icent and lovely; but sometimes also, with her earthquakes and whirlwinds, her pains and diseases, she seems to suggest to us a Power which does not care whether we live or die, whether we have all that heart can wish, or suffer lifelong, unmitigated anguish. Conscience, again, has told every man ever born into the world that there is a distinction between right and wrong, that he should do the one and avoid the other, that right-doing is praiseworthy and wrong-doing abominable. This much conscience tells him; but what he must do in order to act rightly, he has to discover for himself. And the discovery is not always easy. On every page of history you will find illustrations of mistaken ideas of right. The Feejee Islander kills his parents when they begin to grow old, and he thinks he is thereby doing them a service; for he is afraid that otherwise they would be too feeble to make their way into another life. Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, invited the vanquished warrior Sisera into her tent, offering him, as it seemed with feminine kindliness, refreshment and repose. He trusted her; he fell asleep; and she killed him on the spot. She thought she had acted nobly. Deborah and

Barak chanted a pæan in her honour, and declared that, in doing what she did, she came to the help of the Lord. As if the God of righteousness required to be supported by treachery and meanness worthy only of a fiend! History, moreover, "which to him who reads it rightly is but the God of truth working out truth," is by no means easy to decipher. In the long-run, right has always prevailed, and evil has always proved itself to be foolish and, injurious—in the long-run, but not necessarily in the life of the individual. The tower of Siloam may fall upon the righteous. The wicked may be in great power, and may " spread himself like a green bay-tree," even till he dies. And so we may be often misled into mistaking good for evil, and evil for good. These primeval revelations, then, of nature and conscience and history, are very difficult to interpret..

Hence men have often formed the most erroneous and unworthy conceptions of the Deity. Some have regarded Him as indifferent to human welfare, others as positively vindictive. Epicurus, for example, taught that it was a waste of time to worship the gods; for they were too agreeably employed to do men harm or good.

"They haunt (he said)

The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,

Nor sound of human sorrow mounts, to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm."

The belief that God is indifferent is bad, but the belief that He is vindictive is worse, and the latter conception has been the more common of the, two. It lies, of course, at the root of all the sacrifices of heathendom. Savages almost always look upon their gods as powerful and capricious beings, naturally inclined to do them harm, but liable to be turned from their purpose by a grateful savour, or a costly gift, or the pleasing sight of blood.

To a superficial observer it might appear that the sacrifices of Judaism implied the same sort of belief. We know that this was the view commonly held in degenerate times by the masses of the people. But the original intention of these sacrifices was something very different. They are to be distinguished from the sacrifices of heathendom by the fact that there existed among the Jews a mercy-seat. This was a constant witness to them that they did not need to extort mercy from a grudging Deity, but that, on the contrary,

He wished to do them good. A Jewish sacrifice was intended to typify self-surrender; it was symbolical of a determination to serve the God of righteousness. The mere giving up of a thing was not sufficient, as the Jews were taught by the story of Cain. The spirit of the worshipper must be right with God. The sentiment of his heart must correspond with the meaning of the symbol. Under the Levitical dispensation, you remember, the Jews were obliged to offer up the first born of animals as dead sacrifices, and the first-born of men (through the rite of circumcision) as living sacrifices. The first-born represented their strength, their vitality, their endurance. Hence the meaning of the sacrifice was, that all which was best in the nation should be devoted to the service of God. The same remark applies to the Passover. That yearly festival was a symbol of the people's consecration. Their being sprinkled with the life-blood of the paschal lamb typified the dedication of their own lives to Jehovah. So, too, with the ceremonial purifications and the sacrifice of the day of atonement. In conforming to these requirements, they acknowledged the fact that they belonged to the peculiar people, and that they desired to participate in its duties and its priv

ileges. If a man refused to comply with these conditions, he cut himself off from the congregation of faithful Israelites. "Without the shedding of blood there could be no remission." Not, of course, that the blood of bulls and goats compensated for sin, or annulled it. It merely represented the worshipper's state of heart; it symbolised the fact that he was conscious of his sin, and anxious to give it up-that he desired to become a worthy member of the nation which felt itself chosen as the representative of righteousness.

Such was the original intention of the Jewish sacrifices. But the misinterpretation of symbols is one of the commonest of human weaknesses, and the Jews were constantly supposing that their own institutions meant the same as those of heathendom. They were constantly acting as if the God of righteousness were a Moloch or a Baal. Instead of regarding the sacrifices they offered as emblems of a desire to depart from iniquity and to conform to God's will, they looked on them as a means of purchasing immunity, so long as they might please to continue in sin. Against such notions as these we find the prophets continually protesting. They were so strongly impressed with the magnitude of the mischief which