that of the Plymouth cobbler who was the founder of ragged schools, and the Yarmouth seamstress who was the reformer of prisons :— read them, and understand that though few noticed or cared for them in life, yet the Priest and the Pharisee might have sat very humbly at their feet.

In these three ways then,-in Nature; in the books of the great and wise; in the lives and conduct of the good,—and more than any book in the Bible, and more than any life in that life of Christ on earth which good men can but feebly imitate, we may learn to see the face of God.

Alas! my brethren, had I rather spoken of how men lose sight of that face, and live in the darkness, would not many of you have felt that I was describing your own experience? For more rapidly than the clouds roll athwart the sun, do the exhalations from an erring heart blot out the face of the Sun of Righteousness. He who is growing up in forgetfulness of God, careless and prayerless from day to day,he who is living in pleasure, dead while he liveth, he to whom the world and its earthly hopes are all in all, and whose imagination, crowded with earthly images, never reaches to things beyond,—above all, and worse than all,

he who suffers the lower passions of his nature to pass into such a tyrannous and fatal curse, that even his mind and conscience are corrupted and defiled,-alas for him the face of God is visible no longer, or visible only in gleams few and distant, and ever dimmer and more distant as life goes on. My brethren, above all my younger brethren, may you never know what this must be. In the gay bright days of youth, unvexed by care, when Pleasure has not yet stripped off her mask, a sinner may not feel the curse of living without God. But life is not always undisturbed. Men do live to lose all that they have gained; men do live to have their hearts eaten away into emptiness by bosom sins; men do live to be bereaved of all whom they had loved, and pass lonely to the grave; men do live to be wounded in their tenderest affections, and to see their children become their curse; men do live to lose health and to be racked by disease and anguish in every limb. Are you safe from these myriads of human misfortunes? not one of you is safe from one of them; most, if not all of you, will live to experience one or more of them:-and how will it be with you then? If you have seen God's face, you can be peaceful and hope

ful, if not happy, still: but if that face be turned away how shall you bear such crushing burdens? How shall you pass that last dark river, beyond whose billows no fields for you will "stand dressed in living green"? O seek His face now; call ye upon Him while He yet is nigh. Earnestly would I entreat you young new comers amongst us to remember this,—that, if you turn but a little aside from the right path now, you may wander infinitely far;-if you embark now on the forbidden stream, before you know it the stream will be a river, and the river will have mingled with the sea, and then there will be "no springing back from the boat upon the shore."-In the course of 11 years I have seen many vacancies on those seats which you now occupy;-of those vacancies some,-not a few,have been caused by death, and of those we can think with peace and hope, nay almost with gladness now:-but some, alas also not a few, have been caused not by death but by disgrace-and of those that have thus been banished from the midst of us some there are that have gone from bad to worse. These are the dead who point our saddest moral, these the dead over whom most we mourn. They sat there, and listened to our words, and laughed and sin

ned; and so, little by little, became bad boys, and disgraced their own lives, and brought dismay and misery into their parents' hearts. Yet they were once innocent, young, new boys; think you, that when first they listened to the solemn words from this pulpit, as you sit listening now,-think you, that they ever dreamt in what shame and failure their Harrow career after a year or two would end?-Dear brethren, the beginning of sin is as the letting out of water:-be warned in time!

One word more. Many of us kneeling side by side at yonder Holy Table will be striving there to pierce the mists that encompass with perplexity our mortal lives, and to see some dim gleaming of the face of God. Before this term has ended we hope that very many of you will join us there. Let us all be united there in our thoughts and prayers to-day. Pray for this great school; pray for us; pray for yourselves; pray for those young new comers of whom I spoke. Let us strive there, kneeling side by side, to attain if haply it be possible, more love, more sympathy, more nobleness, more happiness, more hope. "When thou saidst, Seek ye my face, my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek."

XVII.

THE TEMPLE OF GOD.

(Preached before King's College School, at the Reopening of King's College Chapel, June 23, 1864.)

I COR. iii. 16.-"Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?"

THE three different senses of this phrase "the temple of God," mark very distinctly three different eras of God's dealings with His Church. In the Old Testament it is applied without variation to that stately sanctuary of marble and gold and cedar-wood which Solomon built in the zenith of his power. In the Gospels, on the lips of our blessed Lord, we find it used in a new sense, which filled the unaccustomed Jews with amazement,-"He spake of the temple of His body." Lastly, in the Epistles, and especially in those of St Paul, the term Temple receives a significance yet more marvellous, for it is applied, as in the text, to the mortal body