and cannot think very clearly, that person must in the unreproachful sense be called vulgar; but such a person is not at all to be spoken of in scorn, because he or she has not yet had the opportunity of seeing the things that excite the best feelings and of being engaged in the works that suggest the best thoughts. The great iviliser is religion, and, of course, the greatest civiliser is the Christian religion, inasmuch as Christianity is God come down without degradation, God taking upon Himself the lowliest offices and performing them in the purest manner,-God amongst us with the utmost beauty of attractive cleanness, and yet stepping along upon the miry path and consorting with the wickedest people. It is God coming down and sharing our poverty, God coming down and sharing the narrowness and trouble of our conditions. It may well be that if all true religion which leads the thoughts upwards is a civiliser, the Christian religion is the greatest civiliser; and it is only as piety begins to develope our humanity that we cease to be vulgar, for vulgarity in the evil sense is not so much something to be scraped off as something that falls away of itself when only the internal condition is altered. As there are diseases of the skin which depend upon the state of the internal organs, and when that state is better the skin is cleansed, so is it with the aspect and manners of mankind; we must have our humanity developed, and then our vulgarity ceases. We are for a while amongst those whose thoughts must be commoner than the thoughts of more cultivated people, whose services must be of au humbler sort than those which the more instructed person can render; but if indeed the Spirit of Christ is ruling in us, there is no king himself ruled by Christ that would disdain us; there is no chiefest man but will discern something hopeful in us, according to our original gift and the care we have taken to develope it as we might.

Thus, when we are speaking of vulgarity, though we have to talk in a moral way, yet we are led at once to spiritual conditions, for we may say all things are bottomed in necessary morals, and all things are developed by free spirituality, and all things are builded up in their development by nourishing knowledge, and all things are clothed about with beauty by art, for art is the expression of things to the senses in such a way as to delight the soul. All things have their moral rule, and the moral rule has its spirit; and we are developed by the "grace" of spiritual affections, for instance by the loving-kindness and condescension of superiors; and if the lovingkindness of our great superior, God, developes us, as we want to get rid of the wrong, and to get advanced in the right, then knowledge is imparted to us, and it is the nourishment of our being; and if knowledge is imparted to us of what we should choose and what we should do, the forms of our utterance and the

forms of our behaviour, and the plans of our association, all cease to be vulgar. There is an art of speech that has no artfulness, and there is an art of behaviour that has no pretence, and there is an art of decoration wherein is no vain display. All that is expressed by the senses is expressed for the soul, to please the soul that already is purer than it was, and is getting purer still. We shall never cease to be vulgar till we cease to be selfish; we shall never put off our vulgarity utterly till we have entered into the sweetness and warmth of celestial love itself. Who is he that is vulgar? He that is always obtruding his own concerns, he that is quite inconsiderate even of the obvious needs and desires of his neighbours. Who is he that is vulgar? He that brags; he whose talk is big and about big people-he is vulgar. Who is he that is vulgar? The person that is always forward and never ready; the person who depends upon his purse without consideration of how he filled it, or his clothes without considering that he has not half as much sense and skill as his own tailor, whom he despises for making his clothes, while he compliments himself for wearing them. In indefinitely numerous ways we could illustrate vulgarity, but it is obvious that whosoever in these or other kindred senses is vulgar will continue so as long as he is selfish, and that there must be a religious work in him.

Now there is often a religious work in a man that is not yet a Christian. I say there is a religious work that takes place in any man when he begins to think of things because they are good in themselves and beautiful in themselves, when he sees that a thing is beautiful though nobody is looking at it but himself, and that an action is good, though he shall never get a bit of praise for doing it. Throughout eternity such a thing is good and is fair; he sees that it is fair, and he loves it because it is; he sees that it is good, and he does it because it is good. Now, if any man is led upwards through what is so fair to what is fairer still, and through what is so good to what is better still, then there is a religious uprising in him; he is an ascending man. But I say that we all best ascend through Jesus Christ, because He comes down to the very lowest places in which we are. He comes down to the person that is in his ignorances, and in his sins, and in his shames, and is deserted, as he feels, by all the world. Let this be a principle of charity in all our minds, that everybody is somebody. But, alas! that is too likely before it becomes a principle of charity in our minds to be a principle of natural pride. "Everybody is somebody, yet I am as nobody." "Oh," we reply, "everybody is somebody, therefore, friend, give us your hand." They that are able to show some respectfulness towards the discouraged are always assisting to deliver them from their vulgarity. And consider that whatever

