01.04. Living Words

LIVING WORDS. A DAT! It has risen upon us from the great deep of eternity, girt round with wonder; emerging from the womb of darkness; a new creation of life and light spoken into being by the word of God. In itself one entire and perfect sphere of space and time, filled and emptied of the sun. Every past generation is represented in it; it is the flowering of all history. And in so much it is richer and better than -all other days which have preceded it. And we have been re-created to new opportunities, with new powers; called to this utmost promontory of actual time, this centre of all converging life. And it is for to-day’s work we have been endowed; it is for this that we are pressed and surrounded with these facilities. The sum of our entire being is concentrated here; and to-day is all the time we absolutely have.

LIFE is a crucible. "We are thrown into it, and tried. The actual weight and value of a man are expressed in the spiritual substance of the man. All else is dross.

MANY a man who might walk over burning ploughshares into heaven stumbles from the path because there is gravel in his shoes. AN aged Christian, with the snow of time on his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest which are nearest heaven. THE spring of all great endeavor is a great trust, pushing men forward to unseen ends, away from the fastenings of custom, out into struggle, and hazard, and mystery. So Luther tosses the Pope’s bull on the burning pile, and sets Christendom on fire. So Columbus goes in his little vessel far away from known land, and finds a fresh, green world behind the veil. So Hancock and Carroll, trusting in the everlasting right of freedom, and risking life, fortune, and sacred honor, strike the drum-beat that echoes round the globe. And, still rising in my statement, I say that the highest power is the highest trust, is " Trust in the Lord with all thine heart." THE best answer to all objections urged against prayer is the fact, that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangements of a boundless Providence. IN the spirit of the Christian there is a perpetual spring-tide, and in the wintry valleys he hears the ripple of ever-flowing streams.

WHAT is most characteristic in true religion what is most wonderful is the fact that it wells up right against a man’s desires, his inclinations, his preconceptions. It shatters his old mouldy crust of habits; it changes the currents of his thought; it makes his dumb, stupefied conscience speak right out, and speak to the purpose; it transfigures, it regenerates him. If it cannot make a small power large, it makes it good. If it cannot give a big brain in the place of a contracted one, it transmutes a man’s intellect all into a divine essence of purity and love, or freights it with the thunder and lightning of dauntless and effective energy. THE temptation is not here, where you are reading about it, or praying about it. It is down in your shop, among bales and boxes, ten-penny nails, and sand-paper.

STAND at your post in the army, and obey your orders.

You do not control the great movement of the battle.

You cannot tell how God will rally the scattered wings, or call up his reserve. No condition is unfavorable to virtue, where virtue is.

STRIKING for the occasion, for the immediate truth or duty of the hour, men have struck for all ages. WITH a vision sufficiently clear we might see in the germ the full circle of the flower; in the acorn the branching oak, with five hundred summers murmuring in its leaves. So in the ground and seed-plot of home we may have pre-vision of the best conditions of this world or the other.

LIFE, whether in this world or any other, is the sum of our attainment, our experience, our character. The conditions are secondary. In what other world shall we be more surely than we are here? IN some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface. Is not this a very melancholy spectacle? A man standing in some high place of intellect and honor, splendid as ever in the brain, but on one side of him the moral side stricken clear down with paralysis! A man saturated with the finest culture, with the most delicate sensibilities playing in his nature, with the escutcheon of pride in eye and forehead, flushed with the heraldry of genius, scorning the temptations of the flesh, beating upward like an eagle towards some lofty point; yet carrying a hard, cold, selfish heart, and marked as a deserter from the right. When some great occasion breaks, and imperilled justice calls to him from the ground, and far above all mean interests and clanging factions the voice of duty summons him like the very trump of God, he vacillates, he takes up the lance droopingly, he lets the ark of the righteous cause totter, he cowers before the dagon of the hour, he falls away from the good cause, he betrays it, nay, he becomes hot against it; and the words of the man, that might have been tones of regeneration and of victory, clatter upon our ears like "thirty pieces of silver."

WE send out from the home incalculable influences for good or evil, into the world and into the future. At the altar and the hearth-stone we grasp the round earth, we touch all ages.

How many men in business are there who steer by their ledgers, and who virtually act upon the principle of making money in any way that they can! How many politicians, eloquent in the cause of liberty, whose regard for freedom is the regard of an owl for the daylight!

How many like these are there who really have any Sinai or any decalogue higher than some official chair, or more vivid than the stamp on a gold eagle? THE world is bad enough, but we see the depravity by light which streams from veins of goodness running through it; and around its lazar-houses and shambles, its giant selfishness and pointed deceits, there are martyrgraves and patriot battle-fields, Love burning forever like a vestal fire, and Faith looking calmly upward.

IT is not the great occasion, but the great spirit, that crowns and glorifies our work.

SCEPTICISM has never founded empires, established principles, or changed the world’s heart. The great doers in history have always been men of faith.

GLOKIFY a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God’s truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.

MAN has wooed the material world as a lover woes his mate, detecting in every "no" a hesitating "yes."

IT is a most fearful fact to think of, that in every heart there is some secret spring that would be weak at the touch of temptation, and that is liable to be assailed.

Fearful, and yet salutary to think of; for the thought may serve to keep our moral nature braced. It warns us that we can never stand at ease, or lie down in this field of life, without sentinels of watchfulness and camp-fires of prayer. A MAN’S love for his native land lies deeper than any logical expression, among those pulses of the heart which vibrate to the sanctities of home, and|fo the thoughts which leap up from his fathers’ graves. THE downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.

WE read and hear many scriptural passages with indifference, until some personal experience elicits their meaning. A wave of the heart washes over them, and then we see all their depth and beauty.

LET Newton ponder the fall of an apple, and he discerns the law by which a rain-drop descends to the ocean, and a planet swims round the sun. Thus rises the ladder of induction from the earth to the skies; and with one true principle the philosopher unlocks the wards of the universe. A SMALL lie, if it actually is a lie, condemns a man as much as a big and black falsehood. If a man will deliberately cheat to the amount of a single cent, give him opportunity and he would cheat to any amount.

WE do not need martyr-stakes, nor battle-fields, nor any public scenery, to show us the good and true man. His little acts, his daily conduct, will furnish tests. One flash reveals the diamond. THAT sex which almost alone was friendly to the Savior, which anointed his feet with ointment, and followed him with tears to his cross, which prepared sweet spices for his burial, and was the first to hail his resurrection, has, in turn, been especially befriended by his Gospel. It has raised her from the degrading condition of a slave, or her still more degrading condition as a mere instrument of passion, to be a refined and purifying influence in society, and_to lend to home the dignity and the grace of the mother, wife, sister, and daughter.

HILL and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man. THE Bible is not to be judged in all respects like a history composed since history became a science; but take that old volume, which has survived the decay of ages and the shocks of revolution; whose every book is an epoch, whose every leaf almost turns over a century, and whose simple narratives open to us the experience and link us to the sympathies of our common nature four thousand years ago; take it, and apply to its records the same tests you apply to Polybius or Livy, and the sceptic, if his scepticism is honest, will find less room for his cavils and his sneers.

MARY was evidently one of those characters who cause us to overlook what they do, in the consideration of what they are. Her heart was a censer of devout breathings, and her whole being vibrated to holy influences like a harp. It seems to be the mission of such natures not so much to act as to shine in their own calm brightness, liko planets, reflecting upon us a light which has been poured into them from unseen urns. But wherever they move their presence is felt; man’s heart grows better for the time, and his sins lie still; while through the rank and seething atmosphere of earth they impart glimpses and suggestions of heaven.

THERE is a higher scale of value in God’s universe than dollars and cents. There is an absolute Right, and all conventional falsehoods must shrivel before it. There is a Kingdom of Heaven, and it shall yet come in the earth. Is it true that we are not looking for the divine birthright of man within, in the moulding of the heart and the capacities of the soul, but only in the color of the face and the shape of the skull; and virtually proclaiming that God has written the charter of personal freedom on white vellum, not on black?

THERE is a sufficiency in the Bible, a meaning in its simple oracles such as the perplexed mariner finds in the compass; such as the pilgrim knows when amid the uncertainties of his journey he discovers a sign of guidance, and a spot of repose.

IT is only to our limited and faithless eyesight that any righteous cause, falling into the ground, seems to perish.

Scaffolds, despotisms, ruinous battle-fields; these are all conditions of the harvest." Truth, or justice, or liberty, swathe it in parchment cerements; dig its grave with bayonets; press it down with thrones, bastiles, slaveblocks; sprinkle it all over with the venerable dust of despotism, and in that dust trace the lines of its epitaph. It may be buried, but has it really perished? Can you bury the spirit of Christ? The earth rolls, the sun shines on, the spring-winds blow, God’s truth flows into the soul of man, and not a kernel of the righteous seed will fail to ripen at the last.

MAN’S own moral nature his own free will is evidence of a moral intelligence and will above and behind the material universe; and his own-consciousness of limitation and defect is an intuitive recognition of that unbounded and perfect One who alone is the Origin, the Life, the Controller of all.

WHAT a proof of the Divine tenderness is there in the human heart itself, which is the organ and receptacle of so many sympathies! When we consider how exquisite are those conditions by which it is even made capable of so much suffering, the capabilities of a child’s heart, of a mother’s heart, what must be the nature of Him who fashioned its depths, and strung its chords? THIS is the main point, not universal progress, but human progress: not progress everywhere, but progress somewhere. Grant but that, and all humanity becomes hopeful; grant but the capacity, and the doctrine is practicable; let the law be in operation only at one point, still it is a law, and as such is to be heeded and acted upon.

EVERY deed of dishonor, every victim of vice, every ghastly spectacle of crime, is an eloquent testimony to the need and the worth of virtue. THE drunkard boasts of his freedom with a tongue that he cannot control, and with a thirst that drives him to his cups. But true freedom consists not merely in the ability to do, but in the power to refrain from doing; and the latter power the votary of vice does not possess.

IF through the melancholy sunshine of idiocy there should break a gleam of true intelligence, the idiot would at least feel no self-rebuke for that simmering brain, that sad, pleased, worthless life. But what shall he say who has dissolved the priceless pearl of intellect in the winecup of debauch? who has sacrificed, yes, deliberately murdered every mental gift, and made himself an idiot? The blind man may feel at times that his privation is insupportable, and mourn the blank that has come between him and the beautiful earth and sky; yet within there may be "a light which no calamity can darken," the scenery of a happy memory, and the vernal freshness of an unviolated conscience. But what shall he say who has killed the optic nerve of his own soul, and quenched his moral eyesight? We lament the dear friend snatched from us by death, yet as we scatter blossoms above his grave our thoughts grow fragrant with the recollection of his virtues, and amidst the mystery of the dispensation religion springs up to strengthen and awe us. But what of him, the worn-out libertine, the soulsick epicure? the drunkard, who, while he might have acted nobly with the living, folds himself in the cerements of the grave, and walks by choice among the charnels of the dead? No good work is foreign to the interests of religion.

IT will make sweet music enough in heaven up among the harps and the angels though the tide of song to God and the Lamb comes mingling from the lips of Presbyterian, and Methodist, and Baptist, and Universalist.

PEACE is an attribute of the highest power. Silence reigns throughout those enormous spaces where worlds travel on their way. Silence wraps that electric life which animates nature, and which is thus more powerful than when.it is disclosed in thunder. A sea of silence lies around the throne of God, and the Almighty speaks not, and utters no sound. So in this peace of a religious soul, there is evidence of a hidden power that is greater than any outward force. THE golden age is not in the past, but in the future; not in the origin of human experience, but in its consummate flower; not opening in Eden, but out from Gethsemane.

GOD’S work is carried on by oscillations: now the truth swings to this extreme, now to that; and between he weaves his steady and perfect plan.

REFORM is legitimate. It is so in accordance -with the general law of improvement, and with the fact that there is a tendency in the course of time to corrupt principles and institutions; so that, previous to the period of reformation, their first estate is the best Reformation is a law of the universe, operating as irresistibly as gravitation or the tides. An Omnipotent Providence is implicated with its march; and so it works on, levelling and lifting up, grinding down opposition, changing the face of history, and unconsciously shifting the very ground beneath our feet. THE busy, inventive, achieving intellect, of itself refutes the doubt of the sceptic, and the dogma of the materialist; reveals the sanctions of the highest faith, and justifies the interest which religion takes in the soul of man.

THERE is moral suggestion in this universal restlessness, this hum, and movement, and ceaseless toil. It proclaims a good yet to be attained, or else that the good which is attained is unsatisfactory. It is a testimony to the incompleteness of the earthly state, and the transcendent destinies of the soul.

CERTAINLY, truth should be strenuous and bold; but the strongest things are not always the noisiest, as any one may see who compares scolding with logic.

WE must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, " I am not alone, because the Father is with me! "

LIFE is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.

IF any one maintains reftrm as a substitute for Christianity, he attributes to the stream the virtues of the fountain; he ascribes to the arteries the central function of the heart. For from Christianity beats the great pulse of this world’s hope.

I MUST pity that young man who, with a little finery of dress and recklessness of manner, with his coarse passions all daguerreotyped upon his face, goes whooping through these streets, driving an animal much nobler in its conduct than himself, or swaggers into some haunt of shame, and calls it " Enjoying life! " He thinks he is astonishing the world! and he is astonishing the thinking part of it, who are astonished that he is not astonished at himself. For look at that compound of flash and impudence, and say if on all this earth there is anything more pitiable! He know anything of the true joy of life? As well say that the beauty and immensity of the universe were all enclosed in the field where the prodigal lay among the husks and the swine!

IF one wishes to unlearn selfishness let him go apart, and stand alone by himself.

RELIGION, like the law of gravity, binds each element of our nature to its own orbit. It gives the peace of a harmonious character, where the moral and intellectual powers hold their lawful spheres, and the appetites fill their restricted place, and the law of purity and holiness reigns supreme.

ANY scheme which makes man the head and centre of all things will fail in its applications. The mariner knows but little concerning the vast, unfathomable sea, who assumes that it was made and spread out solely for the advantage of his little ship.

IT is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot. THIS world, with all its wealth and splendor, hangs but a golden drop in the immensities of God, in the illimitable immensities that open before the soul. IN the market a man exposes himself to impositions and losses such as cannot be reckoned by dollars and cents.

He is liable to be deluded into the idea that material good is the only good;... to make business not only essential, as it.is, but all-important, as it is not.

THERE is joy in every normal state of being: there is joy in heaven. Everything that is contrary to this is evidently abnormal, transitional, or, in the instrumentality of discipline, working out to joy. A MAN’S failure to observe the highest standard of living is not always the effect of wilful disregard; but depends much upon the moral plane in which he moves.

HOWEVER logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.

WHILE it is true that a miracle demands greater evidence than an ordinary occurrence, the united experience of the race cannot demonstrate the impossibility of such a thing. Do you expect with one stroke of the hammer, or with all the hammering you may make, to shatter the great gates of sin, and let in the millenial daylight at a single burst? It is none of your business whether that victory comes now or a hundred years ahead. Work and wait, that is your office. Do something for truth and righteousness. But fret not because all is not done at once. Come in when the sun goes down; come in when the arm grows weak; come in, old, bowed head, whitened with still unsuccessful toil, come in and gird yourself, and wait upon Divine Providence, now that you have toiled. The process will go on. The harvest is sure.

SORROW does not predicate annihilation, but development. There is compensation in all things around us.

There must be in this experience. The real counterstroke to the pulse of mortal anguish is not the full stop of death, but the vibration of immortality. Deep human sorrow; do you argue annihilation in that? or is there not a prophecy in it that with every beat of the heart shatters the theory that a troubled life has a dark end?

NOTHING is so odious and so dangerous as the attitude of the young man who has grown, or rather lapsed, into self-confidence, and drops the curb of restraint while he runs away with the reins. As to environments, the Kingliest Being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger. What a miserable thing to see clay in brocade and velvet shrugging its shoulders at clay in coarse woollen and with black thumbs!

SOME men who stand fast in a good cause stand too fast. They will not consent to carry out a part of their work unless they carry out the whole of it at the same time. The right thing must be done all at once, or nothing right must be done.

KNOWLEDGE and piety burn and brighten with an undivided flame. Revelation and science are continually interpreting one another, while every day the material universe is unfolding a more spiritual significance, and indicating its subservience to a spiritual end.

THERE is a close alliance between true philosophy and true religion. That the New Testament is eminently free from fanaticism, and makes no appeal to mere credulity, any one will see who examines. That it is rational and sober constitutes one of its great internal evidences.

MUST a man get a correct philosophy of prayer before he prays? Must the child, ready to run into its father’s arms, stop and study mental processes before it yields to the impulses of its love?

OBJECTS close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disc of eternity with a dollar, and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust.

THROUGH transient conditions we work for permanent ends, and that only is profit which, adding to the substance of our immortal nature, becomes in us spiritual power and blessedness, and similitude to God.

THERE are men so metallic and hollow themselves that all they touch rings as if it were metallic and hollow also. In passing through their hands it becomes for the time being electrotyped with their own baseness. IN the isolation of his clear, cold intellect, the sceptic abides in a glacial and spectral universe. No glow from the affections lights up the frost and shadow of the grave.

He feels no prophecy in the thrill of the human heart, in the incompleteness of nature. He believes merely in things tangible, and sees only in the day-time. He will not confess the authenticity of that paler light of faith which was meant to shine when the sunshine of reason falls short, and the firmament of mystery is over our heads.

WE believe that though this body shall drop to ashes, the soul shall go beaming upward like a star. But of what use is this belief without corresponding action?

CHKISTIANITY furnishes the only foundation of a harmonious and rational life. While it pours upon this world the light of another, it also burns away those ghastly and distorting mists which evolve from the depths of unguided speculation, and is as unfavorable to superstition as it is to atheism. It urges a code of duty, strict yet simple; fitted to beings of earthly mould yet of immortal destiny. THE religion of philosophy consists of right views of things, and a prudential schooling of the passions. True religion consists in a right state of the affections, and a renunciation of self. In the one case religion may " play round the head, but come not near the heart;" in the other it breaks up the great deep of conscience, and pours an intense light upon the springs of motive. Philosophy contains the idea of intellectual rectitude; religion, of moral obedience. Philosophy speaks of virtue; religion, of holiness. Philosophy rests upon development; religion requires regeneration. THE grand current of events runs not downward or backward. The spirit within these rapid wheels of time, turning them this way and that, still moves them forward and to blessed ends.

IT matters little to what pole of doctrine the intellect swings, if the heart hangs impenetrated and untouched.

EVERY man in this world, be he boot-black or emperor, is a complete instrument. He may be of greater or less compass, but he has all the harmonies, the entire diatonic scale, every chord, every octave. In some way the eternal grandeurs strike him, sounding the deep tones of faith and conscience; in some way the world touches the meaner and flatter keys. The great thing to be considered is, what kind of music he habitually makes.

THERE is always reason to hope and be strong when a good principle once gets a foothold in the world. A true principle never dies. A grain of seed, sown in truth and holiness, will spring up to fruition; though it may be long, long ere it shall flower in its beauty, or spread its green leaves to the sun. WHO says any man is hopeless, utterly degraded, fit only to be destroyed? He falters from the confidence of Christ. His revenge gets the better of his reason. He knows not what spirit he is of.

MANY a stripling considers his excesses as the crackling of the ethereal flame, the dross of inspiration, and as essential to the part which he has assumed as the "eye in a fine frenzy rolling." It generally happens, however, that his achievements are limited to the darker hemisphere of genius. He exhibits little of Sheridan save his recklessness, and nothing of Byron except the gin and water. It has been said that "the defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces;" but they are also the sorrow of the truly wise, who in the very proportions of the achievement detect the greatness of the aberration. And it is idle to say that there is any necessary connection between the achievement and the aberration. While Milton sings to us from the gates of Paradise, we know that the essential inspiration of genius flows not from turbid fountains; and while Newton treads upward among the stars, it is evident that might and comprehensiveness of mind need not the feculent leaven of passion. No one can truly see Christ, and drink in the influence of his character, and not be a Christian at heart.

IT will depend upon the spirit in which we work whether the agencies about us will become agents of good or of evil. IN every Christian denomination there is enough vital, kindling Christianity, to make good hearts. THIS is the union of Christians that I ask for: Not an identity of doctrine; not an indifference to articles of belief; not a worshipping in one place or one form; but a recognition of the great common humanity, of the right of opinion, of the oneness of the Christ-like Image seen through many human forms.

HE who avoids the battle of life remains weak and unready; and only he who contends for the mastery wins the crown. THE radical condition of all business intercourse is reverence for principle, confidence in the sanction that gives credit to the note of hand, and that imparts potency to seal and signature. It is that extends a telegraph of mutual faith around the globe, maintains a bond of communion between men at opposite ends of the earth, and whitens the sea with commerce.

WE have souls here as much as we shall have hereafter. No more important duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theatre of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.

FAR through the opening vista of rent devices and broken symbols, like the heaving billows of a mighty sea, the tide of Christian philanthropy is rolling on. Men of all sects are there. The Catholic is there, with his crucifix pressed to his bosom. The Methodist comes on, singing the sweet hymns of Wesley. The Baptist brings his robe of immersion. The Presbyterian stands upright, as his iron fathers did of old, to pray in simple reverence and freedom. The Universalist chants his anthem of restoration and holiness. But they stand shoulder to shoulder.

