God." And last of all, in that antithesis so full of instruction: "The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a life-giving spirit."

Adam's children we all are in the possession of a physical nature full of possibilities of moral good and evil: the question for us is, shall we be Christ's children too? I cannot assert that this is the only line in which we can inherit life: heroes and saints before and apart from Christ would rise up to rebuke me if I did. God's tender mercies, even of the most intimately spiritual kind, are over all His human children. But it is the line in which we naturally stand; and to stand in it I count the highest privilege of our humanity. I will lay down no conditions of salvation where I believe Christ has laid none down: I will not attempt to compare his disciples with those of other masters: I am content to know that here is a fountain of living waters, which flows for us, and at which those who drink shall never thirst again. I will not even try to define the process by which a strong, bright, master-soul pours itself into poorer and narrower spirits, for I rest joyfully in the certain knowledge that it is so. Is it not possible to forget the fact too much in discussing the rationale of the process? "In the last day, that great day of the feast," when the silver trumpets were sounding, and the priests were bearing up to the temple court the water which they had drawn from that brook Siloam which "flows fast by the oracles of God," "Jesus stood and cried, 'If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.'" There is the whole secret. All true life is contagious. Not the dull and dead, but only the living, can quicken. Fragrance makes fragrant: sweetness imparts sweetness: strength begets strength. How many of us have learned integrity from an upright father, and breathed in the confidence of faith at a mother's knee? They gave because they had; and Christ was their fountain-head.

The religious life, to some imaginations, presents itself as inclining largely to the side of the passive and the negative. It is abstinence from evil quite as much as eager realization of good. On this view, an air of cloistered sanctity hangs about it: it is full of prayers and mystic raptures: its eye is fixed within, or, if not within, only upon God. It is sweet rather than strong: more meditative than active: a faint fragrance exhales from it, but it does not forget itself to grapple with wrong, or descend upon the arena of human woes and oppressions, full of the heat of battle, or, with a careless heroism, spend itself to the last for the kingdom of God. I do not deny the reality and the sweetness of this type of goodness; but it is not the only type, and much less the type produced by the contagion of Christ upon a strong nature and an eager vitality. I have said that the abundant physical gift of life may carry with it a certain temptation to an unsympathizing self-sufficiency. It is difficult not to be proud of an untiring energy, and faculties that are always abreast of the demands made upon them, and an immunity from pain and languor which is like a double portion of strength. But what if all these things are only a larger gift to lay upon the altar of humanity? What if strength be used only to follow with swifter stride in the self-denying footsteps of Christ? What if the sense of joyous energy only fortifies the soul against disappointment, and makes light of hindrances, and enables patience to have her perfect work? We envy the strong because we think they can do more than we, and enjoy more than we—in a word, because they live more than we. Let us envy them, if