SPIRITUAL LIFE: ITS HELPS AND HINDRANCES. BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF ROCHESTER. ETERNAL life is God's own life, in which And the helps which severally assist ust into this life of God are knowledge, which is the way to light; and work, to energy; and devotion, to love; and discipline, to righteous ness. He has dwelt, willed, and loved, from all eternity. This life He purposes for man, and through the Incarnation communicates to him, His free and supreme gift to the race. Spiritual life is the expression of theology Knowledge, I say, is the way into light; for what is at the same time the sphere in all knowledge that is solid, useful, and innoman, and the function or faculty belonging to cent. For all knowledge being more or less him, whereby he receives, assimilates, de- directly a revelation of God, whether in His velops, and matures this divine nature and attributes or character, just so far as it is being. Its birth-time is regeneration; its apprehended exactly, and imparted conCreator, the Holy Ghost; its food, Christ's scientiously, is not only of Him, but for Him. flesh and blood; its condition, faith; its evi- | Even when only secular, its use in the dence, holiness; its outcome, the invisible spiritual life is self-evident, since it helps us Church. The pattern of its conduct is Christ's to equipoise its forces, and to expand them, human life on earth, in its fellowship and and to put them to the best use, and thereby sacrifice. In essential accordance with the protects us from a sour, intellectual narrowcharacter and faculties of the individual, itness on the one hand, and a too supple finds ordained for it by the wisdom of the emotionalism on the other. In divine Divine Sovereignty, its manifold types of things, and especially in that close study of existence; modes of expression, measures of God's Word, both critical and devotional, force, opportunities of growth. Like all which is now so perilously neglected by some other life, it has its eras and crises, and tran- of us, it helps us to bear witness to men outsitions; yet its youth is not of necessity side, of what God is, as living in and speaking immature or hysterical, and its riper years through His children. It might also save must expect no immunity from surprises or some among us whom we honour and love, decay. Its law is progress; its liberty, obe- from casting ashes on their heads and redience; its strength, the joy of God; its proaches on their brethren, for the word of wine, hope; its beauty, meekness. It is at truth, supposed to be lost out of our midst, its best when it hungers for God Himself, through widening for them into something of above and beyond His gifts and His ordi- its glorious vastness, the true horizon of the nances; it is most healthy when least self-mind of God, and showing them how He is conscious. Of this spiritual life we are now higher than our thoughts, broader than our to consider the helps and hindrances. He creeds, vaster than our plans, and older than who has now the privilege of addressing you our years. on a subject on which his own cherished ideal has ever surpassed, as the heavens are above the earth, the most exceptional moments of his own experience, would not have presumed to speak about it, but for the conviction that God graciously teaches us by our failures as well as by our victories, and will lift us up to the peace and light of the region to which I would fain transport you, if we will rest our hearts on the love of God. The spiritual life, being God's own life, given to man, and lived in him, according to the laws and possibilities of his being, must be cognate to it in its substance and cha racter. What is the life of God? It is a fourfold life-light, energy, love, righteousness. "God is light;" "My Father worketh hitherto;" "God is love;""His righteousness reacheth unto the clouds." And God is energy-incessant, unwearied, inevitable, beneficent; and if we would share the fellowship of it we must be at work too. What exercise is to the body duty is to the spirit; all duty, whether of this life or the next. Ours is but a single personality; and in whatever He lays on us to do, God has but one motive, one method. Duty keeps the conscience living and fresh, goads the sluggish will, shames us out of selfishness, shakes us out of laziness; best of all, compels the discipline of self. But while our earthly duties have their share and influence in our religion, to labour for the Master is every Christian's necessity, refreshment, and safeguard. Christ says to all whom He has redeemed, Witness for me. When the Christian laity of England are constrained by the love of Christ to take this yoke on them, the masses may be won to the Gospel, but not before. And reward will come in their peace as a river, and their righteousness as the waves of the sea. We regular soldiers of the Cross do not always discover how a ministry faithfully exercised