other methods for the restoration and elevation of mankind are compelled to recognise that there is an obstinate residuum that will not and cannot be reached by their efforts.  It used to be said that some old cannon-balls, that had been brought from some of the battlefields of the Peninsula, resisted all attempts to melt them down; so there are ‘cannon-balls,’ as it were, amongst the obstinate evil-doers, and the degraded and ‘dangerous’ classes, which mark the despair of our modern reformers and civilisers and elevators, for no fire in their furnaces can melt down their hardness.  No; but there is the furnace of the Lord in Jerusalem, and the fire of God in Zion, which can melt them down, and has done so a hundred and a thousand times, and is as able to do it again to-day as it ever was.  Despair of no human soul.  That boundless confidence in the power of the Gospel is the duty of the Christian Church.  ‘The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth!’ They laughed Him to scorn, knowing that she was dead.  But He put out His hand, and said unto her ‘Talitha cumi, I say unto thee, Arise!’ When we stand on one side of the bed with your social reformers on the other, and say ’The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth,’ they laugh us to scorn, and bid us try our Gospel upon these people in our slums, or on those heathens in the New Hebrides.  We have the right to answer, ’We have tried it, and man after man, and woman after woman have risen from the sick-bed, like Peter’s wife’s mother; and the fever has left them, and they have ministered unto Him.  There are no people in the world about whom Christians need despair, none that Christ’s Gospel cannot redeem.  Whatever my text means, it does not mean cowardly and unbelieving doubt as to the power of the Gospel on the most degraded and sinful.

II.  So, the text enjoins on the Christian Church separation from an idolatrous world.

‘Ephraim is joined to idols.’  Do you ‘let him alone.’  Now, there has been much harm done by misreading the force of the injunction of separation from the world.  There is a great deal of union and association with the most godless people in our circle, which is inevitable.  Family bonds, business connections, civic obligations—­all these require that the Church shall not withdraw from the world.  There is the wide common ground of Politics and Art and Literature, and a hundred other interests, on which it does Christian men no good, and the world much harm, if the former withdraw to themselves, and on the plea of superior sanctity, leave these great departments of interest and influence to be occupied only by non-Christians.