loss, and your great danger, you put off the day of making God your own-oh, yet cherish in your memory those past waves of feeling, for they were raised by the breath of God's Spirit blowing where He listeth. But do not mistake your mere emotions, or still more, that soft, pietistic, heaven and angel prattling, which many regard as part of the conventional proprieties of a house of mourning or specially solemn times, to whom religion would be an unwelcome intruder on the journey of everyday life,-do not, I pray you, mistake even your genuine emotions, though they be bright and pure while they last as Jacob's midnight vision, for that stern and lasting thing, the conversion of the soul to God. Let Jacob's history teach you this, and whether it is wise to put it off.

For twenty long years he toils like a slave for his grasping relative Laban, who, with bitter irony, palms off the wrong wife upon him at the marriage festival, precisely as he had palmed off the wrong son upon his father. At last, in middle age, enriched by wives and much pastoral wealth, the exile returns, longing for home, trembling lest even now he should be smitten by the long-nursed vengeance of his brother. Again, when his heart is softened, angels meet him at

Mahanaim-the messengers of that God who, though only dimly known, had been ever watching over him, and is now to meet him face to face. He sends on before him his family, his attendants, his possessions. He is to be alone with God. The narrative deepens into mystery. We are told that in the original, even more than in our translation, every incident, almost every word, lends itself to a double meaning. There are the heavenly "messengers" who meet him at Mahanaim. There are the earthly

messengers" sent on to meet his brother. There are the banks of the Jabbok, "the wrestling stream." There is the "face" of his brother Esau, and there is the "face" of God, both of which he longs but fears to see. It is in the midst of these conflicting images, as in a dream, that he encounters, he knows not whom, on the mountain - side. Through the long watches of the night he is locked in a struggle, as for death and life, with a mysterious combatant. At last, as the dawn breaks upon the hills of Gilead, despair brightens into hope. The day-spring is rising in his heart, and, with the instinct of coming victory, he exclaims, "I will not let thee go unless thou bless me." 1 Stanley's Jewish Church.

And then the blessing bursts forth upon him like the beams of the sun now rising in his strength. Not a fraud - gained inheritance for Jacob the Impostor, but an everlasting possession for Israel the Prince. "Thy name shall be no more called Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince thou hast power with God and with men, and hast prevailed."

To say that this is allegory is to misuse language. Allegory is a product of the imagination to illustrate spiritual truth. But here we have a real story and a real transaction. It is indeed only by material imagery that we can have brought home to us the unspeakable realities of the spiritual world. "The deep things of God," as St Paul says, "are made manifest by the things that do appear." The struggle of Jacob was as real as that of St Augustine, who, after a youth of impurity and theft and lies, and after many longings and strivings after good, had also, like Jacob, his whole nature transformed, after the age of thirty. "The tempest within my heart had hurried me," he says in his Confessions, "where no one might impede the fiery struggle in which I was engaged with myself, until it came to the issue that Thou knewest, though I did not. But I was mad

that I might be whole, and dying that I might have life, knowing what evil thing I was, but not knowing what good thing I was shortly to become."

Observe the word Life. It embodies a vital truth. We know that the gulf between life of any kind and its absence is absolutely bridgeless.1 Science has broken down the barriers which used to be thought to exist between plant and plant, between animal and animal, possibly even between plant and animal. But with every increase of knowledge one gulf yawns wider than ever,—the gulf between life and that which is lifeless-between the kingdom of the mineral and the kingdom of the animal or the plant. There is no haze, no shading away in this border-land. Dead matter, in order to become living matter, must be born from above.

Precisely the same thing is true of spiritual life. Here also there is a bridgeless gulf. Spiritual life cannot grow or be evolved out of natural life. It is the direct gift of God. No lapse of time, no course of training through infinite generations, could transform the brute

1 Vide 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World,' pp. 70, 71. I hope the sequel will show that it is possible to differ from Mr Drummond without preaching spontaneous generation.

creation into spiritual beings. But the truth, of which some systems of theology have lost sight, is this that every man, in virtue of his humanity, has the principle of spiritual life within him. Conscience is the voice of God speaking to us by the organs of this life; and wherever this voice continues to be heard, even in the faintest whisper, life survives: or, to vary the metaphor, "Christ is the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." He shines within every human heart by the rays of His Holy Spirit. But this life is subject to a disease which threatens to destroy it-the universal disease of sin. And here again the grace of God comes in. God is not only the giver of life-which He is to all men-but He is the Good Physician, the restorer and strengthener of life to all who seek His aid, in whatever dim light they may grope after Him with feeble hands.

Now we know that in natural disease there are great crises or turning - points. And when a man has come through one of these, and he feels that threatening death has been beaten back, and that life has got the upper hand in the struggle, he naturally says that such a remedy or such a course of treatment has been new life to him; meaning obviously by this, that the life which

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