heard telling in each household of communion with the Father as the aim-the joy-the end of life,-can it be, but that the barrier between our servants and ourselves will be gradually, perhaps imperceptibly lessened? It cannot be broken down, it has been built with too great care for that, but it may crumble away before the consciousness that in worship there are no masters or servants, that all we are brethren, sons of God, and joint heirs with Christ. The change of tone in society cannot be effected in a day: we have sown the wind, and may have to reap the whirlwind. "Let come what come may," the gospel of the son will save us, if we will receive it. "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." A religion which is loyalty to the Father, child-like trust, free loving obedience, will make one in the ideal sonship master and servant, employer and employed. The letter of Christ's teaching may be burlesqued and misunderstood,* but the spirit remains to give life eternal. Jesus had a gospel for the poor, as well as for the rich. His religion was no church creed or guild, but a veritable bond that held brethren to brethren and all to the Father, through sonship.

Political economy may exhort and Cassandra utter her warnings, but international societies and master's associations will go on widening the social gulf, until, may be by some great disaster, we are

* As by "Joshua Davidson."

driven back to the simplicity of the Divine revelation, and loyalty to the ideal son, in whom there is equality, which communism in its wildest dreams cannot comprehend, and which no rank or social position can destroy.

Let but the voice of the religion of Jesus, the worship of the Eternal Father, be heard morning and evening in each household, and men will go forth to their work with a consciousness of a Divine brotherhood, of a common Father, that would, in time, work a revolution the most silent and yet the greatest, that has ever been seen on earth.

It will be answered, that these ideas of family

worship are impracticable. That in upper and

middle-class society the engagements of life would not allow of their being carried out. Balls and parties and theatres, take up the evening, and in the morning there is no energy, no spirit for worship. If it be so, so much the worse for the engagements of life! Doubtless there are a small number of persons whose duties might prevent their presence at morning or evening service, but for their households is an alteration of the usual hours an impossibility? As regards working-men-it will be asked, how are they to find time and place for worship? If their present condition were final, there would be no help for it but to confess that our boasted brotherhood is a dream and must be condemned as an impossibility. We have sown the wind,

I

as has been said, and may have to reap the whirlwind, but perhaps the poor are not to be for ever left sweltering in fever dens. Perhaps there is to be some limit placed on those who make fortunes out of filthy courts and rotten staircases. Hours of work too are shortening and tend to shorten, as the skill of man learns to wield more successfully and easily, the powers of nature. Artisans are not different to other men. They have the same longings, the same spiritual wants, the same "imnatureable basis of the religious sentiment" in their move as others. And they, like others, can find rest only in the Divine revelation of the One better than the best they can conceive, the Heaven-Father. Is it too good a thing to hope, that with increasing leisure they will find time and place to gather their children together in worship of Him after whom they yearn; in loyalty to him who is a head of a brotherhood, wide as the world and lasting as eternity?

In thus extolling the value of family worship, it may be thought by some that a great deal is being made of nothing; that what is put forward as a remedy for the evils of the age is an every-day custom of the "religious world." What God hath cleansed let us not call common. He offers us His one eternal gospel of Father and Son, to meet the evils of this and every other age. We may turn it into a relation between a tyrant and his slaves, thus deepening the class differences among us, or we may accept its.

blessed revelations of brotherhood and oneness with the Father, and so draw closer to each other and to Him, and if we do so, our home worship will be a new fountain of life and righteousness for the individual and the nation.

Worship in the family can never detract from public worship or lessen its importance. Let the conception of Jesus once be returned to, once be grasped in home life, and it will be inevitable that a national worship becomes the nation's highest glory. Men will "go up to the Tabernacle of the Lord of Hosts to worship," when they have learned to worship, “every man, in the door of his own tent."

THE GOSPEL OF SORROW.

SINCE ever the thoughts of man have been known to us, they have been busy with "the mystery of evil." Pain and suffering, disease and death, have formed the walls of a prison-house against which humanity has dashed itself in vain attempt at extrication and in which it has often laid down, to curse God and die. Wherever we hear the articulate voice of man's religion,-Worship,—there are in it the undertones of sorrow, these undertones being generally loud and strong enough to destroy its harmony. From the great heart of humanity, there goes up for ever to the Eternal, the wail, "deliver us from the evil one." It is now and again only that we catch the triumphant ascription of praise, "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever."

That it should be so cannot be matter for surprise, remembering how unfaithful man has been to the Divine revelation. The revelation he could drive away from him, but it was different with Sorrow; that was always with him; his bed-fellow and playmate, from whom he could not part company; beside him from the first consciousness of infancy till