Frofession and Practice.

Now of penance as penance the Christianity of Christ knows nothing but self-denial for the sake of others is its very breath and being. Where fore do those who enjoin self-donial for the sake of others, perform no [unclear: s] self-denial themselves? Yet even so the question states too much, for my perplexity is heightened by the fact that many true-hearted Christians exercise in other respects a self-denial worthy of their high calling, but decline to make this tiny sacrifice—a sacrifice which would cost them so little, and which would be such a boon, to the world. I should not attempt to pin any mas to the letter of the two last texts I have quoted if they contained anything hyberbolical, or Local, or isolated. St. Paul was a superb rhetorician, and page 13 his hyberboles are sometimes beyond me. And even with Christ himself the necessary allowance to be made for the more complicated conditions of modern life, or for the use of metaphor, or even for the misunderstandings of hearers and reporters, occasionally makes a literal application of his precepts impossible for us. But in these words of Paul I see nothing that is tramsitory, nothing that is impossible, nothing that is not of the very quiet-[unclear: ence] of Christianity and a simple application to a particular matter of christ's express teaching, which must otherwise of itself have led us to the same conclusion. A German commentator sums up that 8th chapter (1 Cor.) thus—"The strong sought the solution of the question from the stand-point of knowledge and its rights; the apostle finds it from the standpoint of love and its obligations." There surely you have the very spirit of Christ, and it is through that spirit, if I mistake not, that the only solution of this great liquor question is to be found.

Nor does the liquor question stand alone in this respect. All the other great problems of society are in precisely the same position. The Individualism which is only another name for selfishness, and which in defence of its own comforts misapplies to the spiritual world immoral catchwords about "the struggle for existence" and "the survival of the fittest" which have but a limited scope even, in the world of nature; the Socialism which has for its leading idea of sacrifice the sacrifice of really, and seeks from the mere mechanics of State action a social millennium which must mainly depend upon a change in the spirit of the individual—these contending falsehoods and their respective broods of subsidiary quackeries really rest, for all their seeming difference, upon the same fundamental [unclear: llacy] which it was the mission of Mazzini, the most prophet-like figure in modern politics, to expose. They all take for their basis the rights instead of the duties of man. And they must all be sent back to Christ to be made clean.^*