by the slave of the lamp in the Arabian tale. What behest will not the genius of gold fulfil for its master, so far as the material conditions of gratification are concerned? It surrounds him with every luxury of art and society. It pours the fruits and fabrics of all climes into his lap. Without any violent figure of speech, such an one may be said to have gained the whole world; and all the preachers in Christendom may go on declaiming against his achievement, from now till the crack of doom, and never convince one sensible man that it is not - other things remaining the same a magnificent blessing.

Furthermore: rank, honorable position, is a symbol for all the goods of society. He who has the prerogatives of social power in his hand, the honors of a nation at his feet, the control of its treasures, the appointment of its officers, the sway of its fleets and armies, intrusted to his keeping; who looks far around and sees no one in political place above him, but all underneath, looking up to him with obsequious service,surely he may with emphasis be said to have gained the whole world; since the world contains nothing of public pomp, privilege, or pleasure, whose equivalent is not his. And this position, too, if rightly won and used, is a wonderful boon to hold. The desire for it is not to be condemned, but to be morally regulated.

There is another who, still more intimately and genuinely than either of the foregoing, gains the world. There is on the earth God be thanked! - many a wise man, who, by the consecration of vast faculties to vast toils, has conquered the costly domains of human knowledge; mastered the treasures of history, science, philosophy, poetry, and religion; who, at will, sweeps the intellectual scale of humanity from end to end, in thought and feeling, subsidizing all its glorious resources; marshals the facts, understands the laws, reads the uses, sees the panoramas, recognizes the mysteries of the universe, all girdled in by the generalizations of his mighty imagination. Carrying as he does in his mind an incorrup tible epitome of the outward creation, a spiritual picture and fruition of it, no one can deny that such a man has, in a

very striking sense, gained the whole world. The world is his, to contemplate in vision, to systematize in thought, to possess as boundless treasure indestructibly mixed with the fibres of his consciousness. Such a gain, so far from deserving to be despised or denounced, is a prize fit to fire a deathless ambition.

There remains still an additional final mode of gaining the whole world. It is by a sympathetic appropriation of all the use, sweetness, and glory of the world through an imaginative personal identification of ourselves with our fellowbeings, a disinterested enjoyment of the goods of other people as if they were our own. An unperverted, generous, loving soul, free from pride, arrogance, or corruption, counts no grandeur of the creation, no honor or boon of society, no achievement or blessedness of humanity, as foreign to itself. By right of eminent domain its self-surrendered will traverses and ideally reaps the benefits of all. Its glad, pure sympathies are a private focus through which the public harmonies of the universe, the costly properties of life, play, and pay a tax of joy as they pass. Thus the soul has an indefeasible usufructuary possession of the whole world. And in exercising this dominion, so far from yielding to a fatal sin, it illustrates its choicest and richest estate as a child of God here below.

We have seen, then, that man may appear to gain the world by wealth, by power, by knowledge, or by guileless sympathy. And this gain is an imposing good unless, - heed well the qualification, - unless it be neutralized by connection with some sin which turns it into a curse.

The next step in our subject is to determine the meaning of the other clause of the text. Dismissing, as the fiction of a sick brain, the idea of an eternal local imprisonment of it in hell-fire, let us ask, In what sense is it possible for a man to lose his own soul?

A man possesses his soul when he has the unimpeded and noble use of its offices; when it properly occupies its material seat in peaceful and happy work and play. We need not be told that this often fails to be realized; and that where it has

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once been gloriously experienced, it often ceases to be so experienced any more. The first case in which a man may be said to lose his own soul is when the use and enjoyment of it are taken away from him; when the action of his being is perverted from its normal blessedness into misery, the royal order of his faculties gone, the harmonies and pleasures of virtue and health swallowed up in friction, discord, and woe. Obviously, he is no longer the lordly delighter in his own soul. Consciousness is then wretchedness, and he is its victim. Disease has wrenched the throne from him; and until the pleasurable use of his nature is restored to him, no earthly gain, even if it be the world, can avail him any thing. What good is light to the blind, music to the deaf, motion to the paralyzed, love to the hater, logic to the irrational? Worthless the gift of the whole creation, except to a soul fitted to enjoy it.

