purity. But the moral elevation came back before the religious belief returned.

This principle lies at the very root of the teaching of Jesus Christ. "If any man wills to keep my commandments, he shall learn of my doctrine whether or not it be from God." "He that doeth my will shall know of my doctrine." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." These are not mere obiter dicta. The connection is quite easily traceable. For example, the self-indulgent man who refuses to be disturbed in the ease and comfort of his life by human wrongs, and is untouched by the spectacle of human wretchedness, who is unwilling to lift a finger to alleviate humanity's distress, such a man is incapable of any real knowledge of God. He cannot know Him because he has no sympathy with Him. The relation between God and man is a relation between persons, and, in order to real acquaintanceship between persons, there must be to some extent sympathy in character. Or again, the greedy, rapacious, unscrupulous, dishonest man comes very quickly to disbelieve in future rewards or punishments. His sense of justice fades away because his practice of justice first disappears. He loses the spiritual faculty which keeps account of such a fact, and therefore with him the fact ceases to be a fact. Or, the frivolous, capricious, dainty, selfish woman loses all capacity of insight into spiritual things. She

has no sympathy with them. So also, sins of the flesh surely obliterate one's own sense of divinity. The obscene man ceases to believe himself to be in any sense divine, and it quickly follows that the divinity that there is in the universe comes to him to be non-existent. Serving Mammon makes Mammon to be to its worshiper the only true god.

It is this principle which relieves God's exacting command for belief from the charge of unreasonableness and inequity. and inequity. If religious belief depended upon intellectual capacity, men are so unequally endowed in this possession that it would be unfair to hold them to the same standard in regard to their possession or lack of faith. Yet, since God appeals not to the understanding, but to the conscience, and since conscience is the faculty which is possessed by all men, and which is largely independent of intellectual advancement, but is cultivable by the learned and unlearned alike, therefore God makes His appeal to that capacity which is constant, abiding, and eternal in all men, and which, so long as it retains its own consciousness, can look God in the face and bow before Him in adoration. But if it becomes obtunded or dulled, then the whole universe of divineness becomes non-existent.

XXII.

SATAN'S DIVIDED KINGDOM.

"If Satan be divided against himself, bow sball his kingdom stand?"-LUKE xi. 18.

A MARKED peculiarity of Christianity is to be found in the fact that its members always look forward with confidence to a good time coming. By this they mean a good time, not necessarily a happy time. They mean a time when moral goodness shall become dominant and evil shall, little by little, be brought under foot and finally crushed out. It is moral hopefulness which really is the spring out of which flows all the peculiar activities of Christendom. Why do Christians look for this? As they take their stand at any particular point in the progress of the world, and look about them, the world is filled. with evil. They are confronted with bad men, bad things, bad institutions. They look these in the face serenely, and expect that they shall all ultimately either pass away or be transformed and have their places taken by good men, good institutions, and good things. But really it looks as though the experience of life were sufficient to crush out this expectation of a good time to

come. In the text that we have to-day, Jesus illuminates the whole situation by a single expression, as by a flash of lightning, revealing the principle which lies at the bottom of it all. He points out that the kingdom of evil is divided. It contains within itself the causes and the pledge of its own ultimate destruction. Satan's kingdom is divided. Wherever there are two devils they quarrel, and where there is only one, he, by the very necessity of his own being, slowly commits suicide. The pledge of the future triumph of goodness, then, is in the fact that evil cannot hold together.

I know that there is a vague sort of feeling that the converse of this is true. In our moods of moral despondency we are apt to fancy that wrong is a great, mighty, well-organized army; that it moves toward its own ends by wellcalculated methods, and that the good is always at a disadvantage in the presence of it. If one looks no further, he is like to be filled with a feeling of despair. He says goodness is identified with weakness; evil is strong because it is unscrupulous. Now, for anyone who is in this mood, it will be well to seriously consider two facts. The first is the moral advance of the race as a whole. No one will question that the moral status of the race is infinitely better to-day than it was three or four thousand years ago. It has steadfastly moved forward, through primeval bestiality; through savage turbulence, and vio

lence, and cunning, and cruelty, and lust; through barbarism and semi-civilization, until it has reached the point where it is to-day. But it has left most of its faults behind it. Now, why has it done so? One may answer, "It has been due to the force of civilization." But that is simply to say the same thing another way; it is not at all to give a reason or explanation for it. It is due to the fact that the evil against which the good of life is compelled to contend, always disorganizes itself and ultimately disappears. It is due to the fact that right is strong, and wrong, with all its boastfulness and cunning, is weak. In the long run good triumphs over the devil.

Or, regard again another fact, even more striking, within a smaller area, and which has manifested its phenomena within a shorter period. I mean the development, growth, and progress of the Christian Church. That institution is one which from the beginning has been organized around the idea of righteousness. It has been its purpose to keep alive this idea, to feed it, to revive it when it became faint, and to ultimately secure its triumph. Now, at the beginning there was never a more quixotic idea suggested than the establishment of the Church. It was a little, insignificant, apparently loosely organized society, which set itself up and undertook to make head against the most corrupt, and at the same time the most highly organized, institution