vast multitudes, and loses the sense of individual responsibility in
the vastness of the crowd which surrounds him. How many professing
Christians, for example, deplore drunkenness and impurity, while they
shrink from any kind of open protest, and will not even trouble
themselves to vote for representatives who will fight these evils; and
if a preacher boldly denounces such iniquities they will even beg him
to leave questions of that kind alone, and to confine himself to
doctrinal exposition. We are all too apt to forget that truth and
righteousness, sobriety and holiness, are of God; and that the mission
of Jesus Christ was to establish these, and to put away sin, even by
the sacrifice of Himself. The religion He exemplified was not to be
ranged on the shelves of a library, but to prove itself a living force
in politics, in business, and at home. What was His own doctrine?
"_Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the
kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in
heaven_." Evils outside the Church, then, are to be combated, and not
tolerated, by all true Christians--even though in the result they are
maligned as renegades to their party, or jeered at as Pharisees or
Puritans. The late Tom Hughes was quite right half a century ago, when
he thus described to the lads before him the lot of a would-be reformer.

"If the angel Gabriel were to come down from heaven, and head a
successful rise against the most abominable and unrighteous vested
interests which this poor old world groans under, he would most
certainly lose his character for many years, probably for centuries,
not only with upholders of the said vested interest, but with the
respectable mass of the people he has delivered. They wouldn't ask him
to dinner, or let their names appear with his in the papers; they would
be careful how they spoke of him in the palaver, or at their clubs.
What can we expect, then, when we have only poor gallant, blundering