are equally imperative in their demands that we shall take a retrospective and prospective view of our human life. Unlike the lower animals, we must be housed and clothed as well as fed; and our provision for these cannot be limited to the present. We must build and sow and weave for the future. Nor are we content to provide what may be necessary for our sustenance; we wish to lay up something for the time to come, and for the generation that is to follow. It may seem, however, from the teaching of our Lord, as if this looking to and providing for the future were not a necessity either of our nature or our needs. For our Divinehuman Teacher tells us to take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for things of itself. This does not, however, prohibit trustful care, but only distrustful solicitude. Our heavenly Father, who feeds the fowls of the air and clothes the grass of the field, also feeds and clothes us, but He feeds and clothes us through our own exertions. Unlike the lilies of the field, we must toil and spin; unlike the birds of the air, we have to sow and reap and gather into barns; and yet it is our heavenly Father that clothes and feeds us. He is the Author and Giver of whatever we obtain by our own labour. We sow, but it is He that makes the seed to grow, and conducts the plant through all the stages of its growth, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. We spin, but it is He that gives the flax and the wool wherewith to make the garment. Nay, it is He that gives us the skill to devise and the strength to labour, and that crowns our efforts with success. "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." "Doth the plowman plow all day to sow ? ... When he hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cummin, and cast in the principal wheat and the appointed barley and the rie in their place? For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him." Reason and experience are indeed our schoolmasters; but it is God that both gives these teachers and instructs us through them. What and how do they teach us? Reason and experience teach us to draw lessons from the past for the use of the present and the future. We have the power of looking into the past, and of tracing the operations both of the hand of God and the hand of man. Looking back through the geologic ages, we can see the hand of the Almighty working out of those changes in the structure of the earth which He had created, which were required for the purpose of making it a suitable habitation for man. And although time is no measure of eternity, yet the countless ages during which this preparatory work was silently going on gives us an idea, such as nature can supply, of God the Eternal, who is from everlasting to everlasting, and with whom a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years; with whom there is no past and no future, for to Him all is present. And this past history of our earth teaches us that He who has thus been working hitherto for the sake of His rational offspring, still works and will continue to work for the same benevolent end; and we may reasonably believe that He will make His work still more perfect as a habitation for still more perfect men. But the history of man, for whose sake the earth was created and is sustained, is a still more interesting and useful study of the past for us; for here we see the Divine and the human brought together, each manifesting its own character and working out its own end. God in history is a subject that has engaged the attention and employed the pen of some of our most eminent thinkers. If man is the noblest of God's works, and that one for whom He has reserved the high destiny of a future and endless existence, we must conclude that God is, so to speak, still more intimately present and active in the history of man than He is in that of the earth on which man dwells. In humanity there is a higher plane on which the Divine influence operates than in all the lower parts of creation. Man, simply as a created being, is nearer to the Divine than any other creature. The image of God is there in the simple capacity of knowing and loving Him. And as God never can for a moment cease to act upon the human soul for man's highest attainable good and happiness, the Divine must be ever present in all human activity, and therefore in all human history; and from history we may learn much to guide us in the way of life. So far as history extends, it tells us much of man's inhumanity to man. Men, like the animals, more especially of the ancient world, seem from an early period to have preyed upon one another, not to appease their hunger, but to satisfy their cupidity. This is not, however, the created but the perverted state of human nature. And secular history to a great extent repeats itself, with the difference that the wars of ambition and spoliation come, with advancing civilization, to be on a greater scale, and to be conducted with more system and science. Yet wars themselves are not unmingled evils. They are educational and disciplinary, and are thus so far useful when men will not listen to more humane instructors. Nor is history entirely a record of human conflict. Nations within them selves pursue the path of peaceful industry and cultivate art and science, which tend to refine and elevate, while their wants and their superabundance prompt them to engage in commerce, which, like mercy, is twice blest, enriching those who give and those who take both physically and mentally, and promoting concord and union by mutual good, although of but of a national kind. And all the good and the evil of past times have become the inheritance of the present, and will be carried into the future, except so far as they are modified or changed by this and succeeding generations. History therefore teaches us a great lesson. It enables us to see our hereditary and more or less our actual character in that of the generations that have preceded us. And applying the standard of truth and justice to the subjects of history, we are able to judge of the present from the past as well as to hope from the past for the future. So far we accept and apply the doctrine of evolution. But when we consider history, not only as delineating the character of man, but as exhibiting the Providence of God, it becomes far more solemn and instructive. For what were