ns, the vices, the
godlessness, the miseries--the removable miseries--of our great town
populations, lie upon your hearts. Have you ever lifted a finger to
abate drunkenness? Have you ever done anything to help to make it
possible that the masses of our town communities should live in places
better than the pigsties in which many of them have to wallow? Have you
any care for the dignity, the purity, the Christianity of our civic
rulers; and do you, to the extent of your ability, try to ensure that
Christ's teaching shall govern the life of our cities? And the same
question may be put yet more emphatically with regard to wider subjects,
namely, the national life and the national action, whether in regard to
war or in regard to other pressing subjects for national consideration.
I do not touch upon these; I only ask you to remember the grand ideal of
my text, which applies to the narrowest circle--the family; and to the
wider circles--the city and the nation, as well as to the world. Time
was when a bastard piety shrank back from intermeddling with these
affairs and gathered up its skirts about it in an ecstasy of unwholesome
unworldliness. There is not much danger of that now, when Christian men
are in the full swim of the currents of civic, professional, literary,
national life. But I will tell you of what there is a danger--Christian
men and women moving in their families, going into town councils, going
into Parliament, going to the polling booths, and leaving their
Christianity behind them. 'The remnant of Jacob shall be as a dew from
the Lord.'

Now let me turn for a moment to a second point, and that is

II. The function of English Christians in the world.

I have suggested in an earlier part of this sermon that possibly the
application of this text originally was to the scattered remnant. Be
that as it may, wherever you go, you find the Jew and the Englishman. I
need not dwell upon the ubiquity of our race. I need not point you to
the fact that, in all probability, our language is destined to be the
world's language some day. I need do nothing more than recall the fact
that a man may go on board ship, in Liverpool or London, and go round
the world; everywhere he sees the Union Jack, and everywhere he lands
upon British soil. The ubiquity of the scattered Englishman needs no
illustration.

But I do wish to remind you that that ubiquity has its obligation. We
hear a great deal to-day about Imperialism, about 'th