that seems solid and potent to men while they are enacting the masque of life which we call living, faint back like rushlights in the lightning's flash, like aged institutions in the hour of revolution, when the breath of the Spirit as at Pentecost is falling on the world. I speak, and I am quite sure the sacred writers spoke, in no scorn of money. No thing is base: we keep our hate, our scorn, for base spirits, not for things. But for money Paul must have starved, and the kingdom must have perished in its birth. What the Lord means us to understand is that money is the inevitable satellite of higher things. Spirits in earnest movement sweep it with them in their course, as the earth sweeps its atmosphere. Give us hearts of fire, fire that kindles and flashes from heart to heart, from peak to peak of the human; and what work will wait long for gold? Men who in common levels of interest dole out their tens and hundreds, and feel some dull glow of satisfaction stirring the stagnation of their hearts, scatter forth their thousands when God fires their spirits, and their whole being is alive and thrills with joy. Money! nothing greatly spiritual was ever made by money, or was ever marred by money in this world.

There is a touch of scorn in the Saviour's words, "Shew me the tribute money." Scorn of the vain worldly mind that was perplexing itself about tribute, while the love of God and the belief in judgment were fast dying out of human hearts. One sacred conviction in their hearts would have answered the question, and lifted them above the sphere of tribute-as Paul was lifted-into the region of that kingdom which would sweep Cæsar's as a satellite in its sphere. Did the Lord foresee sadly the scene from which a few dark days divided them, when they would yield to Cæsar-these men, who were groaning and haggling over the tribute-absolutely everything that was God's? (John xix. 7-16.)

The leader of the band who turned the world upside down witnessed this confession, "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: in the name of Jesus Christ

of Nazareth, rise up and walk." They were poor as beggars, but richer in power to draw forth the treasures of this world than kings. What king's command could have wrought this miracle? "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common." (Acts iv. 32.) In truth, this love of Christ is the universal solvent. Nothing remains any man's own when once the heart is touched by this Divine fire. It melts all selfish separations and appropriations, as sun-warmth the bonds of winter, and quickens in the universal human heart the glow and circulation of the spring. Nothing starves in summer for want of the bread that perishes; supplies lie thick everywhere around. And no Divne work stays for lack of the gold that perishes, when once the sun of the Divine love has loosed men's hearts from the winter of their isolation and selfish grasping care. Don't worry about the tribute. "Trust in the Lord, and do good," and things will right themselves at once. Tribute will pour into the treasury, and even the exactors shall become ministers and yield their willing aid. “Thine officers shall become peace, and thine exactors righteousness." 66 Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and queens thy nursing mothers." "Violence shall be no more heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders," if the King is in thy palaces; if thy heart, soul, and hand are loyally devoted to Christ. I often think, in these days of grand Christian institutions, with their vast fixed incomes and endowments, and all the magnificent apparatus without which it seems to us the Lord's kingdom must perish out of this land and out of the world, of the little company who trudged wearily about the highways of Palestine, seeking their morning meal from the fig-tree by the wayside, and lodging wherever a poor cottager's faith and love gave them shelter for a night, and who,-beggars as to the things which were Cæsar's, but filled as never men were filled before or

since with the things which were God's, faith, hope, joy, truth, wisdom, and Divine charity,-went forth in this their might and re-made society: the grandest revolution in the history of this universe, accomplished by its beggars and, as the world thought, its fools. And the fact repeats itself in every revolution. Let a man in any age go forth with the fire of God in him; and the force he wields, the mastery he wins, the new life he quickens in a nation, in a world, pours silent contempt on gold. The gold is gathered, as spirit gathers flesh about it and becomes incarnate; so all that belongs to Cæsar's sphere is at the commandment of that which comes straight from God's and glows with the inspiration of His life. Gifts of a splendid lavishness in such seasons are abundant; and strangely enough the givers feel enriched unspeakably by the joy of giving, enlarged immeasurably by impoverishment, and increased by abnegation. The richest in such seasons are those who give most, not those who have most. A wonderful sense of the glorious wealth of a heart which has a guestchamber for Christ, and whose pulses beat joyously as the free tide of the Divine love flows through and over it on all around, kindles men's souls to a new conception of riches. It fills the beatitudes with a wonderful meaning, and shows the sorrows and straits of poverty overflowed by the riches and joys of God.

III.

"UNTO THIS LAST."

"I will give unto this last, even as unto thee."-MATT. xx. 14. THESE words appear at first sight to set us very decisively face to face with the sovereignty of God, in its sternest and most naked form-affirming its right to distribute its gifts and payments at its pleasure, and refusing to consider the question of equity when urged by the creature's sharp complaint. "Take that thine is, and go thy way." "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?" "I will give unto this last, even as unto thee." There, it is said, and with apparent truth, is Sovereignty-pure, naked Sovereignty. The "I will" of God seems to be the sole explanation which is vouchsafed of His dispensations and decrees. But this view of the matter has always seemed to me deeply unsatisfactory. Equity is a strong instinctive principle, which God Himself has established in the judgment seat of the human conscience; and God never beats down with the bare assertion of an irresistible Sovereignty the soul that is perplexed about the equity of His ways. It is equity, pure, celestial equity, which reveals itself to those who will search for it in this parable; equity to the poor souls who had been standing all the day idle in the market-place, because no man had called them to the vineyard; equity to the labourers who had borne the burden and heat of the day, and had made the dignity and culture of the Lord's husbandmen their own. It is an equity which invites the closest criticism from those who will search it thoroughly, and which reveals to the searchers deep vital truths about man and about God.

"I will give unto this last, even as unto thee." It is a

:

startling sentence. This man had been labouring in the vineyard under the burning heat, through the blazing noon; he had borne and bent under the whole burden of the work while this one had been brought in at the eleventh hour, in the cool evenfall, and by a few minutes of light sweet labour he had won the equivalent prize. There is something startling here, and men have felt it; and they have striven in manifold and curious ways to square the method of the Master with their fundamental notions of the righteousness of God. There are theologians who feel no need to square it. According to a theology which has exercised a wide-spread and malign influence in the past, Sovereignty answers amply every difficulty, and treats our ideas of equity as a high impertinence, when they claim to weigh the ways of God. If it pleases God to make some men to be saved and other men to be damned, who shall question His rights? and if He is glorified equally by the salvation of the chosen and the damnation of the reprobate, who dares complain, or to what court can we carry the appeal? There are theologians who would have us rest calmly on the conviction that a sovereign and inscrutable will is ruling, and trouble ourselves in no wise about the equity of the decrees. But one cannot but reflect that this composed contentment with the doctrine of reprobation is mainly conspicuous in those who feel themselves safe from its trenchant stroke. With the exception of Lord Byron-to whose malign and scornful tone we believe that this was the real key -we hardly discover the disciples of the doctrine among those who believe that they are reprobate; and in the case of the theological school whose influence is happily dying away, but which survives in out-of-the-way places to an extent little dreamed of still, we may fairly entertain the question, whether, if it were flashed suddenly on their souls that they, the theologians, were doomed by the Divine decree to everlasting anguish, their rest in the inscrutable Sovereignty would be so calm, and their contentment so assured. For thinkers of this school, of course,