It was his meat and drink to work for Christ. Writing to his father, he says: "It is a great privilege to serve the Lord in China. I feel so thankful to God for giving me this honour. In our hospital work we are daily meeting with men who have never heard of the way of salvation, and it is our delightful privilege to tell them of a Saviour, mighty to save. It is our joy to see from among these lifeless souls men truly born again. It is a wonderful sight to see a dead soul come to life again; no wonder there is joy in heaven." And so this noble life ran on from year to year, filling its busy hours with divinest service, and when climbing up to the bright meridian of almost unparalleled usefulness and success, when to mortal eyes it seemed as if he was the last man that China could spare, God whispered to His faithful servant, " • Come up higher." Fever laid its burning hand upon him, and in less than a week he was not, for God took him. Among his last words we hear him saying, "Oh, it's all right; I am quite ready to go." "Yes, I am quite ready, whichever way it is. I only want the Lord's will to be done." Turning over on his side he remarked, "Oh, this is so restful, I feel as if I could sleep so well for such a long time," and so he seemed to peacefully rest till "the weary wheels of life stood still." "There seemed to be something specially beautiful," says his biographer, "in the time of his release." "Very early in the morning, while it was yet dark," on Easter Day, 1888, in the thirtyeighth year of his age, "God's finger touched him, and he slept" in Jesus. The funeral took place on the afternoon of the day following his death. It was a lovely afternoon, the air balmy and fragrant with the breath of peach blossoms. Large crowds of Chinese, whose special friend he was, thronged the road to the cemetery, and on many a face were marks of deep and heartfelt sorrow, as they stood by Dr. MacKenzie's open grave. There in the quiet churchyard, in the land of his adoption, among the people whom he loved and lived for, the tired body lies sleeping, awaiting the resurrection of the just. "Sleep on beloved, sleep, and take thy rest, Lay down thy head upon thy Saviour's breast; "Until the shadows from this earth are cast, They do neither sing nor sigh In the burgh of by-and-bye, Where the streets have grasses growing, cool and long; Leaving all their thoughts unsaid, Deeming silence better far than sob or song. Though the robin be a-wing, Though the leaves of autumn march a million strong. There is only rest and peace In the city of surcease From the failings and the wailings 'neath the sun; And the wings of the swift years Beat but gently o'er the biers, Making music to the sleepers, everyone. There is only peace and rest; But to them it seemeth best, For they lie at ease, and know that life is done. 66 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. BY REV. F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., Archdeacon of Westminster Abbey. That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him."-Acts xvii. 27. It seems to me of especial importance, in days of decaying faith, to point out the many voices in which God speaks to us. The great lessons in His sacred Book do not stand alone; they are illustrated and reinforced by His lessons in other and widely different books. I will speak of the voice of history, of God as manifested in His dealings with the race of men. But let me from the first entreat you to believe that now and always it will be my desire to preach not a scholastic sermon, or a fanciful sermon, or any sermon but such as may, by God's grace helping my feebleness, help us in the endeavour to be better men, and, therefore, also better citizens, profitable members of the Church and commonwealth, and hereafter partakers of the immortal glory of the resurrection. And where, let me pause to ask, could history be more fitly spoken of as the source of divine teaching than in this Minster, which is the most historical church in the world? You are gathered here to-day at the very centre of the history of the English people, a history as sacred and as instructive as any other in the world. For eleven centuries at least, have our annals been more or less closely connected with the sacredness of the spot. No building in the world-not St. Peter's at Rome, nor the cathedrals of Florence or of Milan, or of France; not the Kremlin at Moscow, not the Escurial in Spain, nor the Kaaba at Mecca, can show us such a succession of historic scenes so rich in interest and pathos. Nowhere has human sympathy been poured forth in such torrents, in ways so great and various and over so vast an epoch of time. In yonder chapel you have the bones of the Sainted Confessor, the tombs of kings and queens which were venerable when Shakespeare wrote. Yonder is the belmet that shone at Agincourt, and the sword that conquered France; there is the first contemporary portrait of any English sovereign, of Richard II., baptized, crowned, wedded, buried in this Abbey, and in part its builder. On the walls of yonder aisle are sculptured the scenes of Barbarossa, of Saint Louis, of Simon de Montfort. On that spot has every English sovereign since the days of William the Conqueror been crowned. There Plantagenets and Tudors were anointed; there sat, clothed in white satin, the king whose head