itor of the Quarterly Review This indefatigable scholar and littérateur is a native of London, born in 1815, and educated at the London University, in which he was Classical Examiner from 1853 till 1869. In 1870 he published, in conjunction with a friend (Mr. Hall), a Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary,' said to be the result of fifteen years' labour. In acknowledgment of his services to the cause of education and classical literature, the university of Oxford, in 1870, conferred upon him the honorary degree of D.C.L. Perhaps no university honour was ever more worthily won.

DR. CHARLES JOHN VAUGHAN.

The Master of the Temple, CHARLES JOHN VAUGHAN, D.D., is author of a vast number of sermons and addresses, besides several works of a more elaborate character. His Expository Lectures on the Romans,'' on Philippians,' the First Epistle to the Thessalonians,' 'the Acts,' the Revelation of St. John,' &c., are valuable and popular theological works. Some of his collected sermons were delivered in the chapel of Harrow School (two series, 1849 and 1853); in the parish church of St. Martin's, Leicester, 1853; Epiphany, Lent, and Easter Sermons,' 1860; 'Sermons at Doncaster,' 1863; The Book and the Life,' being four sermons at Cambridge, 1862; Twelve Sermons on Subjects connected with the Church of England,' 1867; Lessons of the Cross and the Passion' (six lectures), 1-69; Earnest Words for Earnest Men,' 1869; 'Last words in the Parish Church of Doncaster;' &c. For thirty years or more, it may be said that not a single year has passed without some work from Dr. Vaughan; and his ministrations in the beautiful Temple Church in London (of old the church of the Knights Templars) are attended by large congregations. Dr. Vaughan was born about 1817, and having passed a brilliant university career at Trinity College, Cambridge (in 1837 Browne's medallist for the Greek ode and epigram, and gainer of the members' prize for Latin essay; in 1838, senior classic), he entered into holy orders, and became Vicar of St. Martin's, Leicester -a parish of which his father had been incumbent. He was next Head Master of Harrow School (1844-1859), refused the bishopric of Rochester in 1860, and shortly afterwards became Vicar of Doncaster. After a residence of nearly ten years at Doncaster, he accepted the Mastership of the Temple in 1869. As parish clergyman and as Master of the Temple, Dr. Vaughan has been distinguished equally for his affectionate earnestness and zeal and his unwearied activity, while his classical attainments have placed him in the first rank of English scholars.

Three Partings. — From 'Last Words in the Parish Church of

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Doncaster.

Life is full of partings. Every day we see some one whom we shall never see nin. Homes are full of these partings, and churches are full of these partings, and therefore Scripture also, the mirror of life, is full of these partings; tells us how

bitter they are-or takes that for granted, and tells us rather how solemn they are, how admonitory, how important bids us regard them, use them, turn them to ac count.

First, I will speak of bodily partings. Those who were once near together in the flesh are no longer so. It is a thing of every-day experience. To-night there is a family in this congregation which before next Sunday will have left the town. If I had not gone, they would have gone. You will say it is a small event to chronicle in this manner. Still it shews, it serves as an example, how common are these local changes which make people who co-existed before co-exist no longer. It shews how hopeless it is to avoid such separations. They are part of our lot. They remind us of the great dispersion; they should make us long for the great reunion,

It is a serious thing to stand on the pier of some seaport town, and see a son or a brother setting sail for India or New Zealand. Such an experience marks, in a thousaud homes, a particular day in the calendar with a peculiar, a life-long sadness. And when two hearts have grown into each other by a love real and faithful, and the hour of parting comes-comes under compulsion put upon them, whether by family arrangement or by God's providence-when they know that in all probability they can meet never again on this side the grave-tell us not that this is a light sorrow, a trifling pain; for the time, and it may be for all time, it is a grief, it is a bereave ment. it is a death; long days and years may run their course, and yet the image is there; there, and not there-present in dream and visiou, absent in converse and in communion. The Word of God is so tender to us, so full of sympathy, that it paints this kind of parting in all its bitterness. No passage of Scripture has been more fondly read and re-read by severed friends than that which contains the record of the love, passing the love of women,' between David and the king's son. That last farewell, of which the Prophet Samuel did not disdain to write the full, the almost photographic history, had in it no pang of unfaithfulness or broken vow: the two friends loved afterwards, in absence and distance; and it was given to one of them to bewail the death, in glorious though disastrous battle. of the other, in a strain of lyric lamentation which for beauty and pathos stands still unrivalled among the dirges and dead-marches of the most gifted minstrels and musicians of

earth.

