that by our circumstances we are glorifying God and may help our brethren. A man to-day becomes a wonderfully happy man when his happiness comes pouring from the skies like a great shower, and rising from the ground like a great fountain. When a man stands in the simple consciousness of happiness and says, "How happy I am!" then his happiness is in danger of corruption. If it remains simply conscious happiness it turns to corruption. But if he immediately says, "Here is God glorifying Himself in the world by another happy life, and my happiness may fall upon my brethren with some mitigation of their lives," then his happiness is kept pure.

Oh, my dear friends! It may well be some of you here to-night, young or old, have to-day realised some happiness. Let it summon you to think of the hand from which it comes, as the flower might be supposed to drink in the sunshine and think more of the glory of the sun than of the beauty and brightness itself has received.

There is in this Epistle one strain of anxiety, which shows how anxiety may exist in the happiest lot. In the beginning of the second chapter he writes: "If, therefore, there be any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies, fulfil ye my joy, that ye be like minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind let each

esteem the other better than themselves."

He feared some sort of dissension and difficulty. The church was full of vitality-the best condition a church. could have. But he feared their very richness of spiritual life might bring them to criticisms of one another, and narrowness, in which some individual should think his type of piety ought to be the type of all. How natural it is! We picture to ourselves a church overrunning with life, full of zeal and work, and looking forward to richer enjoyments of the Master's love. Just in proportion to zeal is likely to come division and narrowness. Every soul in such a church is likely to consider its way the better way, if not the only way. Such a spirit is likely to grow in a live church, and less likely to grow in a partly dead church. Many of the largest spiritual conditions of the Church have had seeds and roots of bitterness and sectarianism and dictation, by which they have lost that great peculiar richness of the Christian Church by which every soul develops in a different way. It was a deep, a sad, and a natural anxiety of St. Paul's.

Be sure to live so deeply in such consciousness of the spring and source of all spiritual life that no difference in the development of the life shall keep you from recognising it in another. And this can only be done by feeling the roots of the diversified life of the Church to be in Him who is the Head of the Church.

In the first chapter is another characteristic

passage. He is speaking of the way in which every one of them is to be humble in criticism of his brethren. "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God." The new version more correctly translates, "Being in the essential nature of God, thought it not a thing to be aspired after to be equal with God". In His incarnation He abandoned equality with God. He did not go up and sit by the side of God. He took upon himself the nature and reputation and came in the likeness of man. He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death.

The point is this: The way in which St. Paul, when he is teaching the Philippians-who were, after all, commonplace people, such as he might have found anywhere in Macedonia, or in any village in the world—the duties and simple details of daily life, sets before them the highest of all patterns. He does not say, "This man, or that man, is to be your example". He wants a star to set before them, by whose shining they are to guide their lives, towards whose shining they are to direct their steps. He does not lift up a light for them, he brings down the light for them out of the very skies. There is nothing in the heavens, or in Deity itself, too good to become the pattern of the humblest soul in Philippi taught by St. Paul.

In these verses we have one of the most remarkable and beautiful descriptions of the Incarnation.

It is rich in theology. It is rich because it is not a great, formal statement, as if he took his seat in a lecture-room and there expounded the doctrine -where he would be sure to get it wrong. It is the richest and deepest description of the nature of Jesus Christ which we have, to which the wellinstructed student of the New Testament would turn first of all, in which the mystery of the Incarnation is most unfolded, as if to set before the eyes and hearts of simple men and women the nature of Christ, that He might be the pattern of their lives.

In St. Paul, the theologian is never separate and distinct. He is never the didactic, autocratic teacher. He is always the sympathising brother.

THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS.

"Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timotheus our brother, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colosse.-COL. i. 1, 2.

THE Epistle to the Colossians differs strikingly from that to the Philippians. Much of the interest of the Epistle to the Philippians depends on the Apostle's relations to that Church, which he loved with especial fondness. But St. Paul never visited Colosse, and never saw the faces of the Christians there. Hence these two Epistles show us the difference between what one writes to dear and trusted friends, and what the same man writes to people whom he has never seen, though he has certain interests in common with them. The Colossians could remember no days in which they sat under St. Paul's instructions. The tie between the writer and the readers of this Epistle was simply that the great principles of the Gospel which the Apostle was preaching had taken root in Colosse.

During St. Paul's imprisonment at Rome there had come to him one who had visited Colosse, and who brought an account of special corruptions that had crept into the Christianity of the Colossian