the ways of his heart, and the sight of his eyes. There are no tones in the passage of ascetic Puritanism, any more than of mere cynicism. Life is good, and to be enjoyed; yet it is always grave, and the account is alway running up against it.

The cynic is wrong who undervalues life either in its joys or sorrows. The Puritan is wrong

who would stretch over it the shadows of an artificial religion, and follow all its steps with eyes of jealousy. The true view is at once earnest and genial, bright yet always thoughtful, looking to the end from the beginning, and forecasting the future, yet without anxiety in the experience of the present.

And this thoughtful insight, which is the best guide for our own lives, suggests also the highest view of life around us. The great advantage of looking below the mere surface to what has been called the "moral granite" beneath, which really makes the substance and power of human experience, is not merely that it makes us mindful of our own ways, and critical over ourselves lest we fall into condemnation, but that it helps us better to understand others. It feeds in us the springs of sympathy, and helps us to imagine difficulties other than our own. There may be good below many a surface where

we see only evil. Wrong, no doubt, is always wrong, and selfishness we are never in ourselves or others to dignify with the name of amiable weakness. But every full-hearted man knows that there are forms of good more than his own -it may be better than his own and that there are often higher thoughts and higher aims where he may fail to trace them.

A large and thoughtful view of life nourishes this tolerance towards others, as well as watchfulness over ourselves. Tenderness, charity, hopefulness-all spring from it. It is the man who grasps the deeper realities of his own life most wisely who will be most loving, and hopeful, and helpful towards others. As he knows how near weakness lies to strength in himself— failure to aspiration-selfishness to generosityhow inextricably the roots of sin and the shoots of virtue are entwined in his own heart,-so he thinks what good may lie near to what seems to him evil in other lives, how strength may come out of weakness, and God be glorified in ways that he knows not of. Let us be hopeful for others, while careful over ourselves, and leave lives around us to the judgment of God, while seeing always the awful finger of this judgment pointing to our own.

And now, unto Him who hath given us the promise of the life that now is, as well as that which is to come, and whose grace can alone strengthen us to live now so that hereafter we may abide in His presence-unto Him be glory Amen.

for ever.

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XIII.

CHRISTIAN WORSHIP.

1 CORINTHIANS, xiv. 15-19.-"What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also; I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also. Else, when thou shalt bless with the spirit, how shall he that occupieth the room of the unlearned say Amen at thy giving of thanks, seeing he understandeth not what thou sayest? For thou verily givest thanks well, but the other is not edified. I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue."

THIS

HIS chapter, and particularly the verses we have read, give us something of a real insight into the character of the earliest Christian times. They carry us back, across more than eighteen centuries, and help us to see, as in a mirror, the Corinthian Church, and what its worship was, less than thirty years after the death of our Lord. say this with confidence; because the Epistles

I

to the Corinthians are admitted beyond all question, by all critics, however sceptical, to be the genuine writings of the Apostle Paul. They give us therefore, so far, a real picture of the thought and life of their time. The Corinthian Church, planted by the apostle, with its strange enthusiasms and mingled beliefs, stands revealed in them. And how very valuable and rare such a picture is, may be estimated by the difficulty we have in calling up before our minds any true image of facts or institutions only one or two centuries past. There are few things more difficult to do. Let us try, for example, to recall our own Scottish Church of the seventeenth century -to bring clearly before us its mode of worship, the attempt to displace which, in the summer of 1637, gave rise to the memorable tumult whose force spread through England as well as Scotland, and changed our whole history-how little would we be found agreeing in our reproduction of that worship, and the famous scene connected with it; how scanty the materials for their reproduction! How much harder still is it to realise the form of that ancient Celtic Church which prevailed in these islands before it was supplanted by the Latin or Roman Ritual-the