chants, and the offering of eucharists, and a life of contemplation, as economies and shadows. And yet these alone are the shrine of an abiding life. This pompous, wise, stately world must have its day, and then be dissolved, "as a dream when one awaketh." We live in the midst of it, till it bewilders and stuns us, and we do it homage; and when we turn from it to unseen things, they are too subtle and too pure for our deadened sense. There is no cure for this, but to be more alone with God. Solitude and silence are full of reality. We must draw more into our own hearts, and converse more with Him. Never do we so put off the paint and masquerade of life, as when we are alone under the Eye which seeth in secret. A man must be either very bold, or very blind, that will there still keep up the play and artifice of his common bearing. I do not speak of hypocrites. There is no man that is not in some measure twofold; and that simply because there is no man who is willing to be known by his fellow-men as he knows himself, and as none knows him beside, but God only. We see only a part of each other, but God sees all. Our partial view is, if not mingled with untruth, yet misleading, because imperfect; we know only half the riddle, and we are led astray in guessing at the rest. But "all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." Our

very helplessness makes us real. His eye holds in check the duplicities of our being; and by the habitual restraints of solitude with God they are weakened and overcome. In the world, all day long, there is an influence playing upon us, which draws our characters to the surface, and there fixes them, leaving our hearts hollow and inactive. The works of our calling, even the most sacred offices, have a tendency to become an unconscious facility, and to sever themselves from the powers of the will. The next move is, to withdraw themselves from the region of the conscience. Now, nothing but self-discipline in secret can keep up the integrity of our whole nature. And the more difficult this is, by reason of a man's overburdened life of daily business, the more absolutely needful is it for his safety. Fearful thought! we were born alone, and alone we must die; and yet through all our life, we, as it were, flee from loneliness, which is alike the beginning and the ending of our earthly transit! Does not this seem to say that we are never at ease, but when we can lose the consciousness of what we are? All that we can do, when we find ourselves grown artificial and excited, is to go apart, where none but God sees us, and fall down as dust and nothingness before Him, and plead with Him against ourselves, and pray Him to abolish in us all that is not real and eternal.

We have the more need of this sacred disci pline of self, because we have few aids and helps of a secondary sort. They are not many who have the blessing of being subject to any proximate superior; to any rule out of themselves, by which the detail of their life is ordered. More is thereby thrown upon the energy of the individual will. The need of some imposed discipline, which shall bear upon the actings of our inner nature, is wonderfully attested by the yearnings of thoughtful men at this time: on every side we hear them painfully striving to free themselves from the bondage of unmeaning and artificial habits, and to find some basis on which they may rest the full weight of their living powers. This has grown upon them, more and more, ever since the current of the world turned aside from the path of the Catholic Church. The more energetic, dominant, and mighty, the more learned, toilsome, and selftrusting it has become, the more hollow is it and "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof." It is confounded at its own perpetual changes: it sees that none of its schemes abide; that it daily grows more weary of toiling, and more transient in its toils. And why, but because it has divorced itself from the Church of the living God, and is resolving again into the incoherencies of its fallen state? All men are conscious of this:

untrue.

even they that cannot explain the cause. They feel, when they are busied in the world, that there is something empty, something which mocks and wearies them they feel that the leaning of all their worldly toil is away from God; that they are moving in another direction; that their returns to Him are by a sensible effort, and, as it were, against a stream. They feel, too, that their daily life is a hindrance to a life of devotion. It is distracting and importunate; it exacts too much service, and repays with a perpetual weariness. All the day long they are conscious that they have fallen under the dominion of a power which is not at one with God. They crave after something through which they may submit themselves to the realities of the eternal world. And for this end was the visible Church ordained. To meet the yearnings of our baffled hearts, it stands in the earth as a symbol of the Everlasting; under the veil of its material sacraments are the powers of an endless life; its unity and its order are the expressions of heavenly things; its worship, of an eternal homage. Blessed are they that dwell within its hallowed precinct, shielded from the lures and spells of the world, living in plainness, even in poverty; hid from the gaze of men, in solitude and silence walking with God.

L

SERMON XI.

THE LIFE OF CHRIST THE ONLY TRUE IDEA OF SELF-DEVOTION.

PHILIPPIANS ii. 21.

All seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ's."

THERE is something peculiarly touching in the saddened tone of these few words, in which St. Paul glances at the slackness of his fellow-labourers. It must have been a cross almost too heavy to bear without complaining, when from his prisonhouse at Rome he saw his brethren in Christ drawing off, one by one, from the hardness of their Master's service. It must have been a provocation almost beyond endurance to see, day by day, tokens of a faint heart and a selfish purpose coming out in the words and acts of those on whom he most depended. It added to his bondage the worst form of desolation—the loneliness of a high, unbroken spirit in the throng of shrinking and inconstant men. He had before now seen, in faithless and fearful Christians, open apostacy and undisguised