m alone' is a commandment, and it is a
commandment to God's Church, but it is not a commandment to despair of
any that they may be brought into the fold, or to give up efforts to
that end. If our Father in heaven never ceases to bear in His heart His
prodigal children, it does not become those prodigals, who have come
back, to think that any of their brethren are too far away to be drawn
by their loving proclamation of the Father's heart of love.

_There_ is the glory of our Gospel, that, taking far sadder, graver
views of what sin and alienation from God are, than the world's
philosophers and philanthropists do, it surpasses them just as much as
in the superb confidence with which it sets itself to the cure of the
disease as in the unflinching clearness with which it diagnoses the
disease as fatal, if it be not dealt with by the all-healing Gospel. All
other methods for the restoration and elevation of mankind are compelled
to recognise that there is an obstinate residuum that will not and
cannot be reached by their efforts. It used to be said that some old
cannon-balls, that had been brought from some of the battlefields of the
Peninsula, resisted all attempts to melt them down; so there are
'cannon-balls,' as it were, amongst the obstinate evil-doers, and the
degraded and 'dangerous' classes, which mark the despair of our modern
reformers and civilisers and elevators, for no fire in their furnaces
can melt down their hardness. No; but there is the furnace of the Lord
in Jerusalem, and the fire of God in Zion, which can melt them down, and
has done so a hundred and a thousand times, and is as able to do it
again to-day as it ever was. Despair of no human soul. That boundless
confidence in the power of the Gospel is the duty of the Christian
Church. 'The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth!' They laughed Him to
scorn, knowing that she was dead. But He put out His hand, and said unto
her '_Talitha cumi_, I say unto thee, Arise!' When we stand on one side
of the bed with your social reformers on the other, and say 'The damsel
is not dead, but sleepeth,' they laugh us to scorn, and bid us try our
Gospel upon these people in our slums, or on those heathens in the New
Hebrides. We have the right to answer, 'We have tried it, and man after
man, and woman after woman have risen from the sick-bed, like Peter's
wife's mother; and the fever has left them, and they have ministered
unto Him. There are no people in the world about whom