They all point upward, earnestly upward, to that great banner which waves over all, whose device is the Crucified Jesus, whose inscription, all over in letters of blessed light, is his last command: "Love one another;" is the spirit of his pure and undefiled religion: " Visit the fatherless and widows, in their affliction; keep yourselves unspotted from the world" THOROUGH truthfulness truthfulness to others and to ourselves is a rare virtue; and he who indeed acts upon it is the noblest of all heroes. THE weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties. Hope is born in the long night of watching and tears. Faith visits us in defeat and disappointment, amid the consciousness of earthly frailty and the crumbling tombstones of mortality. THE best and the bravest man is the man who, amid all thronging realities of life, endeavors to conform to an ideal rectitude. Those who have accomplished great things, who have stood in advance of the age and dared to rebuke it, and who have overcome the world, have lived from sanctions that are above the world.

PATRIOTISM! It is used to define so many diversities, to justify so many wrongs, to compass so many ends, that its life is killed out; it becomes a dead word in the vocabulary, a blank counter, to be moved to any part of the game; and that flag which, streaming from the mast-head of our ship of state, striped with martyr-blood, and glistening with the stars of lofty promise, should always indicate our world-wide mission, and the glorious destinies that we carry forward, is bandied about in every selfish skirmish, and held up as the symbol of every political privateer.

I ASK, if that system which should come into the world, having for one of its objects the elevation of the soul to such a degree of goodness and moral strength as to destroy the will and the disposition to sin, I ask, if that system is not worthy of being heralded by angels, of being announced in a chorus of glory to God in the highest of peace and good-will to men? Yes, glory to God in the highest! Glory to him in the great design, and the triumphant means of accomplishing such a work!

Glory to him that must result from the consummation of manhood purified from its sins, elevated above its sensuality, living the true and divine life! And on earth, peace to men! Peace after the stormy warfare of passion and guilt. Peace by the old shrines of martyrdom, and on the fields of ancient battle. Peace in the haunts of secret crime, and the homes of shameless transgression. Peace where clanked the prisoner’s chain, and where groaned the doomsman’s axe. Peace where rose the sobs of injured innocence, and the pleadings of trampled, bleeding humanity. Peace in the individual soul, where all is in harmony with God, and where the end of human laws and outward institutions is not destroyed, but fulfilled, fulfilled in the highest and the deepest sense.

CHRISTIANITY is a life, and every devout and loving heart has felt it, no matter what its name or sect. THE plant that shall blossom unto an immortal flowering must assimilate to itself elements that have been -winnowed in the storms and changes of the past.

IT is too late for reformers to sneer at Christianity; it is foolishness for them to reject it. In it are enshrined our faith in human progress, our confidence in reform.

It is indissolubly connected with all that is hopeful, spiritual, capable in man. The past bears witness to it, in the blood of its martyrs and the ashes of its saints and heroes; the present is hopeful because of it; the future shall acknowledge its omnipotence. THE safety and happiness of society flow out from the recesses of private principle.

IT wants not merely microscopic but telescopic power to know humanity in its essence; a power to discern its grandeur as well as its littleness, the infinity of its relations as well as the meanness of its pursuits. The human soul is a great deep. We must take into view the nebulous possibilities that are brooding and waiting there, and notice the buds and films of light that reveal themselves even in the darkest spaces. IN the most shallow nature there clings some shred of dignity which redeems it from utter contempt. And it is a mean performance, or else it is purblind sight, that selects the odious features, and parades them as the sumtotal of human nature. THE highest genius never flowers in satire, but culminates in sympathy with that which is best in human nature, and appeals to it. No man knows the genuineness of his convictions until he has sacrificed something for them.

THOSE two mites of the poor widow! They were heavy with her labor, and her prayers, and her self-denial; and so, as they fell into the treasury, they rung in the ear of Heaven, and Jesus valued them. No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother’s love It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star hi heaven.

EVERY man who regards position more than principle the garment more than the heart computes life by the dross, and rates the substance by the shell. THE great fact to be considered is not our lot in life, but we who are in that lot, and what we make out of it.

BECAUSE of existing evils, to break the strong bands of the marriage relation, and set the family group adrift in some vague conceit of social freedom, or some nonsense of " spiritual affinities," would be like knocking a ship in pieces because some of the passengers are sea-sick. This organism of the family is a ship that has carried human civilization over the waves of ages, an ark that has preserved the germs of the social state in many a deluge.

Sunder theties that hold it together, and who can estimate the ruin, or from the shattered fragments reconstruct society?

MAN in selfish solitude is like a telescope closed up. The qualities of his humanity may exist, but they are unknown.

DEATH is a great revealer of what is in a man. and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.

THOSE who draw around them the upholstery of an artificial world a world of frippery and gas-light shut out the true world of thought and life; shut out the true world of nature, where flowers bloom and sunbeams fall, and over which Orion sparkles and the Pleiades lead their flashing train The representative of this variety in its weaker aspect is a slick and harmless being, a kind of whiskered essence, or organized perfume, level to the minutest propriety of the drawing-room and the opera; his thoughts oppressed with ten thousand points of ceremony, or pondering grave problems as to the color of a glove or the shape of a boot. THE philanthropist’s hope may not appear in the coming future; yet the inspiration of that hope may make him a hero, and perhaps a martyr.

GOD’S beneficence streams out from the morning sun, and his love looks down upon us from the starry eyes of midnight. It is his solicitude that wraps us in the air, and the pressure of his hand, so to speak, that keeps our pulses beating. Q! it is a great thing to realize that the Divine Power is always working; that nature, in every valve and every artery, is full of the presence of God. THE sublimities of God’s glory beam upon us in his care for the little, as well as in his adjustments of the great; in the comfort which surrounds the little woodbird, and blesses the denizen of a single leaf, as well as in the happiness that streams through the hierarchies of being that cluster and swarm in yon forests of the firmament; in the skill displayed in the spider’s eye, in the beauty that quivers upon the butterfly’s wing, as in the splendors that emboss the chariot-wheels of night, or glitter in the sandals of the morning. THE wild bird that flies so lone and far has somewhere its nest and brood: A little fluttering heart of love impels its wings, and points its course. There is nothing so solitary as a solitary man. A VAIN man is not one with a dignified consciousness of his own personality, but rather one with a nervous solicitude about himself, a fear that he shall not be noticed enough; with a half-suspicion that he may be a sham, a counterfeit, and, therefore, an extra endeavor that his chink and jingle shall be heard in the world. BUT little good is derived from the company of a highly intellectual wolf or a moral bear.

BREAK up the institution of the family, deny the inviolability of its relations, and in a little while there would not be any humanity. THE physical law is also God’s law, the expression of his intention, the enactment of his will. It has had no set place of proclamation, no vocal utterance. But its administration is abroad on the pure air of heaven, and its decrees are in the light. It is not engraved on tables of stone, but its sanctions are in every part of your wonderful, throbbing organism: in the currents of the blood, the hand-writing of the nerves, and the tablets of the lungs.

While you obey it its mystery works on, with serene unconsciousness, affording that pleasure which there is in bare existence itself; in the play of muscle and the equal pulse of health; in full, deep breathing, and sweet sleep, and the exhilaration of the sunshine and the air. But violate it, and the relentless consequences will tell you how sacred and how divine it is.

IF we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness; to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.

EVENTS, things, -world-movements, individual experiences, contemplated from a partial point of view, may seem chaotic, purposeless, disconnected, like the foamflakes, pitching, -whirling, turned into mist, bounding into white annihilation, at Niagara. But every atom of that dishevelled water is held in the curve of nature, and descends by law, and combines and sweeps onward to the broad lake. So with human events. They are governed; they accomplish a majestic course; and over their maddest plunging, their most terrible anarchy, there arches the superintending Providence a bow in the cloud.

DEATH makes a beautiful appeal to charity. When we look upon the dead form so composed and still, the kindness and the love that are in us all come forth.

WHATEVER may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.

ALTHOUGH the notions of many are so contrary to ours, we discover that in common life they are worthy people, and that their theories do not make such shocking havoc as we had inferred.

HE is a true man who realizes the dignity of his nature; who is loyal to his best convictions; who controls his passions and appetites; who is guided by his reason; and who blends a noble mastery of himself with a filial dependence upon God, and who is greater than anything that he has or does. To be a man in the best sense of the term is a loftier object of ambition than anything that he may acquire as a man.

IT is an error to suppose that religion is unfavorable to vigor and fulness of nature.

COURAGE is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable "when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.

THERE can be no true manliness without gentleness, mercy, love. There is only superficial strength in him who can do but not endure. OF all strength of character, of all spiritual force, Christianity is the main spring. A glance at facts is enough to show this. For where are human energies the most active and the best developed? Where has science achieved its grandest victories? Where have invention, art, and civilization unfolded their richest results? In Christian lands, and under Christian influences. A GENUINE loyalty to truth, that dares to speak it and to live it, is one of the grandest features of manhood. IN the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure. THIS is the essential evil of vice: it debases a man. THE seeds of good resolve, progress, virtue, fly to young men winged with fresh hopes. Often the only remedy that we can descry for present evils is the substitution of another stock of men. In the coming of a new generation there always opens a better prospect for the world.

WE are astonished at the sight of nerveless infamy and decrepit lust. It makes us sick at heart to see the limbs that stoop so near the earth shaking with the tremor of indulgence, and the eyes whose feeble vision should be lifted heavenward blinded with the filthy rheum of debauch.

It appals us that one who for threescore years and ten has experienced the goodness of his Maker should use the accents of his faltering voice to defile that name with blasphemy; that he who knows how much purity there is, even yet, in life, should to the very last maintain such an example to infect its sanctities; and that, while it should seem most men would grow solemn at least when those great shadows are thickening upon their heads, he should mock them with his toothless laughter, and, gathering curses about him like a garment, stagger headlong into the gates of death.

PHYSICALLY, man is but an atom in space, and a pulsation in time. Spiritually, the entire outward universe receives significance from him, and the scope of his existence stretches beyond the stars. A THOUSAND wheels of labor are turned by dear affections, and kept in motion by self-sacrificing endurance; and the crowds that pour forth in the morning and return at night are daily processions of love and duty. THE truly beautiful is useful. And no man needs this kind of help so much as he who ignores it; whose conception of utility is limited to the bounds of a coarse, material interest, and the service of the senses. Why, what does he think of this vast palace of industry all around him, with enamelled floor and its star-sprinkled dome, where the Divine Intelligence, working for illimitable ages, has mingled the materials of use with the expression of beauty? "What does he make of the contributions which summer brings to this great exhibition, of the upholstery of the sunset and thetent of midnight? Does he not wonder that the leaves should put on such pomp for the dying year, and that such useless things as flowers should line the traveller’s dusty way?

You have opportunities for serving God that all the past had not.

TRUTH and righteousness do not break forth in sharp and sudden shocks. Secretly they work down in the deep heart of things, leavening the lump. Gradually they proceed, like the issues of the morning, in which we detect no sudden crisis, in which we hardly observe the transition, until, bye-and-bye, in place of the shadows and the cold, gray mist, lo! a clear, transfiguring splendor rests on the mountains and the sea. THE strict conservative says that truth is in danger.

It is the idlest fear in the world. It plainly indicates no intimacy with the truth. He who has communed with great principles knows that they are everlasting, and that nothing can shake them from their orbits. He is willing to trust truth in every encounter, knowing it to be eternal and omnipotent. THE man who strives to reach the core of things, who anxiously wrestles with doubt, and clasps his temporary conviction though it makes his very heart bleed, and yet who beats about in blinding mist, and cannot see, may be nearer the kingdom of heaven than he who mechanically wears the yoke of tradition, who worships in listless conformity, but who cares nothing for the truth in itself, and in whose soul that truth lies dead. OF all sensualists the worst is that moral sepulchre within whose gilded exterior the life of principle has crumbled darkly away, the man whose tiger propensities are disguised with a velvet tread and a silver tongue, whose real nature, into which has entered the curse of withered innocence and broken hearts, is hidden by the glitter of accomplishments, and each accomplishment a treacherous lie.

IF angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness. A LIFE of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it, when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine. THE minister should preach as if he felt that although the congregation own the church, and have bought the pews, they have not bought him. His soul is worth no more than any other man’s, but it is all he has, and he cannot be expected to sell it for a salary. The terms are by no means equal. If a parishioner does ^not like the preaching he can go elsewhere and get another pew, but the preacher cannot get another soul.

EARTH has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tomb-stones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

WHAT is prayer without love but the mockwy of lofty compliment, or the awe and agony of servile fear? Love is the very life of the best things, and without it they are mere bodies, dead and empty. THE city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion. AN ague-fit in the Bank of England or in Wall-street sets the whole world a shaking; and if you would discover the most sensitive and powerful interest of the day consult the barometer of the stocks.

0, HOW those men are to be valued who, in the spirit with which the widow gave up her two mites, have given up themselves! How their names sparkto! How rich their very ashes are! How they will count up in heaven!

IT is hard work to read the moral law straight through the double lens of twelve percent interest; and a man will find some way to hitch his conscience to the train of a profitable transaction, and keep it running in the grooves of a thriving business.

THERE are many men, I fear, who make Sunday answer the purpose of a dull business spell or a raing day. They turn over the leaves of the ledger instead of the Bible; mourn not their sins, but their bad debts; and are so busy writing their own letters that they have no time to read the epistles of Paul.

EACH man occupies an original position. Every great fact comes straight to him. Every appeal of duty must run through the alembic of his reason, his conscience, and his will. The cope of heaven bursts above him; the unfathomed depths open beneath him; the mysteries of God and immortality come streaming in, with their awful splendors; and truths that have confounded the loftiest intellects truths that in all ages have roused up the soul from its foundations, and baptized it with reverence, and kindled it with love environ him as intensely as if he were the first-born of men set face to face with fresh and unresolved problems.

IT is a shameful inconsistency that the law should busy itself only with consequences, and neglect and even foster causes. It leaves uncared for the hot-beds of iniquity, and shuts up the vagrant and the thief. With one hand it licenses a dram-shop, and with the other builds a gallows. THIS is the most fearful characteristic of vice: its irresistible fascination; the ease with which it sweeps away resolution, and wins a man to forget his momentary outlook, his throb of penitence, in the embrace of indulgence.

HAPPY is the land whose granite heart is warmed by sacred hearth-fires, and in whose homes are nourished venerable associations and local attachments. These intense sympathies are not less but more favorable to broader claims. These enrich the blood, and toughen the fibres of a noble patriotism. These impart that vitality which withstands oppression and clings to the right.

These send some element of purity and honor into a nation’s life, lend it that identity of soul which stirs to this common suggestion of the altar and the home, and, hemming it around with the father’s ashes and the children’s hopes, make it a land worth living and worth dying for.

HE is a miserable being who has no resources of enjoyment -within himself, but depends entirely upon foreign suggestion; who, in fact, must run away from himself, and pitch into the waves of superficial excitement, a perpetual whirl and glitter that drowns all personality, and sweeps away soul and sense.

I DOUBT the validity of any amusement that is thought proper for the people but improper for the minister. THE universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf. The vapor climbs the sunbeam, and comes back in blessings upon the exhausted herb. The exhalation of the plant is wafted to the ocean. And so goes on the beautiful commerce of nature. And all because of dissimilarity, because no one thing is sufficient in itself, but calls for the assistance of something else, and repays by a contribution in turn.

EVERYTHING grows from the centre outward; and so humanity grows from moral and intellectual inspirations. A MARTYR’S blood may become not only "the seed of the Church," but of far-reaching revolutions; and the philosopher’s abstraction beats down feudal castles, and melts barriers of steel. One great principle will tell more upon the life of a people than all its discoveries and conquests.

WHATEVER touches the nerves of motive whatever shifts man’s moral position is mightier than steam, or caloric, or lightning. IN the great sum of social destiny, England is not that empire whose right arm encircles the northern lakes, and whose left stretches far down into the Indian Sea; but an influence which is vascular with the genius of Bacon, and Locke, and Shakspeare, and Milton.

IT is a proof of his immortality that while these material elements are united with his body, and hold the mortgage of his dust, they are obsequious to his purposes, and before the moral and intellectual man assume an attitude of inferiority. This is a new proof of his immortality, that flashes out in the wide diffusion of science at the present day, that man appears as a workman, nature but as an implement.

ETHNOLOGY may break the concrete surface of. humanity into the mosaic of a thousand races; it cannot turn into diverse channels that common under-current, that deep gulf-stream, which heaves with the impulses and the yearnings of one nature and one blood. Geology may throw open its rocky catacombs, stamped with the hieroglyphics of incalculable time; it cannot divorce the conscious soul from that eternal Love which is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. Astronomy may appal our fleshly eyesight with its sweep of boundless space. But only more impressive, more needed, more real seems that Bible truth uttered long ago: " Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me." As we see what the natural world is, we only feel more vividly what the spiritual truth of Jesus means; and the clouds of sense that to some may have seemed for the time to eclipse it, part open before the divine lustre that streams from the love of the Cross. THE bud withers, but no kindred bud takes its withering to heart, or yearns for its renewal. But the bud that drops from a mother’s bosom, overshadowed by the petals of her yearning love; tell us not that that has no renewal, no blossoming in more genial air; for then you mock a deathless instinct; then you would balk an inward spring that flows like the love of God himself. THE productions of the press, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder. It is an additional tongue of steam and lightning, by -which a man speaks his first thought, his instant argument or grievance, to millions in a day.

NATURE is God perpetually working; and we need only look around us to see and to feel that truth of a Providence to which our deepest instincts turn.

SETTING is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life. WHO has not been glad to plunge his individuality into this ocean of superintending goodness and wisdom, and feel, through the struggle and fever or his own little life, the Infinite Heart beating under all things? BE not so solicitous to rebut all suspicion of " greenness " as to come out in vice full blossom. Better live green and die green than to be thus rotten before your prime.

WHEREVER we gaze, wherever we explore, we behold the features of creative skill steeped in the smile of creative love.

IF that, philosophy which repudiates whatever is not useful had its way it would daub the oracles of song with plaster, it would break up the master-pieces of sculpture to macadamize roads, and send the poets to the lunatic asylum.

LET us make a proper distinction between the economy of living and the economy of life. A man may find it necessary to scrimp his body, but it does not follow that therefore he should starve his soul. And sometimes when, as he thinks, he shrewdly saves a dollar, he may be doing a more- extravagant thing than the profligate who spends one. He is doing an extravagant thing if merely for the sake of saving his dollar he bars out some opportunity to become richer or better in his intellect or his heart. WHEN we save our money at the expense of our souls, then saving money is not economy; it is the worst kind of wastefulness Let us enrich our souls as we lawfully may with all beauty, with all truth and excellence; for this is the real economy of life.

OLD age ought to be, and essentially is a manifestation of what is hidden in the depths of a man’s nature. It might be, it should be, not an exhibition of crackling impotence and gloomy decay, but the very crown and ripening of life, the symbol of maturity, not of dissolution. So rich in its resources, so bright in its memories, so calm in the fulness of its harmony, so lifted up by a grand faith, as to over-top all melancholy associations. It is so in the natural world In this luscious autumn, these days of marvellous beauty, the earth appears like a pallette set with gorgeous colors, and enriched with a haze of sifted gold It seems as though from every crypt and secret vein affluent nature had summoned all her riches for one full, glorious manifestation; and all her hidden beauty swims to the surface. The buried seed, the dew that came by night, the unregarded sweat of human labor, bursts out in purple grapes and yellow corn. The secret juices of plant and tree tingle in quivering gold and blush in crimson. And every lowly and lovely thing that came and perished long ago has, as it were, left its legacy, and is represented in this congress of yearly glories. The latter spring has bequeathed the color of its sky, the early summer the softness of its breath, and every little flower its peculiar tint, to be woven in this mantle of serial gauze, and to suffuse the woods with this unconsurning and prismatic flame. In the latest hours oMhe year come out the full glory and richness of the year. Why should it not be so with the latest hours of human life? Why should these bear merely a record of waste, and feebleness, and unfulfilled opportunities? Why only dark with regrets and forebodings? Why only wear the look of a ruin, with its broken casements and shattered walls?... Surely a genuine old age, a Christian completion of existence, will wear a kind of October glory, even when the body is broken and the flesh is weak. It will correspond with autumn not only as the last but as the richest of the cycle. Then, in clear points of mental flame, in glories of faith, in the beauty of love, every tint of the soul, every gentle and holy affection, all the juices of secret devotion, every process of silent, inner, faithful work, will come out to complete and adorn the life of a man, and the vestibule of death will be a gate- way of coronation. THE best men are not those who have waited for chances, but taken them, besieged the chance, conquered the chance, and made the chance their servitor.

IT is not splendors, principalities and powers, that mark the grades of being, and determine the footprints of progress. It is the mind, the soul of man.

SEE how things in the world of nature live up to their best, and in their sphere fulfil a perfect work. Now, as at the first, it may be said of these that they are "good." But how shall we gain such a benediction? Only as we, too, live up to our best, as we come into conscious harmony, not only with nature, but with the God of Nature, the God of Life.

