manly and noble in the shepherd lad with sling and stone to accept the challenge of that bullying giant who had paced up and down the ranks, shouting, "Show me a man that we may fight together?" But we need not go so far back in the history of the world. Unhappily there have been wars in every age; but still, in every age, war has given occasion to the exercise and manifestation of extraordinary courage, patience, and heroism; and I marvel not that the military profession has always been regarded as eminently manly. In the ambition which stimulates to unjust aggression, there is nothing worthy of a man. The sovereign and the nation who give way to such a spirit are only burglars on a large scale, and robbery, however ingenious, however successful, is never manly on any scale at all. But all war is not robbery. Some warriors are the burglars, others the brave opponents of the burglars-all honour to such men! When war is reluctantly resorted to as the only price at which freedom can be secured, public rights vindicated, innocent weakness protected, and lawless violence put down, let no man say that it is unmanly. No; the men who have waged such wars are amongst the noblest the world has ever seen. War is a terrible thing, and so it is a terrible thing to be aroused in the dead of the night, and, in the darkness, to contend in a life-and-death struggle with a gang of robbers; and worse still if these robbers be your own domestics, who know your habits, to whom, perhaps, you have unwisely entrusted some of your keys, and who take up your own kitchen poker, and the cleaver, and the carving-knife, wherewith to massacre you and your wife and children. This is our unhappy case as a nation at the present moment; and we should not be worthy of the name of men, if we did not, to the utmost of our power, oppose the monsters who have perpetrated this all but unparalleled series of crimes.

Still, the true weapons of man's warfare are not carnal. War by physical force is a sad necessity imposed upon us; but in the imposition of which we, too, have had a part. Let us hope that courage is not always to manifest itself in scenes of carnage and death; that there are yet to be far nobler victories than those which history records. Sir Thomas More, speaking of the estimation in which the Utopians hold fighting, says, "Bears, lions, wolves, and dogs, and all other animals, employ their bodily force against each other; but the Utopians judge that a man acts suitably to his nature when he conquers his enemy in such a way as no other creature is capable of, that is, by the strength of his reason and understanding." Yes, if we must fight, this, though as yet often impracticable, is certainly the manliest method of fighting. But in the development of mankind, "that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual." Long enough has the world been under the dominion of the natural, now may the spiritual rapidly advance; now may the conflicts of physical force speedily give way to the conflicts of reason and understanding; and the manliness which has shown itself in so many noble heroisms on the battle-field, find other and far greater enterprises in which to exercise its strength, in modes more worthy of creatures who are the children of God and members of one common brotherhood.

I have now to advert to a department of my subject which I cannot but regard as the most important of all, and that is, Manliness in relation to Religion. "What!" asks some one in surprise, "is there anything particularly manly in religion, or anything calculated to form a manly character ?" Yes, my friend; at least I, for one, most earnestly believe that religion is the manliest thing in this world, and that without it your manliness cannot be complete. It is very

possible that you may have learned to scoff at religion as a superstition, worthy only of the dark ages. Possibly you regard Christians, decided Christians, Christians who mean what they say, as a weak, slow, small-minded class of persons. Much of the popular literature of the present day is calculated to produce and foster such an impression. I wish that writers who hate religion, and only pay a hypocritical respect to its name, would be manly enough to speak out. We can understand a hard-headed, and even a hard-hearted argument; we can admire the courage, and respect the sincerity of the man who boldly declares himself the conscientious enemy of religion; but to introduce into works of fiction miserable sneers, and to picture characters that are scarcely to be found in any denomination, to represent these characters as average and normal specimens of religious professors; this, I submit, is a cowardly, a sneaking, and altogether unmanly course.

But I am quite prepared to admit that professors of religion have done much towards confirming the contempt which is felt by many for the religious character. There is amongst them so much rank-worship, so much moneyworship; in many cases far stronger faith in the gospel of Mammon than in the gospel of Jesus Christ; a living and working faith in the former, only a dead and unproductive faith in the latter. Then there is no little cant, no little hypocrisy. Christian men of business, whose treatment of those in their employ is worse than that experienced by the servants of men who make no pretensions to a religious character. Members of Christian churches, who are to the full as avaricious, as mean, as dishonourable, as given to trickery and fraud, as men who openly despise religion. There is a woful deficiency of the practical evidence of Christianity afforded by the Christian life. We may rely upon it, however, that no other evidence will satisfy this pre-emi

nently practical age. We have had evidences enough of another kind, critical, historical, philosophical. There is no lack in this respect; but men now ask, and they have a right to ask, that those who call themselves Christians shall, in all matters of business, act with the perfect integrity and honour to which their profession pledges them. You, Christian men of business, have a ncble work before you; there is no Christian minister, no Christian missionary, who has a finer sphere for Christian influence than that in which you move. The shop, the warehouse, the office, the market, are the very places in which you can most effectually demonstrate the manliness of the Christian character.

By your sterling integrity, by your moderation in pros. perity, by your patience under adversity, by your victory over self, you will preach the most eloquent, the most convincing, the most masterly of all sermons, and compel the scoffer to admit that your Christianity tends to make you, in the highest sense of the expression, manly.

But it must be confessed that the Christian ministry has also had its share in bringing religion into disrepute. The ecclesiastical "Nimrods, ramrods, and fishing-rods," are now happily rather rare, but the ecclesiastical coxcomb is common in all denominations. I am told that the getting-up of ministerial dress is a distinct department of the tailor's divine art. There's the M.B. coat, and the cassock waistcoat, and the starch; and when the people see a young Levite decked out in all these proprieties, pulling at the same time a long face, as if the spirit of Christianity was the very essence of sourness and gloom-don't the people laugh at him? But this dandyism is a trifle; there are far graver faults; on the one hand there is often a lack of earnestness on the part of the intelligent; on the other a want of intelligence on the part of the earnest. Some have given religion the appearance of a cold heartless worldliness; with others it

has degenerated into screeching buffoonery and spasmodic rant. Some of our places of worship, of all denominations, are nearly empty Can any man of common sense wonder at this? The only matter of surprise is that anybody at all should be stupid enough to submit to such a dull and wearisome ordeal as awaits him there. The people show their good sense and their religiousness rather by forsaking than by frequenting such temples of inanity, such ministries of insufferable dulness. "Timber to timber," said the conscientious Presbyterian minister, when, at an ordination, his sense of duty preventing him from laying his hand upon the candidate's head, he laid his walking-stick thereon, quietly remarking-"Timber to timber."

There are unmanly Christians; there are unmanly ministers; and it must be further confessed that there is much unmanly religious literature. A cheap press has its advantages: it has its disadvantages also. It affords facilities of which those who are least competent to afford sound and sensible religious instruction are sure to avail themselves. Many of our religious books are mere trash, which never can emit one ray or spark of light, unless committed to the flames. Some of our religious periodicals are simply the Mrs. Grundys of the religious world; and the Mrs. Grundy of the religious world is, if possible, a more disagreeable person than her kinswoman of the fashionable world. She is not by any means so good-tempered or so charitable. I have seen and read not a few tracts which I should be extremely loth to place in the hands of an intelligent but somewhat sceptical mechanic. I should not respect the man's good sense if such arguments as those tracts contain convinced him of the truth of Christianity. I should only be too thankful if they did not confirm his impression that religion is weakness and superstition. The very names of some religious publications are almost ridi