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cross He prayed for those that had nailed Him to the tree. Every well instructed Christian will imitate the Master, "because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow in his steps who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered he threatened not, but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously."

The nature of Christ's reign is beautifully depicted by Isaiah-" He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruningbooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." It is vain to fold our arms and wish for this happy time. I believe it will never come till the people of God fetch it; but the moment they return to the old paths, and in principle and in practice carry out the Gospel as preached by Christ and the Apostles, that moment shall we see the prophecy verified.

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The early Christians were surrounded by the most cruel and formidable enemies on every hand, and yet they bore all kinds of maltreatment without resistance. "The weapons of their warfare were not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." They wrestled not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

The following extract from Cheever's Religious and Moral Anecdotes will show that the followers of Jesus, immediately after the Apostles, did not engage in war. "The absolute inconsistency of war with the Gospel was the prevalent belief of the early Christians. Justin Martyr, A.D. 140, quoting the prophecy of Isaiah, already cited, says, 'That these things have come to pass, you may be readily convinced, for we, who were once slayers of one another, do not now fight against our enemies." Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, A.D. 167, discusses the same prophecy, and proves its relation to our Saviour by the fact, that the followers of Jesus had disused the weapons of war, and no longer knew how to fight. Tertullian, A.D. 200, indeed alludes to Christians who were engaged in military pursuits, but, on another occasion, informs us that many soldiers quitted those pursuits in consequence of their conversion to Christianity; and repeatedly expresses his own opinion, that participation in war is unlawful for believers in Jesus, not only because of the idolatrous practices in the Roman armies, but because Christ has forbidden the use of the sword, and the revenge of injuries. Origen, A.D. 230, in his work against Celsus, says, We no longer take up the sword against any nation, nor do we learn any more to make war. We have become, for the sake of Jesus, children of peace. By our prayers we fight for our king abundantly, but take no part in his wars, even though he urge us."

Had the followers of Jesus deemed defensive war justifiable, they, most undoubtedly, would have taken up arms during the ten Pagan persecutions. No people had more just occasion to retaliate, but they preferred to imitate Him who " was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before the shearer, so opened he not his mouth." They remembered the words of the Lord- Fear not them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."

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Of the numbers that suffered during those ten fiery trials we have little conception. Jenour quotes from Lactantius' description of the last:"Persons of every age and sex were consumed in the flames, and so great

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was the multitude, that they were not burnt one by one, but in whole companies, who being surrounded with fire were thus consumed. The household servants were thrown into the sea with a millstone about their necks. The prisons were filled with the accused. Tortures unheard of before were invented; and, that no one might have the benefit of a trial needlessly, altars were placed in the courts and before tribunals, that the accused parties might do sacrifice before they were permitted to plead their cause." Another writer says, "Had I a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths and a voice of iron, I could not narrate all the forms of wickedness, or even rehearse the names of all the different kinds of torture which the provincial magistrates practised towards righteous and innocent persons." If the early Christians had believed defensive war in accordance with the teachings of Jesus, most undoubtedly they would have defended themselves but had they done so, instead of " the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the Church," the cause would have been strangled in its infancy, and posterity would have looked with shame and contempt on the Christian name. But as they kept themselves unspotted from the world," how pleasing it is to reflect that " they loved not their lives even unto death; and "took joyfully the spoiling of their goods, knowing that in heaven they had a better and more enduring substance."

Let all the followers of the Prince of Peace imitate their noble example, and trust Him who upholds the sparrows and numbers the hairs of His people.

After all that has been said on both sides, I think we may heartily concur in the opinion that, there never has been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace." D. SCOTT.

PRAYER AND SCIENCE.

THE man of science is very anxious to make me understand that it is useless to expect the laws of nature to be set aside because I pray. Very likely. I do not care to dispute his doctrine. But then who wants "the laws of nature to be set aside? Assuredly, not I. I do not know very much about "the laws of nature," and he does not know all. His knowledge as yet is very incomplete, and for aught he really knows, it may be quite possible for such a Being as He to whom I pray to answer every prayer that is divinely prompted (for this teaching by his own Spirit how to pray is part of the Scripture doctrine, and therefore part of our theory of prayer), and yet all the while take ample care of the settled constitution of the universe. We may say to any modern heathen, a very Nebuchad nezzar of science though he be, summoning all men to bow down to his golden image, what Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego answered and said to the king, "O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in

this matter."