helps our godliness, till we learn, in the languor of sickness or the painful surprises of holiday time, how the strain of our work keeps us by the River of God. But God is righteous; and all righteousness, whether in God or man, is essentially the same: and the one end of the Incarnation, and the Cross, and the Pentecost, and the Intercession in Heaven, is that we should be righteous, even as He is righteous. But discipline is the only road. It was so for Christ, who though He were a Son, yet learned obedience through the things which He suffered and the disciple is not above his Lord." Discipline for the will through disappointment, and for the affections through bereavement, and for the understanding through difficulties of belief, and for the flesh through sickness and decay. To human eyes, some men are far more sorely tried than others. In the thicket behind some homes the angel of death seems ever to be poising his sharpest arrows. The sad heart asks itself: Is it because I am a sinner above all the Galileans? If Job's friends do not vex us, often we are Job to ourselves. This, however, is quite certain Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth; and if the anguish is great, the sweetness of the comfort makes up for it. It is worth a good | deal of trouble to learn to feel sin hateful, and to measure the world at its true worth, and for the soul as a weaned child to rest on the bosom of God, to feel Heaven so real and so near, that at once to go there would be like stepping into the next room. As to God-to be taught truly to say, "Thou art my portion," is worth the heaped-up sorrows of ten lives. No one can understand the Divine tenderness but those whose souls have been drenched with it. He is so gentle, that He is like a mother hanging over us; so humble, that He patiently waits our time; so pitiful, that He will have us on our own terms; so filled with kindness, that we seem to hear Him say, "Come as you are— do what you will-say what you feel-only trust me.' This is but one step further towards the ever-nearing welcome in the sinless, tearless shore. Once more, God is love; and towards the fuller possession and fruition of Him there is one straight road-the most indispensable and lofty of all—devotion. By devotion I do not simply mean the confession that whispers its guilt, nor praise that murmurs its thanks, nor the petition that urges its necessity, nor the intercession that tenderly wrestles for a brother's need, nor even our supreme and central and all-including blessedness in the communion of His body and blood; but the adoring and, perhaps, silent fellowship that kneels and muses and wonders, and, looking up at the King's face, catches from it something of its excellent glory, to which God says, "Let me go, for the day breaketh which humbly replies to Him, "Whom have I in heaven but thee?" Other things are good and useful; one is vital-communion with God. My friends, the Church as well as the world is growing too busy to pray. Do not tumble into that snare, or your spiritual life will not be worth a year's purchase. What we want we ask for, and what we ask for we get; no more. Our Saviour's company may be worth much or little; this is certain, and it touches the entire area of our spiritual life, that it is not won in a day, nor do a week's prayers climb its Pisgah. The spiritual life of which we speak is like some vast elevated tableland, which we do not reach by beholding it from afar, nor climb by feebly wishing we were there, nor win by a single sword thrust, nor ripen by a year's sorrow. God slowly and painfully educates His elect for their long immortality; but― When the shore is won at last, We have also to consider the hindrances to the spiritual life; and out of them time permits me to indicate but three - Religious egotism, an unwise indulgence in means of grace, and spiritual pride. In the spiritual life both the objective and subjective elements claim recognition; and a characteristic preponderance of one over the other must, within due limits, be expected and allowed. But let us beware how we encourage a want of symmetry and proportion between one feature and the other. Of course conscious union with God lies at the very root of personal religion; yet if there is too much introspection in it, too much comparison of yesterday's feelings with today's, too jealous a criticism of motives, too keen a sensitiveness about tiny faults, what will happen? Our own holiness will insensibly be taking the place of Christ's righteousness. His precious blood will presently lose its power in healing the wounds of sin; our whole moral nature will become flabby and nerveless; we shall lose our tight grip of those grand central facts and verities which, like a great mountain-range, are guides to the pilgrim, shadows from the heats and the blasts, cisterns of living water to make glad the City of God. Not what I think of God, but what God is in Himself, is the