holds. The Church admits, nay, she asserts it to be true, that man by nature is altogether fixed in the grip of heredity and in the clutch of circumstance. Christ claims to give a new force of heredity, a new birth. "Ye must be born again." He claims authority to bestow upon human nature a new strength, greater than the power of circumstance. "Abide in Me," "Without Me ye can do nothing." The Christian faith does not deny the strength of the forces which seem to drive us toward evil. But it asserts the actual existence of grace, a force through Jesus Christ, greater than all the powers of evil. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound."

S. Paul seems to have been keenly conscious of the evil in his nature, of his own helplessness to combat it, and yet alive to the sense of a new power of grace through Christ which gave him victory. "The good that I would, I do not," he says, "but the evil which I would not, that I do. * * I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am," he cries, "who shall deliver me from this body of death!" And then he learns to say in deep humility,

when he has conquered himself, "By the grace of God, I am what I am," and "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."

This is the real miracle of Christianity. With all the sins laid to its charge, with all the failures and shocking hypocrisies of individuals, it has continually renewed life and transformed character. One must be deeply prejudiced against the Middle Ages that connect the apostolic days with our own who does not recognize in them a brilliant stream of genuine Christian life that shines forth through the darkness. And the amazing thing is that, in those ages, the growth of Christian living persisted, when the whole force of what we call heredity was set against it. The best minds, the best morals, the finest flower of Christianity, during that period, were cloistered within the walls of friaries and nunneries, and commanded never to reproduce their kind. But the law of grace defied the law of heredity from age to age, and out of the common clay kept on producing ever new flowers of Christian living.

The law of grace abounds here in the Church today. It is inconsistent to accept the

supreme mystery of the Incarnation, to believe that God became Man, to believe that the God-Man died upon the Cross for us, and to repudiate the consequent mystery of actual grace flowing from His Cross, through the Church which He established.

Yes, it is true! Grace is given in answer to prayer and in the doing of good works in the name of Christ. Grace is actually given in the Sacraments of the Church. Grace is given in Holy Baptism, a new birth to conquer the force of heredity. Grace is given in Confirmation, the seven-fold gift of the Holy Ghost, to arm men against the evil circumstance of life. Grace is given in Holy Matrimony, to hold men and women true to solemn vows. Grace is given in Holy Communion, by which through many failures, men are strengthened for the battle of the world.

Only let us be humble, and earnest, and sincere, in receiving these great gifts, and the coward becomes brave, the angry becomes meek, the lecher conquers his passion, the miser becomes generous, the sot becomes sober, the sloth becomes diligent, and we press on toward the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

III.

CONCERNING LIARS.

Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?-Acтs v, 3.

We learn that there were at least two notorious liars in the very first Christian congregation. It was in the days of the Apostles, in the primitive Church, in that period to which we point as the period of perfection, when many of the church members were men who had walked the fields of Galilee in the companionship of Jesus Christ. But the Church seems to have included then, as it includes today, all kinds of men, with every type of mind, and men and women possessing various vital weaknesses. We see not only S. Peter and S. Paul, ready to die rather than not proclaim the truth. We see also Ananias and Sapphira, liars both, grovelling before the Apostles, and attempting by hypocritical falsehoods to gain a reputation for extraordinary sanctity and piety.

The judgment of God falls upon the liars and strikes them dead, with the lie upon their

lips, at the feet of the Apostles. The modern reader is likely to be shocked by this terrible scene. He thinks sudden death for lying too harsh and extreme a punishment to be visited upon men by a God of Love. But if God should strike dead the liars of today, in modern life, perhaps we should more deeply realize today the awfulness of the sin of falsehood.

There was a practical reason why, in the early Christian community, the liar was visited with swift and dreadful punishment. For this small Christian community in Jerusalem was to win the world for the Christian faith. It did win the world for the Christian faith. But while it was the living power of the faith in Jesus Christ that gave the Christian message its original impetus, it never would have carried far if the primitive church community had tolerated lying, and if the messengers of Gospel truth had been known to be liars in their everyday life. It was owing to the Christian life and example of its disciples, quite as much as to the power of the dogmatic truths, that the Church touched the whole European world of its time, within two centuries after its foundation. It increased the moral renown of