There are partings between souls. I speak still of this life. The sands of Tyre and Miletus were wet with tears when St. Paul there took leave of disciples and elders. But those separations were brightened by an immortal hope, and he could commend his desolate ones to the word of God's grace, as able to give them an inheritance at last with him and with the saved. I call that a tolerable, a bearable parting. God grant it to us! How different is it when souls part!

There are partings every day between souls. There are those who once knew each other intimately, calied each other friends, who now scarcely know whether the once beloved be dead or living. There are those who have drifted asunder, not because one is a lawyer and the other a clergyman; not because one has had experience abroad of battles or sieges, and the other has led the home life of a merchant or a landowner; not even because sess and lands have permanently separated them, and hands once closely clasped in friendship can never meet again in loving embrace on this side the grave. They have parted, not in body but in spirit. Ghosts of old obsolete worn-out friendships haunt the chambers of this being, to remind us of the hollowness of human possessions, and the utter transitoriness of all affections save

one.

Go on then from the partings of time to the death-parting which must come. Set yourselves in full view of that-take into your thought what it is-ask, in each several aspect of earth's associations and companionships, what will be for you the meaning of the text- He saw him no more.'

The life-partings, and the soul-partings, all derive their chief force and significance from the latest and most awful-the one death-parting, which is not probably, but certainly, before each and all. He saw him no more." That parting which the text itself describes was momentous, was memorable. That consecration of the prophet by the prophet-that original casting upon him of the mantle, by which his designation was announced to him-now fulfilled in the very falling upon him of the same mantle, as the chariot of fire made its way into the abyss of heaven above→ turned a common life, a life of ploughing and farming, prosperous (it should seem)

and weathy, into a life of absolute unworldliness, a life of dedication to God's service, and to the highest interests of a generation. This parting was indeed a meeting. It brought two lives and two souls into one, as no length of bodily converse could have united them. The spirit of Elijah then began to rest on Elisha, when they were parted for ever as to the society and fellowship of the living. It has ever been so with those highest and most solemn unities in which man with man, and man with his God, finds the crown and consummation of his being. It is through the death-parting that the everlasting meeting begins.

The Ascension.

When a man's heart is crushed within him by the gall'ng tyranny of sense; when, from the dawning of the day till the setting of the sun, and for hours beyond it, he is compelled to gather straw for Egypt's bricks, and to bake them in the world's scorching kiln, till the spring of life is dried up within, and he is ready to say, Let me but eat and drink and sleep, for there is nothing real but this endless task-work; then, how sweet to say to one's self: And a cloud received him out of their sight. Yes, just out of sight, but as certainly as if the eye could pierce it, there is a heaven all bright, all pure, all real; there is one there who has my very nature, in it toiled as ceaselessly as the most care-worn and world-laden of us all, having no home, and no leisure so much as to eat. He is there-His warfare accomplished, His life's labour fulfilled; He is there, at rest, yet still working, working for me, bearing me upon His heart, feeling for and feeling with me in each trial and in each temptation; and not feeling only, but praying too, with that intercession which is not only near but inside God; and not interceding only, but also ministering grace hour by hour, coming into me with that very thought and recollection of good, that exact resolution and purpose and aspiration which is needed to keep me brave and to keep me pure. Only let my heart be fully set to maintain that connection, that spiritual marriage and union, which is between Christ above and the soul below; only let me cherish, by prayer and watching that spirit of soberness, that freedom (to use St. Peter's strong phrase in this day's Epistle) from the intoxications of sense, which makes a man in the world and yet not of it-and I too shall at last reach that blessed home where Christ already is, and is for me!