man without One to shape his ends, rough hew them as he may? Yet why should we speak of man as if he could even rough hew his ends without a Divine power being ever active within as well as around him? His liberty and rationality, which constitute his humanity, are not only God's original gift, but His continual bestowment. They are in a certain sense God with him, and He who bestowed and maintains those gifts can never act without them, much less against them. And yet they sometimes act against Him. Without this possibility, there could be neither liberty nor reason. This possibility arises from the fact that God gives to man the sense of complete ownership of the power to judge and choose. It is his proprium, his sense of being his own. Yet it is through man's liberty and reason that God exercises all His providential operations in him and over him. He works out His beneficent purposes, so far as they can be wrought out, by providing and permitting. He provides good, He permits evil. He cannot force the liberty or override the reason He bestows; but He can influence man through the good that he favours, and He afflicts him through the evil he loves, until he freely chooses the good and refuses the evil. This is the Divine mode of dealing with His rebellious children, and has been in all ages and under all circumstances. But for this, history would have taught no lesson, for man would have made no advancement in wisdom or goodness. All that it teaches of human progress is from Him who worketh in us and in all men both to will and to do of His good pleasure. There is another element to be taken into account in the history of the past as exhibiting the providential government of God. His Revelation has been a guiding light to all nations on the earth, directly to those within the Church, indirectly to those without. And when the Truth that had been revealed became incarnate, a new power was given to the Divine Influence and to Divine Revelation. The year of redemption is an epoch in the history of humanity infinitely more important than all others. Not only is it the glory of the past, it is the brightness of the present, and the hope of the future. And now that the Lord has come the second time, and has appeared to those that looked for Him, with power unto salvation, all these are enhanced. The efforts of the Second Advent have already become visible. Its influence is being felt, its light is being diffused. The former things are passing away, all things are becoming new. future has now And if written There is pre But we must narrow our horizon, and look for a moment at the two years that, astronomically, have already met and parted, or one of which has glided into the other, one we call the Old Year, and the other the New. This marks the course of human life. What twelve months ago was to us the present and the become the past. It has become a part of history. nowhere else, it is inscribed in our own book of life. served all of the past year that has become part of ourselves. The knowledge we have turned into wisdom, the experience we changed into virtue, remain with us. They are treasure laid up in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal. On the other hand, the knowledge and experience we may have neglected or abused are as talents laid up in a napkin or hid in the earth, which will be brought forth against us and taken from us in the judgment. Use it is which fixes the gifts of Heaven and makes them our own. If we keep this in view, and steadily pursue it during the year that is before us, trusting in Him whose Providence is ever over us, and whose Spirit is ever striving with us, we cannot fail, whatever our experience may be, whether more of sorrow or of joy, to find ourselves increasing in wisdom and righteousness, which are the basis of all true happiness. EDITOR. 7 SERMON ON THE DEPARTURE OF MR. BATEMAN. PREACHED IN THE COLLEGE CHAPEL, DEC. 5, BY DR. COLLINGWOOD. "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints." ALL humanity might well be divided into two great sections, whose lives depend on the views they entertain upon the subject of death. One of these sections regards death as the end of all things; looking upon life as a vain shadow, in which they are for a time called upon to take a part. They imagine that at its close they shall have ceased to exist as completely as the dying shadows which are cast upon the wall by an expiring fire. They regard life, this life, as the be-all and the end-all of existence; they recognise no higher power as the giver of life; they believe in no Supreme Being to whom they shall render it again. Life, they say, is an affair of organization, and man is but a higher form of animal. When organization ceases to be sound and effectual, life can be no longer supported; when a race of animals has exhausted or outgrown the conditions of its existence it becomes extinct, and to this law, they say, the HUMAN race is no exception. Thus does this section of mankind confine its own powers and aspirations within the narrowest limits. It places man on the same plane as the animal, only differing from it in a barren intelligence, which for some threescore years or so mocks its own powers, falsifies its own aspirations, and laughs to scorn its own hollow pretence of philosophy. This section of mankind lives a colourless life in the uncertain and precarious present, indulges in no hope in the dark and dread future, clings to no solace or encouragement in the performance of its moral duties beyond that of living in the remembrance of posterity, and leaving the shadow of a great or famous name. Religion is to them a superstition; the spiritual, a dead letter; heaven and hell, cunningly devised fables; and God, an impossible phantasy! But there is another section-and that, we would fain hope, by far the larger-which by no means shares these hopeless views, over which we will henceforth gladly draw a veil. This section is characterized by widely different ideas, for in their belief this life is but a preparation for another and a higher one; this life is but an education for a superior and transcendant state; this life is but the threshold as it were of existence, the career of the worm which is destined to expand into a butterfly; the sorrowful, the struggling, the painful progress of a hampered and fettered soul, which contains within itself |