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mental luxury, which belong to God, that person robs God. To rob God is a sin. Perhaps the eye of the Omniscient sees a more flagrant exhibition of selfishness and unbelief and downright irreligion in many a luxurious home of refinement than He sees in some dens of sensual vice, where ignorance is sinning against but small light and under powerful temptations. Pleasing self without caring whether God is pleased or not is "sinful pleasure." To persist in pleasing self in utter defiance of God is to choose death!

We must not be deceived by the expression "for a season." The immediate gratification produced by self-indulgence may be momentary. But the influence lasts. The mischief of the sin is permanent. The guilt is permanent. The effect on the conscience is permanent. I know of impenitent persons whose character is absolutely worse to-day for having grieved God's Spirit ten years or fifteen years ago. Sin poisons. Sin kills. These "sins for a season last into eternity. Their consequences are felt in the endless retributions and woes of the world to come. The wages of sin is death! Just as a night of sensual indulgence is often followed the next day by the headache and the severer heartache, so a career of selfpleasing ungodliness is followed by the agonising heartache of Hell.

Now comes the question, How shall the pleasures of sin be rooted out? If they are destroying the soul, how shall they be destroyed? There is but one way, and it is by the expulsive power of a new affection. The right must expel the wrong. Christ or sin must have the control. Both cannot rule. Christ must expel the supreme love of sin, or you are lost! The soul cannot remain empty. Either Jesus or sin will hold the helm and control the affections. When Moses shut out the luxuries and the ambitions and the idolatries of Egypt, he filled their place with something infinitely better. He chose hardship, banishment from court, a forty years' march of faith through the wilderness. Was there any "pleasure" in all these? Yes, yes! "He had respect to the recompense of reward." God was more to be trusted than Pharaoh. Duty was sweeter than self-indulgence. A good conscience was better than being "called the son of the king's daughter." The desert was safer to his soul than the guilty glitter of a palace. Heaven was better than Egypt! He shut out "the pleasures of sin" by the incoming of a grand, a holy, and a glorious faith, and a sublime self-consecration to the Lord and the Lord's work! And what a career he had, clear on to the hour of his majestic translation to glory from the top of Mount Nebo !

The conflict was between Christ and self. With Christ came 66 reproach," self-denial, hardship. But with Christ came a new affection, a new strength, a new joy, and a magnificent career, that blessed the whole world for ever. Happy choice! Happy man! Happy will you be, my friend, if you can put the Lord Jesus Christ where you have always put sin-on the throne of the heart!

God gives you your choice. You have to decide. Either sin or the Saviour must have you. Either the "pleasures of sin for a season," with the afterpangs of perdition, or the self-denials of earth, with the limitless joys of heaven. Which will you have?

The enormous demand for our goods which the waste and wreck of great wars developed, found our country the only secure and stable political centre in the whole civilised world. The American war helped largely to throw into our hands almost the whole carrying trade of the world. The European wars drove capital to our shores, as to the only secure haven which it could discover. There was not the faintest chance of the overthrow of the throne, or of the serious disturbance of the order of society, in these favoured islands; while everywhere else the storm was raging, and every year wit nessed some overthrow of ancient institutions, some removal of ancient landmarks, some readjustment of the limits of States. So capital flowed into England rapidly. The great continental houses had their branches in London, which gradually became the centres of their operations. "All went merry as a marriage bell" with English commerce, while confusion raged around.

The influence of this stimulus on our commercial production it would be difficult to over-estimate. We have never seen before, perhaps it will be long before we shall see again, anything like the vivid activity of those years. And the political activity was really fed from the same spring. It was the general stir and onward pressure of European life which infected us; we caught the glow of the conflict, though we were out of its dust and blood. Great issues were being decided in Europe, great things were being enterprised and done. It would have been strange if in our peaceful way we had not aimed at great achievements too. The general stir and excitement of the European commonwealth did, without question, very largely stimulate that energy, that intensity, that enthusiasm of progress, which so nobly sustained Mr. Gladstone through that most remarkable course of legislation, which, considering the magnitude of the interests, and the rapidity and thoroughness with which they were dealt with, will remain one of the most noteworthy and pregnant passages of our political history. Pregnant we say, for it must be noted that the legislation was based on germinant principles, and contained the seeds of future reforms, which reach to results whose prevision would startle the sober-minded Liberal There was a great flood of energy which swept into the political sphere, and which enabled a great statesman to carry out his great designs. And now the flood is over, and the ebb has set in. There is just as remarkable a depression now as there was then excitement and activity. And it seems to affect equally politics and trade. There is no panic in the City, though trade is as dull and unremunerative as it well can be if it is to be carried on at all; and there is no alarm about our liberties, though the reactionary policy of the Government grows more marked and flagrant day by day. A certain listlessness seems to have settled down upon the world commercially and politically; it is just the listlessness of those who have been under a strong and unusual strain and are wearied by it. It will do no permanent harm, if men are content to wait till the tension is restored. The effort which we made both in manufacture and in legislation during the earlier years of the decade, was exhausting. No nation with a character for steadiness and deliberation, and with manifold important interests in charge,