truth that saves me. Not what I feel to God, but what God feels to me, is the charter of my salvation and my hope. To know and believe the love God hath to us, and in the strength of that meat to go on day by day till we see Him, this is the faith of men. ship of Christ's body, either in a chilly unsociableness or a dread of infection—must tell, and more seriously than we suspect, on the vigour and fruitfulness of the soul. Some sorts of avтapкela are fatal. They mean the loss of that vital spiritual heat which is generated by the assemblies of the faithful-of that wide and instructive interchange of thought and experience, whereby prejudice comes to be corrected, ignorance remedied, duty suggested, sympathy stirred-of that opportunity But in vital connection with this is another of passing on to others what we humbly beperil, against which I would utter a very lieve our Master has intrusted to us-of that gentle but a most distinct caution. Gentle, wholesome discipline of natural, yet dansince the danger has a very blessed side to gerous self-love, which, whether in the idolatry it, and some of us may envy it; distinct, of our own opinions or in our sturdy dislike because, just through its blessedness, it may of other men's, works like dry-rot on the fail to be seen. Ours are eminently emotional Church of God. Yet "no man liveth to times, of daily communions, frequent spiritual himself, and no man dieth to himself;" and retirements, personal intercourse with religious if we try to reverse God's Word in Paradise, advisers of the most unreserved character-"It is not good for man to be alone," we in a word, forgive the expression, of incessant spiritual luxuries, of which our fathers and their fathers never dreamed, but without which they still contrived both to do and to suffer a good deal for Christ. Let us judge no man. Let us not presume to force our own standard of what is good for ourselves on the conscience of our brethren. We are all free, and we will hold fast our freedom. must take the consequences, and they are serious. From spiritual pride who here shall dare to say, I am free? All of us are tempted in turn to be intolerant of other men's methods, over critical of eccentric types of goodness, doubtful about unfamiliar formulas, ready to look coldly askance at a liberty which we deny ourselves, merely because it would hurt us; almost to refuse credence to a life that seems to grow in another zone. Still I caution. Let us be specially on our But let us be humble and full of charity. guard against whatever may tend to make Nothing is so saintly as humbleness, nothing us put the ordinances of Christ in the place so wise as Charity. God fulfils himself in of Christ, or so to treat and regard those many ways. Outward circumstances, difficult ordinances, as if they were the inevitable and functions of life, the burden of secular cares necessary conduits of His grace, which may | must modify the outward features of religion, not be had without them. Christ and Christ and often make it tenfold harder than we alone is the food of the soul. He has been | pleased to appoint these ordinances as channels to convey Himself: but He is not bound to them, nor confined by them. Sometimes He has to vindicate His own honour, by leaving His people in the wilderness till they come back straight to Him for Himself. The soul pampered with unwise provision has a sad but needful famine, when circumstances deprive it of its cherished ministries. Some stand the test, but you may count them on your fingers. Others, who have overstimulated their life by living on cordials, find it at first a weary and thankless journey back to Jacob's well, where the stranger Jesus patiently waits for them, once more to give them with His own hands of the water of Life. suspect. No doubt, as St. Paul says, a spiritual man has a right to judge, while he himself is judged of no man. But weigh in the scales of God. Above everything, never suffer your spiritual religion, either in the language that professes it, or the features that indicate it, to outstrip your moral life. As much for your own sake as other men's-more swiftly and surely than the deadly dews of the Panama swamps on the European traveller, will the faintest mildew of insincerity poison the springs of your soul. As for society-and you have to be the salt of society-it does not forbid or even dislike spiritual life among spiritual people. It expects it, and in a way admires it. But it is very uncompromising in exacting consistency; it will have reality, and it is right; and with the sharpest of needles it pricks the tumour of religious pride. "If men live in the clouds they should To "be in Christ" is the secret of our life ; be like the angels ;" and if, with our lofty profession, and great aims, and frequent to be for Christ the end of our activities; to exercises there be found small infirmities, hard resentments, insufficient self-control, palpable