NATIONAL

MORALITY. 87

For instance, the majority, they say, has now
come down to agree to secret voting. It is a|
coming down. It may be necessary, b melan- |
choly necessity, just as crutches may bé needful,
though it is sad to see the number of the lame
increase. It is sad, though it be an admission of a
truth, to hear numbers proclaim themselves unable
to discharge their duties without the protection of
secrecy.

Again, as an example of what I mean, we
annually hear of some legislative attempt to pro-
mote a better observance of the Lord’s Day, and
we are told that large numbers of shopkeepers are
anxious to have some legal help in securing rest
on Sundays. ‘This means that they are anxious to
have human laws called in to prop up those which
they profess to respect as divine. Of course they
are at liberty to put up their shutters on Sunday,
but they don’t like, can’t bear, to do it, unless their
neighbours shut up too. They want to have the
privileges of the day of rest secured to them.
Natural enough, perhaps, but an indication of what
sort of nature? Here is another sign of that
feebleness of national morality which is inextricably
mixed up with the tolerance of wholesale deceit,
the effect of which is to weaken the power of
conscience, a deceit which, under one form or
another, has become customary in that which we
are proud of, our character as a great commercial
nation; a system of deceit which presses itself
upon us even from every hoarding, where every
thing claims to be the best or cheapest or largest
or most wonderful in the world.

The notoriety of all this does not really lessen
its mischievous effects, since, as Christians, it is
our business to compare ourselves, not with others,
but with the divine rule of right and wrong. If
a nation were all leprous, lepers might be com-
paratively contented, but they would be none the
less diseased. It is national acquiescence in wide-
spread duplicity which should distress us. To
hear, “Oh! that is nothing, every body does it,” is
one of the saddest hearings, for it indicates a
morality that accommodates itself to the disease
of a people, and has small promise of amendment. |
When all have settled down a little lower, this |
standard will be equally good, equally bad. To}
fight against it—and there are some who do—re-
quires a courage that dares the charge of being
singular, officions, meddlesome, or eccentric ; about
the most galling charges that can be made against
a man who, though he protests against the present
majority, is conscious of being—so far from eccen-
tric—in vital communion with God’s great laws of |
truth, order, and righteousness. Still, herein is a
chief exercise or use of the Spirit of Christ, who
was content to be alone so that the Father was

social, commercial, and, if you will, religious deceit
—for the religious world has not escaped it—that
the Christian must expect to find the severest trials
of his life, and the shrewdest test of his disciple-
ship. The pressure for him to give in, to connive,
to hold his peace, is not only importunate, but
presents itself even in the minutest concerns and
circumstances of his daily life. It is to the spirit
and help of Christ that he must look, if he is thus,
in the truest sense, to fight the good fight of faith
and lay hold of eternal life.

There is one other national fault which I must
notice before I conclude this paper. Lhardly know
how to define it, as it appears in many forms of
sensationalism and coarseness of taste. Perhaps I
may come nearer to the evil principle of what I
mean when I call it irreverence. I do not refer to
carelessness of demeanour in church, or in con-
nexion with what are called sacred matters alone ;
but rather to the want of perception of what is
sacred. There is indeed I believe a general, perhaps
growing conventional respect for the professional
externals of religion. For instance, a Clergyman or
Priest, or Scripture reader, or Bible missionary,
will generally meet with civility in the discharge
of his ministrations, even from those who decline
or dislike them. But when we see the grin of
enjoyment in the faces of a crowd at, say one of
the saddest of all spectacles, a drunken woman in
the street, or when we know that gratification is
afforded by the public gymnastic performances,
the deliberately shameless antics, to multitudes of
people of one who is perhaps, as has been the
case, a mother, we have a revelation of irrever-
ence, a blindness to that which is sacred in human
life, deplorable beyond words. There are features
of so-called enjoyment—I don’t mean the down-
right shameless prosecution of debauchery by those
in the full flush of idle passions, but semi-sensual
or sensational indulgence, by people who pass cur-
rent as commonplace, respectable citizens—which
betray an appetite for that which is essentially pro-
fane, which have all the cowardice and meanness of
vulgar popularity about it, and which is one of the
most damning defects in national reverence, and
thus in national Christianity. There is one aspect
of faith judged by the words, “ To the unbelieving
nothing is pure,” and there is a greediness to seek
questionable sensationalism which detracts heavily
from our religious character.

The protest against, if not the abstinence from,
this sensuousness is the other danger and difficulty
of our days. Extreme professions of religion and
interest in religious matters do not protect us from
it. It is not without some form in which it invades
even the sanctuary. It can be indulged under a
variety of guises. It sorely presses the inclina-

with Him. It is in the protest against the taint of

tion of thousands who, in the main, are not insin-