now.

could continue long to live at such high pressure without pause. We are resting in our legislation, we are resting in our manufacture and export-but there is no panic and no paralysis of industry. The excise returns establish that the spending power of the working classes is diminished in only a very limited degree.

But luxury has received a check, and wanton expenditure is curtailedand it was time. Very serious dangers of a moral kind were gathering around us through the rapidity and magnitude of our gains. A much more sober spirit reigns in society; and it reaches deep down, among the labouring class, who needed the lesson almost more than their employers. The demands of labour, which had reached a point almost paralysing to our trade in competition with our continental rivals, are greatly moderated, and the working classes have learnt a very valuable lesson, that in pressing unduly on capital they are drying up the springs of their own sustenance, and that the paradise of labour, which a large class of well-paid workmen seemed to seek in bull-dogs and skittles and beer, or more costly stimulants, is in the far distance still. Over all this there is no need to be very dismal. Everyone is somewhat crippled. Holders of shares suffer severely; manufacturers have to find storage room for their wares. Articles of luxury are largely dispensed with. Pictures may be bought by other than millionaires. An old china shepherdess is no longer worth an earl's ransom. But for the present the worst which we have to endure is a general straitening and narrowing of resources, imposing self-denial, economy and simplicity. It is probable that when the crisis is past we shall find ourselves greatly the better for the discipline. It is not good for any people to have too much of its own way upon the earth.

Most emphatically will the working class profit by the lesson which it is learning and has yet to learn. There was something very saddening in the manner in which a very large section of it set itself to enjoy its sudden outburst of prosperity. It was proved plainly enough that our workmen were not inwardly educated to the point of their prosperous fortunes; and they are sent back by the present dulness and stagnation in all the departments of trade, to study humbling lessons in the lower forms of the school. In America the stagnation is still more complete, and the artisans are feeling the pressure sharply. But their superior intelligence enables them to adapt themselves more readily to what they recognise as a necessity. Strikes there are mainly among the unskilled and newly-imported labourers. The intelligent American workman gets to understand the true bearings of a crisis almost as well as his employer, and trade there rarely comes to a dead-lock. It is just this intelligence and self-command which the English workman has to master. An immense advance has been made during these last years, but the test of the recent prosperity shows plainly that the best part of the lesson has to be studied still. But the blessing is for all classes, if we can accept the discipline cheerfully, content ourselves for a time with narrower resources, and live a somewhat simpler and healthier life.

In politics it is perhaps well for the future of the Liberal party, that the Tories have shown the country so plainly what a reactionary policy means.

They have gathered strength from the general lassitude to neutralise all that they could, and to undo all that they dared, of the policy of their predecessors. The country suffers from it for a time, and the Church is using the opportunity to lengthen its cords, and to strengthen its stakes, and to throw forward, as it hopes, the Disestablishment movement to at any rate another generation. But here again good is mixed with the evil. The present pressure of the Church on the springs is but preparing the material for a strong recoil. Perhaps for the moment we may say that the more it presents and urges its pretensions the better. But there is one department of our public life in which the reaction has been profoundly detrimental. Mr. Disraeli's enormous majority, and the general lassitude of parties, has enabled him to play with the Eastern question in a way most congenial to his cynical Oriental temper, but most humbling to this country, and most disastrous to the Christian populations in the Ottoman Empire. His tone and language about the Turkish atrocities throughout have been shamefully indifferent and contemptuous. He little appreciates how deeply the country has been stirred by it; and how firmly the resolution is forming itself, that the power and influence of England shall no longer even appear to be prostituted to the support of the basest and most brutal despotism which afflicts the civilised world. J. BALDWIN BROWN.

