perform this elementary duty. It is in vain that the lost plead that they have never neglected their religious duties. "Lord, when saw we Thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto Thee?" He replies with the utmost sternness : "Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me."

It will be seen that this judgment cuts at the root of a great deal of so-called religious life. While it does not condemn it, it shows that it is not a deciding factor in the ultimate approval or condemnation of our earthly life.

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That depends on the way in which we have regarded and acted towards our neighbour. It is quite true that our relation to God lies behind it all. It is because we love God that we love our neighbour, because we love God that we sympathise with him, and try to understand and to help him, but it is this attitude towards our neighbour which is the test and the outcome of the reality of our love towards God. He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God Whom he hath not seen?" The lesson is much needed for it is as easy to slip into selfishness in religion as into selfishness in anything else; only if we allow ourselves to do so we miss the whole point and essence of the Christian faith, and are entirely alien to the spirit of our Heavenly Father and of His Only Son Jesus Christ Who emptied Himself of His glory and came down from heaven and was made man, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross, for us men and our salvation.

XXXVI.-PLEASURE

She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.— 1 TIMOTHY V. 6.

T. PAUL is here speaking of widows, but his words wore,

that is with pleasure as the main object, end and aim of

our lives is, St. Paul says, to be spiritually dead, the most terrible fate that can befall any of us.

Now pleasure is not necessarily bad in itself, because excess of it can kill the soul, any more than eating and drinking are necessarily bad because excess of them can ruin the body. Pleasure in strict moderation is a good gift of God meant by Him to be enjoyed, meant to ease and sweeten work. God wishes us to be happy, but it is quite a mistake to think that the pursuit of pleasure has any power at all to make us so.

It is the pleasure which is not sought, the pleasure which comes incidentally and unsought which brings the truest and most enduring happiness.

In the present day people have gone mad in the pursuit of pleasure, and are thereby missing the happiness which God intended for them. They crowd to the towns because they find lights and amusement, crowds and excitement, dances and picture-shows, and a double result follows. On the one hand they become weary and satiated with pleasure and ever seeking something new, something with more excitement or more sensation to relieve the weariness of repetition; and on the other hand the desire for and habit of pleasure and amusement has become so strong that it gets a hold of them, like drink, and they are ever more and more unable to break away from it or to live without it.

People desire shorter and ever shorter hours of work, not in order to have time for self-culture, reading, and selfimprovement, but to have more time for pleasure; they work not because they have any pride in good work honestly done, but simply in order to get money to spend in pleasure. They hate to have children, and resort to every vile device to avoid them, because they fear that children will involve them in responsibility and interfere with their pleasures. They sometimes even persuade themselves that it is for the children's sake that they do such things.

Now the pursuit of pleasure is at best a very unsatisfactory thing. Not only does it, as we have seen, lead to

satiety and weariness, and to a constant craving for fresh excitement, but in the end it leads nowhere. It has no result beyond ourselves to compensate for the bad effect on ourselves of that excess into which we so easily drift.

Is there then no higher and better end in life than this unsatisfactory one of the pursuit of pleasure? Christianity says that there is, and that the end that it sets before us not only leads to results which are of the highest benefit both to ourselves and to others, but that it will incidentally bring us far greater happiness and contentment than we can arrive at by the most frantic and persistent following after pleasure.

Christianity tells us that the great end and object of life is not pleasure but service, service of God and service of man and that this service is and brings its own reward.

This was the ideal of Jesus Christ: "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life"; "Even Christ pleased not Himself," we

are told.

This idea of service is of the very essence of the Christian faith, and yet so many of us forget it altogether. We think of our religion as of something that provides us with help and comfort in time of trouble, that is a help and strength to us in our spiritual doubts and difficulties, that gives us a future, wider and more hopeful than anything which this world can offer, and though this is all true, yet these things are surely not the main meaning of our religious faith. Our religion is, or should be, a call to service, a call not to weigh the losses and profits, but to give ourselves boldly to the service of man in and for God's sake.

The essence of God's nature is Love, and the essence of the life of Jesus Christ is love and the essence of the life of the true Christian should be love too. Now the pursuit of pleasure is inconsistent with love as a principle of life. Pleasure bids us seek our own way and our own desires as the end of life, love bids us sacrifice our own wishes and seek the happiness, not of ourselves, but of others. The two principles will not work together and must come into

continual conflict. If we are to serve it cannot be always in our own way, or according to our own liking, we must be controlled by something that is not ourselves, and we must be constantly prepared to give up that which is ourselves.

Is then Pleasure altogether inconsistent with the law of service? This is by no means the case. In the first place, the service of love unconsciously and unintentionally brings with it a greater happiness and pleasure than any we can gain by the direct and selfish pursuit of pleasure. "My yoke is easy, and my burden light." Those who submit to the yoke of Christ find that after all it is no yoke, but that it brings happiness just in proportion as it is willingly and gladly accepted. The lives of the Saints are full of the rapture of happiness, so great sometimes as to be almost unendurable, that they found in the service of God. "God is not unrighteous, that He will forget your works, and labour that proceedeth of love."

But apart from all this, Pleasure has its real and proper place by God's ordering in service. Neither mind nor body can be always on the stretch, both must have rest and refreshment. The story is well known of the huntsman who expressed surprise at St. John for wasting time in playing with a tame partridge, and the Saint's question as to why he did not keep his bow always bent. God means us to have and to use Pleasure in our lives, but we must be very careful to keep it in its strictly proper and subordinate place, to use it only as a foil to, and refreshment in, the work to which our first care is due. This then will be a proper test of Pleasure. Have we earned it by honest work? Is it a real change and refreshment to us? Does it help us to do our work better? or do we go back to our work jaded, tired out, and dissatisfied? Judged by this standard a great deal of modern Pleasure is quite unjustified. So far from being a refreshment in work it has usurped the place of work, and become a substitute for it. It is not a help but a hindrance. It has no relation at all to Service, but does more than anything else to keep people from service. Instead of thanking God for it we

can only feel that we are robbing God of the time and money and trouble that we devote to it.

It is hard to lay down any definite rules for others to abide by. We can only go by general principles, but it is obvious that the modern claim to pleasure as a right, entirely dissociated from work and service, is entirely ungrounded in any law of God or of Christian Service.

The undue pursuit of Pleasure tends to make us selfish, idle, and useless for any good purpose in the world, and if we are going to be faithful soldiers and servants of Jesus Christ we must be carefully on the watch against the mere love of Pleasure in all the myriad forms in which it presents itself to us to-day. We serve a Master Who certainly did not please Himself and if we are to serve Him aright we must be careful how we please ourselves.

XXXVII. THE SACRAMENTS

I am the Living Bread which came down from Heaven.— ST. JOHN VI. 51.

HE Latin word Sacramentum meant originally a solemn

covenant or agreement. It was the word used for the oath of allegiance taken by the Roman soldier when he joined the army, and Pliny in his account of the worship of the early Christians tells us that they were accustomed to assemble before dawn, and bind themselves by a sacramentum not to do any evil. We cannot do better than recall the definition of a Sacrament given to us in the Church Catechism. It is "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained by Christ Himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.” "An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us.' If in hot summer weather, when all the country was brown and bare, you saw a narrow line of green grass growing on the hard ground, you would know that there was a spring

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