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inscriptions and other mementoes of those who had prayed and had not been delivered. Of course, they were not there.

I am not arguing against prayer. I am only undertaking to show that, if you cannot prove to me that God is willing and able to answer prayer, you cannot find any satisfactory evidence that prayer ever was answered. That coincidence where prayer was earnest and unanswered answers all the natural presumptions arising from the man's deliverance after prayer. So I hold that the man who denies that the Gospel is a supernatural communication, is wise and logical in ceasing to pray, and this accounts for the fact that you do not find any record of theists who have rejected the Gospel in toto, as we are discussing it, and declared it had no supernatural origin, who pray, unless they are Jews. A distinguished citizen of New Hampshire, who was once a rationalistic preacher, and a very powerful logician, ceased to preach, and a friend asked him why he stopped. Said he, "I liked the preaching, and could have got along with it very well as long as I lived; but there was one thing I could not get along with at all, and that was prayer. I did not expect my prayers would be answered, and never believed they would, and to stand up before the congregation and address the Deity as if I really believed that prayer produced a result, seemed to me too much like hypocrisy." No man will long pray who has not a specific promise upon which to rest.

9. I now have to speak very briefly about a few things that are not generally supposed to rest upon Christianity. As regards the Sabbath, of course the Sabbath goes, if Christianity be false. There is no reason why a man should keep one day in seven as a holy day, though there may be reasons why he should keep it as a holiday. He must give it up as a day specifically consecrated, if he repudiates Christianity; and if it be given up generally as such a day, then, of course, it is left merely to the self-interest of men, the effect of

which is that the majority of mankind would be divided into two classesthose who would work on Sunday, because they could make it pay, and those who would play and dissipate, because they would prefer to do that rather than make what they could.

Now the institution of Marriage-one husband and one wife-cannot be sustained without a religious sanction, and never was in the history of this world. In the early history of Rome it survived for a considerable period of time, and the first man that divorced his wife in the Roman empire was treated with the utmost contempt; but the operations of human nature were such that in a very short time the whole Roman Empire virtually repudiated monogamy to such an extent that the leaders were obliged to beseech the people to marry upon some such absurd principle as this: that, while it was a great misfortune to have wives, the State could not possibly be kept up without children, and the only way to have children was to marry, and therefore they besought them to marry for the sake of the State. The heaviest strain on human nature is chastity, and it cannot be sustained unless the obligation rests upon a solemn accountability to God, and the human race cannot sustain it without religious sanction after marriage, and never have, even among the Jews. They disregarded monogamy, and Jesus, according to the New Testament, stated that Moses, for the hardness of their hearts, suffered them to put away their wives. But the fact is, the Jewish people, acting under the influence of wholly unsanctified human nature, gave loose rein to their pas sions, and all over the world that thing exists. Taking human society as a whole, in the absence of general belief in Christianity, it would not stand a twelvemonth. Polygamy, on the one hand, as a species of fanaticism, and either spiritual or carnal or free love on the other, would certainly spring up, as they have done, to run riot all over the world.

Moreover, denying the spiritual power

are committing suicide, and making
such a trifling thing of it-I won't say
the reason,
but one of the reasons-is
the spread of infidelity, the spread of
doubts as to future accountability.

of Christianity, of course you uproot the whole idea of future accountability, and the question of whether a man will live or die becomes a question of logic. Some persons, if you undertake to speak on the subject of suicide, will hardly listen to you; but it is a vitally important topic. I cannot tell if there is not now some one before me contemplating suicide. I have been obliged to visit the friends of several who have committed suicide since I became the pastor of this church. I know of men who have gone straight from the house of God, and within forty-eight hours attempted suicide. The papers are full of recitals of this crime. The crime increases in this country without parallel, and it will go on increasing. It will have to be discussed and handled from a point of view totally different from those ordinarily selected, to prevent it. Now, what reason is there why a man utterly dissatisfied with life, should not commit suicide? Prove that he ought to hold on. Make it clear, if you can. Suppose the case of a man who has lost all his friends, his property, and his reputation. He is too old to begin again. Prove that he ought not to commit suicide. I cannot, unless you give me the Gospel. When a man rejects the Gospel the most trifling trouble in the world may make him commit suicide. I admit that many professed Christians do it-some because insane, and some because they do not know anything about applying the Gospel. I have known men who have been familiar with the Gospel twenty years, and then did not know how to apply it on the question of suicide. You cannot find an instance of a sane, devoted, intelligent Christian committing suicide; but you can produce a hundred instances of irreligious men not insane committing suicide. It had become a passion among the Roman matrons, and the only way the evil was cured was by an edict that the body of the woman who took her own life should be dragged after death through the streets, exposed to the rabble. The reason men

And now I have come to my last point, which is this: That if the Gospel be not true, everything that there is in the Bible with regard to a future state of happiness must be remanded to the realm of conjecture. No man can prove a future state in any proper sense of the term. Of course, most men think it is the easiest thing in the world; but I am not preaching to them. I am preaching to the man who has thought, and been troubled with doubts about the Bible. That man knows you cannot prove a future state, and he knows further, that if you could show it to be probable, you could not determine the mode of existence, or the relation between the future and present life, or get any means whatever to do so. Then, if the Gospel be not true, let us face the issue and strike out, "In my Father's house are many mansions." Let us stand by the side of the dead, in the presence of weeping relatives, and, when some one shall say: "I heard a Voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,"" silence him, and tell him it is falsehood, and that he is endeavoring to comfort the bereaved by that which has no foundation in fact. Every word in the Bible relating to a future state of bliss is remanded to the realm of conjecture.

