The following is the last of a series of four lectures, viz., Duty— Religion-Theism—and Christianity. Christianity. Ir any of you should ever visit Florence, that artistic metropolis of the world, you will doubtless go to see a group of famous statues by Michael Angelo. Two of them represent Dawn and Twilight. Twilight is a man hardly past the vigour of life-his limbs left purposely unfinished by the Artist. A lethargy is stealing over his frame, a deathlike slumber is upon his eyelids. He looks as though he could yet do mighty things, if he could once rouse himself for work and effort. But no-there is some fatal charm which prevents his doing that, the day-light slowly wastes-the light in which alone man can workand fold on fold the night is coming on. Turn now to the figure of Dawn. She is a woman of earnest and thoughtful face, in the first glory of pure and radiant womanhood. The brightness of the morning is on her limbs; her eyes, from which she is just withdrawing the veil, are turned towards the source of light. In another moment she will be alive and awake and at work, spreading a beneficent power among men. Such, my friends, are two historical aspects of Theism. In past times there has been the Theism which has turned its back upon the Christian revelation, and slowly but surely it has always sunk back into slumber and lethargy and death. And there has been the Theism which has struggled onward into the fuller light of CHRIST, and that has been a living power among men. For my witnesses I appeal to Judaism, Arianism and Mahometanism, the only Theisms which have been tried on any large scale. Can any of these at the present day, whatever they have been in times past, be called regenerating moral powers? To the members of the Brahmo Somaj I said last Sunday a word of genuine thanks. Will they accept from me to-day a word of loving warning? Now all Christians, I need hardly say, are Theists. They are believers in one GOD, and One only. The doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation guard and supplement this Unity; they do not contradict it. Let me say a word about these two central truths of Christianity— these two doctrines which alone, when firmly held, make a Christian. I do not profess to explain them-GOD would be no God to me if I could perfectly penetrate His Nature. To do so I should have to be on a level with Him. But I will give you an illustration which may help you to see that, though these doctrines are above the grasp of human reason, they are not unreasonable. You yourselves are three persons in one: you are reason, heart, and will: you say, I think, I love, I will: and yet it is not your heart that thinks or your reason that wills. You must confess that, in some sense, you are one but you are three. Again there is another division to be made of your human nature, the division into soul-the spiritual part as a whole-and body, the material part. These are held together by one personality. And so, "As the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so GOD and man is One CHRIST." I give this, I say, but as an illustration; GOD's Nature is not to be measured by man's. And yet, to one who accepts the Christian doctrine that man is made in the image of God, it is more than an illustration; though it does not amount to a proof. In any case, is it a shallower or a deeper conception of GOD, to say that He is less complex, less manifold and marvellous than man? And now let me ask you to hold these thoughts in your minds, while I resume briefly the argument of the preceding lectures. I said if you remember at the beginning, that there were three conditions indispensable to the search after truth-the honest desire of obeying it, the belief that there is a truth to discover, and the conviction that we can discover it. I laid these down as assumptions, I did not undertake to prove them: nor do I think they can be proved. But the object of the former lectures was to show that each of them respectively answers to one of the deepest and most imperious needs of the human soul-the sense of Duty, the thirst for a Religion, and the belief in GOD; needs which wherever crushed are certain to assert themselves again; needs which are felt indeed in very different measure by different souls, but to which, wherever they are most strongly felt, those three primary conditions make their strongest appeal. Of these needs the most fundamental of all was L the conception of duty, orm oral obligation, and by making this enquiry into truth we hoped to establish this on a firmer footing than that vague, instinctive, unsteady longing of our human nature. Now remember I have not spoken and I do not speak to those in whom this conception of duty has been allowed to die. But I ask you, my brothers, who have trod with me along the steps of this argument under a solemn sense of your responsibility for the truth, whether we have not found a basis on which duty can securely rest, and be deepened, strengthened, and enlarged. We have seen that if we accept the principle of Theism—“Thou shalt love the LORD thy GOD with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind "-it includes all those other principles which by themselves could only make imperfect ethical systems: the love of man; the satisfaction of the intuitive moral sense; the reaching after a righteous happiness for ourselves. "Our nature in its perfect state is intended to be the balance of many great forces acting in mutual correspondence under an overruling power, like the movements of the great deep composed of its many tides and currents under the law of gravity: and these several forces in our nature are true when they are elicited by their respective attractions, and directed to their intended ends, under the will of God." We wanted a sanction for duty. We have found it: but in the quest there has dawned on us the possibility of holiness, perfection, and union with GOD. 1. Perfection! Holiness! Union with God! The very words send a wholesome and a sobering shudder through my frame, recalling me back to facts. Perfection! O world of nature, art thou not stamped from top to bottom with imperfection—ruin, waste and decay? Holiness! O world of man, art thou not scored across and across with moral evil, earthly, sensual, devilish? Union with GOD! O my soul, I look within thee, and do I not see that which GOD, "Who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," must loathe and abhor? It is true. The whole of this natural world, the sphere of nature, the sphere of man, the hidden recess of my own heart. is signed and sealed-surely by some enemy's hand—with the mark of corruption. (a) Look out into the world of nature. Is it not so? Could the Creator look down upon His work now, and say, Behold it is very good. Take into account that which scientific men call the waste of |