holy places of life. They fast, pray, give alms, meditate.

Outside this inner circle there is a far larger one composed of several hundred millions of people who keep Lent more or less. Rather more attention is given by them to prayers and alms and self-repression than ordinarily. The spirit of the season touches them without controlling them, just as the spirit of Christmas touches multitudes.

Now, so extensive, so sustained, so enduring a phenomenon must rest npon some real basis. It is foolish to wave it off in airy fashion as "a survival of paganism, or certainly of Judaism.” There are "survivals" in every organism, but those organs which have outlasted their function do not dominate the body's action in this fashion. We may be quite sure that the custom survives because it fills some necessity. All the gibes of the society journals about "fashionable sackcloth" are beside the mark. They cannot be more trenchant than the words of the Master: If anyone "fasteth so as to appear unto men in fast," he is dismissed as a hypocrite in advance. But such people are not common in actual life, y and when they do appear it is rather through weakness of head than through badness of heart that they err.

What, then, do Christian people mean by their Lenten discipline, assuming that they are honest in entering upon it? It springs from a fact

Akyhers?

which any man can know, and which every religious" man does know, to be true. That is that each man's inner and essential self is solicited in opposite directions by two rival attractions. They are the "flesh" and the "spirit." Of course, these words are not terms of scientific precision. But people know sufficiently well what they mean. The "flesh" is a comprehen

sive word for all those facts and forces which the

But

senses take account of. The "spirit" may stand for those higher and deeper but less insistent facts and forces with which the soul deals directly. These two sides of life clamor constantly for the right to dominate the ego. everybody knows that the solicitations of the flesh draw more powerfully than those of the spirit. Pleasure is pleasant right now; while goodness only promises to become pleasant by and by. The flesh pays cash; the spirit waits upon time. It is about impossible for many to' believe that business or professional success, bringing with it leisure, luxury, power, and selfsatisfaction, is not really the best thing possible for the ordinary man. It is a good thing; but it may come too high. Not a few men have paid for it all with their souls. They have no souls now. They have assassinated them because they disturbed their owners' peace. They "lived to the flesh" and have died. They still live, to be sure-that is, they have not yet learned that they are dead.

It is only in our generation that men are beginning to see how closely bound together are the flesh and the spirit, the soul and the body. For many an age they were thought of as two pilgrims, loosely attached, who should journey together a little way and then separate, each regardless of the other's destiny. We see better now the nexus. Morals has a physical basis, and the spirit is a flower whose roots are in the flesh.

"Living to the flesh" is not living grossly. The most unspiritual man may even be the most fastidious. It is simply a life so conducted that the soul is neglected. It gets no chance. In Lent the Christian world resolves more or less strenuously to redress the balance of life as far as may be. It would "bring the body under." Not humiliate it or revile it, but relegate it to its proper place. He who would get good from the season will take it as an opportunity for a deliberate, sustained attempt at self-mastery. He approaches the unseen through the medium of the tangible. It is a fight for life and death. But it is the contest of the long ages, entered upon by the first man who had gained moral insight enough to discern the monition of God from the flavor of a fruit; carried to its ultimate issue when the Son of Man fought it out in his own soul in the desert; facing every son of man with the inevitable alternative,

"If ye live to the flesh ye shall die; if through the Spirit ye mortify the flesh, ye shall live."

X.

WHO HAS A DEVIL?

"Then answered the Jews, and said unto bim, Say we not well that tbou... bast a devil ? ”—JOHN viii. 48.

THE Jews, on the occasion of which our text is part of the account, were thrown into a fever of rage by some quiet words of our Lord. They stormed and raved and called Him names, and finally accused Him of the very thing which was the matter with themselves-they said He had a devil. The truth was a devil had them.

The lesson is, a bad mind sees bad things. It makes a bad element to live in. The habit we have of projecting ourselves upon the world outside us is most marvelous. What is the reason that sometimes of an evening, after a day's work and worry, we feel so utterly hopeless? We look about over our business or our household, and everything seems going to the dogs. Our plans seem sure to fail, and the path seems absolutely closed before us. But we go to sleep in the wake up all is changed.

midst of it and when we What is the reason? Has any change taken place in the face of the world while we slept? Not at all, but we look at the world through

other eyes.

The truth is, we make our world to a great extent. / Two great factors make up the total of every human life-one's self and the rest of the world. The world outside is but the reflection of the world inside each one of us. We are compelled to go inside of our own experience to get terms to describe what goes on outside. This is true more particularly concerning moral things. The wicked man is not sane. Not that he is insane, but unsane. His nature is not acting in obedience to the laws which ought to regulate it. It is out of joint. It is a distempered nature and can only see distemper in the world around it. Even the sun is smoky seen through a smoked glass. So we are all our lives meeting bitter, painful, vexatious things because we are out of gear ourselves. It is a law of nature that things really good become not only an annoyance, but positive pain, if the organ to which they appeal is out of order. If one is sickish, food makes him worse. If one has sore eyes, light hurts them. In this way selfishness and sin make the whole soul a diseased receiving organ, and therefore things which are really for its good hurt and worry it. The wise and good law of God becomes a burden to it. Christ Himself becomes hateful. Truth becomes distasteful; good and pure people are a disturbance.

The most abused Man who ever walked this earth of ours was the most perfect Man that ever was in it, and He was abused because He was