HE is best qualified to be and to act who apprehends this state as an integral part of his moral and perpetual existence, and who feels that each day, each hour, is precious in itself as belonging to the vast sweep of eternity.

How often a new affection makes a new man. The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.

WHAT spiritual benefit in lopping away one or two bad habits, while the original virus remains in the constitution? One may lop away all bad habits, and yet, having no positive spiritual life, he is only like an old stump with the branches broken off.

’WE think too hardly, my friends, of positive pain.

There is hope in that; there is mercy in that; but in loss, privation, deadness of faculty, there ’s retribution.

There ’s retribution; not in what is suffered by the man, but in what is wasted of the man.

PRINCIPLES of righteousness that are commended from lip to lip are for us worth nothing until they are coined in our own hearts, stamped with the image and superscription of our own personality, and poured into the world by our own positive endeavor.

THERE is a substantial ground of rest for us when we actually feel that God knows our hearts clear through, and do not try to hide ourselves, or disguise anything that is within us from his eye, but in simple confession of our sinfulness rely upon his mercy and his help.

How much in this world is charged to chance or fortune, or veiled under a more devout name, and accorded to Providence; while, when we come to look honestly into afiairs, we find it to be a debt of our own accumulation, and one which we must inevitably pay. THE faculty by which we convince ourselves of any veracity in the reports of our senses is an inward faculty. And if we rely upon this in its report of that which comes through the senses, shall we not rely upon it when it reports that which comes more immediately to itself? And if by the decisions of the mind we accept the facts of an external world, shall we not by its decisions also accept the existence of spiritual realities? If the reports of this inward witness are not veracious, what reports are veracious? If man does not know the lines of eternal rectitude, if he sees no real distinction between right and wrong by the help of conscience, then what does he know or perceive? If the soul turned towards the Infinite, in its quivering awe, in its joyful dependence, does not discern God, what power in all our complex being have we, and what objects are real?

IT is God’s work we do whenever we perform the right thing let what will oppose itself; and who can limit the uses which God thus makes of his instruments? He does not require great things to effect his great ends; not always a battle or a treaty, a mission or a martyrdom. Your little act of faith and fortitude; he may take it up and weave it conspicuously among the splendors of his unfolding plan.

WHAT a blessing man acknowledges in sleep, whose soft oblivion makes an island of every day, and breaks the hold of continuous care; that cools the hot brain, and bathes the weary eye-lids, and lets the buffeted and foundering heart cast anchor every night in some harbor of happy dreams. He feels the beneficence of that law which makes even misery halt, and besieging fortune strike its tents, and in the great democracy of nature levels the children of men in common helplessness and common need; finding no conditions so wretched, no spot so bleak that even the most desperate cannot recline nearer to the bosom of the common mother, and forget for a little while their sorrow and their shame.

CHRIST’S revelation of the All-encompassing Providence over-arches us at times like the clear night-sky, when one halts on his march through the desert, breathing a blessed coolness over our parched and weary nature, and amidst the lonely waste, the drifting sand, and the fluttering tents, looking down upon us with a great and tender assurance of permanence and peace.

THROUGH every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls as a golden link in the great chain of order.

ALWAYS the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother’s arms, and the workman’s hands lie still by his side, and the thinker’s brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl’s broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.

TO-MORROW may never come to us. We do not live in to-morrow. We cannot find it in any of our titledeeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of to-morrow. To-morrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight, behind the veil of glittering constellations. THE devil has been painted swarthy, cloven-footed, horned, and hideous. Do we expect to see him in that shape? 0, surely it would bo better for us, if he did come in that shape! The trouble is the devil never does come in that shape. He comes by chance, with unregistered signals, and in all sorts of counterfeit presentments. WHO shall say that prayer has no ground of reason because science cannot find any avenue for it? Who shall forbid this instinct that cleaves every cloud strait up to God, because visibly he does not reach down his hand? THE dreaded morrow, that has cast its gloom over so many yesterdays, and prevented our needed sleep; how often have we found its anticipated trials soften and dwindle, as we passed under their shadow! As we entered into the cloud some heavenly voice has saluted us, inspiring us with courage and with hope; some unexpected help has encountered us; we have seen something to mitigate our grief; some clue has led us through the perplexity, and the foreboding ill has broken and vanished as we drew near. Or, if the full tide of anticipated trouble has rolled over us, we have been enabled to bear it, and we are now enriched in life with so much additional experience.

WHAT is it that so far has failed? Surely not your conviction that this is God’s right, God’s truth, which you have been striving to maintain. And for any cause there can be no absolutely fatal symptom, except a demonstration of its falsity.

REVOLUTION does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil? The deepest woes of humanity are not cured by universal fraternity and soup-kitchens. The social millennium is not based on barricades. THIS great gospel is not a cramped, feeble, narrow thing of times and seasons; but wherever God can be worshipped, or humanity be served, or the spirit of love manifested, there is the work of true religion.

LOVE by its own hidden processes will secure the ends of love. Humanity, swept and winnowed, trampled down and thwarted, fading and vanishing away, is taken up and borne along in the scope of His great plan who doeth all things well. THE slender conduits of a flower or a leaf, the finest nerves in an insect’s eye, are regulated by unerring laws.

Surely, then, the career of nations is not without an appointed orbit. THE fatal fact in the case of a hypocrite is that he is a hypocrite. IN every person’s character his inward, spiritual life is the true private account of stock and capital, of profit and loss. merchant or mechanic, so anxiously balancing your accounts for the year! there is stated the precise amount of your real wealth, the only scrip and substance you can carry with you when the years pass away. politician! man in office and in power! there is the register that enrolls your actual honors, and shows to what you are elected. The types of character stamp deeper than printing-presses, and will tell your story better than all the newspapers. mariner! there is the log-book of years, declaring what course you have held in your earthly voyage; there is the chart that indicates upon what shoals and breakers you may be driving now. Young man, young woman, there is the journal of your daily life; there is the remembrancer that records no compliments, no flatteries, only the plain, honest truth.

WE do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another’s doubt.

THERE is no mockery like the mockery of that spirit that looks around in the world and believes that all is emptiness.

SAT, imperial diplomatists, who are now about setthng "the balance of Europe," will you settle the balance of crushed affections and sore bereavements? Can you piece together broken hearts, and tie up their shattered strings with your red tape? In the parchments which you will exchange with your courtesies and champagne, have you estimated the value of desolate homesteads, of bones and sinews made of stuff as good as your own now bleaching in the ruts of battle-fields? Have you settled that balance of everlasting justice and humanity which God finally holds in his hands, thinking perhaps that your crowns and sceptres in one scale will weigh down the heaps of slaughtered men in the other? forgetting, it may be, the unmoving shadows of widowhood and orphanage that will brood amid the festal lights, and that undertone of a vast sorrow which will mingle with the salvoes of artillery and the billowy Te Deums that shall proclaim that the nations are once more " at peace! " THE creed of the true saint is to make the best of life, and make the most of it. Do not ask if a man has been through college. Ask if a college has been through him; if he is a walking university.

ONE day, walking over a barren and stony piece of ground, I came upon a little patch of verdure starred all over with yellow flowers of the later summer, and as it opened upon me so fresh and beautiful, as though it were spread out there simply to touch the sense of joy, and to add to the measure of boundless life, for the time it seemed to me as glorious as the firmament; and the majesty of God was as palpable there, in that little, unconsidered plot, as among the splendors of the morning, or in the sparklingtent of midnight.

WE grow in artistic culture, we grow in ripeness and delicacy of taste, as we stand before the great masters, and drink in the fulness of their genius, rather than by perplexed efibrts to find out the processes of their work. So our sense of beauty and of grandeur grows as we lean upon the breast of nature, and let its moods and aspects pass into us, until morning, and midnight, and noontide splendor, and flushes of sunset, and rock, and woodland, and the vast, old sea, become tints and forces of our own being inwoven among the filaments of our innermost life.

So, then, let our thoughts upon divine mysteries lead where they will, it is by looking upon the ideal of Jesus, and seeking to apply it in the practical results of righteousness that we add to our spiritual substance.

GREAT intellect and selfish impulses; that is devil nature.

MAN was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless force. The world was spread out around him to be seized and conquered. Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting him to tread those shining coasts along which Newton dropped his plummet, and Herschel sailed, a Columbus of the skies.

NEUTRAL men are the devil’s allies.

EUROPE is all sown over with grains of gunpowder, while the emissaries of its kings are industriously at work blowing out everything that looks like light, and quenching everything that feels like fire. A comfortable time of it those continental kings must have, feeling as if their thrones were built against a powder-mill, with Guy Fawkes at the back door. THE man of the nineteenth century is a condensed Methuselah. A BOY ought to be like a cat, so that tumble him into the world any way he will strike upon his feet.

WE cannot plaster over these questions of poverty, and vice, and crime with a Christian sentiment of charity, or solve the great social problems suggested by them by the decent proprieties of alms-giving. You might as well attempt to put out the flames of Vesuvius with a bottle of Cologne water. THE poorest beggar that walks the street is greater than colossal New York, with all its architectural grandeur, and its crowded marts, and its laden ships. So man is greater than the church. Not the soul for the church, but the church for the soul. And whenever the soul is brought into communion with Christ, and the divine life obtained, the end of all is reached.

TRUTH is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.

Go to the man absorbed in this world of time and sense, and tell him of the peace of believing, of the satisfaction of love, of the beauty of holiness, and ydu talk to him of dreams and of shadows. He knows nothing of these things in himself, and therefore your words have no meaning for him. You talk to him, as it were, in a foreign dialect, and there are hardly any corresponding ideas in his experience which can furnish you with terms for the translation of joy, beauty, and God But when these earthly forms in which he trusted are stripped away and have crumbled down, the instincts within him are left free to awaken; and then it is that the truth which Jesus utters the blessed offer which he makes is comprehended as it cannot be before.! men come to the New Testament in a shady room, with the darkness of this world around them; and then it is that like the myriad stars, that are only seen by night, the great texts that fell from the lips of Jesus shine out, and they awaken suggestions we never saw before, and which burst from them, kindling and blazing along the old lines that have been written there for nineteen hundred years. Then men begin to understand what is the burden and the application of such passages as " Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

MORALITY is but the vestibule of religion.

WHILE- with fevered and parched lips men lie around this old, mossy brink of worldly pleasure, these crumbling curb-stonSs of human graves, and again and again come to lap there of that which cannot fill, and which never can satisfy, it is the glory of spiritual truth of inward life, and peace, and righteousness that with ever-enlarging capacity there is an ever-enlarging abundance, and as we crave more the more comes to us.

ALL evil, in fact the very existence of evil, is inexplicable until we refer to the paternity of God. It hangs a huge blot in the universe until the orb of divine love rises behind it. In that apposition we detect its meaning. It appears to us but a finite shadow as it passes across the disc of infinite lisiht. THE most feeble and degraded of our race is separated by a broad line from all other creatures. There is a moral deep in him, a spiritual power, which, obscured as it is, is not the possession of any other earthly being, and is a dim image of the Eternal. Under the cloud of sin and the corruptions of sensualism there is embosomed an essence which reflects the overshadowing of its Infinite Original, and sparkles in response to the uncreated Light.

HE who to-day utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man.. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy. So the world moves; a divine, living current flows under the stony pavement of daily custom; so God draws us through space; so the currents run; so the winds blow; while all the while we think that things stand still, because we ourselves are disposed to stand still. Not at all. Abstractions move the world; ideas wear crowns, sway sceptres, and draw swords; and principles conquer. There is nothing so immutable as truth, nothing so fluent as error, though error stands surrounded by bastions, and moats, and castles, and turrets, and towers, while truth is nothing but an humble cry in the wilderness, a solitary idea that finds its home in a good man’s heart.

BEFORE the love which is in God all things are sure to come round to his standard; and the most giant iniquity of earth strikes its head at last against the beam of God’s Providence and goes down.

WHATEVER theory we may entertain concerning primeval time, with whatever innocence it may have been peopled, with whatever glory adorned, it is not for us to sigh over its lost loveliness, or to cast back wistful glances upon its glimmering gates. The Gospel requires of us diligent hands, prayerful hearts, and & forward look. It urges self-sacrifice, but it holds out a glorious expectancy.

Humanity is in neither a state of decay nor of stagnation. It is moving, and moving for the better. Continents of time and mountains of difficulty may stretch between us and the glad era, but a serene light streams down from heaven upon the destinies of the race, and an auroral promise tints the horizon of the future. WITH infinite depths of truth, and an incessant spring of spiritual life, Christianity cannot be limited to any time, or petrified in any shape. It is fluent and eternal. The reconciling element of the world, it goes forth into every age, and responds to the deepest tone of want in every posture of humanity. THE expression of God is in nature, and it never looks approvingly to the bad, nor inhospitable to the good. A FULL and steady perception of God would melt every heart in homage before him. THE ocean is beautiful, lulled to rest;
The pictured stars that gem its breast
Are epitaphs, written upon the deep,
Over the places where loved ones sleep.

Beautiful, where no mortal eye
Looks in on its gorgeous heraldry,
Is the vast, cjpep sea! And beautiful, too,
Where it spreads to the gaze its expanded blue, Or reflects the clouds in their pomp unrolled,
And moves in its glory of green and gold.

NATURE takes a higher aspect from places where good and memorable deeds have been done, and it lends to them a deeper charm. It is enriched with rarer sanctity; it sheds more blessed dew upon the spot where the hero struggled, or the martyr perished, or the righteous sleep.

Palestine will always be a "Holy Land."

GOD’S work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man’s will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.

GENIUS is the accumulated wealth of our humanity, its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.

IT is a great thing, when our Gethsemane hours come, when the cup of bitterness is pressed to our lips, and when we pray that it may pass away, to feel that it is not fate, that it is not necessity, but divine love for good ends working upon us. WHEN a man would send out the organ-music of inspiring truth; when he would sweep the entire diapason of patriotic and Christian sentiment; when he would wake the land with some old passage of the past, or some jubilant strain of the future, let him set his foot upon the pedal of Plymouth Rock, and strike the keys of Fanueil Hall! *

CHARACTER has more effect than anything else. Let a number of loud-talking men take up a particular question, and one man of character, of known integrity and beauty of soul, will outweigh them all in his influence. At a Festival in Fanueil Hall. IN calm, fine nights of the latter summer, when the woods are clothed with the luxuriance of maturity, and the corn stands fully ripe, in the clear midnight, when all else is still, there comes a manifestation as of the conscious earth communing with the conscious universe.

There rises a low, deep murmur of the sea upon its shores, and the leaves shiver with a sudden ecstacy, and a light of answering gladness ripples along the firmament, and sparkles to the edge of the remotest constellations. It is as if nature herself knew the counsel that embosoms all things, and for a moment confessed the glorious purpose. This may be fancy, but surely it symbolizes a consoling fact. As in space, so in the immensity of God’s plan, and among the ministering influences of his Providence, our world is carried onward; with the graves of the saints and the martyrs on her breast, and the cresent good slowly spreading over her; and the seeds of truth and righteousness, planted with great pains and buried often in seeming defeat, are swelling with life and bursting into victory. THE excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strenth to gain another. The continual glory and joy is the possibility opening before us.

I BELIEVE all things lead to final joy; I believe that the brightest flowering of existence will be in joy; that the atmosphere of heaven will be in joy. But it is not true that our being’s end and aim, or rather that the object of this life, is merely to be happy and comforted. And therefore people make a great mistake who complain of religion because it does not remove all evils. THE way to overcome evil is to love something that is good. No man in this world ever conquered evil merely by butting against it with his will, but by getting into positive love for goodness, by which this evil becomes hateful.

"LET it pass from me," said Christ, in the agony of / the garden, as the sweat fell like drops of blood upon the ground. Thank God that he prayed "Let this cup pass from me," and justified the trembling weakness of our humanity. If he had said " Let it come; I can meet it," he would not have been a Christ.

IT is the penalty of fame that a man must ever keep rising. " Get a reputation and then go to bed," is the absurdest of all maxims. "Keep up a reputation or go to bed," would be nearer the truth.

HE who has been wandering in the maze of false conceptions, and upon whom, at length, has burst the truth of God’s paternity, opens his Bible as a new book. Christianity spreads around him a firmament of sudden glory, and reveals to his eye unexpected riches. Knowing that he is our Father, through the storm and the night we may trustingly proceed; for the star of his compassion never sets, and he spans our voyage with a zodiac of promises..

STRIKE upon what path of moral attainment you may, that path intersects with and involves all others.

WE speak of the works of God as though we meant merely this finished material universe thereby. Yet he has been continually working even there. The earth in its convulsions is nothing but a rocking-cradle for the various stages of progress and development And when each one has reached its full period of development, then the foundations of a new epoch are cradled upon them, they become the tomb-stones of the past, and new forms of life come forth. And so it is in spiritual and moral things; God is continually doing a work. And when we have reached the extreme of our effort, have gone as far as we can, it ia an indication that we are to stand still and see what God’s working will be. THE silent stars that stand sentinal at the gates of heaven keep a glorious secret; the dark, still curtains of the grave, that folds its heavy veil before me, hides a great secret. Those processes of mystery, that are so silent in human life and human affairs, are all full of a great secret, be patient, and wait. The faith that tells me to do this is the faith of development, of movement; the faith that enables me to be something higher and do something better. THE ascetic is often nothing more than the sensualist upon the obverse side. Each is engaged by the appetites, and each is spiritually hindered by them; although the one is doing his best to serve them, and the other his best to extirpate them. The true method is simply to let them alone, to leave them in the orbit God has ordained for them, guarding against them not by arbitrary restrictions or fixed embankments, but by positive life and pure afiections. IN proportion to the difficulty of the endeavor is the glory of the achievement. The rich man who complies with the terms of discipleship is a stronger man than he who glides into them almost by the sheer pressure of poverty. WHEN Douglas was carrying the heart of Bruce in the silver case, to bury it in the Holy Land, he was attacked by a body of Turks; and finding the result somewhat doubtful he took the silver case and flung it among the ranks of the enemy, saying, "0, brave heart of Bruce! go forward as ’you have ever done, and I will follow." fake the beating heart of Christ and throw it among your temptations, and follow where that leads, by its divine impulses, by its eternal recognition of that which alone is right, and good, and true.

IT may not be an invariable test, but certainly there is ground of doubt as to the faithfulness of that man whose way in the world is always smooth and easy.

ALL nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within, it a spiritual truth. THE elements of genius need the controlling power of a still deeper life; else that which astonishes and dazzles the world often burns by making wreck and fuel of those finer sensibilities and more eloquent passions which separate the man of genius from the rest of his kind, and fit him to be their oracle. THE peculiar sympathy of God with human souls, over and above the sympathy that he has with the round globe that he has sent into space, with the little violet which he wets with dew, with the flower whose cup he fills with golden sunshine, with the cattle for whom he has spread a carpet on a thousand hills, the sympathy of God with the being that is like unto himself in deathless aspiration of faculties could only be expressed by a person. Nature does not express it; nature does not touch us as he did who came to consort with our weakness, to stoop to our lowliness, to pity us under the burden of our sins, and nr us home to God.

SOLITARY heart! darkened, troubled soul! when you want to know who is dealing with you, do not take the telescope and try to find him by piercing the blank immensity of space; do not go to philosophy, spun from poor human conceits, that may bewilder and lead astray.

Turn over the leaves of the Evangelists, old leaves, wet by a million tears, and consecrated by a million prayers, over which struggling hearts have breathed with hope and trust; come to these pages; take the delineation of Jesus there. They will tell you what God is, who is dealing with you in the strange, mysterious passages of life. And if you want to know what man should be, there it is. As the eye requires the light, and is incomplete without it, so does the human soul crave, so is it not only incomplete, but inexplicable, without God and immortality. THE themes which the poet consecrated ages since are just as dear to us now, are as fresh and beautiful as the water and the light. The strains with which he urged his own generation to freedom stir our pulses like a trumpet. His magic line touches the fountain of our tears, and we weep at the woes which he bewailed. His words of love, and truth, and gladness echo from heart to heart forever, because mankind is one.

WHEREVER man thinks or acts broods the idea of God. It is the germ and meaning of every form of worship. No religion, however rude or gross its expression, is wholly arbitrary. It never originated with kings or priests. If any one thinks so let him explain how kings and priests came by the idea, and how it was so readily received by men, and how it is that in one form or another it appears all over the earth. Religion cannot be arbitrary, cannot be a fabrication. It is the breaking forth of a necessity of our nature. It is the human spiiit acknowledging and seeking its source.

GOODNESS consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be is the great thing. THE very fact that great intellectual problems baffle us, that the realm of truth seems endless, that we stagger before the great problems of existence, and long to know them, is to me prophetic of a higher state, when I shall know them, and go on to know more and more.

IT is not the man that gives me most of outward things that helps me to live; but the man who gives me thoughts, and ideas by which a wider sweep of beauty opens to my vision, and kindles in me holy affections, by which I rise nearer to God.

