rn that he was, and that
he was near them. But us he treats as grown men, who know that he
is, and that he is with us to the end of the world. And if he
treats us as men, my friends, let us behave ourselves like men, and
not like silly children, who cannot be trusted by themselves for a
moment lest they do wrong or come to harm. Let us obey God, not
with eye-service, just as long as we fancy that his eye is on us,
but with the deeper, more spiritual, more honourable obedience of
faith. Let us obey him for obedience' sake, and honour him for very
honour's sake, as the young emigrant in foreign lands obeys and
honours the parents whom he will never see again on earth; and let
us look forward, like him, to the day when him whom we cannot see on
earth we may, perhaps, be permitted to see in heaven, as the reward-
-and for what higher reward can man wish?--of faith and obedience.

SERMON IV. NOAH'S FLOOD

(Quinquagesima Sunday.)

GENESIS ix. 13. I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a
token of a covenant between me and the earth.

We all know the history of Noah's flood. What have we learnt from
that history? What were we intended to learn from it? What
thoughts should we have about it?

There are many thoughts which we may have. We may think how the
flood came to pass; what means God used to make it rain forty days;
what is meant by breaking up the fountains of the great deep. We
may calculate how large the ark was; and whether the Bible really
means that it held all kinds of living things in the world, or only
those of Noah's own country, or the animals which had been tamed and
made useful to man. We may read long arguments as to whether the
flood spread over the whole world, or only over the country where
Noah and the rest of the sons of Adam then lived. We may puzzle
ourselves concerning the rainbow of which the text speaks. How it
was to be a sign of a covenant from God. Whether man had ever seen
a rainbow before. Whether there had ever been rain before in Noah's
country; or whether he did not live in that land of which the second
chapter of Genesis says that the Lord had not caused it to rain upon
the earth, but there went up a mist from the earth and watered the
face of the ground, as it does still in that high land in the centre
of Asia, in which old traditions put the garden of Eden, and from
which, as far as we yet know, mankind came at the beginning.

We may puzzle our m