FIRST SUNDAY.

Bead Exodus xxiv., and Heb. viii.

WHATEVER else the Israelites believed, they had intense faith in the personal nearness of the living God. The life of the Patriarchs was marked by the fresh sense they entertained of One who knew them in all their wanderings, and with whom they walked as with a friend and father. The teaching of the Exodus impressed the same lesson; and however impossible it is now to separate the symbolical from the actual in the pictures given us of the Divine manifestations in the wilderness, especially during the mysterious grandeur of the Law-giving, we can have no difficulty in perceiving how direct and sincere was the belief of the people in the Personal Presence of Jehovah, in His speaking to Moses, and that the awful pageantry, now of darkness, now of splendour, which dwelt on Horeb was the visible token that God Himself had come down, whether immediately or through the Angel of the Covenant, and was speak ing to them in the signs and wonders that filled them with terror.

Among the many incidents recorded of that time there is one which appears peculiarly strange. "Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the very heavens for clearness. ... And they beheld God, and did eat and drink."

The incongruity is startling. We stumble on the words with a shock of surprise, when in the midst of an episode so full of awe, and when the actors knew they were gazing on the tokens of the Divine Presence, we read: "They beheld God, and did eat and drink."

The meal referred to was doubtless sacrificial. From the preceding verses we learn that Moses had sent beforehand young men to offer sacrifices, and as it was the custom of those who did so to partake of the sacrifices, we may believe that it was as a religious act -the act of those who wished to identify themselves with the spiritual reality of which the external rite was the expression-that they now "did eat and drink" before God.

But these sacrificial meals had surely a wider and more permanent teaching. We must not confine their meaning to the ritual

of which they formed a part, but must try to discover what is of permanent value and true for us as well as the Israelites. Whatever other ends these institutions served, it may accordingly appear that the eating and drinking before the Lord, the sacred feasts connected with many sacrifices, and the very materialism which entered so much into the ancient worship, ought to be regarded as a striking witness to the sacredness of everyday life and to the importance of the body as well as the soul. The hallowed character of such feasts were, so to speak, sacraments of common life, telling how religion has to do with every interest appointed by God in human existence. If we are almost shocked by the incongruity of men eating and drinking when under the sublime influences of the scene described in Exodus, may it not be because we have ourselves fallen into an unreal way of looking at religion; drawing distinctions which God has not drawn between the sacred and the secular, "the world" and "the Church;" having one set of principles for Sunday and another for the weekday, and failing to consecrate with a sense of the Divine Presence the ordinary routine of our daily task? It is only when we translate the symbolism of Jewish ritual, with its recognition of the religious meaning of civil politics as well as ecclesiastical ordinances of the Divine side of national and family life as well as of individual responsibility of the holiness of even natural seasons, and the sanctity of agriculture and commerce when fulfilled in the spirit of brotherhood-that we can learn the lessons which were intended for all time.

The striking words, "They beheld God, and did eat and drink" suggest three possible modes of life: (1) men may eat and drink without beholding God, and in this we have A Description of Worldliness; (2) men may behold God and refuse to eat and drink, and in them we recognise False Puritanism and Asceticism; and (3) in those who see God and eat and drink, or eat and drink as men who see God, we have The Ideal Life.

We will make each of these the subject of meditation for the remaining Sundays of the month.

THIRD SUNDAY.

Read Psalm cxlvii., and Romans xiv. 14 to end.

If, as we have seen, there are persons who accept the secular to the neglect of the sacred, or rather, who do not make all things sacred by seeing God in all; so there are others who equally separate the two, and by confining religion within the narrow sphere of things conventionally regarded as peculiarly "pious," and frowning on all else as "worldly," come short, in like manner, of the ideal of Christian life. "They see God" but refuse "to eat and drink." This is the essence of asceticism and false Puritanism. Both were natural reactions from a disordered condition of society. It was not extraordinary that during the latter days of the Roman Empire, when licentiousness was rampant-or that during the Middle Ages, when Europe was the battle-field of half-civilised clans, men should have sought retirement in the cloister or the cell, where, undisturbed by the violence that raged around, they might pursue the calm paths of piety or of sacred learning. Nor was it unnatural that in those days a form of opinion should have arisen which gave a stern sanction to monasticism. Theology then taught that the flesh, in the physical sense, was the source of all sin, and that heaven could be best purchased by a literal killing out of every desire or affection which could be traced to such a fountain. By fasting and scourging the faithful must, therefore, subdue all earthly love and human passion, and become literally dead to the world, a spiritual mummy, heedless of science and art or politics-except in so far as they bore upon the "Order "-lost in meditation, and so swathed in ecclesiasticism as to be no more a member of the great human family, but of this supra-mundane society called the Church.

