years; that we grow up in this faith, live in it, and die in it; and at
the same time to contemplate side by side with it all the elements of the
common life, all the rules and customs of society, all the standards of
conduct which ordinary men take as their measure of daily duty and
purpose.

Thus, whilst on the one hand Christian influences, and all the changes in
the world's life which are due to them, fill us with wonder and
gratitude, the failures of Christianity are scarcely less impressive.

When we consider the ordinary run of men's lives, so different for the
most part in spirit, and in aim and guiding rules, from that type which
the New Testament sets before us, it would almost seem as if to the
majority their religion was not a ruling and dominating principle,
pervading this present life, but only an _ideal_, shedding around us a
glow of indefinite hopes and possibilities, an ideal hardly to be
realised, laid up somewhere in the heavens--[Greek text]. These
contrasts between the revelation of the Gospel and the standards of the
Christian world have always troubled the most earnest spirits in every
generation. Some of you remember, no doubt, how this contrast between
Christian profession and the life of selfish sin and waste flashed into
fierce poetry in one such spirit of the last generation, who grew up in
this school.

"Through the great, sinful streets of Naples, as I passed,
With fiercer heat than flamed above my head
My heart was hot within me, till at last
My brain was lightened when my tongue had said
Christ is not risen."