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Thus, if our prayer teaches striving for the will of God in action, it leads also to submission in suffering; and our faith is in one sense a lifelong stretching forward with earnest expectation to some glory to be revealed, yet in another sense a bowing down in meekness under the will which we desire done, not only aroxmd ns, and by us, but even in us. " Such a faith as this has much in common with the best wisdom of India. It owns with Capila, that the world which now is, represents but imperfectly the goodness we would gladly ascribe to the highest Iswara ; but then it refuses to conceive of these things as the end. For it has imlimited trust in the illimitable God ; and feeling that the past we see of His works is but a speck in the contemplation of eternity, it finds the highest reason in stretching itself forward beyond sight into that holier kingdom which is yet coming, and which must come more perfectly. It believes again with the Ved&ntists, that even now nothing truly exists but what has a root in the shaping thought of One Supreme Spirit ; but it refuses to think that the clash of evil men's evil wills, and the madness of wrong- doing, and all ignorance or passion, can have had a place in the eternal will of the most Bighteous, and contends rather that all such evils come of rebellion or misplacement of that which is for an hour, and which has no existence in eternity. For the kingdom of Gtxl must come. The thought of His will must be fulfilled in deed. Nor is such a faith altogether adverse to what the Saugata believes of a certain development of intelligence. * Sunt, quibut expedii cadere. — 8l Augmfine. 330 FAITH. ItEVELATION. For certainly God, who is a Spirit, works chiefly by spiritual means, and His divine processes must be imsearchable to sense, as the thoughts of a human thinker are to sight. Yet Beason which infers the thoughts of man, has a kindred sort of logic, when in its higher growth as a humble and a loving faith it traces from His inworking in the world and in good men the will of Grod. Such an unveiling as it thus obtains of the highest mind, is not altogether foreign to its happiest inferences else- where in the region of thought. Only the knowledge whicli comes in Divine revelation is something higher, and more deeply inwoven with our best self, and yet more than any human exertion could reach, and so more evidently a gift, or a grace. It is an opening of the eyes of the mind, though not one un- connected with purity of heart, or conscience, and life. But our faith chiefly differs from that of the Saugata, in that it would feel cheated of its higliest and dearest aim, or even of its own being, if it could lose sight of that eternal wielder of our des- tinies, by whom it has life and hope and thought, and by virtue of whose will only a better kingdom can come. Again, it differs much from parts of the Hindti speculations, in tlie strength of its conception both as to tlic existing conflict be- tween the Divine will and the human, and as to the harmony which is natural*, and which is to come between them. Hence this intense agony or struggle of prayer, of penitence, of action, which is eminently the distinctive life of Christianity, though it has analogies, and imperfect resemblances which may justify it, in the noblest spirits of all nations. " Give U8 this day our daily bread. If a man is so far the servant of God, as to have prayed deeply the two former petitions, he will include in this one the bread of the soul. He will pray for holy thoughts, for humane affections, for the sympathies of home and country, for wholesome food to his * By n^Uural is meant not any sinking of a higher being, as of a reasonable agent, under the play of animal or physical impulses, but that which God intended to be or grow after its kind in each part of his creation, whether inert or animal in the lower, or thoughtftil and affectionate in the higher. NEEDS OF BODY AND SOUL. 331 intellect, and for happj memories to dwell upon. Also in simpler meaning he will own that good Providence which fills all things living with plenteousness. He will learn from the phrase daily bread how few are the wants which God has made natural to us. Nor will he forget that in asking on account of these he binds himself to such labour as may innocently satisfy them. Thus by bidding us pray for simple things, the AUwise teaches us to restrain that greediness which covets many, and in one prayer suggests temperance, labour, and may I not add charity? For as our prayer is all along in the name of many children, we could not innocently ask the Father to help others, if we were not willing to aid in such a design. The simplicity of human life, its dependence on the Divine bounty, the beauty of thankfulness, and the duty of sober honesty for ourselves, and of beneficence to others, should come before our minds, that we may present them to Heaven in these few words. " And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. If in one clause the Christian prayer has looked around to our bodily wants, it soon returns to the deeper things of the soul. It teaches us to feel that the greatest hinderance to God's more perfect dominion, and to the coming forth of His design in beauty, is not so much the constitution of the world, as the working of an evil spirit in ourselves. It takes hold of that sense of having fallen from our own better mind, which deepens in men in proportion as they conceive worthily of what goodness is. Thus here too our prayer implies faith in the real diflerence between right and wrong, and faith in the righteous attributes of the Almighty, as one who has established an everlasting law. If men not hardened are ashamed of doing wrong, and feel self-reproach at loss of purity, having an un- easy witness in conscience to what no human eye has seen, these things are established by Him who writes His law in our hearts. If the sins against which conscience protests, disturb also the moral order of the world, they are rebel- lion against its Governor. If there is a perpetual contrast of 332 FORGIVENESS OF SINS. opposites, in which imperfect good so ranges itself against the higher good as to become evil, we cannot take part with the enemj, and remain in heart at peace with God. How far have you among Hindiis a true sense of the evil of all sin, as both a breaking of the world's law, and the bringing of discord into your soul, and the building up a wall of uneasy mistrust between your conscience and that Holy Spirit which the pure in heart behold? I should have judged, from the extreme aus- terities and penance practised both now and of old among your countrymen, that God had not spared you this sickness of the mind, which He intends as a way of return to deeper health. Certainly such a sickness is better than death of the soul to any difference between good and evil. Some, however, have said, that all your penances are done rather in the way of self-right- eousness than of contrition ; for that you hope to gain reward by them, rather than testify your sorrow. If this should be so, your religion must have been worked into a worse formalism than I am willing to believe. But at least in Christianity there is revealed both what God blames and what He approves ; or, as St Paul says*, both His wrath and His righteousness. Whatever men may call righteous, this blessed sentence is not pronounced by Him that searcheth our hearts, either upon reckless sin, or upon formal peHance, or upon any external rite, but upon the entire turning of the heart to Himself, and to His holy will. This looking up out of the depth to God is the be- ginning of being called righteous by Him. Then, as a sense of our own unworthiness grows with our sense of His holiness, and a sense of our weakness with that of His majesty, so we learn that our acquittal before God must ever begin with forgiveness, though by the Divine help it may go on to approval. Natural then to all men in whom conscience is not quenched, but espe- cially necessary to the Christian, is this cry. Forgive us our * See Romans L i8; iii. 3i, 23; which are explained by St Luke, xy\. 15. Whoever finds the sayings of the Epistles hard, should compare them with the plainer ones of the Gospels. FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 333 trespasses. We say this as little children at our mother's knee, and we find no reason to cease saying it in our old age.