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Is it rational to believe that God has given no voice to man? Is it rational to believe that the noblest precepts are without a divine sanction?-that the purest examples are rhapsodies?-that there is no voice of pardon, no regenerating influence, no comforting words for tribulation, no sense of future accountability, no sense of the supremacy of conscience, and no well-established hope beyond the grave? Is it reasonable to believe that God, as a father, never made himself known to his children, but cast them out into a wilderness to wander and tremble and die?

IT IS NOT! Rather than believe that, I would go one step further, and saynot as the fool, who says it in his heart, but as the sad and hopeless man who would believe better if he could, "There is no God!" But because I cannot say there is no God, I must say that He has spoken to man, and because I must say that, I must believe that the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ has a supernatural origin.

THE LOGIC OF LAW.

BY JOSEPH PARKER, D.D., IN THE CITY TEMPLE, LONDON.

Thou shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.Exodus xxiii: 9.

MARK the logic of the text. This is not a sentiment only; it is a piece of reasoning, and a piece of reasoning founded upon the rock of history. Why shall we not oppress a stranger? The answer is in logical terms-"for," or because, 'ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." There is a whole philosophy of life in that one brief commandment; there is a whole theology in it also. The argument is that our conduct is to spring out of our experience; we are to go back upon our own history and consciousness for the law that shall guide us in the treatment of our fellow-men. Why, could we do so, no more should we hear the rasping voice of rancor, hostile criticism, mean remark, or severe demand. In this injunction is the germ of the completing commandment called the second: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The Scripture is thus full of common sense and profound philosophy. It lifts us to a new level and inspires us with a new spirit. Thou shalt not oppress the struggling man, for thou thyself hast had thy struggle. You are apt to forget your own oftenbaffled and abortive endeavors in the flush of your success and in the temptation of your prosperity. Once you stumbled in speech; have pity upon

the young speaker who is just fleshing his sword. He has had a hard time of it in private; he is full of fear; he is more nervous than he dare tell his own mother. Do not sit there in the lordliness of your own self-consciousness, easy and in the assurance of all but unlimited resources; but remember your own Egyptian servitude, and how you bungled, and stumbled, and went home one great red blush, unable to tell your own friends what fools you have made of yourselves. Remember your own Egypts, your own experiences, and out of the depths of many pathetic and gracious recollections bring the inspiration that shall guide your conduct in reference to other men. But this would make the world new in less than six days; it would create new heavens and a new earth, and all subsequent lifetime would be one long, long, sunny Sabbath day. Yet we are severe upon one another, and sometimes we get into moods that we call "critical," and imagine that criticism is a kind of heaven. Truly, it is the only heaven to which some men are likely to attain! Do not be hard upon those who are going up hill. You.call them "mean" sometimes, but they are not mean in reality. They are pinching a little here and a little there, and the genius of economy is so ruling them as to give them quite a false aspect in the eyes of an unsympathetic world. You do not know what they are doing. All these pinchings are to be so many oblations laid upon the altar of affection. A few coins here and a few there, some copper and some silver -the very least of their kind shall bulk up into quite a surprising offering of love somewhere. Better take the nobler view; do not call them "mean," or "greedy," or "covetous;" it is not for us to judge with such severity of judgment. It may be that the men are struggling with an invisible opponent, whose name they hardly know; and others could enlighten the whole horizon if they might speak one little sentence, but they cannot. You wonder at their roughness, at their want of

completeness; you say how very nearly they come up to the measure of the stature of perfect men. Why that default-not more than one inch long? They could tell you the story of early childhood and early disadvantage and struggle, which has gone with them, staining all their ascent. But they cannot; they need not. Who are we, that we should be honored with such tales of secret conflict, and rather not be satisfied with such evidences of social and public triumph?

Thou shalt not oppress a doubting man, for thou thyself hast had thy doubts, if thou art more than half a man. We do not always know what doubt is. Doubt takes the color of the mind in which it operates. Some doubts are little and others mass themselves up into a kind of spiritual tragedy. You must understand the psychological differences of mind. All things are not equally plain to all observers. The man may only be doubting my view. The man need not be doubting the solar system because he doubts my interpretation of it. I may be making his doubt vital when it is only accidental. It is possible to believe in revelation and yet not to believe any one preacher of it, but to doubt the whole tribe ministerial. It is possible to live in God and yet to be outside the stone church which is built for His accommodation. The doubt of some men may be but the larger faith. I cannot tell-I will not judge; there is One who knoweth. He will deal righteously with us all, so I leave myself and others in His gentle hands. Do not suppose that words can tell everything, any more than any musical instrument can express the whole apocalypse of music. Suppose we formed a society that shall speak only words of one syllable. That is our orthodoxy-a man who speaks a dissyllable is a heretic; the man who speaks a polysyllable is a blasphemer. Who could submit to such humiliation? Tet that is what is done in effect in relation to many speculative and profound questions.

