count for the different views we take. We cannot help it; but we can help being severe in judgment on each other, and forgetting to apply to our brother the same width of standard, which, JESUS Vouchsafe! may be applied to ourselves.

LXXVIII.

THE PROPHET AND THE PRIEST.

ELASTICITY IN THE CHURCH.

PSALM CXLVII. 2.

"THE LORD DOTH BUILD UP JERUSALEM: HE GATHERETH TOGETHER THE OUTCASTS OF ISRAEL."

1. THE distinction between the Prophet and the Priest is too remarkable to pass over. Their separate vocations and the manifest need of each, suggest so many thoughts in connection with the wants and crying deficiencies of the present day, that it is difficult while dwelling on the characters of the Old Testament to avoid touching on this subject.

The arrangements of GOD's Church are ever made suitable to the wants of man, and like the folds of a garment draping a figure, they will be sure indications in each swell and fall,

of the characteristics of the form for which they are made. But I may reverse this sentiment and say, if the plans and opportunities offered by the Church do not thus exactly represent the varieties of the forms of human nature, in the proportion in which they are deficient they are deficient in truth and reality; and that the Church herself, or the branch of it, obnoxious to such charge, is failing in her great commission. In man, whether considered individually or collectively, there are two tendencies, that towards order and settled habit, and that which restless and jealous of the restraint of fixed forms, is ever seeking for new energies, impulses and opportunities of original expression. The one his normal, the other his abnormal condition. The history of mankind, as well as of the Church, shows this twofold tendency.

In the case of individuals we see this clearly enough. A man falls into the routine of religious life and acts. He has learnt to pray night and morning in childhood, and he continues it to manhood. He has kept Sunday holy, attended Divine service, received Holy Communion for years, and he would not, on any account, drop the custom. He has abjured

swearing and blasphemy, shunned certain vices and pursued certain virtues. He is kind, benevolent, and self-sacrificing, and so entirely is his life formed on these habits that he could not imagine yielding them, except with existence. This is his normal condition. He may be earnest in the pursuit of all these, or he may not be, as the case may be. A fuller or fainter wind may blow the sail of his vessel. He may be performing these acts by the full energy of the HOLY SPIRIT, or he may simply be going in a groove without life, energy, reality, or spirituality of mind. That is not the question. This is his normal condition.

He discovers at length that a slumber is creeping over his eyes and his spiritual sense. He feels he needs some new energy, some new life, to quicken the form which is becoming corpse-like; he needs some power to clothe his dry bones with flesh. The sail lags too windless at the mast. He starts; he discovers, while he lay secure in his vessel, it has drifted into shallows. He will soon be aground. He looks out eagerly for a new gale; be it the storm or the sudden wind of mid-day, to give his soul a new impetus.

This need, this desire, does not militate

against the recognized value of the ordinary means. But it is based upon those rules and laws of our nature which so strongly find their moral history illustrated in Scripture and the Church. GOD from the beginning has arranged the normal system under which men shall ordinarily fall; but while He has done this, He has never forgotten to provide for the case of the "outcast." The folds of the tabernacle have been extended so as to take in His own peculiar people; but there has been at the same time elasticity enough to enclose the sheep "not of the fold;" and power to extend the stakes, so as to encompass those who outlie the ordinary arrangement. "He has " ever "built up Jerusalem and gathered together the outcasts of Israel."

2. Abraham came up a stranger from a strange land to that which was to be the home of himself and his posterity. The hills of Canaan and the waters of Jordan broke on the eye of the father of the faithful, as the outlines of the inheritance which was to be the home of his children from generation to generation. The altar of sacrifice and the mode of the offering became the objective system of that religion, of which the Nature of GOD as far as He