CHRISTIANITY has no alliance with cowardice, or watery sentimentalism. It lies at the roots of all genuine manliness, and the results of its development are before the world. It has furnished the grandest examples of strength of purpose and practical power. It has been the animating impulse in the lives of the truly great, and has rolled through the veins of heroes. OUR faith in the miracles is in this: that we believe in them because of Christ, rather than in Christ because of them. Such a life as his was competent to perform such miracles. The great wonder of all, in this sinful world, is, that once there stood on the platform of actual life a being like that; that once that divine ideal rose like the sun in our horizon; that once that pure, self-sacrificing love made itself manifest. It was not in man’s heart to conceive it, nor in his mind to make it; but all that is beautiful in our ideal, all that is noble in our inspiration, has been caused by it. IN this business- world a good many set up a standard that slants a little from the divine perpendicular.

RELIGION sows within us the seeds of an undying joy that fails not when outward means of happiness fail, and sorrows darken, and cares appall. It sheds abroad a holy serenity in the heart, and imparts a calm lustre to the brow. It is a principle of truth, and therefore it allows us nothing that is treacherous and wrong; but all that makes happy, and grateful, and good it opens for us in abundant measure. It reveals new sources of happiness.

It makes the spire of grass and the star beautiful ministers of delight. THE loss of fortune to a true man is but the trumpetchallenge to renewed exertion, not the thunder-stroke of destruction. He is not a true man who is broken down by the loss of worldly fortune; he is not a true man who says, " Everything is lost: the decks are swept clean, the masts are swept overboard, and I am a poor, foundering wreck, without a hope of life." No such thing. You are a man; have a man’s heart in you. God is over you; you have health and a soul, and the world is wide. Shame on you, if for any transient loss of fortune, any darkening change in your worldly condition, you give everything up. THE glory of the visible creation is, or would be, a perfect man. There are beautiful creations all around us that manifest the wisdom and goodness of God. But the Father has given nothing so glorious and so precious as the human soul. The flower, and the ocean, and the sunbeam are the works of his hands: but this, the soul, is the representative of his very nature. The morning star shines with a perishable lustre; the sea with all its strength shall be rolled together as a vapor, and pass away; but a pure, righteous, and loving soul has in it the eternity and the likeness of God, and shall survive all outward and material things.

WHAT if a boulder from the pro- Adamite world should crash against the first chapter of Genesis, can that quench your thirst for divine life, or cancel the fact that Christ satisfies that thirst? He has little faith in the Bible who turns his reason into a dark-lantern to read it by. Fear not that the freight of divine truth which that book carries sublimely over the waves of ages will ever be wrecked on any coast of scientific discovery. In no depth of strata shall we find anything older than the God it reveals. In no new system unfolding from the bright and awful mysteries of the sky will this yearning, struggling soul discover anything so needed as the salvation which that Bible brings, and the immortal bliss to which it leads the way. THE great doctrine of human brotherhood of the worth of a man, that he is not to be trod upon as a footstool, or dashed in pieces as a worthless vessel, and the doctrines that grow out of this the doctrines of popular liberty, education and reform; all these have become active and every-day truths only under the influence of Christianity.

DESPITE all refinement, the light and habitual taking of God’s name betrays a coarse nature and a brutal will. THE very elements of democratic liberty are the elements of despotism, when they are monopolized and turned in for the behoof of a single man; and it is possible that they may prove to be nothing more than elements of despotism, multiplied by thousands, so long as they are exclusive, selfish, and greedy elements. If we quit the old heavy barge and take a steamboat, it will be better or worse as we use it. It will carry us quicker into port, but it will carry us quicker to destruction. It will carry us more rapidly through the Highlands of the Hudson, if we are inclined to go that way; it will carry us more rapidly over the Falls of Niagara, if we are inclined to go that way. And with these grand ideas, with these potent elements, we as a people arc just in that critical state whence we shall emerge into the noblest social form the world has ever yet seen, or give birth to the most hideous despotism it has ever borne upon its surface. IN studying the fact of human progress, as affected by Christianity, we must employ a standard equal to the magnitude of the movement. We must not consider merely the access or recess in isolated instances. "We must examine the tide-water marks of centuries, and then we shall find that the great deep, as a whole, has been heaved up to a higher level. THE moment Christianity struck the earth it was evident that a new and astonishing force was in the world, a force affecting the mass of humanity, and not merely a few individuals, a sect’, or a nation. Yes, a new force it was that burst as it were from the very core of the world, breaking the old order of things in pieces, dashing down its marble superstitions, injecting a distinct peculiarity among its granitic customs, and leaving a chasm between ancient and modern history. That dividing-line which no eye can miss is the threshold whence the Kingdom of God began its march through the earth. Since then it has been evident that a moral power is among men, accomplishing vast and blessed changes. No man, however logically he may have arrived at the conclusion that he sins by God’s adamantine decree, that he is fated to be wicked, fails to feel rebuked when he does sin. Conscience mutters its thunder against the wrong, and a sense of retribution opens in his soul. But why the indignant remonstrance, why the foreboding fear, if he has done only what he was obliged to do? Say what he will, his moral nature, as authentic and as infallible as his intellect, assures him by its rebuke that he had a power of choice, and that having freely chosen the.wrong he must pay the penalty of his election.

LIFE is the greatest thing that could be given to us.

It is the greatest thing which man can communicate to his fellow-man, when.he enlarges in any way his life, gives him a new faculty. When the artist finds new beauty; when a new fact is discovered; when Galileo turned his leaden tube to the skies, and saw the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter; when Columbus returns with tattered sails to bring the glory of a new world; when Cuvier reads the earth in its mineralogy and its animal structure, passing from fibre to fibre, from organ to organ, until he reaches the highest truth; whenever human philanthropy gives new utterance to the divine love, it adds to the life of humanity, and contributes the greatest thing a man can give to the human race. Christ has enlarged it more than all. He has given the whole soul life. He has brought it into infinite communion with the Father. He has made the eternal world real to us.

GOD’S sovereignty is his absolute control. His will is the disposition with which he wields that control. WE pray that God’s will may be done. But do we do it. Let each look into his own heart. How is that? Is there no moral dislocation, no resistance to God’s will there?

TRUE, our religion -was cradled amid the despotisms of antiquity, It commanded allegiance to Caesar, and forbade political resistance by its disciples at that day. But he who imagines that therefore Christianity sanctions despotism, or absolute monarchy, or social inequality, or a privileged perpetual ruling order of men, must reason from most narrow premises. Christianity came prepared for a gradual work, to perform its labor among men as the sunshine and moisture do theirs; to bring its ideas to perfection among men as the reed is brought forth to harvest. Calm, serene, acquiescent, it laid down its principles, knowing that in process of ages their triumph was certain, knowing that by and by, as the sure results of natural law, the throne of the tyrant would crumble, the chains of the bondman be broken, and the sword of rapine and war sheathed forever. To Him who rolls yon spheres in their path of light, and pours out " sweet influences " from their golden urns; who holds the earth in His hand, and brings the seasons in their course; who regards the fall of the sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our head, to Him it is fitting that from the altar of each heart prayer and pious confidence should ascend for all the destinies of the future.*

* Fast Day. THIS is the day on which the old Church celebrates with peculiar honor the resurrection of Jesus. As though it were a new truth, the hells of Easter morning have pealed round the world the glad announcement that he who had slept in the bosom of the earth, at early dawn withdrew the eclipse of death, and broke forth from the sepulchre the Lord of Life and Glory. And as the mighty declaration echoes in our ears, and our torpid worldliness is shaken by the rush of angels’ feet, is it not indeed like a new truth to realize by this resurrection that we too shall live forever? that the shadows which fled from the Savior’s tomb were as the veils of our own mortality vanishing in the light of God? If this be so, then let us live no more in shadows, but in realities.

Let the prayer that Christ taught us, and which we so often need among the broken passages of life, foretoken the verities and lift us to the communion of heaven.

EVEN yet Christ Jesus has to lie out in waste places very often, because there is no room for him in the inn, no room for him in our hearts, because of our worldliness. There is no room for him even in our politics and religion. There is no room in the inn, and we put him in the manger, and he lies outside of our faith, coldly and dimly conceived by us.

WE are conscious of a will independent and personal. In this we find a strong demonstration of the existence of a God. For the experience of a will in ourselves renders us capable of detecting the indications of another and a divine will in the works of the universe.

PROFANENESS is an awful vice. Whose name is* it you so lightly use? That name of GOD! Have you ever pondered its meaning? Have you ever thought what it is that you mingle thus with your passion and your wit? It is the name of him whom the angels worship, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. THE scholar is more encumbered by the consciousness of what he lacks than by the wealth of his acquisitions y and the saint is so busy with what is yet required that he has little time to count what has been achieved.

BELIEF in God does not rest upon a mere doctrine of logic, which some other statement of logic may come and upset. It is one of those primal facts in the human soul which no mere logic has established nor can refute.

ONLY by the love of God, in whom all truth and righteousness are centered, do you get true light to see evil and to hate evil as you should. IN the revelation of the Father the majesty of God is brought down to us, his infinity personified, and his exhaustless love tenderly expressed. Without this, how awful, how overwhelming would be the act of devotion!

Science is daily revealing to us a wider scope and a loftier grandeur in the universe. To the exploring eye it opens new vistas of creation, and pours upon its dazzled vision the brightness of innumerable suns. And among these dimly swings this atom of a world, and far beyond all reaches the infinity of God! How could we have confidence to look up to him, through all these countless myriads and this intolerable splendor? And again, when we consider his holiness and our impurity, the awfulness of God and the insignificance of man, were it not for his own help we should not dare to approach him. But this revelation of " The FATHER" has swept away all the barriers of distance; it has-streamed into our souls through a.ll the glories of the universe; it has touched us with the intimate nearness, the infinite condescension of God, and gathered into that one name all that is venerable with all that is lovely.

IT is the great peculiarity of many of the Psalms that they speak from and they speak to the inward life.

There is no stamp of external history upon them, no finger-mark of age or place. They are an artesian well of thought and sentiment, that has been sunk through the crust of all centuries, whence the human soul may draw and drink, and recognize the deep uuder-spring of its own experience. In one word, they are essentially of the soul, and so time and space are canceled by them. They are the language of a common humanity, whose emphasis is in every needy, or troubled, or rejoicing heart, and is fitted to all lives. If one wants expressions to convey what is deep in him he can find those expressions nowhere so fully and so readily as here. So the Psalms live forever, and are little affected by the criticism that may break off bits of Genesis or flaw the book of Kings. Touching God and the human soul, they glide over all things else in the great ground-swell of spiritual truth. THE letter of the Scripture may be questioned and argued, but you cannot question the love of the Father nor the gift of the Son. My heart felt this when I laid my loved child to rest, and your science on all its burning axles cannot grind from my heart all the comfort God’s love gave me then. A DIRECT answer to prayer from God does not imply any change in him nor in his ordinances; but simply that in prayer a certain instrumentality is used, upon the exercise of which certain results will follow, which would not ensue without the use of this instrumentality. It is an ordinance of God that the harvest shall depend upon the sowing of seed. If that instrumentality is not employed no result follows. But still, the possibilities all exist, whether the means are used or not; and should it have so happened that man had sowed the seed but once, contrary to all human experience, past and future, a harvest would have sprung up. But would this unusual fact have violated any law of nature? Certainly not. The strange result would have indicated simply a compliance with established terms, which compliance had not been previously rendered. So is it, as I conceive, with prayer. It is a spiritual instrumentality, upon the employment of which certain results are contingent. And that God should grant peculiar and direct blessings upon the touching of that one spring, which he will give in no other way, is no more miraculous than that he should give the harvest when the seed is sown. To say that he grants answers to prayer as well as to labor is only saying that man works with God and God with man in more ways than one. How he answers prayer is a mystery, but it is no more a mystery than the process which converts the kernel into the full corn in the ear, than the connection between thought and action, than the existence of God, and the methods of his communication with the human soul.

THERE is no controlling force, there is no permanent dominion in the universe, but that of love; and every age more and more clearly indicates this truth. The Spirit which is to sink into the hearts of men, and subdue the evil that is there, the Spirit before which the desert shall blossom as the rose, and the world be transfigured with the glory of the millennial day, is that which was manifested when God gave his only-begotten Son. The greatest instrument of power and victory ever sent into the world is the cross.

WE not only give an undue exaltation to the appetites when we yield them a blind service, but when we concentrate upon them a microscopic surveillance. It is a grave idea of heaven to conceive it as one set of external circumstances, which we attain by escaping from another set here below. It is a crude religiousness which seeks to glorify the future life by depreciating this, or that villifies the body in order to exalt the soul. It is a great mistake to confound extatic feelings and super-mundane moods with essential righteousness.

SELF-CONCEIT and haughtiness, or fulness of soul, are barriers to progress. They are generally the landmarks of a shallow attainment. The true man never surfeits upon his attainments, but probes his deficiencies and summons his ideals. THE world is generally a reflex of ourselves. If you find a man disposed to compkin of the coldness of the world, you will find that he has never brought anything into the world to warm it, but is a personal lump of ice set in the midst of it. If you find a man who complains that the world is all base and hollow, tap him, and he will probably ring base and hollow. And so, in the other way, a kind man will probably find kindness everywhere about him. THAT which positively enriches the universe is spiritual life. IN a contented disposition there exists a magic power over circumstances which evokes a hidden beauty from unlikely things, finds marvellous sweetness in a crust of bread, and hangs bare walls with shapes of glory. And not only is such a disposition satisfied with little, but under the chemistry of right aifections that little becomes indefinitely expansive and fruitful. A PATIENT and humble temper gathers blessings that are marred by the peevish and overlooked by the aspiring.

WHAT right have we to celebrate Christmas unless Christ has come to us? It is not a mere historical event, but a spiritual conception, to be celebrated. When he comes to the soul in spirit and power, -when we feel the truth of what he says to us, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," then indeed over the dark soul there comes a brightness greater than that which floated in the night sky and lit up the lonely plains of Judea. Then indeed we get the meaning of that angelic chorus as never before: " Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to men." Then ring out the chiming harmonies of life and nature. Then proclaim Christmas morning to the human soul. Then, then celebrate with double joy the advent of redemption.

LET us not fear that the issues of natural science shall be scepticism or anarchy. Through all God’s works there runs a beautiful harmony. The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the throne.

HARK! hark! with harps of gold, What anthems do they sing? The radiant clouds have backward rolled, And angels smite the string.

" Glory to God! " bright wings Spread glist’ning and afar, And on the hallowed rapture rings From circling star to star.

"Glory to God!" repeat The glad earth and the sea; And every wind and billow fleet Bears on the jubilee. Where Hebrew bard hath sung, Or Hebrew seer hath trod, Each holy spot has found a tongue, " Let glory be to God."

Soft swells the music now Along that shining choir, And every seraph bends his brow And breathes above his lyre.

What words of heavenly birth Thrill deep our hearts again, And fall like dew-drops to the earth?

" Peace and good- will to men! "

Soft! yet the soul is bound With rapture, like a chain, Earth, vocal, -whispers them around, And heav’n repeats the strain.

Sound, harps, and hail the morn With ev’ry golden string; For unto us this day is born A Savior and a King!

I, FOR one, have trust in these two things: that men will grow better as they know more, and that nothing will ever come to wreck our confidence and our hope.

LIKE the gush of the morning light, truth must go forward.

EXACTITUDE in science and reliance upon reason are to be welcomed as evidences of human progress, whatever befalls.

IT is as bad to clip conscience as to clip coin; it is as bad to give a counterfeit statement as a counterfeit bill.

IT is a sublime thing to see Copernicus toiling without a telescope, with instruments of his own construction, with all the learned in Europe opposed to him in theory, drawing his threads of argument from the stars, and weaving in tissues of light his incontrovertible doctrine of the celestial motions. He did not live to hear the admiration that centuries have coupled with his name. But genius has its own reward; and he, doubtless, felt it, when the sun took its station, the earth moved on, and the array of planets marched before him around their common centre. THE great mind is ever humble and studious. IN the old French Revolution, they set up the goddess of reason, and voted God out of the universe; but God would not leave humanity, scoffing at him, forgetting him, but stood by his universe, and manifested himself in the midst of all their malignity; and all the ingenuity of man could not vote him out of it. Here is a sort of truth that nothing can reverse. There is a God Almighty; and although men may wish there was not a God, and try to get rid of one, here the idea comes welling up in the soul, in the depth of his primal instincts, and men believe in it because they cannot help it. THE worst effect of sin is within, and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.

EVERY phase of this life shows that it is disciplinary. But for what is its discipline? For a mortal purpose? for the grave and annihilation? Is this the explanation of temptation and sin; the meaning of love and sorrow; the use of education; the worth of social affections; the end of virtue? Surely if spiritual existence is a falsehood life is a mystery.

HUMAN life, with its strange mutations and experiences, its melancholy and extatic realities, its shame and its glory, its broken resolutions and its undying hopes, its close clinging to the things of earth, and its gravitation to an unseen sphere, what is it to the materialist but a satire and deceit? THE moment you see through all God’s working, that moment his infinity is lost and he becomes finite. The very conception of God implies that he is a mysterious worker. THE stars that roll in glory far above us, and that have stood out so long upon the firmament, like figures on the dial of eternity, shall fade and disappear. But we, who tremble at their greatness and thirst for their secrets, shall pass and live beyond them. Time has no mortgage on the human soul. WHEN one has performed a good act, made a noble sacrifice, resisted temptation, or broken up a bad habit, nature looks more pleasant and peaceful. It sheds, as it were, a benediction upon him in the sunshine, and whispers approval in the breeze. On the contrary, when he has committed any deed of shame he cannot look up unrebuked to the calm blue sky or the majestic hills.

IT is a sublime thing danger with courage to see Socrates take the hemlock with that sublime philosophy of his. But what is that, compared with the words of Christ in the darkness of Gethsemane, that imploring cry, " If it be thy will, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done "?

ANYTHING that is deep enough to touch the conscience is too deep to carry Presidents into the chair. To stand up and speak God’s truth, -whether men will hear or whether they will forbear, when it crashes like thunder and lightning into cotton-bag Christianity and politics, to be called fanatic, to be denounced as an agitator, when you speak God’s simple truth from your own conviction, that may cost a man something more than a decent acquiescence in mere morality. But that which Christ requires of us is to be, as well as to do, to have in our hearts the spring of love, self-sacrifice, devotion to the right, adherence to God’s will and God’s truth.

EVENTS are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystalized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet.

WE are conscious of something within ourselves which is not the body; something that is more essential than the limbs and organs which it controls. We are conscious of thought, of affections, of creative power that moulds and uses the elements about us, of a desire that reaches beyond the limits of this world: As to the fact of a spiritual existence, then, of a principle of being involved in and acting beyond the forms of sense, we cannot reasonably doubt.

LOVE anything if you want to comprehend it. You will never know your neighbor or your dearest friend until you love him. You will never know the nature which lies behind the outward aspect of things the core of the great throbbing life of mystery covered up in every clover-bud and glistening in every star until you love nature. You will never know God until you possess some of the unselfish love which Christ exhibited, and which he has kindled within us. Not by searching can we find out God, but by becoming can we find him out. Not by intellectual probes which seek to penetrate the mystery of the universe, not by our starry ladders climbing through a million cycles, not by our plummets sounding the infinite depths, not by our microscopes scanning the minutest forms of being, not by all these can we find out God. They are only the vestibule of the great temple. They are only the threshold of the infinite residence. But by loving we pass beyond all nature and get behind all forms, go deeper than the life of the material world, and come into contact with the Infinite Mind and know him. AT the bottom of a’ good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice.

Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion. THE moment we see that around all the darkness and uncertainty of this life, as around this dark, lowering, dim, misty morning arches the blue sky, so arches the love of God, and the brightness of his majesty breaks upon us, all becomes changed. It is the master-key to every riddle, the clue to every labyrinth, the one sure light to light us in our darkness.

EVERY great fact of nature or society may be regarded as a parable, veiling yet suggesting spiritual realities, even as Jesus found the witnesses of his truth in the lilies that waved in the field, and in the fisherman casting his net into the sea.

NATIONS, like individuals, exist for something beyond themselves. America is to do more than to develop its own magnificent resources, if it fulfils its legitimate destiny. It has a world’s work to do. It has to achieve the practical unity of the human race by the elements of freedom, truth, and love.

I KNOW a good many people, I think, who are bigots, ancl who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.

WHATEVER demoralizes the man and the citizen whatever violates the dictates of conscience, or lowers the standard of rectitude in his soul inflicts a more dangerous wound upon the Constitution, and shakes the fabric of our nationality more than any open treason. Senators and statesmen do more damage to the public weal by moral disloyalty and depreciation of the eternal right than they do good by Buncome rhetoric and a delirium tremens of indignant patriotism. The basis of all public law is private virtue. The anchorage of our national Union is in personal rectitude and reverence. If it holds by anything more shallow than this it is unsafe; and they who flout individual conscience and the moral law in the soul do violence to the strongest guarantees of all order and all law.

HE whose will flows serenely into history, and who gives the coral island time to grow, has spread out this vast continent in the waters, balancing the globe, for some great contribution to the general plan. If we are faithful to our principles, our intelligence, our freedom, our true development of humanity shall become the ligatures of the world.

IT is not the thing we do, but the spirit that we work in, that tests our moral and spiritual condition.

CHRISTIANITY is the true conserving and developing power of a nation. All time demonstrates this truth.

What is the source of progress and safety to a people?

