undistinguished ideas and emotions, before the light had come in and order succeeded to chaos. The next morning he was entirely different. No one could be more genial, less preoccupied, more delightful towards every person he met. The speech was not yet delivered; but the speaker had worked his way into it, and was now ready. In a great preacher's life we must make allowance for all this. When the phys ical exhaustion consequent upon the excitement of Sunday is over, there comes over him an indefinite feeling of awe and expectation in regard to the following Sunday. There is no distinct idea of what the subject is to be. A vague, indeterminate impression throws its shadow over him. As the week advances, the shadow deepens. He is compassed about by a sense of the infinite. He seems to those around him dull and sluggish, or preoccupied, living in other worlds, sensitive, impatient of interference or interruption. At length a subject begins to evolve itself, but as yet "without form, and void." It seems as if an inspiration were borne in upon him, or a creative power working within, steeping his whole nature in its spirit; and when distinct ideas come in orderly succession and clothe themselves in definite forms of speech, he stands as in the presence of God, and feels himself endowed with an authority from Him whose inspiration has given him understanding. A teacher or lecturer is one thing; a preacher of righteousness, endowed as a minister of Christ, with the gift of utterance, speaking as an ambassador from God to man, belongs to a different sphere. "Necessity is upon him." He cannot escape. "Woe is unto him if he preach not the gospel." He stands before his people with a divine authority to deliver his message. bears his great commission" in his heart. It modulates his voice and gives its expression to his features. The highest eloquence that the world has known has been of this char

acter.

"He

But he who preaches thus must necessarily be separated from the world, even when he seems to connect himself most closely with it. In preparing a sermon on the Voyage of Life, he may visit a packet ship, look into its separate parts,

inquire into the details of its management, and make himself familiar with it. But all the while, the higher thought which takes these things up as outward types or emblems of what he would say absorbs his inmost mind, and makes him a stranger there. He may frequent a counting-room, master its methods of doing business, use them for his own personal advantage, but he is not at home there. He learns many things which help him better to understand the men to whom he is preaching, their temptations and trials and opportunities and virtues. But his "conversation" is not there. If it were, he could no longer fill the place he does as a preacher of the Gospel of Christ. Among these things he has not where to lay his head. He is a stranger, out of his element, but in his study dictating his holiest and highest thoughts, and in the church, when he enters into its services, he is entirely at home. The whole man in the full intensity of his being is there,- a quickening influence to a thousand souls who go away with a new sense of what is divine. A surer sense of right, stronger convictions of duty, a sweeter consciousness of God's love, a more tender and self-forgetting regard for others, go with them and diffuse a holier, happier atmosphere through their homes. And all through the community, a better spirit is kept alive because of the tone which has been infused into the devotions and instructions of the sanctuary. The air men breathe is fanned and purified as it were by the motion of unseen wings. Earth is brought nearer to heaven. Faith binds them to what is unseen as the only possession worth living for. And charity, with her beautiful features all aglow, shows them how lovely and how divine a thing it is to be permitted to do something for the good of those around us.

Twenty-three sermons out of the two thousand, more or less, which Dr. Putnam preached, are contained in this volume,― a single sheaf gathered from the great harvestfield in which a gifted and laborious life was spent. A sheaf of seed wheat we are sure it has been to many a waiting heart, and, unlike our earthly seed, it may be sowed again and again with constantly renewed and increasing abun

dance. It is prepared as a memorial volume, precious to those who knew its author, and precious also it will be to many who never looked on his face or heard his impressive

utterance.

This volume very appropriately contains the first and the last words which Dr. Putnam spoke to his people. There is the same decisive personality running through them both. In his first sermon we find the terse, incisive mode of expression, the manly independence, and the assumption of authority which belongs to a superior mind conscious of its own powers. But there is a certain meagreness and dryness of style, which his fuller experiences and grander developments of sentiment enabled him to fill out and enrich in his later discourses. We cannot better close this article or give a better sample of the minister and his preaching than by quoting a few of the last words of encouragement and of faith with which he welcomed his young colleague to his pulpit :