If men do not

believe my words-one syllable or many syllables-how prone I am to regard them as publicans, and heathen men, and outsiders, and rebels! I will remember my own doubts. I was in darkness that gathered upon me so heavily that for a long period I had no day; life was one long night, troubled with serious dreaming that had in it all shapes and voices and sore vexations; but the light came-white in the east, and up came the sun in all the reality of day, and I had liberty and joy not to be spoken. It shall be so with my brother; he will not die in the night of doubt and unrest; he will be brought through to the land of morning, and there he will build a temple that shall never be thrown down!

Now the text has a meaning in reference to ourselves as well as to others. Thou shalt not renew old fears, for all thy fears have been round, black, blatant liars. What liars they have been! And yet to-day we still open the door and take them in, believing that now at last they are telling the truth. They cannot tell the truth; they are not liars only, they are lies. Their little measurable personality is lost in the infiniteness of incurable falsehood. How foolish we are and slow of heart in this matter, by allowing all our old fears to talk to us like old friends! In six troubles you have been delivered, and I charge you now with talking to the seventh as if he were an old friend or a truth-speaker. How dare. you? Where is your faith? Where is your Christ? Where is the Holy Ghost? Remember the case: Six fears have been with you, have lied to you, have made you play the fool in all the higher relations and issues of life, and yet I detect you this morning talking in the corner to a member of the same false family! Why do you not throw it from you, or order it behind you, or mock it with the jibing of perfect rest in God? You are baptized Atheists, you are Church-going idolators, and if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness?

These are the words of truth and wis

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is still as if it were reluctantly welcome; the old shadow that followed me like a cloud, that fell upon me on all sides, that put out the household fire, that hid the old arm-chair in impenetrable darkness, that gloomed upon the altar, until the prayer of faith became an impossibility. It has been blown away by the wind of heaven, pierced by shafts of sunlight, and yet, when it returns, I accost it as if it had some right to my soul! So faithless am I, so little has my baptism into Christ done for me, I say "God," but I do not mean it. It is the Church that must be converted, not the "masses." I am not yearning about the "masses" and building canvas tents for them, and sounding bassoons over their revelries and madnesses. The Church, the Bride, the Lamb's Wife, has gone wrong! You must convert the scepticism of the Church, the pedantry and selfishness of the pulpit; you must re-convert the converted, otherwise the Church is the greatest mischief-doer among all the institutions of men. Oh, that the Lord would send amongst us some burning prophet, that went up nightly in a chariot of fire unto heaven, and wanted not money, not patronage, nor help of man; but could seize the age, and live for it, and die for it, and rise again for it! Three years would kill him, but with Christ he would live for

ever.

"Thou shalt not-, because." That is the logic of the text. The illustrations I have given might, as you will see, be infinitely multiplied; but they would all be germane to the philosophy of the text; they would all find their vindication in this divine injunction. Now, what must He be who gave such laws? In the character of the laws, find the character of the legislator. Will you debate about God in terms philosophical, scholastic, literary? Your debate will end where it began. I will try to find out God little by lit

tle, along the line of the words which He is said to have spoken. I will worship the God that spake these words. I do not know always the God of the theologian. He is a ganglion of metaphysical terms and contradictions and sovereignties and covenants and bargainings and transactions-endless and vexatious. The God of the Bible I can in part understand; not see through the lightnings, not understand the thunderings and the noise of the trumpet, not walk upon the smoking mountain there I stand back in veneration and amazement, having no more to say than the little child who never spoke. But when the laws themsel ves come afterwards, out of that apocalypse, I can look at them, weigh them, and follow them somewhat into their practical applications in daily life. This is an instance in point. God must be tender; He takes care of strangers. Why should He, who inhabits eternity, take care of a stranger-one stranger? When He was upon the mountain, amid all the noise and thunder, amid all the dazzling splendor and mysterious incense, I did not know Him; but when all the accident has passed away like a pageant, living but for a moment, this word is left behind "Thou shalt not oppress a stranger." He who said that has a big heart, a tender spirit, a father's royal love. I want to know more about Him. He touches my sympathy. Not only so, He must be aware of human history in all its changes and processes. He knows about the strangers who were in the land of Egypt; He knows about their deliverance; He knows that strangers are a tribe that must be on the earth from age to age; He knows us altogether He speaks a word for the stranger. Oh, man, friendless, lonely man, you should love God. Oh, woman, mother, sister--sinning woman, you should love Christ. Oh, little children-frail flowers that may wither in a moment, you should put out your little hands, if in but dumb prayer, and long to touch the Son of God. Oh, working man, led away by the dema gogue, made to scoff where you ought to

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