Let " the vocal earth," let the graves of buried nations, answer. One after another they have arisen, they have built their towers of strength, and fortified their lofty walls, they have opened their sources of wealth, and hardened their sinews of power; and for what object? For perpetuity and success. Go linger around the desolate spot where stood Chaldea, go question the fallen columns of Tadmor, go seek the mystic pyramids of Egypt, go ask the Acropolis or the Capitol; go speak to one or all of these, and they will tell you that the hearts which have withered to ashes beneath their ruins, that the minds which were their pride and their glory, that the hands which strengthened their power, were all moved by the great idea of adding to their prosperity and greatness, and perpetuating their station in the earfrh. Surely, then, here in this pillared past we may ascertain the source of a nation’s prosperity and conservation; at least we may ascertain what it is not. Is it wealth? Where is Lydia? Its inhabitants " possessed a fertile territory and a profusion of silver." But its vast treasures were no walls of defence; the riches of Gyges and Croesus were not its safeguards. It was swept by the sword of Cyrus, trampled under foo| by the victorious hordes of Persia. Has intellectual excellence alone secured perpetuity and progress to empire? Where is Greece? Its very soil is animate with mind, and its every pillar, like ancient Memnon, breathes music to the sun. Its mouldering altars are garlanded with poetry, and eloquence and philosophy kindle amid its desolations. The home of Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes and Eschylus, Pericles and Homer, what is it? Did /its intellectual greatness, its glorious poetry, its lofty philosophy, its burning eloquence, its glowing canvas, its life-like marble save it from the dust? Did Spartan heroism gather around in the hour of peril? Did Attic genius flash up from its altars, like guardian flame? It went down at last; the wave of desolation rolls over it. Can paiver insure prosperity and safety to a nation? Where is ancient Rome? Where is the crowned and imperial city that sat upon her seven hills, and sent her armies through the earth? Her "eagle flag unrolled, and froze " by the icy streams of the north; the bones of her legions covered the burning sands like drifting snow; her triumphant shouts pealed up from the hills of Gaul and the chalky cliffs of Britain, and were answered by her hosts from far Jerusalem and Damascus. Over the face of the known world, you entered no walled city where stood not a Roman sentinel, you passed no crowd in which was not heard the Latin tongue. Where is the proud city of the Capitol? Where are the mailed hand and the kingly brow? Did her power start forth from the tomb of Julius, did her ancient renown appear in the person of Augustus, when the eager hordes of Goth and Hun rushed upon her palaces, quenched the light on hei altars, shattered her glorious marbles, and trampled with barbaric exultation on her purple pride? Her very tomb is crumbling beneath the breath of time.

I know that these references are trite; yet would I urge you to seize upon the deep burden of their meaning, to feel their cogency. They demonstrate that wealth, knowledge, power, without a controling influence, without a right motive for their direction, are not the sources of conservation and true progress. THE language that is becoming the master-speech of the world; the language uttered by those new-born colonies that are blossoming around the globe; the language that peals through speaking-trumpets on distant seas, is the language of the Declaration of Independence; and wherever the keels of our commerce cut their way there go the intelligence, the freedom, the inherent justice of the English tongue.

TAKE the first line of the Declaration of Independence, and drive it home to its logical conclusions with the beetleweight of its moral force, and how many institutions among us would it split into kindling-wood, annihilate old msty forms of order, and go through tract societies as if they were pine stumps. THAT desolate place* on yonder shore is not only an impressive witness to Prophecy; it is itself a prophet to other cities. Sitting there, with its head cowled by desolation, and its feet chafed by the sea, from its solemn lips there comes an appeal to London, Paris, New York, warning us that there is no stability in material greatness; that corruption and luxury, however fortified by power, however swathed in splendor, cannot elude the relentless law; but that now, as ever, God holds the world in his hands, and his eternal sanctions control it.

WE move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.

* Site of Tyre.

FREEDOM does not radically consist in free maxims, in free institutions, but in free men. Those maxims, those institutions, may constitute conditions of freedom; they may exist as the frame- work of its expression and its development, but they derive their significance and their value from the freedom of human minds and human souls.

Alas! we all know how, amid prevalent forms of democracy and sounding mottos of liberty, there may exist the veriest despotism and the most abject slavery, base standards of action, blind party spirit, and rampant demagogueism. When such is the case, of what avail are technicalities of freedom and theories on parchment? These are valuable only as they furnish conditions and inspirations of that liberty which consists in harmonious development and uplifting of personal sentiments and faculties. Without this all such forms and signs of freedom are but fossil symbols, in which the spirit of past achievement is petrified, and which lie around us in the strata of tradition. A declaration of independence is not freedom; a constitution is not freedom; universal suffrage is not freedom. The right to elect our rulers or legislators, the right to worship according to the dictates of our conscience, call you this freedom, when the elector smothers his conscience in his ballot, and the worshiper sacrifices his reason in his pew? THE rebellion of atoms would be universal anarchy. THE great consequences of life depend upon the little things of the moment. How do you know what the least thing you do is pregnant with, and how much it may produce? You tell a single lie, and how many lies that may set going. It may be the spark to explode a whole magazine of lies upon the community. Just that one lie you have told may set fire to a whole train of deceit, the evil consequences of which no single man and no community can limit. Speak one kind word, and you do not know how far it may reach in its influence. A man comes down town in the morning, and all seems dark to him, either because his mind or his body is diseased, or some temporary irritability has roused him, or some sad news has fallen upon him; he comes out, at any rate, with the conviction that all is dark with him, that everything is unfortunate and wrong. He meets a friend who speaks one kind word to him, and then passes on; and as the sun sends a ray of sunshine across the sky that was before dark and lowering, and changes the whole appearance of nature, that -one kind word sends a ray of sunshine into his heart, and changes the whole world, and he does his work better all the day long in consequence of it.

TRUTH is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life.

WHETHER we truly enjoy any lot in life depends upon the disposition we carry into it. The kind of eyes with which we see, the kind of temper with which we act, will make much of little or little of much.

EVEN plenty itself, the most profuse evidence of God, is often that which most shuts us in from him. In the blasted harvest and the unfruitful year, perhaps, we fall upon our knees, and think of his agency who retains the shower and veils the sun. But when the wheels of nature roll on their accustomed course, when our fields are covered with sheaves and our garners groan with abundance, we may lift a transient offering of gratitude; yet in the continuous flow of prosperity are we not apt to refer largely to our own enterprise, and bless our " luck?" No community is so safe as that where God’s attributes are sovereign in their essential unity, a community strong with that justice which is the pillar, that mercy which is the glory of his throne. THE glory of revealed religion is the fact that it confirms the grandest truths of nature. Christ rested upon them as admitted propositions. A MAN can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon’s mouth, and encountering the enemy on the field. THE prize of the Christian life; what is it? Do you think it is a heavenly crown, a golden harp, a white robe, a comfortable place in heuven, and then a limitation?

No; heaven is better than this, a higher field of action everywhere, broader vision, sweeter and more glorious conceptions of God, and more of the excellence of Jesus Christ. No heart is so glued into its socket that it does not swim in a little sea of affection.

How can we be forgiven unless we forgive? How can we have our sin remitted, sent away, unless hatred, revenge, selfishness the root of all sin, be removed from us? Is not the one, by the inevitable nature of things, the measure of the other?

TIIE more we become like God the more sure y do we recognize him, until, as the heart grows clear and calm, it reflects him like a mirror.

PKATER is natural. Every man has in him the elements of religion; folded up it may be in secularity and sin, unheeded and forgotten; yet at times in some hour of silent thought, or some shock of Providence responding like a great deep to the highest realities of being; to the mysteries of God and immortality, of life and death.

! there is not one so hard, so reckless, drifted away so utterly from the current of humanity, as never to experience blessed desires and more than earthly influences.

There is not one vfho has not, at some period, felt the impulse and the necessity of prayer, and lifted up his cry to God as his helper. But the wonder is that these seasons are not more common, more habitual; that, living as we do in contact with the infinite God, wrapped around by his almighty Spirit, we should not feel it more; that, considering the magnificence of the universe about us, the varying loveliness of the day, the rolling splendors of the night, we should not gladly seize our privilege to pass within the veil, and commune face to face with the Being who made it all; that, throbbing with the consciousness of filial dependence, we should not lean upon the arm of our everlasting Father; that, knowing our exposures, our follies, and our faults, we do not seek the succors of his Spirit and the shield of his protection; that, with no intervening meditation, no sense of the invisible God, we should sink to the embrace of slumber, and leap into the morning light; making our homes but inns of bodily refresbment, and all outside a mart of worldly care; as though life, embosomed as it is in wonder, breathing as it does with unseen influences, were but a flow of sensual interests, and " rounded with a sleep." No exclusive sphere bounds the highest privileges of religion. The qualifications for communion and intimacy with God do not inhere in those gifts which are the endowment, and too often the pride, of the few, but in the profound depths of that nature which is the inheritance of all. And when we see the proud philosopher denying the reality of religion, and cavilling at its truths, let not our faith be shaken; for his vision, after all, is dim. He only reasons from what he perceives, and perceives only with the head; while thousands, in the revelation of their own experience, know that which he repudiates. In the serenity of humble trust, in the transparent depths of sanctified affection, they see God. IN its highest significance the material universe is not a collection of dry facts and rigid laws, is not the unrolling of a gorgeous epic or artistic masterpiece; but it is a temple filled with God’s presence, and declaring its final cause to be his manifestation and his praise.

IN" the course of history, those who have denied themselves for truth and righteousness, those who have shed out their love like balm, those who have stood in their lot and meekly endured, begin to touch the hearts of men, and sway their souls. As ages roll on, the mere splendor of achievement fades, and the nature of the deed is regarded. The tinsel of the conqueror drops off, and the grossness of his ambition, the blood-spots of violence, and the canker of selfishness appear. Yes, as ages roll on mankind begin to recognize their real benefactors and the true heroes. The sweat of productive toil comes to be esteemed more than princely blood; and they who have made grass and corn to grow than they whose harvests of honor have sprung in the furrows of battle, and been reaped with sickles of death. The world’s actual monarchs come up in the soiled garments of labor, with their hands on the printing-press and the plough. They draw near from the fields of exploration, whence they have plucked the trophies of discovery and touched the magnetic pulses of human thought. They issue from low lanes of suffering, followed by the blessings of the poor, and they control the affections of the race with the sceptre of a healing mercy. They riso from the red dust of the amphitheatre, they leap from the martyr’s fire, and go upward, with their unyielded truth, to shine as stars forever. So speaks the inevitable law of events, " Fall 12* back, ye glorified Caesars and Napoleons! ye possessors of a dead renown and of a material good! Give place in honor, in power, in permanent dominion, to the patient, the loving, the faithful, the meek, and let them thus ’inherit the earth.’ Above all, in the wreck of dynasties, of institutions of old violence and cruel wrong, come Thou who didst not strive nor cry, who didst not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax! Come, pierced and gentle One, stained not with the blood of others, but with thine own, and ascend to universal dominion!"

SINCERE desire after God, and actual communion with him, constitute the real life of religion. THAT which evinces the personal grandeur of Christ is not so much the gospel he gave as the spirit of the times which have succeeded him. THE thought of God is as a chastening cloud, to qualify the dazzling temptations of prosperity; and in all the night-time of sorrow, and through the dark valley, his presence is a pillar of fire.

GOD is spirit, and therefore can be discerned by our spiritual nature only. He is moral, and so can be known only by moral affinities. He is love, and is to be apprehended by deep and right affections. Therefore the pure in heart, and they alone, see him, of course, not with any outward, palpable vision, for thus is he apparent to none, but with that true seeing which consists in. intimate knowledge and interior apprehension. As he who haa something of genius in himself enters into the spirit of genius, and therefore most truly sees or apprehends it, as we see our friend, by intense sympathy, by a similarity or a correspondence of quality on our own part, so the pure in heart see God Sense alone, intellect alone, cannot discern him. We must exercise those affections, those religious faculties of our being, which, forever unfolding, will, throughout eternal ages, bring us nearer and nearer to him. We must cherish that love and that faith which will render this life sacred and blessed. Then, even here, we shall always stand in his presence. Then, everywhere within the scope of the sanctified earth and the condescending heavens we shall see God. WHEN Christianity appeared, the clouds which hovered over the spirit of Socrates and drifted before Plato’s vision broke into a constellation of sweet and awful truths.

IT takes something of a poet to apprehend and get into the depth, the lusciousness, the spiritual life of a great poem. And so we must be in some way like God in order that we may see God as he is. THE prime object of Christianity was, not to gratify the curiosity of man, but to attract and sanctify his affections; not to exercise his mere reasoning faculties, and multiply the data of his scientific knowledge, but to enrich his soul with love and faith. It came not to solve problems in metaphysics, but mysteries in life; not to give sharply-defined revelations, but to clarify the interior vision and heave up the whole spiritual ground- work. It came not as a mere philosophy, to propound and instruct, but as a religion, to regenerate, to brood over the solemn depths and chaotic elements of our nature, until it should emerge in a new creation of harmony and joy, glowing with divine beauty and pregnant with holiness. And while it is in harmony with the grandest action of the intellect while in order to accomplish its result it makes use of the intellect, and by that result the intellect itself is quickened and enlarged the main point of its effort is this moral centre, this lever of the soul, this throne and gateway of the powers of life, thronged with motives, sentinelled by passions, and too often polluted by sensuality and sin the heart.

REASON about it as we may, there stands the ineffaceable fact in the annals of the world, as distinctly marked upon the face of the earth as the geological epochs are marked beneath its surface, of a general shifting of thought and tendency, a starting forward of humanity by a sudden impulse, a setting in of a fresh current, a voice speaking far behind the oracle, a strange, glorious, shimmering fire above the statue, the crystalization of new ideas around the abutments of the old past; until at last, when the old inherent vestiges of antiquity crumbled away, there appeared a youthful civilization more glorious and more vigorous than the old ever was, even in its prime. That is simply the alphabet of history. It is a statement of mere facts, account for it as we will. As Christians, we explain this extraordinary revelation by the fact that precisely upon the boundary-line between that ancient and modern history we detect the advent of the Gospel. We maintain the correspondence of these results to the impulse which appears in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

CHRIST could not have been our exemplar by despising sorrow, by treating it with contempt; but only by shrinking from its pain, and becoming intimate with its anguish, only as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." As we can only account for the centrifugal force of our planet by referring it to the primitive impulse imparted direct from the hand of God, so can we account for the phenomena of Christian civilization, and Christian influence in the world, only by attributing the first movement to the personal action of Jesus Christ.

WHAT we can do, now that Christianity has been illustrated for us, is not to be confounded with what we might have done had we never received that illustration. Criticism performs but a sorry task, when it overlooks the importance of Christ’s agency, and speculates upon the capacity of other light than his. It works in an ungenerous as well as an ungrateful spirit. It sees by the instruments which he furnished, and then boasts its own powers of vision. The great doctrines which Jesus exhibited those orbs of truth, and love, and holiness the philosophic critic reduces to their primal elements, and then boasts how he, too, could discover and construct. As well say that in the nebulous womb of matter you can find every bone and artery of a planet, and draw hence the structure of a harmonious and perfect world.

IT is not simply retribution for sin, but the consequences of the nature of sin, that it separates us from God.

BEFORE the advent of Jesus, something was needed by humanity, and sought for, which it could not obtain itsel It is this desire, this want, that sighs wistfully from the great heart of heathenism. It is this that heaves up in broken longings from among the symbols of a declining worship. It is this that clouds with dissatisfaction the glory of the oracle, and strips the veil from the beautiful deceits of mythology. It is this that breathes in snatches of fragmentary music, wandering as if in search of the full harmony. It was because of this that philosophy struggled but could not attain, and the wisest intellects groped omong strange splendors and awful shadows. It was this that made the world look, at the time Christ came, like a world in eclipse, an exhausted world, a world of orphanage. He filled a great want, which until then was unsatisfied. JETe realized an ideal, which until then was incomplete. He imparted a power to the soul, which until then it did not possess. And there is no reason for maintaining that the experience of the past would not be the experience of the present, if Christianity had not appeared.

IT is the veiled angel of sorrow who plucks away one thing and another that bound us here in ease and security, and, in the vanishing of these dear objects, indicates the true home of our affections and our peace. THE power by which Christ wrought in the world is something more than the power of moral precepts. He uttered truth in such a way that it went into the souls of men. It flashed upon them with the sanction of eternity.

It caused the great idea of duty to rise above the narrow and temporary sanctions of the hour, and to be connected with the idea of God and immortality.

CHRISTIANITY was, Christianity is, a system of life communicated from God to the soul of man, embodied in Jesus Christ, who is himself the essential revelation, who inspires each truth, forces home each moral precept, and with his own personality affirms the miracles. This is the principle which, when poured into the hearts of men, caused them to feel that Jesus spake as never man spake. This shifted the very level of their nature, and opened heights of divine reality which they had never known before. This gave them sublime vision. This transfigured their personality so that peasants became apostles, weak ones heroes, and lowly ones stood up undaunted before priests and kings. It flashed upon atheistic senses a revelation of God, new thoughts and convictions burning into the soul. It tore away the veil from the grave. It reduced and diminished earthly things, and it expanded heaven.

IT is the wonder of almost every word of the New Testament that it carries live truth, just as a live coal carries fire, and carries this truth through all ages and all times; that it is just as applicable to one man in his condition as to another man in a very different condition, to the man in the nineteenth century as to the man in the first century.

TAKE away the personal Christ from the gospels, leaving the same precepts and doctrines, and the whole aspect of Christianity would change, as the aspect of the earth changes when the sun goes down. The same eternal mountains lift their heads to heaven; the same rivers flow onward. But their animation is gone; they are cold, and gray, and dark. Thus would Christianity be without that central personage, around which all its glories cluster, from which they stream.

IT is not said " Blessed are they that mourn, because they mourn, but because they shall be comforted.

Mourning is consecrated as leading to higher and profounder joy. And in the general spirit of true religion we find no encouragement for fixed melancholy or asceticism, but a disposition which throws over life and the universe a tempered yet serene and cheering light.

TO-DAT the Christian world presents the spectacle of a grand and glorious unity. The most diverse forms of faith and ceremony, gliding in opposite spheres of thought, and moving in the most eccentric orbits of opinion, are illuminated with the glory of one great event, and gravitate to a common centre. The churchbells of innumerable sects are all chime-bells, to-day, ringing in sweet accordance throughout many lands, and awaking a great joy in the heart of our common humanity. The hard, cold winter season grows genial, as though the world in its frosty veins felt the warmer quickening of that ’glad mysterious hour when the infant Christ was borne upon its bosom. His advent reflects its gladness and its glory upon the hour. It is a time for the sympathies of a common faith, for the feeling of a common humanity; it is a time for sectarian differences to melt away in these grand fundamentals, upon which the broadest church confessedly stands.

Nay, even international asperities may grow calm upon this beautiful Christmas Sabbath,* and this political storm, so harshly rising, may lull for the while, and give place to the sweet, soothing zephyrs playing alike through the forests of Maine and the pines of Carolina, and proclaiming a union stronger than constitutional compacts, and broader than national lines.

* 1859.

THERE is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.

WHAT mean the discipline and trial of life? What mean the dark shocks of disappointment, the breaking of hopes, the sundering of humanties, the terrible baptism of suffering and of fire, if there is not something beyond?

If in every bath of sweat and tears, every drop of sorrow, every falling wave, there is something by which I am led more near to God, by which my soul is made stronger and purified, then I can understand life. But if I am hurled in the chaos of life, battered by sorrow to-day, and kicked by misfortune to-morrow, stricken by my fondest hopes, deluded and deceived, and all is to end in nothingness, I must confess that you present a problem I cannot solve.

HE who cannot retire within himself, and find his best resources there, is fitted, perhaps, for the smoother passages of life, but poorly prepared for all life. He who cannot and dare not turn away from outward engrossments, and be in spiritual solitude, who is afraid or sickens at the idea of being alone, has a brittle possession in all that happiness which comes from the whirl, and dance, and surface of things. One hour may scatter it forever.

THERE is efficacy in disappointment or adversity, when it occurs as a foil to our plans; when it breaks in upon the tenor of our days as a counterexperience; when it darkens the summer sky of life with the suggestion of higher and profounder realities; when the soul is loosened from its fancied security in earthly good, and sent in search of substantial rest; and the glittering forms of things that seemed so compact and solid at the going down of the sun, as they stand up in relief amidst the infinite spaces of being and the night-like glories of eternity, fade and look empty. And it is in trial it is in poverty, pain, and persecution that the strength of the human spirit is tested, and its energies summoned forth, as all our physical power is challenged when thrown among the crests and hollows of the sea; and one strikes out with a bold vigor when thus overwhelmed who before could not swim a stroke. Often a great sorrow rushing over the soul like a freshet has swept away its upper-soil, and laid bare unsuspected treasures. Thus has adversity stung the sluggish man to enterprise. Thus has obloquy roused the timid to courage. Thus has the uncouth nature grown beautiful with sympathy and fidelity. Thus has woman risen from her drooping reliance to a heroic strength, and covered her breast with a mailed fortitude. The brilliant beauty that only kindled passion has been transcended by a loveliness shining out from her deeper nature in lineaments of patience, fidelity, and affection. That which flickered only as a coquettish light in the saloon and the boudoir steadies itself into a pure and holy flame, a taper for the sick-bed vigil, a lamp for the dungeon’s gloom. So in sorrow and in suffering are hidden the springs of a peace and a power that can be affected by no outward storms. It is a great thing, when one has grown strong through that trial which melts away the dross and proves the true gold; when, being driven to the handling of many expedients, he has been trained to detect all counterfeit comforts, and to discriminate between unsubstantial good and that which abides every test; when he has learned to dispense with all outward props, can let riches, honors, health drop away from him, and yet feel that all this does not touch his real life; while above these coils of uncertainty and mutation he lifts his naked personality erect in its own spiritual resources. Surely, prosperity has never generated such depths of power, such intrinsic and full consolation. THE great test which proves the excellence of the religion of Christ is its adaptation to man in solitude; because it is then that he is thrown upon the resources of his own soul, upon his inner and everlasting life.

