Is not the recovery of that joy something that the Christian Church and the Christians within the church are crying out for. It is so evidently one of the first-fruits of fellowship with Christ, and how really rare a gift it is! St. Francis had it because, like the birds he loved, he leaned only upon God. Some men in war, having given themselves wholly to a cause that they believed to be of God, learned the quiet of having the world behind them. We who are burdened about so many things, so anxious to assume the right attitude, to maintain the conventional opinion, to insure against every conceivable misfortune of worldly estate, how can we know the joy of living free, the release of casting the burden upon the great Burden-bearer? The stoic taught the Roman to endure by denying the presence of pain. His strength was in his passive receptivity. But Christ Himself felt pain, dreaded pain, was distressed by pain in the house of His friends; and, moved thus by the sombre and unkind things in life, He yet had an undisturbed peace. If the church is to regain its hold upon men, it must be composed of joyous Christians. Only then will there be removed those misapprehensions which have made for such multitudes the thought of religion the thought of gloom. Only thus shall we be conquerors through Christ who loved us. 2. _The Faith Which He Possessed._ Although it is two years since its publication, Mr. Lytton Strachey's _Eminent Victorians_ still leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Mr. Strachey made it his business to destroy the halo around some well-known and long-venerated heads. He spoke what he believed to be the truth, not always in love, about Thomas Arnold and Florence Nightingale and General Gordon and others. He suggested that Gordon had been intemperate, and that some of his daring had been due to this fact. To read the insinuation was to remember the day, nearly forty years ago, when Gordon, at a few hours' notice, stepped out of London and took his road for Khartoum and death and an immortal name. The magic of the story is felt beyond the bounds of the British Empire. A real hero is the possession of all mankind, and the thought of this one solitary and God-possessed soldier setting out alone by sheer personality to quench the rebellion that had spread over half a continent will always make the blood of the lethargic and the stay-at-home run a little faster. But that temper, if we could only grasp it, is essentially the temper of religion, and it means the possession of peace. The materialism of our day has overshot all our conceptions of peace, and we identify peace with comfort and a substantial bank balance and a fortification against the vicissitudes of chance. No wonder that the venture and the happiness have gone out of faith, which is the trust in the centuries as against the years, in the unseen instead of in the seen. There is little to be gained by society congratulating itself in its victory over alcohol if all