all classes and conditions of that rich and living church; both sexes, all ages, and all descriptions of church members bore this fine apostolic name.  ’Salute Urbane, our helper in Christ . . .  Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ.’  And both Paul and John and all the apostles were forward to confess in their epistles how much they owed of their apostolic success, as well as of their personal comfort and joy, to the helpers, both men and women, their Lord had blessed them with.

Now, the most part of us here to-night have been at the Lord’s Table to-day.  We kept our feet firm on the steps as we skirted or crossed the slough that self-examination always fills and defiles for us before every new communion.  And before our Lord let us rise from His Table this morning.  He again said to us:  ’Ye call Me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am.  If I then have given you My hand, and have helped you, ye ought also to help one another.’  Who, then, any more will withhold such help as it is in his power to give to a sinking brother?  And you do not need to go far afield seeking the slough of desponding, despairing, drowning men.  This whole world is full of such sloughs.  There is scarce sound ground enough in this world on which to build a slough-watcher’s tower.  And after it is built, the very tower itself is soon stained and blinded with the scudding slime.  Where are your eyes, and full of what?  Do you not see sloughs full of sinking men at your very door; ay, and inside of your best built and best kept house?  Your very next neighbour; nay, your own flesh and blood, if they have nothing else of Greatheart’s most troublesome pilgrim about them, have at least this, that they carry about a slough with them in their own mind and in their own heart.  Have you only henceforth a heart and a hand to help, and see if hundreds of sinking hearts do not cry out your name, and hundreds of slimy hands grasp at your stretched-out arm.  Sloughs of all kinds of vice, open and secret; sloughs of poverty, sloughs of youthful ignorance, temptation, and transgression; sloughs of inward gloom, family disquiet and dispute; lonely grief; all manner of sloughs, deep and miry, where no man would suspect them.  And how good, how like Christ Himself, and how well-pleasing to Him to lay down steps for such sliding feet, and to lift out another and another human soul upon sound and solid ground.  ’Know ye what I have done to you?  For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.  If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.’

MR. WORLDLY-WISEMAN

   ’Wise in this world.’—­Paul.