and hourly supplies from the minds of our fellowmen, alike in the shape of direct communications from those about us, and indirectly from those who are at a distance from us.

3. Even if we regard man simply with reference to his present state of existence, the first place in his constitution will be undoubtedly assigned to that department of it which, using the word in its widest acceptation is called moral a. But if we further regard him with reference to the state of existence which awaits him hereafter, this moral department of his nature presents itself to us as the basis on which this future life is to be reared, and the germ out of which it is to be evolved. And in whichever of these two aspects we regard him, we shall recognise exactly the same need of the presence and co-operation of those kindred moral powers which alone can awaken his dormant energies, and sustain and guide them when awakened.

And the fact of the employment of human agency in so high a service may be fairly re

I have here made the term "moral" embrace those highest faculties and instincts of our nature which, in chap. ii. of my treatise on "Historical Religion," I have called "spiritual."

garded as suggestive of the employment of the same agency on service of, if possible, a still higher character; at all events, must completely remove all ground for objection to such an employment.

4. So far we have considered the ministrations rendered by one human being to another, chiefly as they contribute to the subsistence and development of each of us in turn regarded simply as individuals. And were the tendency of our nature like that of some of the lower animals, towards a solitary life, we should still stand in need of these ministrations so far as they helped to promote the first growth and exercise of the faculties which were to enable us to set up an independent existence, each one for himself in after years.

But it needs no argument to prove that the whole bent and bias of our nature is towards a social and not a solitary state of existence. The family into which we are born, and in the midst of which we are reared, points unmistakeably forwards to the various gradations of social life, which finally terminate in the state. And many of our strongest and noblest feelings and faculties imperatively demand the social

state as the only one in which they can find the scope and breadth necessary for their exercise, and indeed for their very existence. And as we take into account this social tendency of our nature, we recognise a thousand additional ways in which the ministration of man to his fellow man is called into action. Nor is it by those alone who form part of the same generation with ourselves, that these ministrations are rendered. It is, indeed, difficult to say whether we owe most to those with whom we are most nearly and closely connected, or to those who have lived and left this life before our entrance into it, and who have bequeathed to us the rich inheritance of their examples and achievements. It would be no overcharged picture, but a simple delineation of fact, to describe human society as embracing not only those who at any given moment are found occupying the surface of the globe, but all those also who in their turn have ever helped to occupy it, and have thus, each in their manner and degree, contributed to swell the collective sum of ministrations rendered by one human being to another.

CHAPTER II.

HUMAN MINISTRATIONS INTRODUCTORY TO

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.

1. THE Christian religion is based on the assumption that our only access to God, our only entrance upon the highest phase of which our life is capable, lies through the person of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And this means of approach to God through Jesus Christ, this life in Him, is described in Scripture as consisting in His human, still more emphatically than in His divine nature. It is through His human nature that we are enabled to comprehend and lay hold of His divine nature.

a

2. It is not given to us to discover in this life the many ways in which the great mediatorial work of Jesus Christ is employed for the benefit of the whole human race, and it may be for the benefit also of other departments of God's creation. And it would be presumptuous in us to speculate upon the future condition of those, and they constitute by far the largest portion of

a 1 Tim. ii. 5.

mankind, who have lived and died in entire ignorance of the event, which of all that ever happened in this world's history most nearly concerns them. Still it is evident that in order to our becoming Christians in the ordinary and proper sense of the term, it is necessary not only that Jesus Christ should have died and risen again for us, but that we also on our part should have consciously apprehended these great events in their main significance, and that we should further have entered into a state of conscious relation to Him in whom these events were realized. And the special faculty of our nature by which we are enabled to enter upon the necessary relation to Jesus Christ, and to appropriate His work to ourselves, is Faith. It is unnecessary to attempt the definition of this, the highest and perhaps the most highly complicated of all our faculties, or to attempt to measure the vast importance which Scripture and our own experience concur in assigning to it. We have here only to consider the particular means by which this faculty is enabled to enter upon the sphere allotted to it, and to perform the work there set before it. Now, however spiritual faith is in its own essence, it is clearly requisite that