Thus, too, when sorrow comes, when the light of this life is quenched and annibilated by reason of some fond wish frustrated or some precious possession torn away; when I am beginning to say, take away now my life, for there is nothing left to live for-then I look upward and see, if not at this moment the bow in the cloud, the bow of hope and promise, yet at least the cloud-the cloud behind which Jesus is, Jesus the Man of Sorrows, having still a thought for every struggling sorrowing man, and holding in His hand the very medicine, the very balm, for the particular sorrow, the particular void, the particular stroke and pang, of each disconsolate desolate wayfarer towards the home and the rest.

Such is one part of the doctrine-let us say, one utterance of the voice-of the ascension. This is not your home. This life is not your all-no, not even now. Behind the cloud which witnessed the view of the ascending Lord, there, there is your country, your city, your church, your dwelling-place, even now. 'Ye are come,' the apostle says, to the city of the living God, to the spirits of the perfected just, to Jesus the Mediator, and to God the Father of all.'

Comfort is strength. The very word means it. But we separate the two-in idea at least-and the ascension has both for us. We want not soothing only, but invigoration too. The ascension has a voice of this kind. The Lord working with them.' They went forth everywhere, in the strength of the ascension-the Lord working with them. He who is Himself in heaven for us, will have us on earth for Him. We must be His witnesses.

Think we, all of us, of that coming day when the cloud which concealed shall be the cloud which reveals Him. It is a solemn and touching thing to gaze into the fathomless depth of a perfectly clear sunlit or starlit sky, and lose ourselves in wonder and awe, as we vainly search out its mysterious, its ever-growing and multiplying secrets. But scarcely less solemn or less touching, to one whose Bible is in his heart, to mark that little cloud, small as a man's hand, which just specks with white the otherwise blue expanse, and which, though it seems nearer, less ethereal, less celestial far than the other, is yet the token to Christian eyes of an ascension past

and an advent future. A cloud then received Him. Ye shall see Him coming in a cloud. Knit the two in your thoughts-knit the two in your prayers and your aspirations-live in the twofold light of the angels' ascension-day greeting. This same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go.'

DR LIDDON.

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The REV. HENRY PARRY LIDDON, D.D., D.C.L., Canon of St. Paul's, and Ireland Professor of Exegesis in the university of Oxford, is author of the Bampton Lectures for 1866, the subject being The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour;' also Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford,' 'Some Elements of Religion, being Lent Lectures,' &c. Dr. Liddon was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and took his degree of M. A. in 1852. From 1854 to 1859 he was Viceprincipal of the Theological College of Cuddesden; in 1864 he was appointed a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral. The volume of uni. versity sermons was originally published under the title Some Words for God,' but that title was soon dropped-wisely we think-as 'liable to misconstruction and in deference to the opinion of critics.' The author says his volume makes no pretention to be a volume of essays. 'An essay belongs to general literature; a sermon is the language of the Church.' Dr. Liddon, however, is an eloquent preacher, whose pulpit ministrations are highly prized, and appear to want no other graces of literature than those which he adopts.

Faith and Intellect (2 Cor. x. 5).

Here is an Apostle of the Lord Jesus who used the language of a soldier. He is planning a campaign; nay, rather he is making war: he glows with the fire of a gen uine military enthusiasm. The original Greek which he uses has in it a vigour and point which is lost, to a great extent, in our English translation. The writer might almost be a Roman general, charged to sustain the honour of the Empire in a r volted province or beyond a remote frontier, and bent upon illustrating the haughty maxim which defined the duty of an imperial people

To spare the vanquished, but to crush the proud.

Indeed, it has been urged that the recent history of Cilicia itself may have well suggested this language to St. Paul. The Apostle's native country had been the scene of some very fierce struggles in the wars against Mithridates and the pirates: and we are told that the latter war was only ended, not sixty years before the Apostle's birth, by the reduction of one hundred and twenty strongholds and the capture of more than ten thousand prisoners. The dismantled ruins may have easily and naturally impressed the boyish imagination of Saul of Tarsus with a vivid sense of the destructive energy of the military power of Rome; but the Apostle of the nations only remembers these earlier impressions to give them a spiritual application. The wear ons of his warfare are not carnal; the standard under which he fights is a more sacr d sign than that of the Cæsar; the operations which he projects are to be carried out in a territory more difficult of conquest than any which kept the conquerors of the world at bay. He is invading the region of human thought; and as he fights for God, he is sternly resolved upon conquest. He sees rising before him the lofty fortresses of hostile errors; they must be reduced and razed. Every mountain fastness to which the enemy of Light and Love can retreat must be scaled and destroved; and all the thought of the bumen soul which is hostile to the authority of the Divine truth, must be led away 18 a prisoner of war' into the camp of Christ. Truly a vast and unaccountable amvition; a dream-if it were not, as it was, a necessity; a tyranny-if anything less E.L.V.8-6

vigorous and trenchant had been consistent with the claims of the Truth of God, or equal to the needs of the soul of man.

