ness, and kindly sympathy, on those whom Providence has made poor. It was never meant that wealth should accumulate around a few persons, for selfish gratification and merely personal enjoyment. If some are rich, they are rich in order that others may derive advantage from them. Poor relations, needy dependents, the strangers, the orphans, the widows, the sick, the destitute, the afflicted, have all a claim upon them which God expects that they should recognize. God might have helped these suffering persons in some other manner. God might have relieved their sorrows without the intervention of man's aid. But had He done this there would have been less than now there is to bind the world together. Sympathy would have been left without an object for its exercise. Love would have been deprived of one great field on which to display its tenderness. And gratitude would have found no human creature to whom it could pay tribute. If there were none to give there could be none to bless and give thanks.

God therefore has so ordered the concerns of men that there should be some to give, and some to receive, some to pay kindness, and some to repay with gratitude. But for the fall of man there would have been equality, not perhaps in such a way or of such a kind that all would have had equal, but so that all should have had enough. Afterwards, when sin is finally and for ever vanquished, a like equality may be restored again. "Mine" and "thine" will be words unknown in Heaven, for all will there have all things richly to enjoy. In Heaven all will be rich. But now, in this intermediate state of things, while we are living among the ruins produced by sin, and yet are building up mankind again into a higher and more

perfect and more happy condition, we must so use the unrighteous mammon as to change it into true and undecaying riches.

So that this is what we must now do. We must spend as much as possible of this sinful wealth which God has now given, on works of religion and charity, so as to raise it, and ennoble it, and store it in that treasury which is above. We must provide ourselves "bags which wax not old, a treasure in the Heavens which faileth not," by giving of our substance to the poor. We must make friends by means of mammon. We must so use it that the poor may become our friends. We must look on every sacred object, and on every poor man as a benefactor, who does us a greater favour in receiving than we do him in giving to him our alms. We must think that generosity makes us like to God, who gives to all liberally. And we must consider that money is never so well laid out as when invested in works of benevolence, or sunk in deeds of charity. To make the poor our friends is the highest aim of our existence, because to love them is to love God. And mammon is the instrument which may be changed from its unrighteous nature, by being steadily and constantly directed to this good end.

IV. Thus, my brethren, I have called your attention to the chief points which are brought before our notice in these words of our Lord. I have but dipped into a vast subject. I have omitted many things to which our thoughts might have been turned, had time allowed. But I trust that what has been said is sufficient to show you that money is a talent intrusted to our stewardship, and that, bad as it is in its own nature, it can be turned to the highest uses, and become the

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means of making man and God our friends. Gold, like everything else, can be ennobled and illuminated by love. I have brought this matter before you with no very special and immediate object, though I should be thankful if God would put it into your hearts to contribute more largely than you now do to the relief of your destitute and afflicted brethren. My wish has rather been to direct your attention to a subject which, on many grounds, needs consideration, and to lead you quietly and calmly to reflect, in your own homes and hearts, upon all the questions which poverty suggests to our notice, and to think what you can do, each in his several station and circumstances, for the suffering poor whom God loves. The poor are increasing among us. Wealth and poverty are growing side by side. Scarcely a month passes but some family is left to the mercy of those who can compassionate the fatherless. There are ignorant persons whom we are called to educate. There are sick who require our care. What are we to do? And these are but a few out of many good works which cannot be done by any public efforts of the Government, but must grow out of the fertile soil of Christian charity. That they can be done I have not any doubt whatever. That they may grow up here, little by little, one after another, as God and circumstances call us to do them, is as certain as that they have been done in older countries, and are now bearing in other lands their beautiful and blessed fruit. I commend them to your thoughts and your prayers. I do not, for one moment, urge you to them, as if the matter was one which needed art and rhetoric to persuade you to it, for the truth which the text teaches has more rhetoric in

it than a whole library of sermons. It is enough

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for you to know that God permits you to associate yourselves with Him in doing good. If you have the means of doing it you can make the poor your friends. You can help the poor now. found institutions which may do good to all future generations. And all these many men of many generations whom your bounty may bless, will stand at the gate of Heaven and lead you to everlasting habitations. That is the truth, and such a truth as this contains in it a thousand arguments. No man who believes that this is truth can live without showing mercy, or die without remembering the poor, whom God loves, and who will plead for his soul in the day of judgment.

Money is never so well invested as when it is trusted into the hands of mercy. God Himself tells us that for whatever a man gives up for His sake he shall receive an hundred-fold now, and an infinite recompense by-and-by. He takes it as lent to Himself, and he requites it with usurious interest. Giving is but sowing, and he who sows little shall reap little, while he who sows much shall reap much. Even upon the score of earthly prosperity it is wise to be liberal in dispensing the goods which we possess. The way to gain much in trade is to adventure boldly, and the way to gain gold is to trust it boldly into the hands of God, and give it to God's poor. "Honour the Lord with thy substance and with the first fruits of all thy increase, so shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine."

Of course, it will never be supposed that acts like these are meritorious, or that by anything within themselves and of their own intrinsic efficacy they can avail to win Heaven. I assume that

they are done from faith in Christ, whose sacrifice is all-availing, and out of love to God, who accepts them for His Son's sake. But I do say this, and I say it without reserve or hesitation, that good works are absolutely needful, and that he who loves the poor for God's sake, and shows his love by sacrifice, shall find in them friends, who will assist him with their potent influence at the critical epoch in his history, and who will conduct him, with shouts of endless gratitude, to a rest which never ceases, and to a home in the purest and serenest heavens, where he shall find a perfect bliss in seeing God.