them labouring and heavy-laden and gives them rest. All who have committed themselves to Christ bear the same testimony, telling us that to them life has got all its richest charms and sweetest pleasures since their new birth

"Then first they lived, when they began to love."

Is there truth in these representations? Is this second reason for the distrust of working men towards Christianity even more baseless than the first? If it be, have they not great cause to examine the subject far more seriously and attentively, and consider whether this Christianity, to which they feel so coldly, be not, after all, their most valuable friend?

Christianity claims to be a glorious divine remedy for all the evils that have come into our world by sin. That great evils have somehow come into our world, that the state of things in which we live is very much out of order, none know better, none feel more keenly, than the hard-working classes themselves. We don't need to prove to them that they are not dwelling in Paradise. The lovely garden, with its cool streams, and its abundance of trees pleasant to the sight and good for food, and its gold, and bdellium and onyx, is but a faint tradition of the distant past. Pain and weariness have come to

afflict their bodies. Their lives are spent in toil and turmoil. Difficulties beset them at every turn; life itself is a struggle; temptations surround them which it is hard to overcome. Outside and inside, things are out of order. Outside, men are struggling for their interests and their pleasures; the strong jostling aside the weak, embittering their lives with disappointments and provocations, and snatching from them the very ewe-lamb that lies in their bosom. Inside, there is disorder, too. The heart is not calm. The temper is not placid. Volcanoes rumble and grumble beneath the surface, bursting out at times in words of passion and deeds of violence. A kind of low fever hovers about them, often inflaming their lusts till they become ungovernable, and in their wild excitement, dash and ruin everything. And then a worm sets a-gnawing and a-taunting, and fills the soul with the bitter sense of evil- doing. It is a miserable state! And so difficult to cure. Often men resolve and resolve to be better. But it seems as if it would be about equally reasonable to resolve that the winds shall not blow nor the waves beat. The storm comes back in spite of all. Things are bad enough now, and the tendency is to get worse, and what the end is to be, they never like to contemplate.

Well, it is this state of things that Christianity

undertakes to deal with and to remedy. In common disorders, it usually happens, that if you can tell what has caused the disease, you are in a fair way to find the remedy. Christianity proclaims that the primary cause of all this disorder is, that man has forsaken God, the child has abandoned its home,-the feeble sheep has strayed from the fold. We are out of our place--dislocated-off the rails-rocking and jolting in a wrong groove, and rushing on to an awful crash. It proclaims, likewise, that what first of all is most indispensable to a cure is, that man come back to his God. The prodigal must return to his home; the dislocated joint must be set; the train must be replaced on the right rails; the sheep must let itself be laid on the shoulders of the Shepherd who has come to seek for it, and be carried back to the comfort and security of the fold.

But Christianity not only teaches what has caused the disease, and what would cure it, it also provides the remedy. The Son of God has been manifested in the flesh to bring back wanderers to their home. And whereas they have broken God's law, and incurred its penalty, and the holy God cannot pass by such transgression without satisfaction, Jesus has made that satisfaction; He has made it at unutterable cost, completing it by his agony and death on the cross; and God has accepted it in full. And

now, through His messengers, God everywhere proclaims this great truth, and invites all wanderers to return to His favour, and to the privileges of their recovered home; assuring them that their return will be to Him the occasion of exceeding joy; partly because the bereaved Father loves to recover His erring children; and partly because their return will redound to the glory of that well-beloved Son who came to seek and to save them, and who desires no other reward than the joy of the husbandman who goes forth and weeps, bearing precious seed, but comes again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

If this be the first grand design of revealed religion, why should any, and above all, why should the working classes distrust it? In the view even of the life that now is, is it not a great matter to be at peace with God? Is it not a great matter to have your own place again at home? To have access to your Father, to have the benefit of His kind training, His wise counsels, His wholesome influence? To know that He loves you, that He is interested in you, that He possesses everything that you need, that in trouble He will deliver you, that He will calm your passions, strengthen you for all your battles, soothe you in all your sorrows,--in short, that He will withhold no good thing from you while

you walk uprightly? Christianity comes offering to every one of you the friendship and highest favour of the Almighty. If it can be shown that it does not provide what it promises, let that be the avowed ground on which it is rejected; but never let it be said that any one believed its offer, but rejected it or treated it with indifference because it was not worth his pains!

Besides the great blessing that has now been adverted to, there are many other aspects of Christianity so very favourable to the circumstances of working people, as to make their indifference towards it wear an aspect of singular infatuation. Our time will not be mis-spent if we touch briefly on a few of these.

Let us begin with what may be called the steadying and strengthening influence of Christianity. By its steadying influence we mean the power which it gives a man to walk erect, unseduced by temptation, uncorrupted by pleasure, unbeguiled by the love of ease. To do this is often far from easy. There are few men but have some weak point, where temptation is peculiarly dangerous. It is painful to mark, when men and women are setting out in life, with the dewy vigour of youth upon them, how soon many of them faint and grow weary, and some even utterly fail. There is one whom intemperance has