The lesson of our text is a lesson we all need to learn. Circumstances are continually arising, in your life and mine, which tend to make us restless and impatient. Sometimes our plans are frustrated, our hopes disappointed, our labours nullified; sometimes we have to bear pain and disease, bodily and mental prostration; sometimes those whom we have benefited are ungrateful, and render us evil for good-or those whom we trusted and loved deceive and wound us; sometimes our stanchest, truest friends are taken from us by death. To one and all of us, then, the advice of the Psalmist is applicable, or will sooner or later become applicable. As soon as trouble comes upon us, we become restless and impatient, as if we had never heard of God. We are always ready to preach patience; why cannot we practise what we preach? can exercise faith for other men; shall we never exercise it for ourselves? Is it likely that in a well-ordered universe-and we profess to believe that the universe is well ordered

We

is it likely that our welfare alone has been overlooked? If it were our destiny to fight impotently against surrounding forces, which were bound in the end to destroy us, then there

would be an excuse for our anxiety and foreboding. But if there be a God, a loving God, a God who is making all things to work together for good, then our fretful impatience is puerile and contemptible. Can we not wait-wait like men-" for the far-off interest of tears"?

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Against Censoriousness.

"Judge not."-MATTHEW vii. 1.

HE wisest maxims are always susceptible of a ridiculous interpretation. This is the kind of interpretation which thinkers of a certain school are wont to put upon the sayings of Christ. Having made up their minds that the Christian religion is impracticable, and altogether unsuited to the exigencies of human life, they proceed to explain Christ's injunctions, in a way which will support this gratuitous hypothesis. They tell us that social order-nay, the very existence of society-would be at an end if we were to act upon the precepts of the Nazarene. They maintain that the meekness of spirit which Christ inculcated, would involve the abrogation of criminal prosecutions and civil punishments; and such an abrogation, they assert, would be absolutely fatal. Of course it would. Christ

Himself said, however, that His mission was not to destroy the law, but to fulfil; and He certainly did not narrow, but on the contrary enlarged, its borders. But this of course is, consciously or unconsciously, ignored. Just notice, if you please, the unphilosophical injustice of which these thinkers are guilty. In studying Aristotle or Herbert Spencer, they try to discover the best meaning which the author's words are capable of bearing; but in regard to Christ's teaching, they always select the worst. It is really too bad. No amount of absurdity or inconsistency is too great to be attributed to Jesus. In fact, the more ridiculous they have made His teaching appear, the more confident do they seem that they have expressed His real meaning. "Judge not!” they exclaim, for example. "Why, it is impossible to fulfil that command; and if it were possible, it would be detrimental!" Very true in one sense. Everybody knows that if we are certain a man has committed a crime, we cannot help judging him to be guilty. And everybody knows that if we did not award punishment, where punishment was due, society would be destroyed. Christian charity itself demands that we be very strict and inexorable in these kinds of judgments. What Christ is here warning us against is not social or

legal judgment, but moral. By a moral judgment I mean the attempt to sum up the worth or worthlessness of a human character, considered not in regard to such and such actions, but as a whole. We may see very clearly that association with certain persons would be injurious to ourselves or to our families, and it is our bounden duty to form such judgments, and to act upon them. But this does not warrant our attempting to estimate a man's moral standing in the sight of God. The reason why Christ forbids our passing such judgments is, that they would be invariably wrong. Let me try and make this plain.

In the first place, we have not sufficient data. "We see a few of the actions which a man performs, we hear a few of the words he utters; and that is all we know of him. Yet some of us imagine that, on the strength of this knowledge, we can form a complete and infallible judgment in regard to his moral worth." We could not make a greater or more foolish mistake. question whether a man is good or bad, very good or very bad, how good or how bad, is a highly complex question, depending on an almost infinite variety of circumstances. In order to arrive at a correct decision, we must know the

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