ship that which shall make all other love bright and dear; that which shall make all else more tolerable; that which shall comfort grief with the consolations of the Holy Ghost.

We pray that to all those who are in circumstances of present trial, of perplexity, of doubt, of anxiety and foreboding, of fear; to all who are bearing remorse and anguish; to all that are bereaved; to all that fear bereavement; to all that stand trembling in the midst of alternations of feeling-we pray, Lord Jesus, that to these thou wilt send forth the promised Comforter, and the succor that is in the Holy Ghost. And may there be, ere long, testimonies of gratitude that shall make known thy goodness to them, and their victory through thee.

ness.

live.

We pray that thou wilt teach us all to find more joy in sorrow, and more strength in weakGrant that we may find more victories in defeat. May we know how to die, that we may May we know how to be empty, that we may be full. May we know how to be crucified, that we may live with Christ. May our life shine; and yet, may it be hidden in Christ. And so may we be identified with him, that all men who behold us shall see something of the suffering of his heart, something of his grace, some proffers of help, and some promises of joy and immortality.

Bless, we pray thee, those that are appointed to bear the burdens of life, and to discharge its active duties. And while they are giving themselves to human affairs, grant, we beseech of thee, that they may evermore remember that their true state is in the world that is to come; that here there is no continuing city; that they seek a city whose builder and maker is God. And may they therefore, while they toil as citizens, remember that they are journeying as pilgrims; and while they build, may they remember that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Grant, we beseech of thee, that to every one there may come the sanctifying influences of thy Spirit, by which our affections, and our households-the realm of affection-may be more purified and more sacred. Grant that we may live together as common heirs of glory. May we count ourscives as the sons of God; and may we see divinity each in the other. May this teach us how to be patient with faults and infirmities, and to bear one another's burdens, and to seek to fulfil the law of love one toward another. And if we fall, teach us the way of godly repentance. Bring us back from all wanderings. If we forget, chide us, that we may remember; and if we are going steadily toward idolatry, afflict us, punish us, that we may have in chastisement the true token of thy love.

We beseech of thee that thou wilt win us from inordinate affections; from things wrong. May we not dwell even with our imaginations upon them. May we not go near them. May we learn how, in the strength of God, to go through the grounds of pleasure and of temptation, and yet be unscathed. Give to us that shield on which the fiery arrows of temptation shall smite in vain, and fall blunted.

Grant, we beseech of thee, that so we may journey through life, bearing our appointed sorrows, practicing as many years as thou, in thy wisdom, shalt allot to us. And then grant, when our time to die shall come, that we may die with our banner flying, and with the name of the Lord written thereon. With great victory may we overcome death by death, and rise again beyond, where there shall be no death, nor sin, nor sorrow, nor suffering; where thou art gathering thine own; where we shall be joined to the blessed company of saints, to be forever with the Lord. And to thy name shall be the praise, Father, Son, and Spirit. Amen.

PRAYER AFTER THE SERMON.

GRANT unto us, our heavenly Father, the inshining of the Spirit, and the indwelling of thy truth, by which we shall be mightier than the accidents of life; mightier than the circumstances that surround us; mightier than our own nature; by which we shall have the power of divine

grace to lift us above the weakness of the flesh, above the weakness of the affections. Teach us how to walk as the people of God. Make it real to us that we are the Lord's. Make it real to us not only that we are his, but that he is ours; that all things are for our sakes.

Grant unto us, we beseech of thee, this indwelling.

be with thee through eternal life. Amen.

Be with us through life. Then may we

THE CRIME OF DEGRADING MEN.

SUNDAY EVENING, JANUARY 17, 1869.

-Jum 1881969

"BUT whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!"-MATT. xviii. 6, 7.

THIS is one of the most striking scenes in the whole life of the Saviour, one of the most striking instances of teaching, where he took a little child, and set him in the midst of the disciples, and declared unto them, that of such was the kingdom of heaven; that unless they became as a little child-that is, were born again-they should in no case see the kingdom of heaven. And then he declared that whosoever should cause one of them to offend-you will mark the difference; not whosoever should offend one of them, in our sense of making him angry, was so culpable; but, whoever should cause a child to go wrong; whoever should so treat a child as to damage its moral constitution, its affectional nature, its present life or its prospect for the life to come-it were better for him not to have been born; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were cast into the depth of the sea. You, of course, in interpreting this figure, are not to imagine our millstones, which would seem rather difficult to tie about one's neck. The mills of the ancients were handmills; and the grinding was done with stones in basins; and these stones were quite manageable, and of just about enough weight, if tied about one's neck, to sink the head below the wave. This was certainly in the time of Christ-a Roman punishment, and many were executed in the sea of Galilee in that way, by being sunk with stones attached to them. So that, dropping it as a specific form of capital offense, we may state that it is a capital offense in the judgment of our Saviour for one to so influence a fellow-creature as to be harmful to him, as to do him an injury.