You will find blessed furtherances and sweet encouragements at every step you take.... Any thought or word or tone of yours that shall pierce through the crust of selfishness and worldliness, ... and shall awaken them to generous aspirings and intents, and a sense of the sacredness of duty, and the wealthiness of love, and the sweetness of charity, and the beauty of holiness,—they will welcome it as the Arctic voyager welcomes the returning sun, as the fields of August welcome the reviving dews. And whenever, on the strong pinions of vital, fervent prayer, such as goes down to the very issues of all lives, you shall be able to lift them above themselves and away from their idols, lift yourself and them up into the realm of the eternal verities, up to the gates of heaven, up to the mercy-seat of God, into the bosom of the Heavenly Father, they will feel it,―aye, the hardest and the coldest of them will feel it,— as a supreme benefaction which they will gratefully remember.... Now, if ever, the great aspirations from which all good things in man do proceed must be kindling, swelling, mounting within you; and those high resolves which determine life and character to noble ends are taking fixed shape and hardening into adamant. Now there comes to you, breathed into your inner ear, the Saviour's tender and pleading question to another, with its attendant commandment: "Simon Peter, lovest thou me?" And to your inner and uplifted eye there appears, as it were, the prophet's roll, unfolding out of heaven, and written over, within and without, with soft appeals and solemn injunctions to a consecrated life and a faithful ministry.

J. H. MORISON.

THE GOD OF THE LIVING.

The problem of God is the problem of Life. We solve the one as we solve the other. We know something of life from the beginning, and little as we understand its ultimate mystery, there is nothing so certain to us as its reality. It is the ever-present, the ever-near. It is the ground and condition of all knowledge. It is only as we live that we have consciousness; and according to the intensity of our living is the intensity of our conviction of reality. Life is the one thing we do know, and nothing else.

So far, then, is God from being the Unknown that there can be nothing so well known as he. He is the ever-present and the ever-near. Every new revelation of life is a revelation of God.

So, although we may never expect to pluck the heart of this mystery, we learn the direction of the search. We must look for God among the living and not among the dead.

In the first place, we must not expect to find him among dead negatives and abstractions. Infinite and absolute! These are the terms in which philosophy declares it necessary to think of God, and then, logically enough, deduces the conclusion that he must forever be the Unknown. But what have such terms to do with Him who is life? They are utterly inapplicable; as much so as if you should speak of the weight of a thought or the color of an emotion. Infinite that is to say, without boundaries - may be applied to space, as unlimited in our conception; but space is not alive, but dead. Life cannot be defined by saying that it is undefined or unlimited. Life is activity, motion, an on-flowing. God is where life is; and if there be any region of space where life is not, there God is not. If you call this limiting God, so be it. His greatness is not in dead extension, but in living intention; not in quantity, but in quality. All we know of life is expressed in the limitation of form or

manifestation. Separate from the means or channel of its expression, we have no evidence of its existence. We are not thinking of God, then, at all, when we are thinking of the vast, the immeasurable, the abstract substratum or ground of existence. These are realms in which speculation loses itself, wandering through an abyss in which it meets no life. Only when we come across some life have we come across God.

And as he is not found in dead negatives of space, neither is he found in negatives of time. Why trouble ourselves by attempting to conceive of the uncreated and unbeginning nature of the divine existence? The child asks, "Who made God?" But this would be just as much a mystery to God as to the child, if he should trouble himself to think about it. If God should inquire into his own. origin, he would not find himself there. He finds himself only by living,- by spending and being spent. "For he that loseth his life shall find it," said One who knew divine things best. Life, "spontaneous, original, native" life, never conceives of the time when it was not, or the time when it shall not be. It feels itself to be in the present, with a positive, abounding impulse and force,-I am. Yet the impulse is from the past, and the force toward the future, "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."

We are to seek for God, therefore, not among dead intellectual abstractions, but in every form of life, from the lowest to the highest; and in the highest we shall know him most and best.

We have become accustomed of late to look with intense interest upon the problem of the beginning of organic life. It seems to be thought by many that, should it possibly be discovered that life passes over, by natural process, from the inorganic to the organic world, the last stronghold of religious faith would be abandoned, and matter have the field to itself. But, on the contrary, if there were no life in the inorganic world, there were no God there. The farther backward