Sin, or the Saviour?

I HAVE just come from a solemn inquiry meeting, in which several members of my flock were making their choice between a life of sin or the service of the Saviour. Some of those gathered in that prayer-room were young men. Many who read this article are yet in the morning hours of life's brief day. To such I have one bright example to present as their model. It is the example of the most remarkable young man of ancient times, who, in a luxurious royal court, "chose to suffer affliction" (or opposition) "with the people of God, rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season." He deliberately preferred the "reproach of Christ" to the dangerous and soulpoisoning "treasures of Egypt." The same choice must be made now by every soul. It is the same alternative-sin, or the Saviour?

We must not restrict the sphere of "sinful pleasures" to gross sensual indulgences. It is a far wider sphere than is included within gaming-rooms, drinking-saloons, ball-rooms, play-houses, convivial clubs, or the sumptuous haunts of harlotry. Every pleasure which does not please God is more or less sinful. Everything which is pursued in total forgetfulness of God, or which so occupies the mind as to exclude God's just claims, must be styled sinful. If Christ and conscience disapprove, then a choice against them is wilful sin. God's claim is first; anything that dethrones God is a wicked

usurper.

When a man lives to make money, and makes money solely to please self, he is pursuing a "pleasure of sin for a season." When a person gives the time, the thought, and the money, to fine arts, to literature, or to any

mental luxury, which belong to God, that person robs God. To rob God is a sin. Perhaps the eye of the Omniscient sees a more flagrant exhibition of selfishness and unbelief and downright irreligion in many a luxurious home of refinement than He sees in some dens of sensual vice, where ignorance is sinning against but small light and under powerful temptations. Pleasing self without caring whether God is pleased or not is "sinful pleasure." To persist in pleasing self in utter defiance of God is to choose death! 99 The immeWe must not be deceived by the expression "for a season." diate gratification produced by self-indulgence may be momentary. But the influence lasts. The mischief of the sin is permanent. The guilt is permanent. The effect on the conscience is permanent. I know of impenitent persons whose character is absolutely worse to-day for having grieved God's Spirit ten years or fifteen years ago. Sin poisons. Sin kills. These "sins for a season "last into eternity. Their consequences are felt The wages of in the endless retributions and woes of the world to come. sin is death! Just as a night of sensual indulgence is often followed the next day by the headache and the severer heartache, so a career of selfpleasing ungodliness is followed by the agonising heartache of Hell.

Now comes the question, How shall the pleasures of sin be rooted out? If they are destroying the soul, how shall they be destroyed? There is but The right must one way, and it is by the expulsive power of a new affection. expel the wrong. Christ or sin must have the control. Both cannot rule. Christ must expel the supreme love of sin, or you are lost! The soul cannot remain empty. Either Jesus or sin will hold the helm and control the affections. When Moses shut out the luxuries and the ambitions and the idolatries of Egypt, he filled their place with something infinitely better. He chose hardship, banishment from court, a forty years' march of faith through the wilderness. Was there any "pleasure" in all these? Yes, yes! "He had respect to the recompense of reward." God was more to be trusted than Pharaoh. Duty was sweeter than self-indulgence. A good conscience was better than being "called the son of the king's daughter." The desert was safer to his soul than the guilty glitter of a palace. Heaven was better than Egypt! He shut out "the pleasures of sin" by the incoming of a grand, a holy, and a glorious faith, and a sublime self-consecration to the Lord and the Lord's work! And what a career he had, clear on to the hour of his majestic translation to glory from the top of Mount Nebo !

66

The conflict was between Christ and self. With Christ came reproach," self-denial, hardship. But with Christ came a new affection, a new strength, a new joy, and a magnificent career, that blessed the whole world for ever. Happy choice! Happy man! Happy will you be, my friend, if you can put the Lord Jesus Christ where you have always put sin-on the throne of the heart!

God gives you your choice. You have to decide. Either sin or the Saviour must have you. Either the "pleasures of sin for a season," with the afterpangs of perdition, or the self-denials of earth, with the limitless joys of heaven. Which will you have?

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