This is not a consideration of those thousand injuries which we do to men, and which are external, as stealing from them, as putting

LESSON PS. X. HYMNS (Plymouth Collection): Nos. 503, 274, 1259.

them to pain, or as putting them to shame. It may involve all these ; but the point of offense which is here prominent, and which is the thing to be considered, is that it is some form of conduct, whether it be injurious or pleasant to persons, which causes them to offend; which makes them worse than they were before. You are bound so to treat men as negatively not to hurt them, and so as positively to do them good, in their dispositions, in their nature, as well as in their external feelings and circumstances.

The whole passage teaches, in an eminent manner, the value of children. Productively, they are of no value. It is supposed by commentators that this was a little orphan child. Some shade of the original language leads to that impression. A little child, and certainly one without parents and home, can return nothing for the services rendered to him. Of all things that you can think of, a child in its earlier years reaps the most of care, bestowed with the least remuneration received-unless you take your pay in loving. It can say but little. It can furnish little for the taste. Very little can its hands do. It has to be watched, rather than to watch. It has to be served, rather than to serve. It is the seed of hope, it is the prophecy of love; but as society reckons men's value-namely, from their productive force—a child is about as valueless in political economy, as any thing that you can imagine. Compared with men in power, men in place, and men of influence, it would seem as if children must get out of the way, and let their superiors pass by. But the Saviour takes a little child, in all its helplessness, and an orphan child at that, and says, "So far from great and swelling men being superior, unless they be converted, and become like this little child, they shall not see the kingdom of God."

But this is only a strong method of enforcing the intrinsic value of human nature itself. It is putting children's value in a strong light; but it is because children are a part of the human race, or because their nature is a part of human nature. So that whatever reverence may linger from this declaration of Christ, for children as children, the inward force of it is toward the value of human nature, and the crime of injuring men.

If injuring the lowest possible state of human life is a capital offense, how much more wicked is it to injure a greater sum of being? If our Saviour had said that to destroy a king was a high crime, every body would have believed that; and without any profit to the rest of mankind, because the king is a representative character. All men agree that it is evil to strike down an eminent and rich and counseling man, in whom the state itself has an interest. Every body would say, "Of course, a noble, a prince, a general, a president, a monarch, a philosopher, a genius, a poet, a painter-to slay these men is an out

rage." But it is the painter that is slain; it is the king; it is the magistrate; it is the philosopher.

Our Saviour wanted to show that with God, independent of these intrinsic reasons, there was something that was unspeakably precious in the mere element of manhood, in the mere element of being; and therefore he goes to the very lowest type of man's life. He takes not the king, nor the king's child; he takes not the great man, nor the petted children of great men; he picks out the little orphan that had neither father nor mother alive, that nobody knew or cared for, apparently, and said, "He that causes as much humanity as there is in this little child to offend, he that damages this little child, had better lose his life. It is a capital offense."

Now, if beginning at the bottom, and putting such a measure to comprehensive manhood as is developed there in its least power and in its lowest aspects; if manhood is as valuable there as it is at every step in which it develops itself; then every step of its ascent, every added virtue, every added stress of power, all that goes to develop a diviner model and nature in the soul, makes it more imperative that you should be careful that you honor, and do not harm, human nature.

Men need their duties and their dangers on this subject to be often and clearly pointed out. I do not suppose that we often, any of us, deliberately harm men-that is to say, cause them to offend. I suppose that few of us are willing to blind men; few of us to be wilder the way of truth; that few of us are willing, for the sake of our own vanity, or our own pride, to mislead men, knowing that we are doing it. It is an unconscious damage that we are doing, and that we need most to have set before us, that we may take heed.

1. Parents are frequently the cause of many of the faults which grow into great depravities in their children. It is true that there are children who receive a nature impracticable-almost unmanageable. It is true that the sins of the fathers are in such a sense visited upon their children, and their children's children; and that parents frequently have to manage children that task their wisdom, and would task the highest wisdom. But these are exceptional cases. Ordinarily, our children are very much what we make them. A great many bad men are made bad by the moral government and the mistakes of parents. The very theory of family government frequently destroys the child. For there are many that act as though they believed that their children were pretty little slaves; that the Lord filled their houses with them to serve them. It is supposed that the child is in the house to run of errands for the parent; to hand him things; to amuse him; to be of use to him in his hours of leisure; and the parent acts all the time as though it was the business of the child to do these things. There is that distinction made in family government.