ety, that it sets before us social claims as standing
before all other claims; that, starting from the Divine Sacrifice as the
central fact of human life, it was intended to root out of our hearts the
noxious weed of selfishness by the power of the Divine love, and to build
up the organisation of men in their common relationships upon this new
basis.

It may sound somewhat strange to speak at this time of day of what
Christianity is intended to do, rather than what it has done already.

But it is even more strange to read the teaching of the Sermon on the
Mount, and all the other words of the Lord; all the lessons of His life
and His sacrifice; the history of the first generation of Christians; the
descent of the Spirit upon them; and the teaching of the apostolic
brotherhood--to remember that all this is our accepted faith; that it has
been the faith of one generation after another for eighteen hundred
years; that we grow up in this faith, live in it, and die in it; and at
the same time to contemplate side by side with it all the elements of the
common life, all the rules and customs of society, all the standards of
conduct which ordinary men take as their measure of daily duty and
purpose.

Thus, whilst on the one hand Christian influences, and all the changes in
the world's life which are due to them, fill us with wonder and
gratitude, the failures of Christianity are scarcely less impressive.

When we consider the ordinary run of men's lives, so different for the
most part in spirit, and in aim and guiding rules, from that type which
the New Testament sets before us, it would almost seem as if to the
majority their religion was not a ruling and dominating principle,
pervading this present life, but only an _ideal_, shedding around us a
glow of indefinite hopes and possibilities, an ideal hardly to be
realised, laid up somewhere in the heavens--[Greek text]. These
contrasts between the revelation of the Gospel and the standards of the
Christian world have always troubled the most earnest spirits in every
generation. Some of you remember, no doubt, how this contrast between
Christian profession and the life of selfish sin and waste flashed into
fierce poetry in one such spirit of the last generation, who grew up in
this school.

"Through the great, sinful streets of Naples, as I passed,
With fiercer heat than flamed above my head
My heart was hot within me, till at last
My brain was lightened when