ch they shrink;--let us creep safely on the lower levels, rather than
strain perilously up the mountain paths, with the free air around us,
the bright heaven above us, the mists, the clouds, the storms, seething
and flashing beneath our feet. This is the cry of our souls--yours and
mine. God is ever stirring us to take the higher view of our nature and
destiny; we are ever burying ourselves in the lower:--"_'Let us alone,
Jesus, thou Son of God._' Thy words are perilous; they search and judge
us; they trouble us in our politics, our pleasures, our trade. We are
fairly content as it is; why should we weary ourselves by straining
after the higher good, which seems thin, impalpable, and may easily
elude our hand? Let us alone; depart out of our coasts." This was the
mood of these Hebrew Christians; it is ours. And nothing does the
devil's work more surely within us than this feeling that on the whole
we were made for poor work, poor interests, and poor joys. Paul seeks to
stir us to a nobler mood, to fire something within us which will burn
with a heavenly lustre and seek to mingle itself with the brightness of
its native skies. Man is made to deal with the substance of things, the
eternal substance; you are content to converse with their fleeting
shadows. "_For the law, having a shadow of good things to come, and not
the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they
offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For
then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the
worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. But
in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every
year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats
should take away sins._" (Heb. x. 1-4.) The heavenly things themselves
your minds were made to contemplate, your hearts to love, your spirits
to commune with; and you are grovelling amid the ashes of the perishing,
while the imperishable, the eternal, passes for ever beyond the range of
your sight. Believe in humanity as the first step to a nobler life. Not
the poor, weak, trembling humanity which your self-communings reveal to
you; but the glorious, Divine humanity which God has set before you to
help your infirmity, to recall the memory of the height from which you
have fallen, and to kindle the hope of the royal dignity to which you
may be restored. Look within; and man seems poor enough, and pitiful