more shame to us if we have been eating our morsels
alone, and hugging ourselves in the possession of the love which has
redeemed us; and if it has not quickened us to the necessity of copying
it in our relations to our fellows. There is something dreadfully wrong
about such a Christian character. 'He that loveth not his brother whom
he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?'

Take these plain principles, and honestly fit them to your characters
and lives, and you will revolutionise both.

WHAT CHILDREN OF LIGHT SHOULD BE

'Walk as children of light.'--Eph. v. 8.

It was our Lord who coined this great name for His disciples. Paul's use
of it is probably a reminiscence of the Master's, and so is a hint of
the existence of the same teachings as we now find in the existing
Gospels, long before their day. Jesus Christ said, 'Believe in the
light, that ye may be the children of light'; and Paul gives
substantially the same account of the way by which a man becomes a Son
of the Light when he says, in the words preceding my text, 'Ye were
sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.'

Union with Him makes light, just as the bit of carbon will glow as long
as it is in contact with the electric force, and subsides again into
darkness when that is switched off. To be in Christ is to be a child of
light, and to believe in Christ is to be in Him.

But the intense moral earnestness of our Apostle is indicated by the
fact that on both occasions in which he uses this designation he does
so, not for the purpose of heightening the sense of the honour and
prerogative attached to it, but for the sake of deducing from it plain
and stringent moral duties, and heightening the sense of obligation to
holy living.

'Walk as children of light.' Be true to your truest, deepest self.
Manifest what you are. Let the sweet, sacred secrets of inward communion
come out in the trivialities of ordinary conduct; make of your every
thought a deed, and see to it that every deed be vitalised and purified
by its contact with the great truths and thoughts that lie in this name.
These are various ways of putting this one all-sufficient directory of
conduct.

Now, in the context, the Apostle expands this concentrated exhortation
in three or four different directions, and perhaps we may best set forth
its meaning if we shape our remarks by these, I venture to cast them,
for the sake of emphasis, into a hortatory for