past or future. It floats nearly free of all the religious difficulties which have troubled the minds of believers since the age of science began. No scientific or historical discovery can refute it, and it requires no apologetic except the testimony of spiritual experience.'1 But if we accept Plotinus as our master we can only enter into the rest to which he offers to lead us by cultivating an indifference to the cares and anxieties and troubles that beset humanity. However attractive it may be to some temperaments, it is not adequate to our needs to-day. It could not hold its own even in the third century; it had no independent vitality, and only maintained itself as an element in Christian philosophy. But we cannot move the world backwards, or identify Christian philosophy with one of the many elements which it absorbed.

We must look in another direction for a solution of the problems that press upon us in the modern world. We do not aim at making the best of things, but at making the most of life as we lead it, of the life of the community and of our personal lives. The men of the modern world are not contented to enjoy the relief which comes from retiring into themselves. They wish to participate in all the activities of human life, and to find their meanings, and to be able to give a meaning to their own personal lives.

1 Inge, ii, 222 ff.

It is not by retiring into himself that any man can enjoy the fullest life, but by entering with sympathy and intelligence into the life around him not by striving to save himself from distractions. He may make the most of life, not by aiming at his own self-development, but by becoming conscious of an ever-widening circle of relationships, in which he tries to acquit himself worthily. He that loveth his life shall lose it, but the man who looks beyond his personal ambitions to seek to do his duty in the family circle, and as a neighbour, who not only shows himself an obedient subject, but is careful in the exercise of his privileges as a citizen, may both be of service to the community and enjoy the fullest life of his own.

IT is the Christian solution of the problems of life that man, by setting himself to carry out the purpose of God, may not only do his best for the regeneration of the world, but save his own soul, and enter into the peace of God which passeth understanding. And this doctrine finds its best expression, not in thought, or in words, which can be bandied about by all the world, but in an actual human life. This conviction was part of our Lord's very nature, and governed what He felt and what He did. There was a suspicion of unreality about the teaching of Seneca in regard to retirement from an evil world; there were apparent inconsistencies between the philosopher's teaching and his life; but our Lord's whole-heartedness was never questioned by His contemporaries, even by His enemies.

He looked at all the world, and found a reverent interest in all that had been made, because He saw in it an expression of the purpose of God. The flowers of the field might have but a brief life-flourishing to-day, and to-morrow cast into the oven-yet God had arrayed them so as to surpass Solomon in all his glory. The weeds among the corn, and the birds which picked up the seed, furnished lessons as to God's dealings with men; and not one of them could fall to the ground without our Father's know

ledge; and if their life had such importance and significance, how much more was the life of man to be esteemed since it could be used to co-operate with God? The reverent interest which He felt in nature became an intense sympathy which was expressed in His relations to men and in His desire to make them conscious of their Heavenly Father's nature and of His love to each of them. The gospels are full of allusions to the intensity of His feeling; His pity for suffering and for sin; His sorrow for Jerusalem and her people; His indignation with those whose attachment to God's ordinances was an excuse for neglecting the manifestation of His present power. The consciousness of the man Christ Jesus was mastered by His sense of the nearness of God, and by his recognition of the value of each created being as springing from its relation to God.

These thoughts not only explain what He felt; they were the ground of His action. He was eager that others should become conscious of the truth which was the essence of His own life, and should awaken to a consciousness of the love of God to themselves personally. His works of healing were not mere expressions of pity for human suffering; they were efforts to set forth the glory of God; they were sacramental when those He healed had faith to take their healing as a pledge of the goodness of God. He did not regard the abolition of pain

as the divine object of a cure; but He hoped, through the physical healing, to arouse a recognition of the nearness and character of God, and to bring about conversion. It was in the exceptional cases of those who had faith to be encouraged that miracles were wrought, and He seems to have been careful to discourage the expectation that He would engage in pro

miscuous cures.

There were two habits of mind which seemed to stand especially in the way of acceptance by his contemporaries of evidence of God's present power. One obstacle lay in reverence for God's ordinances, as absolute and unchanging, as if they were given in the past and stereotyped for all ages; but God's mundane injunctions could not have this unchanging validity, like the laws of the Medes and Persians. The Sabbath was made for man-to secure him a seventh day of rest from the routine of drudgery, and to give him the opportunity of leisure, but this ordinance was not to be used as a barrier against the restoration of a withered arm or of a crippled woman. He restored their physical powers, and they had the opportunity of using these restored powers in God's service.

He also protested against the treatment of the exceptional and abnormal as a sign of divine intervention-as when He was asked, 'Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' The restoration of the human