a person may be, however slender, as we may suppose, his original gift, and however humble, as we think, his proper work, yet he may challenge, if there is anything of religion in him, our respect. The potato is just as cultivable as the strawberry. You can cultivate a potato to get the rankness out of it, as you can cultivate a strawberry to get its size enlarged, possibly to the lessening of its flavour. And so of persons that are so far on in society that we may compare them to the strawberry, and of others so low down that we may compare them to the potato. But our God is the God of humanity and our Christ is the Saviour of the lowest. And if everybody is somebody, those that hoe in the fields are to be respected as well as those who sit or tread upon the lawns. Everybody is to be respected, and the surest way to win a man to be respectful himself is to respect him. We are far more to blame if we show no respect to those whom we suppose are beneath us than they are if they show no respect to ourselves who feel sure we are above them. To say that a man is provoked to be disrespectful does not altogether excuse him, but it very much accounts in many cases for his lack of respectfulness. We must not say that because a man should resist temptation it is proper to tempt him. You ought not, my friend, to be angry; shall we, therefore, say something as irritating as we can to see whether you will be angry, and then when you are angry jeer at you? Would that be right? Ought we to provoke persons because they should withstand provocation? No. And, specially, ought we to provoke the untrained? No, indeed. Ought we, then, to be disrespectful to those who have not yet learnt the primary lesson of respect? No. If everybody is somebody, let us respect those that are labouring in lowliest fields. We deserve their respect if there is any worth in us, and we shall get it if they rise, for a man is never able to rise in society in a heavenly way except through his appreciation of worth in others. You will always find that when religion, and especially when the Christian religion, works upon men's hearts they get a perception of worth, they become more respectful. A man is not ashamed to take his hat into his hand and bend before his master. A man shows plainly enough the difference between servility and loyalty. Let no man be servile, but let all men be loyal. Let us be loyal to our superiors. Why, if there is no one our superior in any other respect, for the most of us there are at any rate superiors in age. Let us rise up before the hoary head, let us show ourselves respectful to those that are in any way our superiors-and almost every man is in something or other every other man's superior. People can do what we cannot do they have their genius of hand, their genius of tongue,

their genius of eye, and they serve us by their gift. Let us respect them.

I repeat that we must, by our respect to others, win them to be respectful towards ourselves, and towards all that is worthy; that we cannot rise except by respectfulness; that Christianity, in coming down to us, does raise us through our love and admiration for God, step by step by many loves and admirations for God's creatures and God's people, till we have left our vulgarity behind us,—and this vulgarity may be left, even if we were born to inherit only a little field, and we have nothing besides that field, made better by a lifelong industry. If you have only one field, and that a little field, and you cultivate it for fifty years, and get bread out of it, and better it by your own bettering wisdom, and your own steady industry, you have risen to be a gentleman in the best sense of that term. If you are a Christian, you have lost your vulgarity, for whereas you were a grudging, selfish, captious man perhaps at the outset, now you are a thankful, and generous, and appreciative man, and, if you have only one field, you can perceive the industry of the man who has ten, and though you only get from your field bread enough for yourself and your household, you are glad to hear of a neighbouring squire who has, besides the bread for himself and household, wealth that has enabled him to build cottages and churches, and what not, for his neighbours. No man can tell by the apportionment of mere wealth in this world the estimation that God has of individuals. Our gains are never exactly correlative to our merits. Merit, we thank God, has very much to do with success, but has never so much to do that success is a certain index of a man's worth. There are most able people and worthy men who according to my illustration are, so to say, born with a field and die with but a field. There are others, as seems to us, of no greater ability, and no greater worth, that, beginning with a field, end with being lords of a township. There are some that, beginning with a pound, can only make it a guinea, and there are others that begin with their sovereign and, in the course of a year, it is a ten-pound note!

Every man should, as a matter of congratulation for the human race, rejoice in legitimate successes; and how can we induce those who may appear-whether it be so or not-to be less successful than others to rejoice in their neighbours' legitimate success unless we are kind to them, and unless we respect them? If it is vulgar to despise because a work is lowly, and vulgar to despise because of ignorance which a man has had no opportunity of being relieved from, it is a proof that we are ceasing to be vulgar if we respect the intelligence of those who, though uncultivated, are not unobservant, and respect the integrity of those who, though they have to do with cabbages or wayside stones, perform their work thoroughly and well.

It will sometimes happen that one man makes money and another man makes away with it. It will sometimes happen pleasantly that you shall see three generations. There shall be the grandsire, with an air of rusticity about him; there shall be his son, whose linemarked countenance shows the labours through which he has passed to gain position; and there shall be the little grandson, with his pretty pony, whose own aspect and common pleasures show that he is beginning life on a higher level than the others; and you say, "Oh, that beginning with an advantage that your father had not, and that your grandsire had not, you may not fall off your pony into a worse mire than that of the ditch!" If a man makes money, and is not wise enough to do what in him lies to prevent his son making away with it, then we say, though he has grown richer, he has not lost vulgarity, for there are those who are vulgar in every class, namely, the people who indulge in the evil special to their particular class. If you merely live according to those habits of a particular class that you do not yet perceive to be evil, you are not vulgar in the sense that allows us to reproach you; but if you see them to be evil, you are vulgar, let your class be that of the learned, the wealthy, the princely even. There are those in every class that are vulgar; and if a man has got wealth, and does not train those that are about him to spend it justly and generously, we say he has not been cured of his vulgarity. What we want to see on a large scale in society is such a gradation as I noted in an individual case. We want to perceive rusticity (there is no vulgarity in it, notwithstanding its rustic air) succeeded by culture that is full of vigour, and that in its turn succeeded by another culture, that without losing vigour has gained refinement. Do not envy the little lad his pony; but pity him if he is likely to become a selfish boy; and a greedy, smoking, drinking youth; and then an idle, vagabond, lounging fashionable. You notice the lounging gait of an untrained working man, but the lounging gait of a dandy is a thousand times more contemptible. The working man will often slouch as he goes because he has never been trained to move his feet and use his limbs aright. There is no reason why a working man should not come out of the ungainliness of his gait as soon as he perceives that his gait is ungainly; but I say that the lounging of a dandy is much more contemptible than the lounging of a working man. We will not envy the little lad his pony; we will not envy society at large its refinement; but we will say that if, beginning with simple work, a rustic person receiving a godly spirit, is followed by a cultured person full of vigour and able to devise and construct roads and bridges and so on, and that person is followed in his turn by others that, without losing vigour, gain refinement, we are to be glad because of this succession; and if we