smaller birds. Now, in order to deceive the bird amongst whose eggs the cuckoo intends to place its own egg, the cuckoo causes the egg it is about to lay to assume the colour and markings of the eggs of the small bird who is to be the foster-mother. Mr. Hart showed me over forty cuckoos' eggs, each one coloured to imitate the natural egg of the bird whose nest the cuckoo had commandeered. This had been done with extraordinary accuracy, from the bright blue of the hedge-sparrow's egg to the dull olive of the nightingale's egg, and even the peculiar markings, like notes of music, of the yellow-hammer's egg, had been imitated.

Consider the extraordinary mental power implied. The cuckoo has first to decide which nest she will lay under contribution. She has then to study the colouring of the eggs in that nest; then, with some amazing exercise of the creative power of thought, she has to cause her unlaid egg to assume that colour. She then lays it on the ground, and, carrying it in her beak, carefully places it amongst the eggs of the little foster-mother. What an intense, ever-present reality is the Infinite Mind! What a glorious thought it is that the Eternal Purpose is everywhere! When the heart grows faint and the hands weary, how sustaining it is to know that there is no chance, no mere machinery—everywhere purpose, intelligence, evolution, love!

Now, obviously the operation of the Originating Mind in all that is differs in quality of self-realization in proportion to the receptive capacity of the matter in which it is immanent. It is not sufficient for us intellectually to affirm the immanence of God in a blade of grass, but it is for us to carry the thought higher, and not to rest until we have realized that Divine immanence is in a far more intense degree in ourselves. Man is the crown of Creation, and when our Lord took that coin in His hand and asked the question, "Whose is this image and superscription?" He was stimulating thinkers to consider man's unique place in the cosmic order, and man's true relation to the Universal Originating Spirit; and when a man has really found that, he is well on his way to the region of understanding and realization.

These Pharisees were no obscurantists. Some of them were Essenes, some Therapeuts, some Mystics; and when the Lord asked "Whose is this image?" their minds would automatically have reverted to the profound declaration of human origins in the Book of Genesis: "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him." They would have realized that the question was a suggestion for a thought-excursion. It was. It was a hint at the transcendent truth of the elemental inseverability of God and man. It was an appeal to a Divine fact in man; it was a reiteration of His dogma, "The kingdom of Heaven is within you"; it was a reaffirmation of the truth that nothing can ever really change the central current of man's purpose, and regenerate man's nature, but the clear recognition of his dignity, his responsibility, his potentiality, as a vehicle for the manifestation of God. If they had brought to Jesus some utterly degraded specimen of the human race, as they brought Him that silver didrachma, and asked Him the question, "'Whose is the image and superscription' on this man?" (and they virtually did this when they brought Him the woman taken in adultery) there could have been but one reply—"In the image of God created He him"; and that which God has once impressed with His image, though that image may be defaced and overlaid, is His for ever, and the impress can never be obliterated.

You remember Tennyson's words:

"For good ye are and bad, and like to coins,

Some true, some light, but every one of you

Stamped with the image of the King."

"Stamped with the image of the King." The thought touches human life at many points, theological, personal, practical. The theological lesson from the human coin stamped with the Divine image is one of the utmost importance as a stimulus to spiritual growth. It is the transcendent twin-truth of the Eternal humanity in God, and the Eternal Divinity in man; that inasmuch as all that is must have pre-existed, as a first principle, in the mind of the Infinite Originator, and as the highest of all that is, so far as we at present know, is man, the archetypal original of man must be in the hidden nature of the Infinite Mind; and therefore man, however buried and stifled for educative purposes in the corruptible body, is in his inmost ego indestructible, and inseverably linked to the Father of Spirits. God needs man as a vehicle for Self-Manifestation. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork"; but only man—mental, moral, volitional man—can declare the nature of God and manifest the qualities of God. As God's power is revealed in the wheeling planet, God's nature is revealed in the thinking man. Man is therefore the special sphere of the self-manifestation of the Originating Mind. We humans are personal spirits who have proceeded from God into matter, and "the image and superscription" of the Creative Sovereign Power, whence we came, remains for ever indelibly impressed upon our inmost ego, and must work in us, and will work in us, until at last it unites our conscious mind fully with God. Inasmuch as humanity is the chosen vehicle of the self-expression of the moral qualities of the Originating Spirit, humanity will, through much initial imperfection and through many changes, evolve upwards and onwards, until at last it shall be complete in Him, and the preordained purpose of the Originating Spirit be completely fulfilled. He who believes this must be, theologically, a universalist.

There follows the personal lesson. The moral evolution of humanity is not automatic, it is not generic, it is not impersonal. It is individual, in accord with the personal equation of each one. Though it is a necessary philosophic truth that our true ego, our imperishable centre, is in the universal, and not in the imprisonment of what we now call personality, still we shall never lose our individuality, we shall always know that "I am I and no one else." "With God," said De Tocqueville, "each one counts for one," and each one must work out his own salvation. You and I will not drift onwards in a vague, impersonal stream called "the race." Each one of us is a responsible life-centre in which God has expressed Himself, and we have to become moral beings, and a moral being is not machine-made—he must be grown; he is the product of evolution, and for the purpose of evolution he must emerge triumphant from resistance, as every flower, every grape, every grain of corn in this church has emerged triumphant. In other words, he must be exposed to what, with our present imperfect knowledge, we call evil. It is just here that the analogy of the coin comes in. Man is a composite being—he possesses an inferior animal nature, a lower region of appetite, perception, imagination, and tendency; in other words, to carry on the analogy used by our Lord, there is a reverse side to every human coin. Don't overpress the analogy, but note that to every current coin there is a reverse side, and when you are looking at that side you cannot see the King's image. Generally on the reverse side there is some device representing a myth, or tradition, or national characteristic. For example, on the reverse side of this denarius, or silver didrachma, that they brought to our Lord, was a representation of Mercury with the Caduceus. Hold in your hand an English sovereign. Think of our Lord's analogy. Let the mind wander back into the distant past, and