majesty of God and the blessedness of man! A living temple! A human spirit within which the Eternal Spirit condescending will deign to dwell!

But is this the state of man's heart by nature? Has the soul been kept pure and unsullied? Who does not know that it has been polluted and profaned? Stand as it were by the door of your heart and watch what goes in and out? What are your thoughts by day and your dreams by night? Are they of heaven or of earth? Are they pure and self-denying or worldly and selfish? Do they chime together in one chorus of praise to God, or are they discordant and inharmonious? Are they of the altar or the market; of duty or of pleasure, of Christ or of self?

On the answer to these questions the verdict of your treatment of what God made and designed as His own temple-holier, more precious than human hands ever reared-depends. Have you filled it with the tables of the money changers? Is the voice of your thoughts rather the bleating of flocks than the anthem of praisethe jingling of coin than the voice of prayer?

Who is there among us all—where is the most devoted Christian that is not forced to confess to his own shame, that this spiritual temple has been polluted by the presence within it of that which is unholy and impurethoughts that he cannot approve, passions that he cannot justify, and yet for which he is responsible? It is a humbling confession. Has he betrayed his trust? Has he, the guardian of that temple, allowed it to be desecrated? Has he surrendered it to the foul hoofs of sensual and worldly things, till the sacred presence is excluded, and the great inhabitant, the Holy Spirit, has withdrawn?

It was accounted even by heathens a crime of special enormity to desecrate a temple. They called it sacrilege. And what is sin, intruding by your own act into the temple of your soul, denying its altar the sacrifice of a contrite heart--but just sacrilege? There is a temple God reared for Himself. And have you installed Mammon within it?

There are, doubtless, some hearts eminent for profanation. They are dens of malicious and murderous thoughts. Lust, and passion, and appetite, and reckless, Heaven-daring defiance, all are there. Avarice, and selfishness, and gloating revenge are combined there in infernal league. You feel as you approach them that you are on the borders of Pandemonium. How far does a Herod, or a Nero, or a Jeffries, fall short of being a hell incarnate? We regard with a shudder such monstrosities of depravity. We feel that in "the lowest deep" we have found "a deep still lower." And then how startling the thought that sin-polluted shrines, to which the scenes of Bacchanalian orgies might sometimes seem almost like vestal purity, were designed for a hallowed service, were meant as temples of the Holy Ghost!

It is true there are lesser degrees of depravity, but the least of them all is a profanation. A sinful thought is a sacrilegious intruder. A selfish aim cannot rank above a money-changer. An idle fancy is a trifler in that sanctuary, where every thought, and imagination, and emotion of the heart should bow down and adore.

Alas for man! He has become like the temple of Jerusalem when Christ entered it. Unhallowed passions nestle there. The greed of gain has displaced devotion, and all the activity of the intellect and will, is often only to disobey his Maker.

But the object of the Gospel is to cleanse and restore and re-consecrate it to its proper, its hallowed service. See the ruin, and see at what cost the provision to restore it is made! What will effect the result? Nothing short of the means which God has devised. It is the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanseth from all sin. Nothing else does or can. It is the Spirit of God that renews the heart. None but a divine might can rear again the pillars of resolve, and restore the purity of affection. Have you called for help? Have you applied to the blood of cleansing? Have you opened your eyes to the greatness of the work? Have you aroused yourself to the urgency of the pressing, solemn duty? It is that work without which no other work is of any avail. It is in vain to cultivate taste or science. How worthless to wreathe crumbled ruins with the twining ivy, or overspread them with venerable moss, while on the desecrated altar within no sacrifice is laid, and through the hollow vaults echoes no anthem of praise, no note of prayer!

Christ comes to your heart to-day. He bids you fit it for His reception, for He would come in and dwell there. It is His Father's house. It is a temple of the Most High. You are its high priest, to offer within it sacrifices of praise. Will you devote it to the traffic of mammon and to the revels of sin?

XXVI.

LIVING FOR THE UNSEEN.

"The things which are not seen are eternal."-2 COR. iv. 18.

MAN

AN occupies a middle point between two worlds, the seen and the unseen. He is himself united to each and compounded of both. He is body and soul, matter and spirit. On one side of him are material things, on the other, spiritual. He stands on the earth yet may commune with heaven. His body allies him to the worm, his spirit to the angel. He is a link between the visible and the invisible, the earthly and the heavenly.

Hence, almost as a matter of necessity, he lives in two worlds, sometimes inclining more to one and sometimes to the other. But something, in spite of himself, he has to do with both. The most perfect materialist that ever lived, the veriest miser whose heart was ever cankered by his gold, the bold boasting disbeliever in all spiritual realities, lives more or less in the realm of the invisible. A man's own soul will be a world in itself, a world of unseen things, of thoughts and fancies, of hopes and fears, of speculations and anxieties, of schemes and cares; a world of light and shade, of day and night, of clouds and sunshine, of storm and calm, of bald mountains and quiet valleys; a world that would still exist to the soul though the whole outward and material universe were dissolved; a world which is far more real, important, enduring, influential for good or evil than the globe itself with all

that it contains. Is it not so? Stop a man's ears, shut him up in total darkness, and into his prison, or into his voiceless solitude, he carries with him in his soul a world echoing with ten thousand voices, and bright or dark with ten thousand scenes of no material landscape. He sees no star-roofed vault above him, but his soul makes its own firmament; he hears no human utterance, but his soul listens to speech from the invisible and immaterial. If he is a Herod, he will have the hell of his own thoughts around him. If a Stephen, he will gaze up even with sightless eyeballs into an opening heaven.

Now, there is an infinite wisdom in that order of Providence which brings us into relations with two worlds at once. We are connected with matter in such a way that we may gain and gather out of material things their spiritual significance, and use them as helps by which to climb up to a region of spiritual attainment. We begin an immortal existence in the use and possession of a bodily frame, and we keep it just long enough for us, by means of it, to come in contact with the spiritual truths, and laws, and relations that it is most essential for us to know. Sensible things are emblems out of which the soul reads a meaning, because in God's plan they are figures and diagrams by which we solve life's problems, the visible things by which the invisible are demonstrated or explained. The body is a sort of scaffolding by the aid of which we build up our own spiritual structure, and when character is complete, and the soul is reared to the maturity of its stature, the scaffolding is thrown down, the body crumbles away, and the soul, built up and furnished for eternity, stands complete and forever independent of the instrumentalities by which it was reared.

Such is the use of the body, such the intent of the Cre