of death-come now, I say, how many of you would like your chances at the judgment bar? Brethrento put it more personally and more plainly too-my common sense assures me that at least some one among you would be surely damned. And, Brethren dear, do not think me hard, or harsh, or cruel, if, knowing that, I put to each of you a bitter question. Some of you would be surely damned: well then, I ask, which of you can say to me, "it would not be I !"

And now, my Brethren, I have shown you the first great figure that meets us in our sad pilgrimage beyond the grave. A figure like unto it, its younger brother, but much larger and much grander, will come on for description very soon. But for the present, I have done my part. Now do yours. Make use of what I have said this evening. And use it in this way: fill your hearts full of the thought with which I have started, that your souls are here but in temporary imprisonment; that a Judge sits waiting for them till their prison-time be over; that, that time over, the Warder Death will bring you up for trial; that, at that trial, you will get no mercy; that, if judgment goes against you, the strong hands of God will strike you into hell, and the gleaming eyes of God will hunt you with their hatred for evermore!

T

V.

ST. PATRICK'S DAY.*

"And again, the Lord said to Moses; I see that this people is stiff-necked. Let me alone, that my wrath may be kindled against them, and that I may destroy them, and I will make of thee a great nation. But Moses besought the Lord his God, saying: why, O Lord, is Thy indignation enkindled against Thy people whom Thou hast brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand. Remember Abraham and Isaac and Israel, Thy servants. And the Lord was appeased from doing the evil which He had spoken against His people."-EXODUS, xxxii. 9, 10, 11, 13, 14.

SIXTEEN hundred years ago, my Brethren, this Ireland of ours looked very different from what it looks to-day. Where our cities and towns are now, then were, for the most part, vast forests or far-extending

The account which is here given of the state of the Pagan Irish is the account which was popularly accepted at the time when the writer was learning, as a school-boy, his 'Rudiments' of Irish History. Until lately, it was no portion of his duties or desires to examine whether modern research required or did not require a change in his boyish beliefs. But since this sermon was preached, he has had occasion to study-and with the

uncultivated plains. There was no Sackville-street nor dream of it in those times. The wild beasts did not care for cities, and the wild people were of the same opinion as the wild beasts. In fact, the wild people were hardly distinguishable, that is, the lower class of them were hardly distinguishable, from the wild beasts. Nearly naked, constantly at strife, dwelling jealously in wood-brakes and forest-dells and mountain caves; when they met, peering at each other with side-long marauding eyes; almost the only point in which they differed from the wolves and foxes was this, that they were perpetually unhappy. Ireland then was in two respects, and almost in two only, what Ireland is to-day. And between these two respects a great modern authority, half in jest and half in earnest (as is his wont), has vouchsafed to show us a natural, if not necessary, connexion. Then, as now, the Irish people were discontented, and then, as now, Ireland was surrounded by a "melancholy ocean." It made no matter then, and I suppose it makes no matter now, that twothirds of the population never saw, and never see,

latest aids-the history of Ancient Ireland. And he is now bound to confess that the two charges, of human sacrifice and of lust-worship, which the sermon prefers against the ancient Irish, are charges in support of which no satisfactory evidence has been adduced. But the writer proposed, for various reasons, to print his sermons substantially as he preached them. And, therefore, he has made no change in this Sermon on St. Patrick's Day.

that same seriously affecting sight, and, therefore, could hardly then, and can hardly now, be much influenced by its moanings. It is a fact, at all events, and that only concerns us here, that then, as now, the hearts of the people were sick with sorrow.

And, my Brethren, in those far-off days there was, for their great unhappiness, good and sufficient cause. There is no peace for the wicked, saith the Lord. The wicked is as a raging sea, and cannot rest. And, of all the wicked people upon whom God's mercy allowed the sun of heaven to shine and the dews of heaven to fall, the Irish people of sixteen hundred years ago were incomparably the worst. We sicken when we read the doings of the poor black Negroes of Central Africatheir hideous cannibal feasts, their naked shamelessness as of veriest brutes-but the black Negroes of Central Africa are very salt of the earth, very lights of the world, compared with the white Negroes from whom we come. The ordinary sins of robbery and idolatry and lust and murder were nothing in their eyes, were mere children's innocence when compared with those giant Irish crimes of theirs that grinned up perpetually in the face of God. Take two. They had many gods, but one was first favourite. And it was-alas, alas for our boasted Irish purity-it was the deified vice of lust! The devil that makes men impure, the vice that makes men brutes, was the chosen god worshipped by our forefathers-perhaps upon the very ground where that

altar of Jesus Christ is erected now. They had many sacrifices, but one was highest and most revered of all. And it-alas, alas for our boasted Irish tenderness-it was, to pour out their children's blood in offering to their cruel deities-nay, betimes to bind their living children on great piles of dry timber, to fire the piles, till amid the smoke and flame the strongest of their poor sous, the loveliest of their poor daughters, screamed out their souls before the pitiless parents and the savage priests. The land was, one might say, the devil's own. Neither God nor Guardian Angel had an inch of it in possession. A great blackness, as of death and doom, overspread it all; the devils screamed and yelled in their very drunkenness of triumph, the softness of mercy was dying gradually from the eyes of God; the outlook of hope was dying gradually from theeyes of Mary; for, all these coasts were underneath God's shadow, with these fearful fires of human sacrifice glaring threateningly amid the gloom.

But, my Brethren, it is, I believe, an Irish saying, and it is, at all events, a partial truth, that the blackest hour of night is the hour before the dawn. There were good things in store for our Pagan fathers. Their dawn was coming. Though he knew it not, the devil was in danger here. No one, man or devil, could have guessed just then where the danger lay. A pirate captain came to the coast of Antrim, disembarked his passengers and prisoners had among the latter a bright-eyed French lad of