fell from the scaffold; there the weight of the crown left a red scar on the forehead of Queen Anne; there fifty years ago sat the young girl who since has reigned longer than any of our sovereigns except Henry III. and George III., and, by God's blessing, far more happily than they. Your feet are on an empire's dust. On all sides of you are memorials of the statesmen, the soldiers, the sailors, the musicians, the poets, the orators who have made the kingdom great and kept it so. All this magnificent pageant, starting as it were into life from the consecrated dust around us-does it mean nothing? Is it only a vast phantasmagoria of meaningless shadows? God forbid, and if not, I ask again, could there be a more fitting place wherein to speak of history as a teacher of mankind. You might say, perhaps, that history is a phenomenon so vast, so complicated, that we can make nothing of it, that our knowledge of it is at the best fragmentary, and that even of that very partial knowledge, much is imperfect and much uncertain. There are whole nations, whole races, whole dynasties of kings over which the iniquity of oblivion has scattered blindly her poppies. "What is history," asked Napoleon I., "but a fiction agreed upon?" "Don't read me history," said Sir Robert Walpole, for twenty-one years Prime Minister of England, "for I know that cannot be true." The answer to such remarks is, that history might be uncertain in thousands of minor details, but it is not uncertain in its wider issues. History is like a battle; it sways to and fro; it is full of shocks and flank movements, retreats and advances, rout and resistance, utterly confusing to those who take part in it. Nevertheless, we know in the evening which side has won or lost. It is like the sea upon the shore; you can scarcely tell at first while you look what each wave is doing; but wait for a moment and you will not fail to recognize whether the tide be in ebb or flood. So is it with the annals of mankind. We are each of us units in an immense procession passing for a brief moment between the darkness of birth and the darkness of the grave; we do not emerge for one gleaming instant between the two eternities of our way from God to God; but as surely as the changes of this planet are chronicled upon its tablets of rock, so surely does each generation leave behind it traces of its thoughts and words and deeds, and these, too, are written for our learning. Much in the Bible is simply history, and all history is the open Bible of God. Of the many attempts to read aright the meaning of history, some have naturally been partial or erroneous, and of those I may mention two. Fifteen hundred years ago, when the flood of barbarous nations was surging around the Roman Empire and had burst itself upon the gates of Rome, there lived a great father of the Church who was bishop of the African town of Hippo. The Vandals had been introduced into Africa by Count Boniface; they had sacked Carthage, and were besieging the town of which Augustine was bishop. To a desponding mind it might well have seemed as though Christianity itself had failed, as though the cross would be over-borne by floods of heresy and heathenism; nay, even as if in the wreck of civilization and of social institutions, the end of the world had come. But the faith of Augustine was not shaken. He wrote his famous "City of God" to prove even in those gloomy times that the world and man are governed by a Divine Providence. But he looked upon mankind throughout that book as falling into two irreconcilably hostile campsthe city of God and the city of Satan; the one destined to endless glory, the other mere fuel for the flame. The view is at best but one-sided. With far larger insight and loftier philosophy had St. Paul taught the philosophers of Athens that God had made of one flesh all nations, and appointed to each their times, and made them all His common care. The lines drawn by Augustine were too hard and too fast. He held the narrow and unscriptural maxim that outside the Church there is no salvation. He saw that in mankind there is a solidarity of guilt; but he failed to see that there is also a solidarity of redemption. The history of nations is not the mere story of a handful saved from universal deluge, any more than it is the chaos of madness and the tissue of absurdities which Goethe saw in it. God is not the Father of the elect only, but He is the Father after whom all fatherhood is named; and the Saviour of mankind said to His disciples: “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." Again, if Augustine, perhaps still unconsciously influenced by the deep seated Manicheism of his early days, saw in mankind only an elect few and a ruined multitude, a cynical and stormy gospel of modern days, which is no Gospel, looks on mankind as only noticeable for the sake of its great men. This was the teaching of Carlyle. Two hundred thousand men," said Napoleon to Prince Metternich; "what are two hundred thousand men to me?" This view, if certainly false, is also ignoble. Some men are but the children of their times, influenced by the spirits of millions of their unknown contemporaries. The multitude are not mere ciphers, the counters of the tyrant or the despot's slaves. The work of God in history is not to elevate this or that man like a Colossus, and leave all the |