and much better worth than to deject and defile with such a debasement and pollution as sin is, himself so highly ransomed and ennobled to a new friendship and filial relationship with God. Nor can he fear so much the offence and reproach of others, as he dreads and would blush at the reflection of his own severe and modest eye upon himself, if it should see him doing or imagining that which is sinful, were it even in the deepest secrecy."

CHAPTER XIX.

THE EVIL OF DEPRESSION.

THIS is how we should view our personal lives, in that inherent grandeur which man can neither bestow upon them nor diminish. And we need thus to feel the sanctity of our beings. Do I not interpret the thoughts of many of you aright when I say that they are often, very often, weighed down by depression and discontent? "Vanity of vanities," so ends a remarkable fiction, by one who lies buried in Westminster Abbey ;— "which of us has what he desires, or, having it, is satisfied?" I am not now speaking of the positive and downright misfortunes that come to all of us. To these we must oppose our constancy. Menaced with shipwreck, we must breast the tempest, and act and speak as men. But are not many of you saying in your hearts, "Oh, that I had a higher position, a wider influence, a larger scope! What boots it for me to come,

day after day, through the dreary streets to the dingy office, to copy and cast up accounts till I am greyheaded and cast aside, or retire on. some miserable pittance?” Or, “Why am I a humble tradesman, harassed by incessant anxiety about my business? by the sordidness of money-craving, with all its base hopes and baser temptations?" Or, “Why am I a poor, lonely woman, who has apparently missed the natural ends of life, whom there are none to praise and very few to love?" How many would be inclined to repeat the deeply-dejected complaint of the poet?

"Alas! I have nor hope, nor health,

Nor peace within, nor calm around ;
Nor that content surpassing wealth

The sage in contemplation found.

Others I see whom these surround, Smiling they live, and call life pleasure,

To me that cup hath been dealt in far other measure.'

And so, more or less, all but a few of us have a lot in life which is all the harder to bear because, in the pathos of it, "everything is below the

level of tragedy, except the passionate egoism of the sufferer.” How many of these discontented murmurs spring from our own false notions and exaggerated claims! How many of them would vanish if, having food and raiment, we would be therewith content! Our complaints and miseries rise in no small measure from our failure to grasp the real meaning, or understand the universal experience of life; they rise because, dropping the substance, we grasp at the shadow ; they rise because we take for solid realities bubbles which break at a touch.

These are the grounds, open or secret, why many men are depressed; and it is of infinite importance to themselves and to the world that they should not be thus depressed. It is of infinite importance to themselves, because such feelings ruin their lives; and to the world, because they are a fatal hindrance to its progress and its blessedness. We need for ourselves, the world needs, God needs for us as fellow-workers with Him, all the joy, all the spring, all the elasticity, all the vigour, all the hope which man will not rob us of.

A depressed life-a life which has ceased to believe in its own sacredness, its own capabilities, its own mission-a life which contentedly sinks into querulous egotism or vegetating aimlessness --has become, so far as the world is concerned, a maimed and useless life. A good and thoughtful writer, the late Jeremy Bentham, said of a nobleman of his day, "He raised me from the bottomless pit of humiliation; he first taught me that I was something." Oh! that the same fire of self-respect could be flashed in upon multitudes of the needlessly despondent. Half the great work in the world has been done by men who would have never made any effort but for the encouragement thus extended to them by some one noble nature. Even a Paul needs at first an Ananias to baptise him, and a Barnabas to take him by the hand. But if we find not so much as one friend on all the earth to do this for us, we all have that Friend in heaven. If none else can or deign to help us, He is ever ready to grasp the hand of the humblest of His disciples as they sink in the