The particular opposition to the work of Christ which the Apostle encountered at Corinth was indeed less intellectual in its form than the Galatian Judaism, or than the theosophic angel-worship which was popular at Colosse, or than the more sharplydefined heresies of a later time which, as we know from the pastoral epi-tles, threatened or infected the churches of Ephesus and Crete. St. Paul's Corinthian opponents resisted, deprecated, disowned beyond everything else, the Apostle's own personal authority. This, however, was the natural course of things at a time wher single apostles well-nigh impersonated the whole doctrinal action of the Church: and feeling this, St. Paul speaks not as one who was reasserting a personal claim of any sort, but merely and strictly as a soldier, as an organ, I might say, as a function, of the truth. The truth had an indefeasible right to reign in the intellect of man Apostle asserts that right, when he speaks of bringing the whole intelligence of man into the obedience of Christ. Now, as then, Christ's Church is militant here on earth, not less in the sphere of thought than in the sphere of outward and visible action; and St. Paul's burning words rise above the temporary circumstances which called them forth, and furnish a motto and an encouragement to us who, after the lapse of eighteen centuries, fight in the ranks of the same army and against the same kind of foes as he did.

The

Remark, first of all, that it is the undue exaltation of intellect with which the Church of Christ is in energetic and perpetual conflict. With intellect itself, with really moral and reasonable intellect, with the thought of man recognising at once its power and its weakness, its vast range and its necessary limits, religion has, can have, no quarrel. It were a libel on the all-wise Crestor to suppose that between intellect and spirit, between thought and faith, there could be any original relations other than those of perfect harmony. Paradise could have been the scene of no such unseemly conflict as that which we are considering; and here, as elsewhere in human nature, we are met with unmistakable traces of the fall of our first parent. A range of granite mountains, which towers proudly above the alluvial soil of a neighbouring plain and above the softer rocks at its immediate base, speaks to the geologist of a subterranean fire that at some remote epoch had thus upheaved the primal crust of the earth with convulsive violence. And the arrogant pretensions of human thought in the children of Adam speak no less truly of an ancient convulsion which has inarred the harmony of the faculties of the soul, and has forced the mind of fallen man into an attitude which instinctively disputes the claims of revelation.

The Mysteries of Nature.

The wonderful world in which we men pass this stage of our existence, whether the higher world of faith be open to our gaze or not, is a very temple of many and august mysteries. You will walk perhaps, to-morrow afternoon into the country; and here or there the swelling buds, or the first fresh green of the opening leaf, will remind you that already spring is about to re-enact before your eyes the beautiful spectacle of her yearly triumph. Everywhere around you are evidences of the existence and movement of a mysterious power which you can neither see, nor touch, nor define, nor measure. nor understand. This power lives speechless, noiseless, urseen, yet energetic in every bongh above your head, in every blade of grass beneath your feet. It bursts forth from the grain into the shoot, from the branch into the bud it bursts into leaf, and flower, and fruit. It creates bark, and fibre; it creates height and bulk it yields grace of form and lustre of colour. It is incessant in its labour; it is prodigal of its beauty; it is uniformly generous and bountiful in its gifts to man. Yet, in itself, what is it? You give it a name; you call it vegetation And perhaps you are a botanist; you trace out and you register the variety of its effects, and the signs of its movement. But after all you have only labelled it. Although it is so common. it is not in reality familiar to you. Although you have watched it unthinkingly from your childhood upwards, and perhaps see in it nothing remarkable now, You may well pause in wonder and awe before it, for of a truth it is a mystery. What is it in itself this power which is so certainly around you, yet which so perfectly escapes you when you attempt to detect or to detain it in your grasp? What is it,