Puritanism was also a reaction, for it arose in times of great moral laxity; and while we freely grant that the picture of the Puritans which serves the purpose of most novelists and essayists is often no more than a caricature, yet there is undoubtedly a way of regarding religion as separate from the fulness of interest which belongs to common life, that must be traced back to their influence. The jealous eye with which Puritanism frowned at all amusement as an ungodly thing, the conventional barriers it set up to stem the flow of natural taste and sympathy, proved a

Puritanism was strong and earnest-would that we had its strength and earnestness now! Yet the religious history of our country may teach us that while we are indebted to the Puritans for nearly all that is purest and healthiest in our national life, yet there has been inherited from them a certain cramping narrowness of sympathy which has more than once led to disastrous practical reactions. These men failed to embrace within religion all that has been mercifully ap pointed by God for the many-sided requirements of our nature. They indeed "beheld God." They grasped and loved religious truth, and served God with a courage which may well shame us; but so awed were they in those days of "the Wars of the Lord," when each man dwelt as if "under the shadow of the Almighty," that we cannot describe them as "seeing God, and eating and drinking." The "eating and drinking," ordinary social life, with its laughter and its song as well as its more serious hours, was contemned as secular, frivolous, almost profane; and with a sublime firmness the Puritan grasped his Bible and his sword, and sang his psalms, and checked as "vanity" the giving of time or thought to any less solemn interests.

The effect of this was widely felt. It made many hypocrites, and it soon produced in society the reaction which all such extremes inevitably entail. The licence and indifference of the eighteenth century followed swiftly on the narrowness and bigotry of the seventeenth. When religion was divorced from common life, common life soon became separated from religion, and thus Puritanism played straight into the hands of worldliness.

Similar pernicious influences are frequently still at work, sapping character far more than is usually believed. The unnatural rigidity and conventional prejudices of religious schools; the distinctions set up between the lawful and unlawful, founded on no real principle, being based on tradition and custom rather than on reason or Scripture ; these produce either a rebound whereby those who have been once held too strictly fly into the other extreme; or, what is worse, making others take, with a bad conscience, what ought to be enjoyed with a healthy freedom. The strait-laced religionist would, forsooth, confine the power of God to the limited circle of things pious and ecclesiastical, forgetting how "every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights;" that we

are living in a redeemed world; and that all lovely sights and sounds in nature, the joys of social intercourse, the manifold talents bestowed on man, whether shown in the victories of learning, science, and art, or in the lighter works of fancy, humour, and wit; just because they have a side true to our humanity, as God has made it, so have they an aspect that is essentially Christian. Wherever a man can "behold God" and recognise a harmony between his interests or his very amusements, and the will of the Father, he ought to have no bad conscience, but a manly, religious liberty. Thus beholding God, let him "eat and drink."

FOURTH SUNDAY.

Read Ecclesiastes xi. 9-xii., and St. Luke vii. 31 to end.

The ideal life as expressed in the terms "beholding God, and eating and drinking," is that which our Lord sets before us by His teaching and example. He said of John the Baptist that he came "neither eating nor drinking." That earnest man whose eye had gazed on the glory of God till all earthly lights had paled under its splendour, came from the bareness of the Desert, an ascetic, a Puritan, scorning all social comfort and reproving with a voice of thunder the laxity and worldliness of the time. The Baptist was found at no feast or festival. He stood aloof not only from the sins, but from the ordinary interests of mankind.

Our Lord puts Himself in contrast to this. "The Son of man is come eating and drinking." For it was His glory to show that the true function of religion is to imbue all duties, and to purify and elevate every sphere of life with its own spirit. He therefore did not stand, like the Baptist, separate from mankind, but was identified with our every-day associations of home and family. He did not live in the desert, but spent His early manhood in a sweet valley among the hills, where the voices of children at play were heard mingling with the sounds of industrious handicraft. He had enjoyed a mother's care and a home life spent with friends and relatives. And thus when He entered on His ministry He consecrated things common by the spirit with which He acted in them all. He did not hold Himself aloof from the merriment of the marriage of Cana, nor refuse the feast prepared in His honour by those who loved Him and took that method of showing their love. On His bosom the sweet innocence of childhood nestled with confidence, and while all that was base,

hypocritical, cowardly, and cruel fell back from that Presence which shed the very radiance of God's own holiness, yet so humane was its manifestation that the friendless, the weak, the unhappy, the sinful, the pained in body as in soul were drawn to Him as to the most sympathetic and tender brother.

He was not as John the Baptist-thank God for it!- -no mere stern reprover, standing apart from life, but one who walked with us on our every-day paths, entered our houses, sat at our tables, and was a sharer of every human joy and sorrow. Like God's own sunlight, which glorifies the greatest and most distant star, while it sparkles on the beaded gossamer, so did Jesus touch the lowliest as well as the highest interests with the same perfect light and beauty. He revealed God, and yet so sweetly tender was the manifestation that the very children in the Temple shouted with joy as He came among them. This is our highest example; it is the ideal life, for it shows the sacredness of everything when God is seen and realised in all. Seeing God, let us eat and drink, but eat and drink as those who verily behold God.

