as that of the Pharisees in the Sermon on the Mount. Religious rules embodied in a code will not, as He showed, call forth the highest type of saintliness. On the one hand, the requirements, if they are to be practicable as a rule for ordinary men, are likely to show some accommodation to their weaknesses, as when permissions were given 'because of the hardness of their hearts.' But a still more fatal defect is due to the fact that a rule cannot define the right manner of conformity; formal compliance is apt to be all that is aimed at. The righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees did not rise above this formal compliance, and our Lord impressed on His disciples that they should do the old duties in a new way-that they should not only keep God's commandments, but fulfil His will, and thus be continually aiming after a perfection like that of their Father in heaven.

Self-satisfaction at the punctual fulfilment of a written law showed not only an inadequate view of God's holiness, and of what He required of man, but it led religious men to a comparison of themselves with other people which did not call forth repentance. The prayer of the Pharisee in our Lord's parable is an enumeration of duties regularly done, and a thanksgiving for help in leading this sober, godly, and righteous life that was not defiled by the laxity which other men allowed themselves, such as this

publican. But there was no consciousness of a need to struggle after a further advance, no sense of a need for divine mercy, and no consciousness of failure and sin. And impersonal religion in the present day may reiterate its high opinion of the doctrine of Christ, but does not consent to the course by which men may come to understand something of the character of God for themselves, or learn how they may commend His service to their fellow-men.

We do not all feel the difficulty which arises from the conflict between personal aims and the claims of the community equally strongly for we are not all inclined to admit the claims of the community upon us at all. But they are likely to come home to those who enter into the married state, and have children for whose welfare they desire to provide and whom they desire to train for their part in the battle of life. They may expect to be roused out of the immediate range of personal interests and ambitions to a sense of responsibility and a share in the life of the community. This habit of thought takes them at once away from concentration on the present, since they must consider a future where their personal lives will be done with and completed, and there is need to take account of the double duty of finding a place in the world for the children and of fitting them for that place. There is a very wide range of matters that have to be considered, and that lie outside personal interests. When the sense of conflict is once roused, there seems to be little hope of allaying it except by a change in our ordinary and natural habits of thought. There must be a change in consciousness, either in thinking differently about society, or in feeling differently about ourselves.

The consciousness of membership of a com

munity came home to the landowner of two centuries ago in a somewhat different form. He was conscious that he had responsibilities and dignity that many of his fellow-citizens did not share, because he had a stake in the country. The estates of the landed gentry were parts of the land of the country, and the prosperity of those estates had a close and direct relation to the prosperity of the country as a whole. The land tax laid upon the landed gentry the chief responsibility for the finances of the country; and the country gentry were the agents, from the Elizabethan time onward, by whom the food supply, the employment of labour, and the support of the poor were attended to; and they were also responsible for the repression of disorder and crime. The country gentleman's life was so closely connected in many ways with public concerns that the wise conduct of his own affairs was beneficial to the country as well as to himself, and disaster to the country reacted immediately on his own personal position. Public opinion condemned him strongly if he used his land for his own private gain, and disregarded that of the country, as his contemporaries conceived it. He had to face the general outcry against depopulators if he ceased to find employment for labour in tillage and took to pasture farming instead. That the landowner was proud of his stake in the country is true enough; but it is also true that he felt

some jealousy of the moneyed men, who contributed little to the expenses of government, who made money for themselves in ways that seemed to render no public service, and who might even by their foreign importations be reducing the opportunity for remunerative work at home. That people were mistaken in looking so exclusively at the land of the country as the source of national prosperity is true enough; the operations of trade brought advantage to the community; the middleman did a public service by equalising prices, the bankers did a public service by directing capital into channels where it could be most profitably employed, and merchant adventurers established commercial relations with all parts of the globe, and helped to lay the foundations of the British Empire; but the distinction they tried to draw between merely personal gain and gain that is incidental to the increase of public prosperity was highly important. It is to be regretted that in our day political economists have left us so badly off for terms in which to express the prosperity of the country as a whole, as distinguished from the private gains of the persons who live in it at any time, and that we are not better able to discuss the best means of securing the wise use of national resources with a view to progress in the future.

Important as has been the position of those who have a stake in the country, there is an