soul's worth is exceedingly imperfect. The vales, the lower places of human existence, which the sun every day visits and God loves to look upon, history does not open to us. But, in fact, near the palace is a cottage; by the side of the great king lives a little peasant; adjoining the celebrated battle-field is an humble, quiet village; Raphael's immortal pictures are taken from the face of a gentle girl, whose name scarcely survives; while Milton composed the Paradise Lost, many a paradise was regained in the holy family circle, and in the acquisitions of meek spirits; while a hundred thousand men were twenty years hauling stone for the Egyptian pyramid, as a sepulchre for a dead king, winds and woods, birds and flowers, were busy converting into an edifice which the Almighty himself should inhabit, the heart of some nameless man by the side of some nameless brook. There is a beautiful painting by Aldus of a poor woman, who, having spun past midnight to support a bed-rid mother, has fallen asleep through fatigue, and angels are represented finishing her work. The obscure woman who anointed Jesus's feet most unconsciously did an act which the Divine Saviour himself has published to the praise of all ages. And where, in the Gospel adjudication, many were rewarded for things they wist not what, they were told it was because they had given cups of

water to the thirsty, and in unremembered ways relieved the distressed. Down in the by-places of life, in untrayelled regions, in unstoried actions, in unbestarred lowliness, the soul has been rich toward God, — its true worth has been displayed, its salvation made certain. All diabolical temptation has been repelled; all insidious, souldegrading thought been extinguished; the sweetest charities have been cultivated, a resistless, far-reaching love exercised, and a pure spirituality attained. Many a widow has cast in her mite; her person was unrecognized, her name unknown, her destiny unascertained; but Christ blessed her as she passed along. The tawny Indian, who in his arms bore one of our Pilgrim forefathers, that had lost his way, across a river, took him to his wigwam, fed him with beans and maize, gave him a wolf's skin to sleep on, and in the morning conducted him to his home, — that Indian, I say, was killed; but I believe he went to heaven.

But, on the other hand, the denial of Christ also goes on; a profitless speculation is had in evil; men barter away that which they can never recover;

their souls.

they lose

The intemperate man loses his soul. He annihilates his self-consciousness and self-command; he quenches conscience and reason; he parts, by degrees, with all the finer attributes of our nature; he repels the heart that is devoted to him, he wastes affections that are lavished upon him. The voice of God he does not hear, and the still, small voice of wife or child, in stupid vioDisease writes her blazonry on his

lence, he assails.

face, and perdition catches his soul.

The avaricious man loses his soul. One such, even for twenty pieces of silver, betrayed the Lord and Saviour

of the world. It was such a one, also, that Christ described in the passage I have read. This man, it would appear, abandoning the higher prerogatives of his nature, despising the proper attainments of a rational and immortal being, hardening himself to all philanthropic sympathies, thought only of his worldly estate, and gave himself up to monetary accumulations. The hungry might starve for him; the good of society he cared not for; all duties to God or man or himself he left undone. He is presented to us as the type of one who concentrates all thought, feeling, means, opportunities, times, in an inordinate selfishness. On that empty shell of humanity rings the hand of death. "This night is thy soul required of thee," is the strange, dreadful voice he hears. The hypocrite loses his soul. "Woe unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites! One cannot long maintain a false position without becoming in his own heart radically false. You practise pretence and subterfuge, and your own character loses its best, its divine instincts. Hypocrisy leads, straightway, to the basest duplicity and the most ruinous hollow-heartedness. ⚫A hypocritical politician not more certainly exposes himself to the derision of mankind, than to the disintegration and waste of personal, conscious rectitude. Those who live to seem soon only seem to be; every vestige of substantiality disappears; there remain but the shadow and semblance of a man. The cloak we put on, like the robe of Hercules, corrodes and consumes us. The grosser kinds of hypocrisy, in this day of civilization, are somewhat discarded. Our hypocrisy is very refined, and very plausible, and interlarded with a good deal of truth and apparent sincerity; so much the worse for that; the nearer poison comes to the heart and the

springs of action, the greater is our danger. We deceive ourselves by our pretexts, till we know not what we are; like the man who committed perjury so often, he knew not when he spoke the truth. Goodness itself becomes hypocritical, and saints broaden the phylacteries of their sainthood. Such a course is onward to ruin. The true inner life of piety, by such fair seeming, is fast turning into a whited sepulchre. We act diplomatically, from an ambassador at a foreign court down to a shop-boy. Death is in all such business, death to truth, death to happiness, death to our prosperity, death to principle, death to the soul.

There is no single vice which our Saviour so especially reprobated as that of hypocrisy, none which seemed so effectually to counteract all the purposes of his mission, and none from which his own principles were more abhorrent, or to which his whole conduct formed so vivid an exception.

The bigot loses his soul. The bigot has no strong appetite to feed, like the drunkard; he has no absorbing aim of life, like the miser; he lacks even the supple smoothness of the hypocrite; his position is one of hatred to all that is beautiful, free, joyous, in the world. Like death, he lays an icy hand on the flowing pulse and the active frame of our life. He repels all approach to his sympathies, to his magnanimity, to his impulses. The love of Christ which embraces all, encourages all, blesses all, he never felt. He prays, but he has no exaltation of spirit; he communes, but he has no fellowship. If he had lived earlier, he would have pronounced sentence of death on Christ; now that he lives later, he makes Christ the punitive judge of others. The fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, gentleness,

goodness, long-suffering, he has none; but what passes for a holy indignation, a species of sanctified malice. He voluntarily cuts himself off from Christ, and lies a dead branch; the sap and juices of his soul are dried up. He does not lie, nor steal, nor swear, but he has erected stakes, excavated dungeons, established Inquisitions, reared pillories, built jails, and recommended the gallows. He is a bronzed statue in the midst of living

men.

I describe characters, not persons, and tendencies rather than finished results. No man, it is said, is a hero to his servant; and we have often said, no man is all a villain. What germs of goodness may slumber in those I have described, what indestructible element of spirituality Omniscience can detect, it is not for me to say. But such tendencies are in the highway to final ruin. Such men are the ones who deny Christ; they are the ones who are ashamed of him, and are most unlike him. Whatever treasures they may lay up for themselves, they are not rich toward God. They are poor in his sight. Their noblest powers are abused. The regeneration of their natures is prevented. Let them carry their gold, their fair-seeming, their loud professions, to heaven's gate; will such things be received there? What have they to offer in exchange for a whole life's perversion, this long waste of talents, and abuse of privilege? But Christ, in the text, has not lifted the veil of the other world; "This night shall thy soul be required of thee," is all he says. It was enough for him to see the process of destruction go on here. And it would be enough for us, my friends, if we had the least sensibility to goodness, the least real dread of sin.