If in this spirit we enter the world we will require no code of rules to guide us. The mere letter of law is at the best an external and dead restraint. The spirit of Christ is the law of Christian life, and where that spirit is there is liberty. To do all things as those who behold God is the Christian calling. Amid the manifold elements which constitute the interest of life let us endeavour to maintain a healthy and happy recognition of our Father's nearness and goodness, and all will come right. Such a consciousness will compel us of itself to withstand the approach of evil as by an instinct, and will elevate all thoughts, all duties, all delights into a pure and bright atmosphere. The life of a man so held by the love of God becomes a continual worship, an unceasing gospel of goodness preached to the world, not in spasmodic and exceptional lecturings, but in the winning language of days well spent, and of a spirit which is manifestly consecrated in all things to God through Jesus Christ. But that spirit can neither be gained nor maintained by merely seeing its beauty. It arises from the vision of God, and if we would enjoy that we must, like Moses and his companions, ever and anon ascend the Mount and be alone with God, and under those influences of which prayer and meditation are the assured channels.

CHAPTER XLIV.-MONCKTON IS RATHER

RUDE.

ton, nor was it in at all a sanguine mood that he set forth to walk to Beckton on the following morning. If rumour was to be credited,

evening all by himself at the Royal Hotel, his solitude only being invaded for a short time by Mr. Petherick, who was respectfully inquisitive, as before. Mr. Petherick hoped he had enjoyed his walk to Beckton, and had found Mr. Gilbert "I should say the Squire; but there! I never can bring my tongue to it somehow"-pretty well. Might he make so bold as to ask whether Mr. Gilbert felt confident about the election? He did hear, but for his part he paid no heed to such talk, that some of the voters was uncommon bitter against the Squire, "through Miss Greenwood being so much the favourite, you see, sir, and well deserved, I'm sure." He trusted, however, that there would be no rioting or throwing of stones to bring discredit upon the place. "And what I always says is, there's two sides to every story, and we didn't ought to be in such a hurry to judge. And as for what has been spoke of in my hearing about the Manor House property, and Mr. Buswell being determined to get a hold of it, and the way as he thinks as it'll come into his hands -why, I should be ashamed to repeat such things to you, sir. No, sir, I really couldn't repeat 'em not if you was to beg me to it." Brian did not get rid of the exasperating man until all that Kingscliff was saying about his brother and Miss Huntley had been made known to him, with what Mr. Petherick doubtless imagined to be extreme delicacy. It was not much more than he already knew or suspected; he had not been able to credit Gilbert even with the poor excuse of having transferred his affections from one lady to another; but it was painful to him that the truth about this sorry business should be made the subject of clumsy ridicule. Where money is concerned rustics are apt to be more cynical than dwellers in cities. It was easy to gather from Mr. Petherick's remarks that Miss Huntley was regarded by the Kingscliffians as a dupe, and that their indignation against Gilbert for his perfidy was tempered by a certain respect for his supposed astuteness. Not much sleep did Brian get in the huge four-poster which was said to have given satisfaction to Sir John PollingXXVIII-56

look with favour upon his project of buying back the Manor House. However, the attempt had to be made; and in any case he must see his brother, if only to dissuade him from taking any measures of retaliation against the bellicose Mitchell.

He did not, as on the previous day, adopt a circuitous route, so that, after mounting the hill, he found himself close to St. Michael's Church and Vicarage, and, being there, it seemed worth while to ask whether Monckton was at home. He had no intention of leaving Kingscliff without having shaken hands with his old friend: perhaps too he thought it would be bracing to exchange a few words with an honest man.

Monckton was not only at home but alone. As Brian entered his study he looked up from the papers with which his table was littered and exclaimed—

"This is better than I expected! I was wondering when you meant to answer my letter; but I would rather see your face than your handwriting any day. Sit down, my dear fellow, and make yourself comfortable, and tell me all about your musical triumphs. I have only heard the most meagre details as yet."

"Oh, well," said Brian, seating himself sideways upon the table and swinging one of his long legs, "there isn't a great deal to tell. The opera succeeded, and it wasn't much of an opera, and—and that's about all, I think. At least, that isn't quite all, because I believe that my success is likely to be in a sort of way permanent. I mean it's open to me to do the same thing over again; and people who ought to know tell me that I shall make money without any difficulty now. That's something to be thankful for— as far as it goes."

"It goes a long way, Brian. found that out yet?"

Haven't you

"Oh, yes; I know it's useful. In fact I mean, if I can, to make use of it forthwith. Do you know why I came down here, Monckton? But you would never guess; and I expect you'll think me rather a fool when I tell you. I want to buy the Manor House back."