The devoutest Christian, however, needs not look askance or with any shyness at science, or at the men who are so nobly pursuing it; forerunners, entering in behind a veil for us. No doubt there was a great deal of ignorance among Christian people; and their prayers may be all the more becoming for the light which has been cast upon the subject. They may pray as much, and with no abatement of confidence, but as regards some things they will henceforth perhaps pray somewhat differently. Still, they will "knock," and with the expectation of being answered too; but they will have learned that heretofore they had occasionally been knocking,

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so to speak, at the wrong door, at a blind door, and nothing but a service has been done them in calling them away from the wrong spot. Science will have taught them, too, that they must act as well as pray, and act wisely and energetically; that as regards some things, at all events, prayer is not necessary, and that they will do well, therefore, to let their prayers em brace another part of the subject. Thus, instead of praying that God would be mercifully pleased to act directly on any particular evil to remove it, they may see that the same amount and energy of prayer must simply be directed to another point, to the obtaining of the necessary wisdom and insight to see where duty lies, and then the reinforcement of their drooping energy and will to grapple with their task. Science says to some men precisely what God said to Joshua, when, after the defeat at Ai, he and the elders of Israel fell to the earth until the eventide, with dust upon their heads, bemoaning, and expostulating, and desponding; " and the Lord," we are told," said unto Joshua, Get thee up, wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?" There was a cause of weakness; and that cause being revealed, action was the proper thing, obedience to the Divine monition.

Science is God's handmaid; and though the handmaid may quite possibly, at times, mingle a perverse individuality with her utterances; yet, so long as she only testifies to facts, she is truly the servant of the Lord, charged to the full with most important revelations. And, if the revelations we have through science serve to confine our prayers within more definite channels, that may be a pure gain. It is not the broad waters of a flood, covering the meadows for miles, that turns our mills and gives us water-power for our machinery, but the water that owns the limitations of the banks on either side. It is a great saving of power, of prayer-power, that was in danger of running to waste and causing disappointment, to be warned off from this and that illegitimate exercise of it. If I kneel in prayer for some things till my knees are like a camel's, I shall only be wasting my breath and idling away my time. That is not the true gate of prayer that I am knocking at; and science is one of God's ministers to save me from this bootless quest. But if science grow presumptuous, get out of her proper domain, and, instead of revealing the facts she is commissioned to make known, fancy herself competent to reason infallibly from those facts, and begin to contradict and blaspheme other teachers consecrated to a still higher vocation than herself, then we must firmly, though still lovingly, for the service she renders, remind her of her trespass, and thrust her back to her own ground. As we do not go to religion for our science, so neither do we go to science for our religion. Not that there ought to be any feud between them. It is only when either the one or the other, or sometimes both, happen to be mistaking crudities for truths that there is any quarrel. True science and true religion embrace each other. But their methods are diverse, and their votaries are too apt to be so absorbed in their own special method as to be unable to do justice to a totally different one. Just as we have all smiled at the mathematician who asked about Paradise Lost, "What it proved?" and have no sympathy with the art-critic in Sterne, who took a pocket-rule to judge a picture by, and tested Garrick by a stop watch, so to-day an utterly false test may be applied to the disclosures of science on the one hand, or to the revelations of Scripture on the other.

Science requires that every hypothesis that is propounded shall be verified by experiment. That is sound. Thereby alone science is science. But why should not the same kind of verification hold good in the nobler

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science of the divine life? Why not spiritual tests for spiritual things, as well as material tests for material things? We test a historian by a different test from that which we apply to a doubtful substance. If an astronomer affirm some new fact, is there any other resource open to us but observation? And if competent observers by and bye say, It is so, are we not all satisfied? If chemistry and all the other physical sciences have each its own special kind of test, why should not the same principle hold good in the higher realm ?

If Kepler, Newton, Laplace, Herschel, Davy, Faraday, testify to certain things, I, first of all, accept their testimony, and, if I am competent, proceed to verify their statements for myself. On many points I cheerfully and thankfully accept the testimony of certain astronomers, chemists, and physiologists. They would say, I, not being myself an expert, ought to accept their testimony, and I do. But why should not the testimony of a long unbroken line of men, from the time of Abraham down to this very hour, carry at least some weight with it? Moses, and David, and Daniel, and Paul, and John, and the great multitude which no man can number, who have marched along through life courageously and with joy because of the hold on God's strength they got through prayer, may surely be as great authorities with us, in this matter of conscious experience, as Shakespeare is in the knowledge of human nature, or any modern professor in his own branch of science. But we have an advantage here which we have not in many other fields of inquiry. When, a thousand times over, in the one book which constituted the Temple library of the Hebrews, we read most distinct statements to the effect, "I cried, and the Lord answered me;" and when invitations to pray are addressed to us by holy men professing to speak in the name of God, backing their counsel by illustration heaped on illustration; and seeing how beautifully the idea of prayer answers to our need, and fits in with our whole moral constitution, and somehow strangely brings us and our Father in heaven nearer together than almost everything else does; and finding ourselves surrounded by myriads who all with one voice testify to the blessedness of prayer; this is open to us-we can try the experiment, each one for himself.

