6

glories of a new age, which shall be ushered in 'peacefully and happily, after they have been laid in the grave."

That such, my dear Stanley, may be your work and your destiny, is the earnest hope of

Eversley Rectory,

July 1, 1863.

Yours affectionately,

C. KINGSLEY.

* Lectures on the Jewish Church, Lect. xviii. p. 401.

SERMON I.

GOD IN CHRIST.

(Septuagesima Sunday.)

GENESIS i. I.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

E have begun this Sunday to read the book

WE

of Genesis. I trust that you will listen to it as you ought—with peculiar respect and awe, as the oldest part of the Bible, and therefore the oldest of all known works-the earliest human thought which has been handed down to us.

And what is the first written thought which has been handed down to us by the Providence of Almighty God?

'In the beginning God created the heaven and 'the earth.'

How many other things, how many hundred other things, men might have thought fit to write down for those who should come after; and sayThis is the first knowledge which a man should

have; this is the root of all wisdom, all power, all wealth.

But God inspired Moses and the Prophets to write as they have written. They were not to tell men that the first thing to be learnt was, how to be rich; nor how to be strong; nor even how to be happy but that the first thing to be learnt was, that God created the heaven and the earth.

:

And why first?

Because the first question which man asks-the question which shows he is a man and not a brute -always has been, and always will be-Where am I? How did I get into this world; and how did this world get here likewise? And if man takes up with a wrong answer to that question, then the man himself is certain to go wrong, in all manner of ways. For a lie can never do anything but harm, or breed anything but harm; and lies do breed, as fast as the blight on the trees, or the smut on the corn: only being not according to nature, or the laws of God, they do not breed as natural things do, after their kind: but, belonging to chaos, the king dom of disorder and misrule, they breed fresh lies unlike themselves, of all strange and unexpected shapes; so that when a man takes up with one lie, there is no saying what other lie he may not take up with beside.

Wherefore the first thing man has to learn is