SORROW as illustrated in Christ’s life, and as interpreted in his scheme of religion, has assumed a new aspect, and yields a new meaning. Its garments of heaviness have become transfigured to robes of light, its crown of thorns to a diadem of glory; and often for some one whom the rich and joyful of this world pity, some suffering, struggling, overshadowed soul, comes there a voice from heaven, " This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."

CHRISTIANITY is revealed to us in the form that walked the streets of Jerusalem and the shores of the Galilean lake; that bent over the sick couch and the bier; mingled in the festival of Cana, and reclined at the Last Supper; stood in serene dignity before the judgment-seat of Pilate, and bore a cross up the way of sorrow; and hung and prayed upon the accursed wood, and came forth radiant from the sleep of death and the broken chambers of the sepulchre. WHEN men, instead of being anchored by the head, drift by the heart, we may believe that they are moved by some deep current of religious feeling, which is better than a shallow surface of conformity or a dead calm of acquiescence.

IF one’s conscience be dead as a stone it is as heavy too. In such a case there would be a consciousness of being unconscious, a sense of life in death. A PERJURED spirit continually feels its false oath hurled back upon it from heaven; fraud spoils the taste of luxury, and makes ill-gotten wealth a cankering chain;. murder always hears its brother’s blood crying from the ground, making the crowd more solitary than a wilderness, and the desert more populous than a city, while sometimes that pale face hangs in the sunniest prospects by day, and that awful memory breeds a fountain of stark and ghastly dreams by night. These men, all unwhipped of human justice as they may be, in the heavy consciousness of sin hear thunders more deep than the sentence of its judgment-seat, and are girt with a burning cincture more terrible than its punishment. THE great cheat and delusion set before every generation is simply this tradition, that there is anything like real substantial pleasure in sin.

I DO not know a more dreadful thing than at a time of trouble going out and calling in God as a stranger.

RELIGION is rich with glad influences; for it is a principle infinitely varied, it presides over the different phases of human life, and sanctions and hallows them all.

Religion forbids folly, forbids excess, forbids an empty, frivolous living, and who wishes to live so? Religion bids us have a time for all things, and wisely live for a higher and purer desting than any of this earth. It bids us not be profane, or indolent, or licentious, or wasteful. Who wishes to be so? But it does not strip us of one, true joy; it forbids not one innocent amusement A COMMUNITY wrapped up in secularity and sin, with all its gay variety and all its bustle, regarded by a vision of spiritual discernment, seems dead and desolate. Yes, those diligent forms appear as lifeless as the embalmed nations who people the catacombs of Thebes; and the appeals of religion, the incentives to higher life, the moving presence of God, is as unfelt amid this waste of worldliness as the wind that sighs over the unconscious sands of the desert.

THERE must be something beyond man in this world.

Even on attaining to his highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against his cage. There is something beyond, deathless soul, like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the ocean to which you belong!

WE have a moral authentication of God in our own souls, answering to the image that comes to us in Jesus Christ.

CHRISTIANITY gives us no hint that evil is only ap- ’ parent, the reverse side of a fact the obverse of which is good, the unsubstantial shadow of a blessed purpose, hideous to our limited vision, but beautiful in the all-comprehending sight of God. This idea, therefore, at the strongest, is but a surmise, and, as I think, it is not a reasonable surmise. I cannot believe there is any such oblique puzzle in the universe as that sin is one thing to man, and another in the sight of God; that as it revolves through the depths of our consciousness it is wrong, but as it turns in the light of his omniscience it is right.

TOUCH a man’s heart, and you lay hold of the helm that steers him; you reach a power that lies deeper than appearances, and behind reason. Thence proceed the shapings of circumstance, the interpretations of outward existence, and the interior scenery of the soul; for " out of the heart are the issues of life." A LIE is black, whiten it as you will.

How and what is that power that works in the shooting of a crystal, and binds the obedience of a star; that shimmers in the northern aurora, and connects by its attractions the aggregated universe; that by its unseen forces holds the little compass to the north, blooms in the nebula and the flower, weaves the garment of earth and the veil of heaven, darts out in lightning, spins the calm motion of the planets, and presides mysteriously over all motion and all life? And what is life, and what is death, and what a thousand things that we touch, and experience, and think we know all about?! as science and nature open upon us, we find mystery after mystery, and the demand upon the human soul is for faith, faith in high, yea, in spiritual realities; and this materialism that would shut us in to death and sense, that denies all spirit and all miracle, is shattered like a crystal sphere, and the soul rushes out into wide orbits and infinite revolutions, into life, and light, and power, that are of eternity, that are of God! THE alphabet, to the little child, is as the nebula to the philosopher. They both answer the great end of stimulating curiosity; and when the soul penetrates one secret it passes with additional power to the solution of a higher, all the while receiving into itself a golden residuum, a permanent virtue, which is the best and final result. THE mere a priori assertion of impossibility, by a little creature who with all his philosophy cannot look much beyond the planet Jupiter, and who with all his sounding lines cannot reach the centre of the earth, that God Almighty, who spins these burning wheels at night, could not, with all his wisdom and power, heal the sick and raise the dead, would be simply ludicrous, if it did not in fact produce such serious scepticism.

HE who will be serious in the work of spiritual discipline, who will act from a vital law of duty, must endure struggles and conflicts than which there is nothing more solemn under the sun.

JOHN HANCOCK, when the Council met in Boston, in the stormy days of the Revolution, and talked of letting the British into the city, though he owned, probably, more property than any other man in Boston, said, "Burn Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar, if the public good requires it" We like to hear such things; but why don’t men say, " Burn the richest treasure I have got, if it corrupts my soul. Burn down the pinnacles of my pride, my worldly interest, if they stand in the way of my attainment, and fulfilment of the great pattern which has been shown me in the mount?"

GOD, spirit, immortality, instead of being inconsistent with what we know, are what we might most legitimately deduce from it, what we might expect from the light that trembles behind that curtain of mystery which bounds all our sensuous knowledge.

MYSTERIES are all about ns, but faith sees light beyond and around them all. Have you recently laid down the dead in their place of rest? Cold and crushing, then, is that feeling of vacancy, that dreary sense of loss, that rushes upon you, as you look through the desolate chambers without, through the desolate chambers of the heart within. But will not He who calls out from the very dust where your sleepers lie the flowers of summer, and who in the snows that enwrap their bed cherishes the germs of the glorious spring-time, will not He who works out this beautiful mystery in nature bring life from the tomb and light out of darkness?

THERE is a spiritual region in and above the nature of every man, where belong the primal patterns of things, whence come the strongest inspirations, and which more or less completely casts the mould of our conduct and character.

ALL natural results are spontaneous. The diamond sparkles without effort, and the flowers open impulsively beneath the summer rain. And true religion is a spontaneous thing, as natural as it is to weep, to love, or to rejoice. No stiff, cumbrous, artificial form can be substituted for it. The soul that possesses it breathes it out in good words and good deeds from a natural impulse. It rises to God in devotion, it flows out to man in kindness, as naturally as the dew-drop rises to the sun, or the river rushes to the sea. It acts not from mere interest or fear.

It is seraphic exaltation of being, throbbing in harmony with the will of God, from which. right action follows as a matter of course. As God does good because he is good, so does the truly religious" soul.

HE who trusts in the word of God knows that he will find nothing in the material universe but the will of God.

THINK for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor’s thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

WHAT a power has the mind evinced in astronomy! Its vision extends into future ages, before -which the years of the earth dwindle to nothing. Its calculations arc prophecies. It makes a chronometer of the sun, an index of the comet. It sets the long marches of eternity to the chime of the morning stars. What is this power? Does it perish with the body that engirts it?... It cannot be.

Mind is deathless. Is it possible that man, who has been led forward from age to age through a splendid succession of achievements, until he has transformed this material world and made it an instrument of power, strung the lightning, and made it work for him, rode on wheels of thunder, with banners of flame; is it possible that man, working upward from this ideal, is simply a clod upon the earth? The moment you think of this power to control and master material things you fall back upon the consciousness that you have a soul, and that there is more evidence than you have supposed of its existence. In fact there is more proof of a soul than of a body. When a man asks me what proof I have of a soul, I reply by asking him, What proof have you of a body? You have more logical difficulty to prove an outward world than a soul. Spiritual consciousness, mounting aspiration, ideal influences have controlled you all through life.

IF Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the worthies of old cluster on the heavenly hills; if Moses wears a glory more celestial than that which he bore from the awful mount; if Elijah is clothed with a radiance brighter than the wheels of his fiery chariot; if Stephen’s face still shines like an angel’s, but is mingled now with no hue of death; if all these are existent yet because God is not a God of the dead, but of the living let us feel that even the least find a home somewhere in the hospitable universe, and in the sustaining omnipresence of the Father. THE eye would be useless in total darkness, and the light would be insignificant if it struck upon a sightless world. There is more expressive evidence of design, then, in the reciprocal fitness than in the intrinsic arrangements of each.

THERE is no night in heaven, shall endless night brood over any part of this great universe?! will it not be that in the end there shall be no night at all? no night for us, no night for those we love, the wandering and the lost? How bright is such an anticipation! From every world that rolls sweet music gushing out, on every crystal wall white robes and starry crowns; and over every radiant isle and every glassy sea over all the boundless universe no night!

MEN constitute eras. Washington himself was the embodiment of the Revolution, and may fitly personate to other men and other ages the principles of that movement. But let not even the greatness of Washington overshadow the merits of the least of those who labored and sacrificed in that early struggle. They come up before us to-day from many a battle-ground, from many a post of duty; from the perilous enterprise and the lonely night-watch! The pageant of this hour sinks from my sight. This temple of industry,* with all its symbols of civilization, dissolves into thin air. These tokens of a great and prosperous people pass away. This magnificent city dwindles to a provincial town. I am standing now upon some villagegreen, on an early summer morning, when the dew is on the grass, and the sun just tips the hills. I see before me a little band clothed in the garb that is now so venerable.

There are the cocked-hat, the continental coat, the wellworn musket. They have turned away from their homes; they have turned from the fields of their toil; they have heard the great call of freedom and of duty, and before God and man they are ready. Hark! it is the tap of a drum, and they move forward to the momentous issue. That drum-beat echoes around the world! That movement was the march of an irresistible idea, the idea of * Crystal Palace, July 4th. the spiritual worth and the inalienable rights of every man, out of which grow the stability of the nation and the unity of the world.

WE cannot consider nature as meant merely for secular uses. It contains something that we cannot wholly employ in eating, or sleeping, or travelling, or making money. We can wield the sunbeam and harness the lightning; but there are powers, sights, and sounds in the glorious world about us which we cannot break into our daily work, or bend to our sensuous necessities. Nor is nature fully explained in scientific statements. All its expression is not exhausted upon the intellect. It fulfils a higher office than that of teaching us geometry, or astronomy, or geology. These truths themselves have an end higher than their scientific significance. Nature teaches us religious truth, it enriches us with larger spiritual life, it kindles in us the fire of devotion, it exalts us to the idea of immortality, it draws us into communion with God.

I THINK it would be easier to toss a Pope’s bull into the fire, to face a whole diet, to steer a ship into wide solitudes, than it is to do the little work or duty which presses every moment upon the will, and the pressure of which no eye recognizes but that of God. THE cross of Christ! There centre our hopes, there die our fears, there fall our sins, there gushes our penitence, there beams the light of blessed assurance upon our tears.

RELIGION is the most substantial thing in the world; it can take more hard knocks than anything else. Geology has jammed great boulders against it, and it is not even scratched; astronomy has assailed it, yet amid the bright spheres of heaven it lifts its glorious head. It has stood all the wear and tear of all sciences and all discussion; it is the most substantial thing you can think of; it is the most robust thing in existence. Do not think you can hurt it by taking it into your work-shop. Let it out of your close pocket; it will suffer there. The only thing that religion dreads is lack of room, lack of freedom, lack of breath. Take it out of your pocket and bring it into everything. Do not fear that it will desecrate religion to bring it in contact with the world. It will consecrate the world; it will consecrate every deed and every act, and make them glorious.

CHRIST has triumphed over sin, and sorrow, and death. Crown him with thorns, then! they are the fittest emblems of those evils which he has made his trophies.

Music, sculpture, poetry, painting, these are glorious works; but the soul that creates them is more glorious than they. The music shall die on the passing wind, the poem may be lost in the confusion of tongues, the marble will crumble and the canvas will fade, while the soul shall be quenchless and strong, filled with a nobler melody, kindling with loftier themes, projecting images of unearthly beauty, and drinking from springs of imperishable life. SHOULD the world be shattered upon its golden axle, we cannot get beyond the mercy and the compassion of God. Should this crystal habitation dissolve, God’s nature will remain the same. THE stars are beautiful; many and deep Are the wonderful mysteries that they keep.

Through the out-spread space they shine and roll, Like solemn thoughts o’er a prophet’s soul.

They speak of peace to heart-strings crushed; Faith looks to them and its doubts are hushed; They glide and they shine to the spirit’s eye As things untarnished, and bright, and high; And it yearneth and hopeth from them to soar When it looks through these fleshly bars no more.

GENIUS holds its universal dominion because it touches the deepest suggestions and utters the multiform experiences of a common nature.

CHRIST is the essence of all law, and -when we have his spirit there is no trouble about the penalties of the law.

LET science extend the domain of actual knowledge, and lay bare as it may the secrets of the material world.

It only exposes more and more the proportions of the great cathedral, and shows us the lamps of God’s glory, and the infinite recesses of his love. It only wafts us on through the ever-rolling harmonies of the universe, until we pause before that awful veil of mystery in which he hides the essence of his being and the counsels of his thought. is not an end, but a transition-crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration, the secret alembics of vitality.

EVERY duty is great; great, because it tries our principle; great, because for the time being it tries our loyalty to conscience, and our energy and will. THE sacred rights of citizenship belong to every man not because of the height of his station or the weight of his purse, but by virtue of his intrinsic manhood.

WHAT is it we need to preach but this: that for you, afar off, cast away, alienated, bruised, scarred by your sins, God is a father? For it is an eternal fact, not a shifting relation, not a relationship created by your faith or obedience, but an eternal fact revealed through Jesus Christ. We are like passengers in a tempestuous gale. Every object we trusted is shifting before our eyes, and sometimes the waters surge over our souls. We need something to take hold of that shall be fixed and firm when the world reels and our hearts grow faint. What is that but the assurance of this truth declared by Him who came from the bosom of the Father to make it known? A GREAT many men some comparatively small men now if put in the right position, would be Luthers and Columbuses. THE desire of man in all ages for God the longing and seeking after God is proof of the reasonableness of some kind of revelation of God to man. WHEN I go with Christ to Calvary and hear his dying prayer, his mighty yielding up of the ghost, I am constrained to say, " Truly, this was the Son of God." And when I tread with him the rocky pavement of the sepulchre, and feel the thrill of his rising, and hear the rush of angels’ wings go by me, and he stands upon his graveclothes, not all the light that breaks through the unsealed tomb can dissipate my awe. But when I pause with him before Jerusalem, and see his full, fast tears, and hear him weep by the grave of Lazarus, I feel that he was a tender, loving being, sympathizing with humanity, and know it is the " Son of Man " whom I am called to love. COULD the universe be seen in its fulness, it would not contradict the perfect fabric of the gospel. No light from any reservoir of creation shall eclipse the radiance of the Cross, but will make it stand out in more glorious relief, and crown it with a diviner lustre.

WELL will it be for us if, witnessing the greatness of the work that God has wrought without us, we realize the greatness of the work that Christ accomplishes within us, and feel that we carry in our own souls the sublimest creation of the Eternal, a universe more permanent and precious than worlds THE soul which fathoms every league of the celestial arc, knows, as a mariner the sea, the distant latitudes where comets flame, and worlds career, and constellations shake their awful clusters, wanders amid the spectral nebula, and makes suns and systems to be but glittering beads upon the aspiring thread of its induction, cannot perish. There is a future life. In a universe so spherical and whole as this, reason argues that its own incompleteness and capacity for more are suggestive, are prophetical. Under-shadows and cross-lights of mystery, these filmy depths of present being, shudder in sympathy with something beyond.

FASHION is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be. THE beast is to-day as he was in the herds of the Chaldean and the Jew. The ant, though it teaches us with the same rebuke as in the days of Solomon, knows no more, does no more. The bird of the air beats the same trackless path, directed by the all-guiding hand. But to man God has appointed a different destiny, and made him peculiar by the gift of an inspiration, compared with which the glories of the outward universe are dim and perishable. THE fact which startles and contradicts the faith of one man will fall into beautiful harmony with the convictions of another, because of his wider and profounder perception. THE origin of evil may puzzle us: its use no Christian can deny When we take the Christian view of life we discover that not happiness merely, but virtue, holiness, is the great end of man; though happiness comes in as an inevitable consequence and accompaniment of this result. And in the light reflected from this view evil assumes a powerful, and I may say a most beautiful office. It is just as necessary for the attainment of virtue as prosperity or any blessing. Nay, in this aspect it is itself a great blessing, and, " Every cloud that spreads above, And veileth love, itself is love."

It is evident that without the contact of sin and the pressure of temptation there might be innocence, but not virtue. Equally evident does it seem that without an acquaintance with grief there would be but little of that uplifting tendency, that softening of the heart, and sanctifying of the affections which fit us for the dissolution of our earthlyties, and for the communions of the spiritual world.

IT is a striking truth that while the intellect has cavilled and rejected, no one ever approached the gospel from the moral side who did not find it satisfactory, and instantly, though increasingly, apprehend its impregnable evidences. FROM the background of pain and sorrow often break out the noblest and most winning manifestations of humanity. The depth of human sympathy, the wealth of its love, is displayed in scenes of tribulation and need. The robes of charity show their whiteness amid the gloom of poverty and distress. Christ-like patience is born of suffering, the soul shines out in its essential splendor through the medium of bodily anguish, and faith trims her lamp in the shadow of the grave. Shall we call this existence a trivial thing, whose very miseries are the occasions of the noblest triumphs, whose trials may be converted into divine strength, whose tears may change into celestial dew, and nourish flowers of immortal hope?

NATURE is incomplete in its expression without Christianity. The revelations of the material universe melt into shadow, and a nebula of mystery hangs around them all. They suggest more than they can answer. Christianity fulfils that " elder Scripture." It is the Apocalypse to its Genesis.

IT is not necessary to darken the present in order to enhance the excellence of the future; and a true spiritual diligence will best be quickened by considering the present as part of the future.

THERE is no reason for maintaining that the experience of the past would not be the experience of the present if Christianity had not appeared If intellect and affection, if intuition and sentiment could have achieved this profound moral life, and this firm, transcendant faith, why did they not do so before Christ? Were there not then as noble hearts and as colossal intellects as now? Did not these intuitions work as curiously, did not reason seek as ardently for truth? Did not the moral nature gravitate as spontaneously towards an ideal virtue? Did not Love mourn as tenderly over the graves of the dead?

If, then, this high faith, this spiritual life, are merely natural developments, why not known before? IN his lowest estate man is compelled to be a seeker; but then he easily finds what he seeks. In a higher condition he cuts loose from all his former trust, and demands truth so broad and deep that Christ alone can fill it.

MIGHTY has been the antagonism in the world between Christ’s spirit of mercy and man’s spirit of selfishness. Where the one has gone abroad as an iron force, the other has proceeded as a moral power. Where the one has swept like the tempest, the other has followed like the summer dawn. Where the one has embattled armed legions, the other has sent teachers of truth, missionaries of peace, and sisters of charity. Where the one has bleached the earth with human bones, the other has clothed it with shining harvests. Where the one haa reared shambles of lust and marts of mammon, the other has built asylums and hospitals and opened countless channels of benevolence. Where the one has blotted heaven with the smoke of worldliness, and shut us in with walls of materialism, the other has revealed the starry prospect of immortality. Where the one has degraded man, nourished scepticism, and engendered despair, the other has kindled in the soul a consciousness of its destiny, and poured the great influences of redemption. IN the religious view, all things stream from God’s throne, and whatever sky hangs over them the infinite one is present; prosperity is the sunshine that he has sent, and Faith as she weeps, beholds a rainbow on the cloud. THE Christian result in the soul of man is, that he shall be enabled to do what he likes. It is so because the spirit of the Lord in the heart of a man makes him like to do God’s will A SHARP disappointment will suddenly drive us to God. The mariner of life sails unthinking over its prosperous seas, but a flaw of storm will bring him to his prayers. WHEN intellect attempts to define and grasp God it thereby gets confused. It darkens and does not reveal.

