use of this renovated chapter-house, religion in the parish will become more real and practical, God's worship more delightful, and His Word more sweet and precious.

III

Further, along with these restorations has come, in a great and most welcome measure, the drawing together of hearts long sundered. At Iona, in particular, the barriers raised by old ecclesiastical divisions seem to melt altogether. None of our own churchmen has been more eager in the work of restoring the cathedral there than the venerable Principal Whyte, of the New College, Edinburgh; Principal MacAlister, of Glasgow; and Principal Smith, of Aberdeen. Not one of the three whom I have named is a member of the Church of Scotland; but all are delighted to realise that they are among the heirs of S. Columba. It is much the same everywhere. These restorations are proving of power to bind us to each other, and to promote a godly and a good reunion. Thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach.

IV

What, you ask, are the present prospects of Reunion -or of that instalment of reunion at which, in the meantime,' our Church is aiming? I have the honour to be a member of the Conference Committee now sitting to discuss the question between the United Free Church of Scotland and ourselves. We meet in private, and confer in confidence. But I may say generally that, if there are difficulties-one difficulty, which was hardly anticipated, proving, one fears, very serious; yet others, which were foreseen, seem almost to vanish in the light of the better understanding we have reached of each other's views. I do not think that any of us believes that the end would be helped if it were hurried. Better a long courtship and a thorough understanding than

a hasty and ill-assorted marriage. Two cannot walk together unless they are agreed. We must see that we fully understand each other and are agreed on vital questionsthat we see eye to eye in regard, for example, to the nature of the Church of God and her mission to mankind in regard to the one body and the one Spirit, the one Lord, the one faith, and the one baptism.

V

But union, in the long run-I mean the visible union of all Christ's believing people, in order that through their consentient testimony and by the spectacle of their mutual love the world may believe in Jesus as the Son of God-must come, for it is Jesus' prayer and it is Jesus' promise. It must be a visible union; for it is to convince the world. It must be a union in the common, gladsome, and unequivocal confession of our Lord's true Godhead and no less real Manhood, united in one Person for ever; for we cannot give different accounts of Him. The Faith is one and the same throughout the world, and our testimony to it must be consentient. Such reunion is our duty; for, as being all baptised in the one Spirit into one body-the Church, which is Christ's body-we are one in Him already, and ought to show by our mutual love that we realise our unity.

VI

How? Just

This union will be helped on by us. in proportion as we are faithful and obedient to Him, our Divine and only Lord. Such a Reunion is worth waiting for, praying for, working for. And God will give us it with a width and blessing beyond our most sanguine expectation. But it will come through us, only on one condition-that we look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others: that

we care supremely not for our own small concerns, but for Christ's; if we take away from the midst of us (as Isaiah bids) the yoke of all kinds of oppression, the putting forth of the finger, in unkind railing, and the speaking vanity in unchristian boasts: if we learn to walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us; and in the believing use of His holy ordinances, If thou call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord honourable. The nearer we draw to the Throne of Grace, the nearer we shall come to each other, the more holy and delightful will be our fellowship in Christ.

KINDNESS TO THE DEAD1

Blessed be he of the Lord, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead.-RUTH ii. 20.

KINDNESS to the dead!—It is a part of piety, which (beginning with that holy reverence for God which is the first duty of the creature) sends out its gracious streams to purify and hallow all the relations of human life-towards parents, towards brother and sister, towards wife and children; to friends and benefactors; to one's father's friends; to one's King and country; to the aged, to the poor, to the widow and the orphan, to all in trouble or distress; and, with peculiar solemnity, towards the dead. For they too have claims upon us we owe them gratitude; since no generation passes without adding something to the great legacy bequeathed to us and we owe them pity-Have pity upon me: have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me ! 3

I

It is a virtue recognised alike by Natural and by Revealed Religion. Dim and confused as were the heathen's notions of a life beyond the grave, they yet felt the sacredness of death, and the obligation which it brought to pay respect not merely to the memory of the departed but to the dead themselves. The classics of Greece and Rome teem with allusions to it. It is for this that Antigone, the noblest heroine of Grecian

1 Preached in the Parish Church of Ladykirk, Berwickshire, in commemoration of its founder, King James IV, on Tuesday, September 9, 1913. 3 Job xix. 21.

2 Prov. xxvii. 6.

tragedy, is called to suffer; and nowhere in Virgil's epic does Aeneas' piety' find more characteristic expression than in his reverent compliance with the call of the dead but unquiet warriors to fulfil for them the funeral rites which had been too long omitted. All over the world, wherever man has trod, two classes of monuments remain to bespeak two instincts whereby he was pre-eminently moved to elaborate exertion-his temples and his tombs-his instinct for worship, his instinct towards his dead. Of the two, the tombs are naturally more numerous; and they are hardly less impressive. The Pyramids of Egypt are greater than her temples the tumuli and cairns of our own barbarian progenitors vie with the stone circles of their worship.

Neither does Revelation destroy-(rather it supports while it enlightens and sanctifies)—this deep-rooted and unselfish feeling. The first Book in the Bible devotes a long chapter to the Burial of Sarah. The wife of the Father of the Faithful, the chosen ancestress of the promised Seed, as in life she had a higher calling than the surrounding Hittites, so in death she may not be laid to rest in the choicest of their sepulchres. A difference still subsists between her and them which must be expressed by a burying-place exclusively reserved for her and for her line.

Jacob, again, the last of the three great patriarchs, expiring in Egypt, that land of splendid sepulchres, charges his sons to bury him with his fathers in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought for a possession of a burying-place; where (he says) they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife, where they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife, where also I buried Leah.2 The sacred narrative proceeds to tell with what reverence and pomp this injunction was obeyed; and Genesis closes with the oath which Joseph takes from his brethren, saying God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence. The writer to the Hebrews sees in 2 Genesis xlix. 29-31. 3 Genesis 1. 25.

1 Genesis xxiii. 6.