may discover in the Bible; but unless you have found Christ therein, your studies are a failure. You have found the shell but not the kernel; the casket not the jewel.

II. That the only real believer in the Bible is he who believes in the Christ of the Bible. There are, it is to be feared, many who profess a very zealous faith in the inspiration, the miracles, the doctrines, and the promises of the Bible, who shew by their unchristianlike spirit that they have no faith in the Christ of the Bible. He who believes in the Christ of the Bible believes in the Bible, he who believes not in Him, whatever else he may believe in concerning the Bible, is an infidel.

III. That the only true preacher of the Bible is he who preaches the Christ of the Bible. Theology is not Christ, any more than physiology is life. It is only something about Christ which may be either true or false. Men want Christ;-not theories about Him. Starving men want bread, not your chemistry of bread. In many pulpits Christ is lost in the preacher's cloudy creed. "The five points" and "the doctrines of grace," as they are called, are no more Christ than Spinozaism is the universe. There is no true pulpit but that which acts the part of John the Baptist, who on the banks of the Jordan pointed his race to Christ, saying "Behold the Lamb of God," &c.

WORK.

There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone is their perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with nature; the real desire to get work done will it

self lead one more and more to truth, to nature's appointments and regulations which are truth.

The latest gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. "Know thyself; " long enough has that poor "self" of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe ! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at; and

work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

It has been written, "An endless significance lies in work; as man perfects himself by writing. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but as he bends himself with free valour against his task, all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of labour in him, is now a purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame.

Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a chaos, but a round compacted world. What would become of the earth did she cease to revolve?

In

the poor old earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the potter's wheel, one of the venerablest objects; old as the prophet Ezekiel, and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous potter,

but without his wheel, reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a potter were destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest destiny, like the most assiduous potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive coloring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish, no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint cornered, amorphous botch, a mere enamelled vessel of dishonour! Let the idle think of this.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows; draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is life; from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial-life essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, "self-knowledge," and much else, as soon as work fitly begins. Knowledge! the knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for nature herself accredits that, says yea to that. Properly thou hast no other know

Yes, all manner of work, and pious response from men or nature, are always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light till they be seen, till they be spoken to. Every noble work is at first "impossible." In every truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through immensity, inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether, under the wide arch of heaven, there be any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to Heaven; and from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind localities and town and country parishes there never could, blessed dew moisture to suffice thee shall have fallen!

Work is of a religious nature; work is of a brave nature; which it is the aim of all religion to be. "All work of man is as the swimmer's" a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how loyally it supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. "It is so," says Goethe, "with all things that man undertakes in this world."

Religion, I said; for, properly speaking, all true work is religion: and whatsoever religion is not work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians,

Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbour. Admirable was that of the old Monks, "Laborare est Orare, Work is Worship."

Older than all preached gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, for-ever-enduring gospel; work, and therein have well-being. Man, son of earth and of Heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a spirit of active method, a force for work ;-and burns like a painfully smouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent facts around thee! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable, obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest disorder there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him; make order of him, the subject, not of chaos, but of intelligence, divinity and thee? The thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk, may grow there instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it; that, in place of idle litter, there, may be folded webs, and the naked skin of man be covered.

But above all, where thou findest ignorance, stupidity, brutemindedness-attack it I say; smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and it lives; but smite, smite in the name of God! The highest God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee; still audibly, if thou have ears to hear. He, even He, with His unspoken voice, fuller than any Sinai thunders, or syllabled speech of whirlwinds; for thee silence of deep eternities, of worlds from beyond the morning stars, does it not speak to thee?

The unborn ages; the old graves, with their long-mouldering dust, the very tears that wetted it, now all dry-do not these speak to thee what ear hath not heard? The deep death-kingdoms, the stars in their never-resting courses, all space and all time, proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition. Thou too, if ever man should, shalt work while it is called to-day. For the night cometh wherein no man can work.

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All true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all sciences, all spoken epics, all acted heroisms, martyrdoms-up to that "agony of bloody sweat," which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not " ship," then I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there, in God's eternity; viving there, they alone surviving; sacred band of the immortals, celestial body-guard of the empire of mankind. Even in the weak human memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surving; peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes of time! To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind; Heaven is kind -as a noble mother; as that Spartan Mother, saying while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!" Thou too shalt return home, in honour to thy far-distant home, in hon

sur

our; doubt it not-if in the battle thou keep thy shield! Thou, in the eternities and deepest death-kingdoms, art not an alien; thou everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very Spartans did not complain. CARLYLE.

THE ELOQUENCE OF IMAGERY.

"There are several modes of acting powerfully upon public assemblies. The speaker may address himself, either to their logic, by the vigour and conclusiveness of his reasonings; or, to their wit, by the vivacity and piquancy of his expressions, allusions, and repartees; or to their hearts, by the emotions of sensi bility; or to their passions, by vehemence of invective; or to their imagination, by the splendour of rhetorical figures. But most frequently it is by means of figures of imagery, that eloquence produces its greatest effects. The prosopopæia of the warriors who fell at Marathon, by Demosthenes; the Roman citizens affixed to the infamous gibbet of Verres, by Cicero; the night, the terrible night when the death of Henrietta broke upon two kingdoms like a thunder-clap, by Bossuet; the avenging dust of Marius, the apostrophe of the bayonets and the Tarpeian rock, by Mirabeau; the "audacity, audacity, always audacity," by Danton; the Republic that, like Saturn, is devouring its own children, by Vergniaud; the voice of liberty re-echoed from the lakes and mountains, by O'Connell; the car which conveys the remains of Ireland to the grave, by Grattan ; the turban which marks on the map the place of the Turkish empire, by Lamartine; Algeria, of which the fruit