It gives us riddles, not revelations. The pure heart alone lies like a mirror, and reflects God just as the still lake reflects the starry heavens. THE great end of being is not fulfilled in any new routine of obedience. The spirit of duty is greater than any form of duty, and there should be no limit to moral effort, as there is none to moral attainment THE mechanism of the state is not merely for classes, or for property, but for the great interests of the whole, and the true interests of the individual.-

0, IP there were a real freedom, that comes from the doing of God’s will in this land, how the dry bones would begin to shake, how corrupt institutions would begin to tremble, how the chains would snap, how the abominations that make us a hissing and a by- word would pass away! For where -the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and not merely Fourth-of-July talk about it.

LIBERTY is an old fact. It has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor.

WE are never to rest. There is to be no point in our spiritual career where we can touch our aphelion, and henceforward revolve in a fixed circle. There is to be no time when we are to aspire no more, and to attempt nothing greater. THE conservative may clamor against reform, but he might as well clamor against the centrifugal force. He sighs for the " good old times," he might as well wish the oak back into the acorn.

VIRTUE, morality, religion by -whatever term we may call it is not a set of regulations, but a constant growth and aspiration, an increasing assimilation to God, a harmonious condition of the soul, when it hangs self r balanced in holiness and love, and independent of all sanctions but such as inhere in these.

MUNIFICENT nature follows the methods of the divine and true, and rounds all things to her perfect law. While nations are convulsed with blood and violence, how quietly the grass grows; and God now sees the earth tending constantly in one direction, growing truer and better, a minim in his universe, driving on its point of melody to swell the chorus of his majestic theme. THE enormous sun is adjusted to the weed by the wall, and the little leaf has sympathies with Sirius. As art is a true expression of the soul’s ideal, let us compare the loftiest exhibition of character that appears in a Grecian statue with the best that speaks from the marble of Angelo or the canvas of Raphael, and we shall see how striking is the demand which heathen virtue makes for Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY is, in society, like that agency in the physical world which drives suns and systems on their tremendous track, yet binds them in glittering harmony, holds them to a central order, fills them with joyful life, and illuminates them with universal beauty.

OPINION, so far as it is a matter of*the intellect, cannot justly be charged with the sins of the heart. THE poor shall love the poet, the blessed, pious poor, the sick heart shall feel a new pulse when he breathes, and the noble yet scorned mind shall know that there is a kindred spirit in the world; the universal soul is moved, the sensualist gives signs of life, the mourner dries his tears, the bowed serf takes courage and looks forward, the hoary sinner trembles or melts, old error appears bald and hideous, tyrants shake, thrones totter, fetters snap asunder, and the whole mass of humanity is stirred, as the waters are stirred by the rushing of a swift wind. THE best kind of a pic-nic is a pick at Old Nick, and if he sticks up his head in the shape of a rum-cask or slavery I go for a crack at it.

THERE is one great distinction between the productions of Heathen and of Christian art. While the first exhibits the perfection of physical form and of intellectual beauty, the latter expresses also the majesty of sorrow, the grandcur of endurance, the idea of triumph refined from agony. In all those shapes of old there is nothing like the glory of the martyr, the sublimity of patience and resignation, the dignity of the thorn-crowned Jesus.

It is easy to account for this. In that Heathen age the soul had received no higher inspiration. It was only after the advent of Christ that men realized the greatness of sorrow and endurance. It was not until the history of the Garden, the Judgment-hall, and the Cross had been developed, that genius caught nobler conceptions of the beautiful. This fact is, therefore, a powerful witness to the truth of Christianity. Christ’s personality, as delineated in the gospels, is not only demonstrated by a change of dynasties, an entire new movement in the world, a breaking up of its ancient order; but the moral ideal which now leads human action, which has wrought this enthusiasm, and propelled man thus strangely forward, has entered the subjective realities of the soul, breathed a new inspiration upon it, opened up to it a new conception; and lo! the statue dilates with a diviner expression, lo! the picture wears a more lustrous and spiritual beauty.

Christ, then, has verily lived; for his image has been refleeted in the minds of men, and has fastened itself there among their most intimate and vivid conceptions.

POETRY is the utterance of truth deep, heartfelt truth. The" true poet is very near the oracle.

IF a railroad company is too poor to pay for engines and for iron let it stop. If it does not every consecutive bar of iron is a consecutive deceit, and every old, leaky, dilapidated, dislocated, asthmatic locomotive is a clattering falsehood. A MAN who is simply living by what we call a system of good habits, a habit of temberance, a habit of chastity, a habit of economy, a habit of prudence, has to steady them every time he goes down hill, for fear they will fall off, and push them every time he goes up hill. But when a man has a love of God, and Christ, and goodness, there is no more danger of these falling off and breaking, than of a man’s organism falling to pieces. It becomes a vital element of his being, a central spring, compact and consistent with the whole of his nature. And if occasionally such a man does break out, here and there, in a fault or in a folly, he has within him that which rallies him to act and overcome it.

WE can imagine a world in which there is no work. A world bathed in incessant summer, whose seed-times and harvests are ever mingling, whose springing influences perpetually ascend, whose fruitage perpetually ripens through all the procession of its golden year. A world in which man would never feel the sting of want, and where the felicities of being would unfold without his effort. But we cannot conceive any such world, connected with human peculiarities and necessities, one half, one tithe so glorious as our old world of struggle and of labor. For wherever God has admitted man’s agency the noblest results, the achievements of real worth and splendor are the fruits of patient and sinewy toil. They have come from the suggestions of want and the problems of difficulty; they have been won in wresthng with the elements; they have been torn from the womb of nature.

Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back. The rock at its touch has grown plastic, and the stream obsequious. It has tilled the soil and planted cities. Discovery accompanies it with its compass and telescope. Invention proclaims it with its press, and herald^ it through the earth with its flaming chariot.

It is enriched with " the wealth of nations." It is crowned with the trophies of intellect. Its music rises in the shout of the mariner, the song of the husbandman, the hum of multitudes. It rings in the din of hammers and the roar of wheels. Its triumphal march is the progress of civilization. There are lands of luxurious climate and almost spontaneous production; yet who looks there for freedom and virtue, for the bravest hearts and the noblest souls? But the elements of liberty, the glories of intelligence, the sanctities of home, and the institutions of religion abide in sterner soil and beneath colder skies, where the fisherman feels his way through the mist that wraps the iron sea-coast, and the reaper snatches his harvest from the skirts of winter. And who would not pray, "Give us the manly nerve, the strenuous will, and the busy thought, rather than golden placers and diamond mines "? And instead of a realm sick with spontaneous plenty and desolate with riches, who would not prefer the granite fields that grudge their latent bounty, since they induce not only the exertions but the blessings of toil? THE world is the great place for us to work in, and there is work a plenty for us to do. Any man who does not believe this ought to be shut up in a glass jar, and made to suck God’s atmosphere through a straw. THE brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, and polished, and glorified through the furnace of tribulation.

IF the poor man’s earthly lot is hard, it makes more welcome the suggestions of heaven. The strictures of necessity, the sharp mockeries of disappointment fill him with a sense of dependence, and put his soul in a position to wait upon God. He has his peculiar temptations; yet so long as they do not pin him down and imprison him they do not cause him to become fascinate4 with the world. His upward escape from it is easier than for the rich man. Eternal splendors stream clearer through the rents in his earthly fortune, and divine visitants have a readier access to him. His wealthy brother is shut in with comfort, and forms of luxurious obeisance stand around his bed. But what though his couch be the bare earth, and his canopy the sky? the more immediately is he enfolded by the sanctities that environ our mortal lot. His stony pillow may become, like Jacob’s, the foot of a celestial ladder, the landing-place of angels. THE angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty. But right with them and with us is one and the same thing. THE man of principle needs not the restrictions of seal sr signature, or any legal instrument. He deals in solitude as in public, at midnight as in the sunshine. His aeart is the throne of honor, and his brow the witness of manly integrity. His grasped hand is as good as a bond, and his promise as sterling gold. The complicated interests of men, which so often jar and conflict, are reconciled in him with a beautiful harmony. He is himself the embodiment of justice, the symbol of a perfect society His charities are not the droppings of a formal pity, but the ointment of a yearning love In his soul there is a fountain of humor, and, close by, a fountain of tears. His spirit is an instrument strung to every proper mood, touched by the light graces of the passing hour, or swept by "solemn thoughts that wander through eternity."

TEMPTATION cannot exist without the concurrence of inclination and opportunity A man may spurn evil suggestions ninety-nine times, and yield upon the hundredth, because that jumps exactly with his inclination.

WE make for ourselves the essential character of the conditions in which we are placed. All that is of real moment in our life, all that is enduring, we carry with us we carry in us. THAT pool of loathsome intemperance has been fed by rills trickling fromh eights of respectability and through marble aqueducts of fashion. Those faces, pale, distorted, furious, tossed about in that dark sea of slime and fire, look upward and catch a reflection that plays through the prism of cut-glass decanters and the colors of champagne and cogniac. THE place in which a man stands, and the work he is called upon to do, is secondary to the spirit in which he works, and the result that abides after it. These matters that are talked about so much in the world, these different sorts of position or occupation, what transparent wrappages, what cases of colored glass, what temporary frameworks are they all, inside which plays the essential mechanism of our manhood, involving the same responsibilities and working under the same relentless laws! This soot and blaze, this aristocratic splendor and vulgar grime, are but the varying processes and shifting tints of that great chemistry in which the common humanity is tried out and refined. God weighs the fine gold, and it will be fine gold forever, whether set in a coronet or hammered out in the coarsest drudgery of life.

EACH age holds the contents of all other ages. THE atmosphere in which a man lives he inevitably imparts. There are some people who come upon you like a fog-bank driven by the east wind off from an iceberg, that chills you all through. There are others that make you happy in their presence always. They are like fruits and flowers, and they retain their fragrance and aroma, 0, how long! They send it out to us continually from their hearts and lives. Men are moving zones; the climate in some seems to be frigid; come very near them, and very likely it will make you shudder. Other men are like the tropical heats in the South, they always consume us. Others are calm and temperate, and like the still influences of our northern spring, or like the solemn midnight. THE Uncreated is illustrated in all his creation. That which makes the perpetual noon of heaven shines in every ray of earth. That which belongs to the infinite spirit is reflected in the soul of man. A TRANSCENDENT faith, a cheerful trust turns the darkness of night into a pillar of fire, and the cloud by day into a perpetual glory. They who thus march on are refreshed even in the wilderness, and hear streams of gladness trickling among the rocks.

MOCKERY never degrades the just. The good cannot be shamed. The arrows of persecution, the sharp missiles of scorn glance from them harmless; more than this, they illustrate their virtue. Though it be not true that the man makes the circumstances, it is true that the man gives character to the circumstances. The strong level all obstacles to their purpose. In trial, the good shine with a refined lustre. Wealth, nor power, nor adulation can ennoble the mean. But the righteous turn ignoming into glory. They do not create, but they command. By a virtue that is in them they subdue all accidents into tone and keeping with themselves. Character is greater than circumstances, and may get the mastery over them. The trial of our Savior illustrates this truth. Never did malignant hatred and heartless cruelty accumulate upon their victim grosser insignia of punishment and scorn.

They scourged him, they buffeted him, they spit upon him; but this was not enough. In order to connect the idea of his sovereignty with the meanest ridicule they tore off his garments, threw around his bleeding shoulders a purple robe, placed in his hand as a sceptre a miserable reed, and platting a crown of thorns crowded it, with its rankling points, upon his head, and then, with mock humility and spiteful grimace, did homage to him. But though all this was meant to deride him never did he seem more truly a king. We shudder, but it is at the sacrilegious spirit of his persecutors! We weep it is because that brow of love is lacerated by cruel thornes! But not for an instant does Jesus seem to us debased or contemptible. Vilely arrayed as he is, he stands there amid that brutal soldiery, amid the malignity that peers upon him, a serene and holy CHARACTER, and everything feels its influence... The more they seek to debase him the more majestic he appears. To those mock emblems of sovereignty his pure life imparts a royal lustre.

They degrade not him, but he ennobles them. He comes forth wearing a crown of thorns. To us it is the same as if he wore a diadem.

OUT of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation-robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of heaven.

ALL that affliction of the darkest kind ever can work to the true soul is to awaken it up to spiritual things, to open the clear eye, to make the spiritual reality the more real. If you rightly comprehend it it only strikes that which is round about you, it only removes that which is outward and physical, but it leaves you all the same a greater and a better man fur your trial. THE shadow of death is around you, bereaved mother! and its cold desolation has come between you and your child. You take the little hand, and it lies heavy in your own; you press the lips, and they quiver with no response; and you must put away in the grave the form that has nestled close to your heart, and the head that you have crowned with a thousand prayers and hopes. And you cannot see why we exist at all, why such tender relationships are y/oven to be shattered, and such deep wells of love opened in the human breast only to overflow with tears. Ah! it is because humanity is not an earthly flower, to unfold in bright air and then perish forever; but an undying germ, to struggle upward out of limitation, and find surer root as its props break away, and to be refined by tears, and to shed rich fragrance in the night-time of sorrow, and to glow with a’ more intense and fixed love as its objects vanish from sight. If life is but a form your affliction is inexplicable; but if it is substance if it is intrinsic and inalienable power, excellence, beauty then the bliss of the suffering and the peace of the poor, and the victory of martyrs, and all the fine gold of character that has been smelted in the furnace of trial, illustrate and vindicate the purpose of our being. There is something for man better than happiness, else he might have lived and perished as the lily of the field. There is spiritual strength for him, which is developed by struggling; there is faith whose telescope sweeps the immensities of eternity when the nearer earth is veiled in darkness; there is trust which springs up in the shattering o all earthly supports; and there is that completeness and harmony and divine assimilation of character which is wrought out only by discipline. NOT in the achievement, but in the endurance of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite God.

WE are in a condition of life or death not merely as we do or do not this or that good act, but according as we are or are not in ourselves, essentially good.

TRIBULATION will not hurt you unless it does what, alas! it too often does unless it hardens you, and makes you sour, and narrow, and sceptical. As the eye is fitted to the light, as the ear to sound, so the human soul is fitted to the apprehension of spiritual realities; and it does apprehend these realities, through the veils of the visible detecting the things that are invisible. THE foundations of many a cause now strong and flourishing were laid in tears and blood.

ALL things tell of the universal Father, all things prophecy ultimate good. As science withdraws the veils of nature, in every depth, in every recess, it discovers a ray of that love which was concentrated upon the cross.

It sees no hopeless incongruity. It argues no endless suffering. The keenest analysis can detect no such thing as unmitigated evil. It falls not as a residuum into any crucible. The bright worlds above tell of peace and harmony; and at the farthest verge of creation, as at the centre, their sparkling glories speak of wisdom, beneficence, and design, the moving of a great purpose encompassed by infinite love as by universal space. Thus all nature seems weaving the tissues of a sublime work.

Slowly yet surely, from the seeming evil, evolves the substantial good. The isolated fact which yesterday appeared so contradictory, to-day, as we open upon a higher series, exhibits a beautiful adaptation. The discords which pained us so, as we draw near them swell into a mighty harmony.

WE must look for the primal truths, the authentic elements of things, in that which is spontaneous and universal. THE things that are the most providential in this life are the difficult things. Therein lies the glory of man and the goodness of God. IN the material and the spiritual worlds nothing is at loose ends; but everywhere there is a sacred order, an intelligible tendency, and a fixed result.

WHAT comes out of nature now is religion. The front of sceptical investigation is passing away. The portentious genii issuing from the chemist’s crucible, the nebulous suggestions of the doubtful astronomer, and the like, are all merging into Christian truth, and faith, and knowledge; and we involuntarily cry out, "How marvellous are thy works, Lord! "

FKOM the scientific discoveries of our day we may claim this result: that what we see of the material universe demands our faith in greater powers that we do not see, makes mind, spirit, a clearer reality than matter, and with innumerable voices from awful depths of mystery rebukes that arrogant scepticism that confines all power and being to the sensible world, and will believe only what it sees and comprehends. THE individual and the race are always moving, and as we drift into new latitudes new lights open in the heaven more immediately over us.

WE must study nature not alone in the dry light of reason, but in the glow of religious sentiment. We must stand in that position where a moral light falls upon it, illuminating its hieroglyphic beauty with a clear, spiritual significance. We must see it,all generalized in God; then we may descend to intellectual formulas and definitions The chain of induction which we so painfully elaborate, link by link, must be charged with the magnetism of faith and love. Then will it be traversed by currents of spiritual life, rending the veil of materialism, and opening the mysteries of the universe.

CHRIST saw much in this world to weep over, and much to pray over; but he saw nothing in it to look upon with contempt. THE book of Ecclesiastes would be the gospel if there were no God in whom our minds were stayed, and in whose wise and beneficent purposes, working beyond all human ends, we could trust. IN the mere farm of the work nature will always eclipse art, and take the premiums. There is nothing like her crystal palace out-doors, over whose inaugural beauty the morning-stars sang together, and whose dome is the immensity of light. She will show an insect’s eye to humble all our skill. She will flash her tints from the arc of the rainbow and the gates of the sunset, and make our richest dyes look pale By the side of our finest fabrics she will hang her oriental lilies; yes, her familiar summer flowers; and all their glory cannot be compared to one of these. But when we consider labor as the developed energy of the soul, when we look upon art as representing spiritual substance, then we perceive the real significance of their products. Then every utensil becomes a hieroglyphic of human progress. Then every fabric shows not only what man has wrought out of nature, but what is in him, and goes forth from him, transcending nature.

IF this earth were turned into a physical paradise, and every man made an independent sovereign of the soil, there would still be the same unsatisfied capacities, the same deep moral wants. The great end of man is not to be adjusted to the world, but to be raised above it, and he needs a Redeemer more than a reformer. IN this old world, battle-scarred, sin-stained, brutalized as it is, there was something that Christ could not despise, even the pure Christ. There was something in it that he so loved that he gave his blood -for it. And I know, poor, sceptical, canting philosopher, that the world and humanity are not the mean things you say, because I measure them by the attitude and expression of Christ’s spirit toward them.

PAUL, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, shows how this valley of Baca, bright with angels’ wings, surrounded with a great crowd of witnesses, is a great race-course and field of noble effort, in which men press forward to the highest attainment; not a ball of dust and ashes, not a theatre of sensual action, but a noble field, glorified, lifted up, and lighted with God’s light, full of glorious influences the moment the inward eyes are unsealed.

IT is always the tendency of the highest knowledge to melt off into devotion, to be reverent and thankful, to find God at the end of its explorations.

CHRISTIANITY has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant. THE man who lies down and goes to sleep, instead of doing his work, is not patient, or, if he has patience, it is of the wrong kind, and nobody else has any with him.

God has not any, nor anybody else, with the lazy man.

IT would astonish a man sometimes to take the torch of introspection, and go down through his own heart, and see how many different faces will look out upon him from its chambers, each one himself, in some phase of possibility that lurks in his own nature. IN every step we take, that admonition of an unfinished work speaks to us. Whence comes this restlessness within us? What is the purpose of this unquenched desire within the soul? We secure one end, but still seek for another. We heap up so much wealth, but ask for more. We increase in knowledge, and yet there is a void. We rise in reputation, but we are not satisfied.

No; we cannot be satisfied with anything short of the true end of our being. We cannot be satisfied until Christ is formed in us. THE best method of acquiring the ability to do what we would is to do what we can. THE noblest men of this day are the devoutest men. The greatest thinkers are men who pray, who meditate upon God, in whose hearts roll the old anthems of the church; that have swept up through the ages, with a gush of melody, for nineteen hundred years. They are devotional as well as logical; they feel, as well as think. THE mystery of this soul enshrined in flesh, even though it be sinful flesh, is, that there is in it that which enables it to claim kinship with God; there is in it a nature like to his nature. ye stars that light up the vestibules of heaven! ye glories of creation, with all your magnificence and power! how ye shrivel up and grow dim before the possibilities of the human soul! The poorest beggar has that kinship to God by which he may aspire to be perfect even as God is perfect. THE testimony to Christianity is the witness of human experience. We are made aware of its adaptedness because more and more driven to seek its aid. We discover, that it is the universal and permanent light because we are passing into a circle which that light alone can fill.

We know it to be the word of eternal life, for nothing else answers our questions or confirms our best anticipations.

WE may blossom into angels, for aught we know, angels who cast their crowns before God, praising him continually. But must we stop there? No; the requisition is, " Be ye perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." You never can.be that; and that is the glory of it. You will always be striving for it, always pressing forward, always moving upward; and all eternity becomes a development of effort, a ceaseless growth, a continual aspiration after perfection.

HE who has climbed to Alpine heights of wisdom must be hi&able; for looking off he sees not the dead wall that seems to line our vision, but a universe in which break waves of being without an echo, and around which hangs the awful darkness that conceals the springs of nature and the mysteries of God. THE sails may be set from the proud ship’s masts, the compass may point duly to the north, and the chart be unrolled; but unless a strong hand rests upon the helm, and a master treads the deck, she rolls among the billows, and drifts where the four winds send her. So with every facility for success, and the light of promise in the soul, the man neglecting the lawful means of subsistence cannot expect to find those means working for him without his agency.

