conscious, or to any magic influence, of which hereafter they may fancy themselves partakers.

Our face must be set utterly against cultivating in children a talent for self-vivisection. By nature, they are truthful, simple and open. To arouse in them suspicion of every motive; to make them be for ever probing their heart and gazing upon the evil of it, is a hateful thing. Under such teaching, children may be developed into unexceptionable Jesuits, Roman or Protestant, as it may happen; they may be dragged through life in terror of God, the devil and the grave, but they will never be made to realize the glory of sonship. That realization may and will be theirs, if we send them on their way fearless and rejoicing, trusting their soul, their life, their all, to the Father who is guiding them; with one only aim, to follow in the path where Jesus leads and with his words upon their lips, "Not my will but Thine be done."

It is in the sacred circle of Family life, that these eternal truths—the glory of God's Fatherhood, the glory of the ideal sonship of Jesus, may be set forth to little ones in language which they need no education to master, in characters that will be ineffaceable from their hearts. Upon parents, upon elder brothers and sisters, lies the momentous duty of making manifest by their own lives, the divine glories of Fatherhood and sonship, of leading children upward from the earthly to the heavenly, through the sacraments of human relationships.

Family life is a peculiar glory of England; if the day should ever come, when the ties of that life are loosened; when its duties become considered irksome; when the name Home loses its power over the English heart, in that day Cassandra may well prophesy our coming decadence. From that decadence, the gospel of the Father and the Son will save us, if we will receive it.

THE GOSPEL OF WORSHIP.

WORSHIP, we understand to be the articulate voice of religion, the response of humanity to the revelation made through the religious sense of the soul; the manifested recognition of, not a wider, but a greater than self, above self, One better than the best we can conceive. It is moreover a universal response. "The world," say the Hindu scriptures, "is not for him that doth not worship!" and we have already seen that history, and where history fails, language testifies, not merely to the universality of men's worship, but to the fact that from the beginning, the object of man's worship was one better than self, above self-The Strong One, the One to be reverenced, my Lord, the Highest One. For the great races of mankind retained this in common, that they worshipped, not themselves or each other, not any particular race, nor the collective race, but One in advance of themselves and the race, One to be invoked only by names expressing the grandest glory, the most dazzling brightness; One revealed as the Heaven Father. In proportion to man's disregard of that revelation, or loyalty to it, did his worship become servile and debased, or free and ennobling, clearing away for

him the clouds behind which "shines the beauty of the loved One," and bringing him near unto the presence of the Eternal.

If we are right in maintaining the glory of the Divine Fatherhood to be a revelation to humanity, through the religious sense of the soul, we can dismiss at once the ingenious speculations of philosophers, as to the origin of worship, for just as human language testifies to man's cravings for fellowship with his fellow-man, so does worship express his yearning after his birth-right, his inheritance-communion with the heaven Father-so that if we find that long before Abraham arose to proclaim a new name, the colossal temple at Babylon, which bore upward to the heavens the shrine of the divinity, contained neither image nor similitude, we are at no loss to understand such a protest for spiritual worship. Man's inherent tendency to worship the unseen, must have been the result of the influence of the unseen working in his soul, an influence manifesting itself universally, though in varying degrees, and proving him to have grasped, however feebly, the great truth to which the study of natural phenomena is daily bearing witness, "The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."

Preachers sometimes warn us against "self worship," but the use of the expression shows how widely the popular idea of worship has become at variance with the original and true one. Self-love is man's animal

inheritance. A man may love himself, make a wreck of self by pandering to self, but the soul refuses its tribute of worship, until it finds One that it recognises as above self. The basest systems of heathenism form no exception. Before idols are worshipped, they must be regarded as the representation of One more powerful, more exalted, than the worshipper; servile fear, not child-like love, may prompt the offering, but there being an offering at all, is a universal tribute of mankind to the claims of One not self, above self.

A moment's consideration of what worship is not, may help to dissipate some false views regarding it and aid towards a truer apprehension of what it really is. It is not mere expression of love. With the love that takes the form of patriotism and gives its all for the land of its birth, worship is not associated. Of the love, divinest upon earth, which a parent will show towards the child who, to use common language, has forfeited all claim to be loved; of the love that prompts the rescue of the sin-struck and the fallen, worship of the object loved can form no part. Nor are outward expressions of reverence, much less of self-abasement, to be identified with worship. “Religion that consists in postures of the limbs, is just a little inferior to the exercise of the wrestler,' SO that the lady who may be seen arranging the folds of her dress before "prostration" at the altar, is no more of necessity a worshipper, than the Hindoo who

* "Verses of Yémana."

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