children shall be called to holiday exercises no longer, but to the deathful roar of the perilous fight, when every ringing whizz of the bullet involves not a smile of triumph, but a ghastly and murderous wound, it will be too late then: -the strength will be gone from the nerveless arm, and the courage from the enervated soul, and there will be neither might nor heroism in the hearts charred to dust with the fires of passion, and rotten to the core with the sins of youth. My brethren, I honestly believe that in this sense also, the sense of fighting against all wickedness, whether without you or within, all of you wish, many of you strive, to be true. soldiers. The fact that for a space of six years, out of 200,000 so very few have brought dishonour upon their uniform,-the fact that the spectacle of a Volunteer in disgrace is so rare as to excite marked and special reprobation whenever it does occur,-the fact that in this camp, out of 1,200 men gathered from every rank, and from every quarter, there has arisen, during so many years, no single cause for complaint of drunkenness, of insubordination, of violence, of unseemliness,-these happy and hopeful facts entitle us to assume that, in donning his uniform, a Volunteer does feel, as he

ought to feel, that he is acquiring a new and powerful incentive to that high self-respect which shall teach him to rise above the meanness and degradation of a sinful selfishness, and to regard his mortal body as the Temple of the Holy Spirit of God.

But its

For, to sum up in one last word;-not only on the fields of Europe now, but ever and everywhere a mighty battle is raging round us, a battle in which we all are Volunteers, ay, and enrolled Soldiers on either side, the great silent internal battle, of lust and purity, of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong. It needs no splendid occasion, no stately amphitheatre, no pomp and prodigality of outward circumstances; -for its seat is in the human heart. effects and issues are in the world. Wherever the haunted conscience, or the desecrated frame, have driven men into madness or suicide,—wherever the root of a youthful life has been as bitterness, and its blossom has gone up as dust, —wherever the drunkard quakes in the loathly feebleness of retributive disease, wherever in the lazar-house, scorned of man, and forsaken (it might seem) of God, lie the miserable victims of calculating passions, who once wore the sweet rose of innocence, and once were, what but for

men's sins they yet might have been, fair human beings with the grace of matronhood upon their foreheads and the dew of God upon their souls, -wherever some lost wretch creeps to the black river-side under the midnight, and there is a dull splash, and all is done,-there, in every sob, and every shriek, and in every murky ripple of the disturbed wave, are the sounds of this battle;and its dead lie thick in all our streets, and their blood, the blood of their murdered souls, which is spattered on many a young man's heart, and the crimson spots of which may perhaps even now be staining some haunted conscience here,— cries aloud to God for vengeance. These are the victims slain in the battle against God; oh! young Volunteers of England, take your part for God in that great battle-field. Be, as I said before, for I trust that the expression may linger in your minds, be a Christian order of knighthood, sworn by a vow, unspoken indeed yet sacred as that of the knights of old. If we be not Christ's soldiers, ready to follow him to the death, if we refuse to receive his counsels, if we delight to break his laws;-then little indeed can our arms avail, and the crown must fall from our brows, for we have sinned. Oh! deliver your souls, a pure, a fresh, and a noble

gift, to Him; oh, listen to the daily summons wherewith He bids you resist his foes. If the sons of England win in that fight, then no other can injure their native land. Such sons will defend and dignify her more ten thousandfold than whole fleets of iron-plated vessels and batteries bristling on every promontory with ponderous guns. The land that is given over to lust, and softness, and luxury, and greed, that land has the law of weakness within herself, and the sentence of pitiless destruction, blazing to her condemnation in every line of the historic page; but that nation whose soldiers are also good servants and soldiers of Jesus Christ, has nothing to fear in the Armageddon of a whole world banded against her with unrighteous arms. If she sink even for a time, she can only sink to rise again more glorious, as a happy, a godly, a christian people,-even as the sun sinks but for a time in the ocean's bed only to rise once more in greater splendour and

"FLAME IN THE FOREHEAD OF THE

MORNING SKY."

VIII.

THE HISTORY AND HOPES OF A PUBLIC
SCHOOL.

(Preached before Harrow School on Founder's Day, Oct. 6, 1859.)

ISAIAH liv. 11-13.-Behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and will lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children.

SUCH was the splendid picture which rose before the mind of the Hebrew poet, when earnest faith and fervent aspiration clothed themselves in the language of prophecy. Such too is the vision which every true heart among us would fain contemplate when we look forwards to the future; and it is a condition which yet may be realised by united exertion and humble prayer.

We have met together, my brethren, to do honour to the religious memory of a good man, and to remind ourselves of the relation in which we stand to a great community. The name of