paid. Take care you do not sell it "for a mess of pottage." This brings me to the second part of the text: "sell it not."

5. There is great danger lest we sell what has been gained by the sufferings of centuries, and cut ourselves off from the blessings which generations of our ancestors have striven to give us.

It may seem strange that there should be the least temptation to sell what has been thus purchased; but this becomes the less remarkable when we recollect how high a price and how luring a bait the devil and the world will offer for principles which they are so jealous of our holding. Too many yield to the luring offer without hesitation, and, in proportion as the prize is high, that offer will be attractive. Amongst other shrines at which we shall be tempted to sell the truth in this day, there are none more common than those that are raised by the principles of erastianism, commercialism, and scepticism; and as offering high and subtle dangers to us in life, I will offer some suggestions with regard to each of them.

The first of these principles which we have so much to dread, lest truth be sold at its shrine, is the commercial spirit of our day and land. It may seem that the young have but little

to do with this; they are in but small danger of bartering the truth they have received for the sake of the commercial grandeur of their country or the aggrandisement of their age. But in one sense, I speak of the future, in which so many of us must of necessity be cast in the midst of many and great dangers. It would therefore be at least as well that I should suggest them in outline; and indeed, I cannot but remember how many of these very temptations obtrude themselves in miniature into the precincts even of a school; and how the great and heaving waters which are in such tumultuous motion in the world ooze through the external defences which surround the seat of education, and the carelessness of youth. The mere fact of giving a greater prominence to one leading principle over and above another in itself tends to check the influence and by degrees tends to impair the secondary principle. If, for instance, we make all the arrangements of time and place, turn all the powers of our mind and ingenuity on the world, and bestow but a little or a mere fragment of that energy upon the acquisition or retention of truth, it is clear we are selling truth in the market of money-making. There are

cases in which the refusal to strengthen our hold on what we have got is equivalent to the positive and conscious sale of it. We can hardly pass from the north to the south of our land without being struck with the preponderance of the factory over the Church, and the foundry over the school, of the elaborate magnificence of town halls when compared with the fabrics raised to the glory of GoD. All this shows us as by letters of fire on the wall, that we are in danger of sacrificing the religious to the commercial principle.

But again, the enormous masses of the middle class of our population, and the rising consequence which they are gaining by their influence, alike over the higher as over the lower orders, creates a danger lest we yield to this overwhelming interest those simple first truths which are among the most precious heritages of the Church. The great body of the community are, from the mere circumstance of their occupation in the practical details of daily life, unable to examine or to lay hold of those deeper truths; consequently the appreciation of the great doctrines of the Church and of education amongst us is likely to be low and unworthy.

There are many ways in which we are tempted to sell the truth to what I have called the commercial spirit of our age and country. Amongst the most prominent will be the mode in which the arrangements of the kingdom of CHRIST are compelled to make way for the arrangements of this world. It might be the just and natural boast for countries in communion with the see of Rome that the Church amongst them does not suffer her arrangements and her laws to be suspended or affected by those of the world around her. The Catholic hours are kept; the nave is filled with worshippers throughout the day; the priests are ever ready to attend her call, and the sound of the chant or the whisper of the confessional are continually echoing throughout each hour of the day, witnessing to the independence of the Church of the world. We once gave up our daily Service and our weekly Communion, and they are but few comparatively who have resumed them. In many parishes there are churches whose doors are locked from Sunday night to Sunday morning again; and the religion of a week is crowded into two or three tedious hours of a dull Sunday. To what can we attribute this more easily and naturally than to

that feverish appetite for gain which drives so many among us to seize every hour of the weekday for the business of this world, and make so many who are like Martha, "cumbered about" the services of life, cast a contemptuous or reproachful look upon those who are "sitting at the feet" of JESUS. The evil of this absorption of mind and time by the spirit of earthly gain is manifold.

a. It is especially felt in two ways; not only by the little time that there is given to directly religious exercises, but also by the false position into which religious days are themselves thrust; so that Sunday being the single centre of external worship to the people, many fear, lest if they should assert for it a greater cheerfulness and relaxation of employment, and a less judaical asceticism in its observance, they should shake to the foundation the pillars of that religion which the nation has retained; the result of which must be that multitudes, seeing no necessary injunction laid upon them to observe the holy day in this fashion, will rush into great excesses of laxity; while others, crowding into the hours of the first day of the week a great mass of religious exercises, discourage others and sometimes themselves in