Again: man may well be said to lose his own soul when he is degraded from the authority of a rightful self-rule, into any vile bondage against which his better nature vainly protests and struggles. He who lives, - as how many a poor wretch does! - in absolute subjection to some low passion, bridging over the intervals from indulgence to indulgence with complaining desires or with drugged insensibility, cannot be regarded as the master of his own soul. The crown of liberty has been plucked off, and his royal crest brought down to the dust. Conscience has been pitched out of its throne in chains, and some foul usurper has vaulted into the seat. In this odious slavery of appetite or rage, the drunkard, the sensualist, the murderer, has lost his own soul. It is not the collective faculties of his poised and authoritative mind that governs the province of his life and enjoys the revenue of its good. The tyrannical passion that holds him in its gripe crushes the counter-impulses of his nobler self; and, in the degradation of his bondage, he cannot say his soul is his own. It is not his. It belongs to the insane passion that domineers over him.

There is another mode, besides, by the perversion of its functions into misery, and by the debasement of its liberty

into slavery, - a deeper and darker mode, in which the soul may be lost, that is, by the ruin of its substantial conditions, and the consequent destruction of its essential glory. In consequence of a disastrous hereditary transmission, or terrible exposures of disease, or abnormal habits of life, a gloomy mist may creep over the reason, a slimy stagnation settle on the imagination, decay with rotten fingers seize on the ethereal network of the brain, and insanity and imbecility come slowly down to close the sorrowful scene of the discrowned and idiotic king of the earth. Of all the dismal spectacles humanity exhibits, none is so ghastly sad as the sight of one thus surviving the loss of his own soul, - the moving corpse of what he was.

There remains still one more method of losing the soul; I mean by the annihilation or smothering of its moral essence; not the wreck of its physical organs, but the gradual degrading of its vital worth and splendor of prerogatives into dead mechanical repetitions and ruts. By a low and narrow monotony of selfish habits exclusively indulged, by a freezing, starving penuriousness of thought and feeling, a man may become, no longer a real man, but a niggardly machine for grinding out some single product; for hoarding money or securing some other base gratification. He thus simply ceases to have a soul. Instead of being a free spirit, he sinks into a fixed instinct. We cannot say of him, as we do of any strikingly admirable specimen of our race, He is a whole soul! He is only a vulgar fraction of a soul.

The genuine possession of the soul, then, is the free and firm holding of the prerogatives of liberty, wisdom, virtue, and happiness. The forfeiture of this high and holy rule in slavery, misery, madness, idiocy, or vulgar routine, is, in the most true and awful sense of the words, the loss of the soul. And with that loss every blessed light is darkened that guides us on our way. Therefore let no one fear lest, in discharging the text of the shocking doctrine hitherto associated with it, we leave it without a most sound and terrible sanction of its own; a sanction a hundred-fold stronger than the other, because, while that was a theory, this is an experience; while that was an incredible fiction, this is an undeniable reality.

Now we have clearly before us all the data needed for answering the question, "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Difficult and portentous as the question appears, uncertain as multitudes are as to the answer they shall make, no one ought to hesitate an instant to give it this decisive reply: It shall profit him nothing at all; neither shall it injure him any; for it is not the gaining of the world, but some sin committed in the process of seeming to gain it, that causes the harm. A few examples of supposed world-gainers and soul-losers will render convincing proof of these statements and make the conclusion clear.

To gain the world, that is, to command all the uses of the material and moral creation around us, is precisely what God has made and put us here for. As princely children of the Infinite Sovereign, we are born and trained to be kings of the world, holding it tributary under our feet to yield us all its powers and joys. But when we suffer ourselves to become slaves of certain mere symbols of the world, instead of solidly mastering the world itself; when instead of really swaying our own proper sceptre we sink under the despotism of what has no right to command us, then indeed there is a miserable confusion, a fatal perversion, and our souls are truly lost in foolishness and sin and retributive misery.

Damocles on the throne, eying the hair-hung sword that glittered tremulously over his head, found no profit in the kingdom with which he was invested; for he was the slave of terror, every capacity of enjoyment gone. Sardanapalus, Tiberius, a thousand other imperial slaves of sensuality, each plunged in his sty of debaucheries, self-disgusted, insufferably satiated and wearied, was a more pitiful object than the poorest day-laborer in his realm. The peace and purity of his soul gone, his body left by exhausted passions like the crater of an extinct volcano, made the possession of the world a profitless mockery. In fact he did not possess the world, only a hollow emblem of it. Napoleon, in yielding to his