like water and like oil into his bones; let sin be the deadliest executioner, the most merciless avenger of sin. Let the acute pang become the chronic malady. Let the thought become the wish, and the wish the act, and the act the habit. Let the solitary become the frequent, the frequent the incessant, the incessant the all-but-necessary, allbut-inevitable transgression. Let crime awake him. Let the serpent's egg become a cockatrice, and its seed a fiery flying serpent. Let hatred become murder; let ambition become conspiracy; let greed become theft and swindling: let lust become some deadly impurity. Ah! when God sends forth a besetting sin-a guilty habit—to be His executioner, the case is most awful, most hopeless then. God only, by Christ's redemption, can save from the body of that death!

My brethren, will you now say that "I will go on in sin, and it does not matter?" Ah! but, most terribly and awfully, it does matter! You may be saved indeed, at last, if God will; saved, not from

Him and His wrath, but from yourself and your own self-destruction; but even then there is a sense in which it may be awfully true that our millenniums depend upon our moments; and though God's infinite love may be able to save you, yet, alas! it may only be as a brand is plucked, half-consumed, out of the burning; "as a shepherd tears out of the mouth of a lion two legs and the piece of an ear!" Do not think that repentance is an easy thing, and be quite sure of this, that the longer it is delayed the less easy does it become, and the more terrible are the consequences—both here and hereafter-which the delay involves.

1

"A spotless child sleeps on the flowering moss;
'Tis well for him; but if a guilty man,

Envying such slumber, should desire to put
His guilt away, can he return to rest

At once by lying there? Our sires knew well

The fitting course for such: dark cells, dim lamps,

A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm,

No mossy pillow blue with violets." 2

1 Amos. iii. 12.

2 Browning's Paracelsus.

The path of repentance may never be closed to us; so I believe the Catholic Church of Christ has in most ages taught; but O how hard may that path of repentance be! over what bleeding flints; through what a scorch of fiery swords; through what deep shame, what dread corruption, what pain of body, what misery of remorse, what agony of soul! O! were it not better to cut off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye, than go of our own choice into the Gehenna of æonian fire, here and hereafter, such as I believe that Christ meant, and such as I have now in part only-in shadow and in outline-described? God is the Lord

God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and yet by no means clearing the guilty. Why? Because He loves us not? Not so, for "God's severity is all love"; but because sin is the one deadly enemy which He must destroy in us, lest it destroy us, and we, with it,

destroy ourselves; He must destroy it for our

sakes, because, as you will hear just now in glorious music,

"The greatness of His mercy reacheth unto the heavens,

And His truth unto the clouds."

BRIEF SKETCH OF ESCHATOLOGICAL

OPINIONS IN THE CHURCH.

THE Scriptures reveal indeed a future state of retribution, but are-when competently interpreted in the light of modern criticism-absolutely silent as to "endless torture"; or, if this be not conceded, they at least seem to express with the utmost possible plainness a view of Final Restitution which cannot be reconciled with the ultimate and all-but-universal perpetuity of sin. Hence the language of the Fathers, who freely adopted both sets of phrases, is frequently self-contradictory. In the earliest of them-Justin Martyr and Irenæus-are some well-known passages which seem clearly to imply either the ultimate redemption or the total destruction of sinners; and though