self-indulgence, a household not ordered for God, and a daily life without the true mint mark on it, the sermons in which we bid men to be holy will sound but as the turgid phrases of a professional sanctity; he who bids his neighbour carry his cross but shirks his own has no quarter from the world. be with Christ the hope of our glory; to be all this together the invincible link of our blessed concord. But a little while, and perhaps sooner than we think of, the curtain will lift, and we one by one shall go in to see the King. Then, but not till then, our robes of whiteness will have no soil on them. Then, and assuredly then, we shall see His face, and be like Him, and be satisfied. SAINT JOHN, This weary head I'M growing very old. In days long past that seem almost a dream, From Galilee to Judah; yea, that stood Refuse to bear me even through the streets My ears are dull, they scarcely hear the sobs God lays His hand on me—yea, His hand, In friendship such as passeth woman's love. The words and deeds that make up daily life; But that dear face, and all the words He spoke, THE AGED. And lighted it for ever. Then His words Oh, what holy walks we had, Through harvest fields, and desolate, dreary wastes, And oftentimes He leaned upon my arm, And so upbore him. Now, Lord, I am weak, apace. Come, let us leave these noisy streets, and The path to Bethany; for Mary's smile Come, James, the Master waits; and Peter, see, Has gone some steps before. What say you, friends! Grow more distinct as others fade away, I was a fisher by the sacred sea. For the first time on that sweet face. Those From out of which, as from a window, shone seen The touching of His garments bring back To palsied limbs! I feel it has to mine. more There let me tell them of a Saviour's love; Has worn so thin that I can see beyond, So, raise up my head. My legacy unto an angry world is this.— What, call the folk my name, The Holy John? Lay me down Once more upon my couch, and open wide Like that which broke upon my soul at eve, came And touched me on the shoulder. See, it As when he mounted toward the pearly gates. Of glory to the Lamb! How loud it sounds! crowd Say! Joy! 'tis the eleven, The shining way? How bright Thou art! and yet the very same To feel this bliss. So lift me up, dear Lord, THE PRINCESS ALICE. ALICE, Princess of Great Britain, second be a disadvantage to her memory.. For we are apt to suppose, or at least find it a little difficult not to suppose, that a good deal that is said about her is due to the spirit of flattery which is always active in the neighbourhood of persons of exalted position. In writing or speaking under such conditions, we are very likely either to say too much or too little. Our self-consciousness may prompt us to use swelling, bombastic words, and so to hide the real simplicity of the character we wish to describe, or it may cause us to shrink from saying plainly what ought to be said, lest we should be accused of being mere courtiers. It would be an infinite pity if that dear and gentle and true daughter, wife, and mother, whose body is now laid to rest at Darmstadt, should have injustice done to her in either of these ways even for But in any case it can only be "for daughter of her Majesty the Queen, and wife of the Grand Duke of Hesse, who was called away from this world early on the morning of the 14th of December last, was dear to England and to Germany, as well as to her own family. The sudden and apparently premature close of a life singularly beautiful and precious in its influence has not only brought unspeakable grief upon the Queen and upon those to whom it is a personal and domestic bereavement, but has deeply moved the sympathies of the whole country. It is the simple truth to say that we have all sorrowed with those who have been thus sadly stricken, and we unite in mourning the loss of one who adorned her lofty position by a bright example of true womanhood. Almost innumerable tributes have been paid to her memory, and the cir- | a time. cumstances under which she met her end a time;" for there is justice, after all, in have been published far and wide, and have human estimates and judgments in the long secured universal attention. And yet we run; and our posterity-generations hence think the story of this princess's life is like-will, without doubt, look back upon the a strain of sweet music, to which we can listen again and yet again, not only without weariness, but with a constantly new sense of its harmonious beauty, and of its capability of fresh and fuller interpretation. Indeed, it seems as though in some respects the high birth and station of the Princess Alice may Princess Alice as one of the fairest and the best, because most truly womanly, of the women of the nineteenth century, and whose now finished life may influence for good the ideal of tens of thousands of the girls now maturing in our English homes. The outward events of the Princess's life |