And now as to the testimony which they could give who would gladly start up as witnesses for God; not only are they to be found in every rank and walk of life, but they are abreast of any of their contemporaries in culture, in discipline, in the knowledge and practice of affairs, in power of all kinds. They are not a company of lotus-eaters, not monkish recluses, not dreamers and do-nothings. If a summons were given for them to appear, they would be seen trooping forth on all sides, some from the council-chambers of kings, some from senates, from famous universities, from schools of science, from the bowers of the muses, as well as from shops, and counting-houses, and factories. Statesmen, and mechanics, and soldiers, and scholars, and peasants, the polished and the rude; there is not a class that would not furnish its best representatives, if there were such a mustering of the host in the Valley of Decision.

And I doubt if there is one man who has been for any length of time in the habit of going to God in prayer as a child goes to a father, who would not be able to testify to innumerable answers to prayer, as plain as any narrated in the Book. And more than that, The very commonest thing among the mutual heart-confidences of Christians, when they have overcome the natural shyness to speak of their most secret experiences, is a confession of this kind, uttered in the low tone which is instinctively adopt

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ed in speaking on sacred themes when the utterance is honest and the presence of a listening God is happily recognized: "I have had such unmistakable answers to prayer-palpable to my own consciousness, beyond possibility of question-that if I were to narrate the half of what I am most surely convinced of, I could hardly expect even my best friends to believe me. They would think me, on this matter at least, a credulous and perhaps superstitious dupe. I know it, and the thing remains, therefore, a secret between my soul and its Father who is in heaven." I say that a physician who was himself unhappily a stranger to the meaning of "fellowship with God," would instinctively put his finger on the wrist and scrutinise the eye of almost every one of the ten thousand times ten thousand who love to pray, if he were to avow to him in private conference what he most surely believes as the result of his own long experience of the blessedness of prayer. And you might as well try by argument to convince a child sucking an orange that the fruit was not sweet, as try to convince such a man that he was possibly mistaken. And such men easily believe all the statements about prayer that they read in the Scriptures-not because they can convince a sceptic that Abraham's servant, for instance, asked of God plain guidance in the matter he was entrusted with, and received it; or because they can historically demonstrate that when Daniel with his three companions "desired mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret," "the secret was revealed unto Daniel in a night vision, and Daniel blessed the God of heaven;" not because they can establish by scholastic evidence each separate narrative in Scripture which shows the worth of prayer ;-but because, by entering in at the gate of prayer, they have found themselves on ground where corresponding phenomena are not strange. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He will show them His covenant.” There is many a blessed "secret" between every devout soul and its God, and it is idle for any man who is a stranger to the experiences of faith to argue that these things cannot be. Neither physical science nor metaphysics, nor both together, cover and rule the whole ground of a soul that is instinct with immortality. It has been well said that "that God has not spent Himself wholly in the courses of custom, and mortgaged infinite resources to nature; nor has He closed up with rules every avenue through which His fresh energy might find entrance into life; but has left in the human soul a theatre whose scenery is not all pre-arranged, and whose drama is ever open to new developments. Between the free centre of the soul of man, and the free margin of the activity of God, what hinders the existence of a real and living communion, the interchange of look and answer, of thought and counter-thought? If, in response to human aspiration, a higher mood is infused into the mind; if, in consolation of peni tence or sorrow, a gleam of gentle hope steals in; and if these should be themselves the vivifying touch of Divine sympathy and pity, what law is prejudiced? What faith is broken? What province of nature has any title to complain?"

BISHOP STROSSMAYER'S SPEECH AT THE

VATICAN COUNCIL.

Selected

THE Guardian publishes a translation of the celebrated speech of Bishop Strossmayer at the Vatican Council. It has been recently published in Florence under the title of "The Pope and the Gospel." We cannot be much surprised at the commotion it excited. "Penetrated,"