How much stronger than the banded legions of the mighty, than the decrees of kings, is one free, earnest soul, as he utters those words which shall move a hundred generations: "Here stand I; I cannot otherwise; God help me."

IF we are hazarding opportunities, and gifts, and faculties for mere earthly and sensual gain; if we are playing for wealth, or pleasure, or fame, instead of living for another life, instead of seeking that we may grow like Christ, what are we but gamesters all?

IT is because we underrate thought because we do not see what a great element it is in religious life that there is so little of practical and consistent religion among us.

COMPLEX as it may be in its operations, our spiritual being in itself is one indissoluble unity. The feelings do not move without some light from the intellect; and the brain feels the pulses of the heart. THE strongest argument against the philosophy of materialism is not dialectic. It leaps out from the very depths of human nature.

THERE is one thing certain: every man has a call from God, and if he really throws himself with earnest heart into life, and asks with a deep sense of moral responsibility " What can I do? " he will find some little shred of power that will catch him to God’s great plan, and weave out results incalculable.

FATALISM, whether it assume the form of torpid acquiescence or of inconsiderate reliance, is not resignation.

It is right to recognize an overruling Providence, but it is a Providence that works with us, not for us. The impatience with which we beat the walls of difficulty, and heave against misfortune, is not an impious discontent, but a spring of noble enterprise, which God encourages, for which he has opened a wide sphere of action, and by which alone we can achieve success. To suppose that he prevents this effort is to suppose that he infringes his own ordinances, established for the wisest and most benevolent ends. To attribute calamity to him, without making this effort, is to confound faith with folly, and religion with laziness. Only by the diligent exertion of our own will can we realize the will of God mysteriously working with us. Only when we have reached the boundary of our extremest effort can we see the superior purpose which encircles us.

I WOULD not give anything for the most eloquent preacher in the world who had not back of that the eloquence of a life of moral power, of a consistent character; and then it is not so much the words that are said as the unction streaming as it were from God himself that has the effect. THE further we penetrate the embankments of evil the thinner the strata appear, while the great underlying power of life is goodness. When we rise above the earthshadows which cover us, and which dwindle away in the universal space filled with God’s love, the further we pierce, and rise, and penetrate, the more do the exceptional facts fall away, and the general rule of goodness appears. The most intelligent faith is the most cheerful faith. Instead of being a mere sentimental conception of God, that he is good, it is a conception confirmed by the broadest knowledge, and by the most solid intelligence.

MERCY among the virtues is like the moon among the stars, not so sparkling and vivid as many, but dispensing a calm radiance that hallows the whole. It is the bow that rests upon the bosom of the cloud when the storm has passed. It is the light that hovers above the judgment-seat.

NATURE is fixed capital; but, if I may use the term, every man in God’s hands, or, as God has sent him into the world, is speculative capital, a possibility that you cannot limit. THE noblest wisdom, the best knowledge of all, is that of a pure, earnest, loving heart. There is a knowledge in which man grows as he truly grows in religion. The harmony without responds to a harmony within. The good man alone reads the wisdom printed on leaf and flower. God has made the sea a great organ, whose pedals and stops are in the heart of the earth; only the good man’s soul discerns its melody. He has made the rainbow beautiful to the eyes of a little child, but only faith and love can interpret its meaning. He has made the stars golden ladders through infinity; only the purified spirit shall tread them. He has given us, best of all, the divine life of Christ; only the Christ-like soul shall understand and live it. Here are sources of knowledge, here is a power, richer than any other, which the ignorant may possess, and the wise be ignorant of. THE deepest life of nature is silent and obscure; so, often, the elements that move and mould society are the results of the sister’s counsel and the mother’s prayer. WHEN banners have been furled, and swords sheathed, and cannons hushed, and men have learned a nobler wisdom than they have heretofore practised, the grandest foundations of society will be built upon Christ’s law of love. THE student of nature is like one who goes with a candle into some immense cavern. Presently a little circle becomes clear, the shadows vanish before him, and undefined forms grow distinct. He thinks he is near the end, when, lo! what seemed a solid boundary of rock dissolves and floats away into a depth of darkness, the path opens into an immense void, new shapes of mystery start out, and he learns this much that he did not know before, that instead of being near the end he is only upon the threshold.

HE who finds the platform where best he can truly benefit others and himself need not feel that he is stepping down, or going apart from the divine presence and blessing as into some unsanctified sphere.

THOSE lofty souls, far upward on the mountain-steeps of spiritual attainment, and whose garments glisten in their nearness to heaven, have trodden the ground that lies between inch by inch.

IF the gospel does not explain all the mysteries of life, and solve the great enigma of evil, the irresistible proof of its authenticity, that which answers all questions and silences all cavils, is its efficacy in enabling us to bear our trials, to overcome them, to convert them into crowns of joy and springs of consolation.

SHE who stood with Christ in his humiliation is called to accompany him in his triumph. She came with her affections to honor the shame of his cross. In the new age that is dawning upon us these affections shall be closely associated with the power of his spirit who hung there.

WOMAN, of all beings, needs the life and the power of religion. When we consider what she is called upon to do, what interests come under her influence, what brave yet tender virtues she must cherish, where can she go but to him who alone has lived these virtues, and from whom alone their spirit emanates?

ALL that can be said of the martyr or of the patriot is, that he diligently occupied the post of duty; and this may be said of you. And it is better to die at the post of duty than to live elsewhere.

How do all other things shrivel in view of the immense possibility that is before every man! How do all things grow dim before this! how do brocade and velvet become like rags, and coronets become as tinsel, before the possession of this immortal nature, which God says, " Occupy, exercise, watch over, and take care of "! That which you will carry with you is the thing which you are to consider. That which you leave behind you, it makes comparatively little difference what is its rank or mark. When men lie with the hands folded and the eyes closed what matter if covered with the robes of a king or the rags of a beggar? Silently, invisibly, down the dark mystic river, is drifted the soul; and we carry with it all that is really worthy, all which should really be our object to acquire in the school of life.

THERE must be something wrong in a man when he is afraid of himself, when he dreads the revelation of his own soul. THE sun uses its power of brightness to shine; the violet on the bank uses its power of fragrance to breathe it forth; and all things are using their powers up to their highest capacities. All but man; man alone is guilty of what may be called the great sin of unused power. THE true Church is not an institution to be kept apart from the world because the world "is common and unclean," but a vital heart of truth and love, beating with the life of Jesus, and sending abroad its sanctifying pulsations until nothing shall be common and unclean. WHEN all theories are set adrift, and all questions agitated, how necessary is it that we should be convinced that there is everlasting truth. When sceptred authority is broken, and the stability of all government is shaken by the eager rush of revolution, how much do we need to believe in an immutable moral control. And while science draws the veil from the primeval earth, and shows us the wrecks of successive epochs, and prophecies the funeral-pyre of suns and systems, how sublime is it to feel the beating pulses of illimitable love, to confide in Him to whose spirit we are allied, and who will maintain us in being through all material changes. And is it not the bliss and the miracle of prayer that it lifts us away from our sins, our little cares, our teasing wants, and all the mutations of earth, and embosoms us in the communion of the Eternal. THE true spirit of martyrdom forbids that selfishness which sometimes seeks martyrdom.

" ABIDE with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent." This is peculiarly a prayer for old age. Already the long shadows fall before its tottering feet, and the sun sinks lower to the horizon. The pulses of desire beat more feebly. The plans of young ambition have been realized or broken. The relationships of life have been formed, and many of them have been severed. The contriving mind is growing weak, and the vigor that could second its enterprises has departed. The voices that the old man heard in his youth have one by one become still, or if a few speak yet it is with the discord of superannuation. The hands that grasped his so heartily in the days long past are now formless dust, except, it may be, a few, which, taking his with paralyzed tremor like his own, say plainer than words, " My brother, it is death that shakes us so! " The narrow valley declines before them. Old father, mother, thou must tread it!

Thou canst not even carry with thee thy dust-worn sandals nor thy staff. Ah! if thou hast Christian faith we know thy answer now: " I am not alone! I have one affection in my bosom that cannot be disappointed. He whom I love has sustained me. when I knelt upon familiar graves. He has drawn nearer and nearer to me, as my aged eyes have become dim, and all else seemed vanishing before me. I know in whom I have trusted. His loving kindness will not fail me now. I see, I see, my sands are almost out, and my feet halt among unbroken shadows. I will cling to him the closer. "Abide with me, Christ! for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent."

Upoij- him who has humbly sought his post of duty, and who bravely works in it, we may be sure God looks down with approbation, and often sees more worthy symbols in the coarse apron and the black thumbs than in stars and coronets.

THERE is no mean work save that which is sordidly selfish; there is no irreligious work save that which is morally wrong; while in every sphere of life "the post of honor is the post of duty."

"!N the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground." Some men shirk this, in one way or another, but in reality they sweat more than anybody else. He who has really stranded in such a position that he has no call to do anything is the most miserable man in the world.

SOMETIMES men heap coals of fire on their enemy’s head in order to love him; but they are very much disappointed if the coals do not scorch.

THERE is a time when the humblest disciple of Christ may weep as he also wept. But let him also strive as Christ strove. Let him not dash his grief in rebellious billows to the throne; let not his groans arise in angry, resentful murmurs; let the remembrance of what God is and why he does be with him, and let the filial, reverent trust steal in, "Not my will, but thine be done." That reference to God, that obedience to him, rising from the very depths of sorrow, and clung to without faltering, is RESIGNATION. It shall bestow peace and victory in the end.! how different from that sullen fatalism that lets things come as they will! To such a soul things do come as they will, and it hardens under them; they do come as they will, but it sees not, cares not, why they come. No thought goes up beyond the cloud to God, no strength is born that shall make life’s trials lighter, no love and faith that will seek the Father’s hand in the darkest hour, and shed a serene, enduring light over the thorny path of affliction and upon the bosom of the graye.

Look at these two. Outwardly their calmness may be the same. Nay, the one may evince emotion and tears, while the other shall stand rigid in the hour of calamity, with a bitter smile or a frown of endurance. But in the one is strength, in the other rigidity; in the one is power to triumph over sorrow, in the other only nervous capacity to resist it. The one is hardened to indifference, sullen because of irreligion, upon whom some sorrow will one day fall that will peel him to the quick, and he will not know where to flee for healing. The other is man contending against evil, yet not against God; man with all the tenderness and strength of his nature, impressible, yet unconquerable, walking with feet that bleed among the wounding thorns, and a heart that shrinks from the heavy woe, yet, all lacerated as he is, able to walk through, because he holds by the hand of Omnipotence. The one is the unbending tree, peeled by the lightning and stripped by the north wind, lifting its gored and gnarled head in sullen defiance to the storm, which, when the storm does overcome it, shall be broken. The other also is rooted in strength, and meets the rushing blast with a lofty front. But as "it smiles in sunshine so it bends in storm," trustful and obedient, yet firm and brave, and nothing shall overwhelm it.

LET a man be bold when he stands upon the ramparts of God’s truth, and proclaims God’s right, but let him be appalled when he descends from those ramparts and calls up carnal, abusive, bloody weapons; for he is liable, though he may inscribe the right upon his banner, and may be marching with God over his head, to be beaten down, because he is undertaking to cast out Satan by Satan. THE soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear, in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust, that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience. OUR moral action must issue from deep fountains within us, springing up in meditation and sanctified by prayer. Those plants of righteousness that will endure the scorching noon and the beating tempest must be silently nurtured by the dews of the night and the early breathings of the morning. There never yet was accomplished any great work that was not the fruit of long and patient thought. Men have first constructed in the resources of their own souls those great results which have astonished us. From lonely heights of meditation they have come down to change the destinies of the world, to revolutionize its ideas, to touch all its springs of action. So moral energy and endurance, and all that spiritual depth and symmetry which helps make a truly religious character, must be wrought out by self-discipline, by inward scrutiny, by frequent communion with great truths.

... Fresh streams of inspiration bear onward the soul that would climb to perfection. Do not baptize your passions with the name of principle, or confound your sharp, selfish persistence with the awful "I dare not" of the brave soul that fears God more than man, THE unmerciful man is most certainly an unblessed man. His sympathies are all dried up; he is afflicted with a chronic jaundice, and lives timidly and darkly in a little, narrow rat-hole of distrust. He has no free use of the world; he breathes no liberal and generous air; he walks in no genial sunshine. He loses all the bliss that comes from sympathy, from open-heartedness, from familiar and confiding associations. More than this, such a theory of humanity is an open self-condemnation.

Whence has he derived this theory? Upon what premises has he built it up? Surely, from his own selfconsciousness, from his own personal experience. There is darkness within him, and so darkness falls upon everything. His own motives are sinister, and so all humanity squints. The suspicious man, the man who distrusts all other men, and so is unmerciful to all, reveals himself as a mean man.

PUBLIC feeling now is apt to side with the persecuted, and our modern martyr is full as likely to be smothered with roses as with coals.

MERCY is in complete harmony with justice There is no conflict between mercy and absolute right.

... Unmerciful justice is unjust, and unjust mercy unmerciful Mercy considers not merely temporary and isolated relief, but the general welfare; so does justice. For instance: in permitting an offender to go free from all rebuke and punishment we do not exercise genuine mercy. We are not merciful to society; for we let loose upon its interests unrestrained and encouraged crime. We are not merciful to, the offender; for we leave him to the sweep of "his own passions, and the deepening canker of his guilt. The father who never corrects his child may be a soft-hearted but he is not a merciful parent. There is no mercy in letting the child have its own will, plunging headlong with the bits in its mouth to destruction.

WHILE the secret of a leaf is not known; while no man can penetrate the mystery of existence; while revelations of a higher truth continually break in upon us, shall we, in the poverty of our knowledge, say what cannot be? Shall we deny those great spiritual laws which throb in our own consciousness? Shall we reject those affirmations of miracle and of immortal life to which our best capacities and desires respond, because they contradict our pre-conceived theories, our systematic methods?

DETAILS may perplex our faith, but the grand whole does not. It vindicates the doctrine of the essential goodness of God as seen in nature. For the harmonies of things appear as we explore. Order itself is beneficent, and that is the great feet that science discloses everywhere. Order in the calyx of the violet, and in the bosom of the sun; in the braided constellations of the heavens, and in the drops of the summer shower. Order everywhere, and law; and that law beneficence, securing harmony and peace, and working out steadily great ends. THE Bible is our mirror into which faith gazes and beholds reflected heavenly things, the celestial land, the palmy crowns, and the face of the Redeemer. " It is our chart. We consult it when heaven is darkened and the shadows fall, when winds rage and waves beat, and rocks and whirlpools are around us, and the cold peltings of the storm. It is our telescope; and we see from afar the gates of the New Jerusalem and its crystal walls.

THERE have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.

" THEN came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe."- What brought him to this?

What led him to endure the mockery and the blows?

What is it that stands there crowned with thorns?

LOVE! It is nothing else but LOVE.’ No other power in all the universe but love could thus endure. Only thus are its exhaustless riches and its divine glory manifested.

Only in suffering and in sacrifice can it reveal its depths. When all else fails, then it begins to shine. When all else gives up, then it commences its work, its immortal, its triumphant work. Yes, that is love, God’s love, that beams out from the face of Christ, that anon will trickle in blood and be broken by nails. God’s love!

It endures long, but it triumphs, and therefore in its greatest manifestation here upon earth was crowned with thorns. Christ crowned with thorns! Can anything else teach us so significantly the great truth of SUFFERING

YET TRIUMPHANT LOVE? And love for whom? for whom was that sorrow borne?! reader, let us not be dull-eyed or hard-hearted; for you and me it was! THE Word of God wars not with his works. Every new revelation of nature but strengthens the chain which links earth and sky, adds to the battlements of that religion whose foundation is the eternal Rock, and whose pinnacle is bright with upper glories. THE true poet possesses something more than truth, or knowledge which is based upon truth. He must commune with that of which truth is the going forth or utterance, the spirit that lies behind all, which is love. THE cross of Christ! It stands there. The body of the Redeemer has been taken away. The crowd have dispersed to their homes. The setting sun gilds it; the stars shed over it their holy lustre; and through the silent night it stands there an instrument of ignominy, and torture, and death. And when the morning light falls upon it the people point to it as the wood on which the malefactor died. But it is an instrument of ignoming no more. From that hour when he drew his last breath it became a glorious emblem, a sign of victory. Through the ages it stands, the guide of the sinning, the hope of the doubting, the rest of the weary. Through the ages it stands. Many suns shine upon it; night-like epochs roll their starry lustre over it; changes go on around it; but there it stands, the great manifestation of truth and love, the point of atonement between man and God. The cross of Christ! The hcsts of steel, the powers of human wisdom, shall roll back and be broken; but here is a power that cannot be overcome, an influence that reaches the heart, that exalts while it binds the soul.

Now when we sorrow we know who also sorrowed; we remember whose agony the still heavens looked upon with all their starry eyes, whose tears moistened the bosom of the b^are earth, whose utterance of anguish pierced the gloom of night. Now, too, when we sorrow we know where to find relief; we learn that spirit of resignation, and under what conditions it may be born.

Thank God, then, for the lesson of the lonely garden and the weeping Christ; ive, too, may be "made perfect through suffering." THE tokens of the divine beneficence are strung everywhere, and the fundamental and comprehensive life of the universe shows the whole to be steeped in love; yet after all Jesus Christ is the only being that gives us a definite comprehension of God as the Father, in all his personality, in all the closeness of his relation.

Childlike is precisely the definition of the Christian disposition. It takes its disciples from the bustle, and forms, and warfare of life, and sets them down at the feet of Jesus as little children. And of what other religion, of what philosophy, can this be said: that its great object is to make men gentle and childlike in their dispositions?

We know of none. It is a peculiarity of the gospel. WHEN long the soul had slept in chains, And man to man -was stern and cold; When love and worship were but strains That swept the gifted chords of old, By shady mount and peaceful lake A meek and lowly stranger came. The weary drank the words he spake; The poor and feeble blessed his name. No shrine he reared in porch or grove; No vested priests around him stood; He went about to teach, and prove The lofty work of doing good.

Said he to those who with him trod, "Would ye be my disciples? then Evince your ardent love for God By the kind deeds ye do for men.".

He went where frenzy held its rule, Where sickness breathed its spell of pain; By famed Bethesda’s mystic pool, And by the darkened gate of Nain.

He soothed the mourner’s troubled breast, He raised the contrite sinner’s head, And on the loved ones’ lowly rest The light of better life he shed.

RELIGION dwells in the depths of the heart, and beams with an angel-radiance from the face of the poor man, and drops the widow’s mite into the treasury, and hallows the humble cottage, and lingers amid the rude arches of the forest; when it is perhaps afar from the robe of learning, and the hypocritical righteousness of the rigid professor, and the golden donation of the rich, and the gorgeous tapestry of the temple, and the glittering ornaments of the altar! Like the still femall voice on Horeb, it is not in the tumult and the show, but in the calm of devotion, visiting the lowly and the humble mind. Heard not in the long, loud prayer, nor in the ornate and eloquent discourse; but breathing through the broken language of the unlettered, and heard in the simple petition of the poor, bowed widow, who lifts her thanks by her scanty board or kneels on the lowest step of the altar.

HOLDING on half-way, while trying to go the whole way with the right, is very different from going on walking with the wrong because it is expedient.

IT is exceedingly deleterious to withdraw the sanction of religion from amusement. If we feel that it is all injurious we should strip the earth of its flowers and blot out its pleasant sunshine. A MAN that has the "spirit of Christ in him has the spring and energy of all positive power. OF all the myriad leaves in the forest, there is not one that has not its office and its use, nor is there an atom in the universe which has not some chink or cranny to fill.

So, we may believe, there is not a superfluous man, one who, if he consults his aptitudes instead of his inclinations, will not find that he has a call.

MEN will do things in public as a community, as a party, as a nation that they would not do as individuals, nor think of doing. No man would think of stealing an apple from a boy because he wants it; but men would Bteal a whole island because they want it, with a meanness just in proportion to the largeness of the theft.

Why is this? Because men talk of an expediency in regard to public acts, concerning which they would not venture a liap in regard to private ones, and make that the rule, rather than the supreme, eternal right. THE great test by which one may know where he stands in God’s universe is to know what he loves and why he loves it. WHEN I contrast the loving ’Jesus, comprehending all things in his ample and tender charity, with those who profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than inspiration for good. IN measuring the decalogue we must take Christ’s golden rule rather than the golden eagle. THE truth beautiful! Where in this world so beautiful as in the walk and conversation of a righteous man, a righteous woman? There is beautiful truth in the sounding, sun-lit sea; there is beautiful truth in the undying stars; but nowhere such a beauty of truth as in that pure-hearted host which do God’s will; in those who live serving God and serving humanity. The gospel is a beautiful truth; but where can we apprehend its beauty as in the life of Jesus?

ANYTHING truly lives when it fills up the capacities of its being; and anything is dead just in proportion as its faculties or functions are inoperative.

POETRY, in its highest essence and expression, is truth; and just in proportion as it is genuine poetry it must b true; it is not mere fancy or-imagination. And, as the converse of this fact, of course it is to be admitted that truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry. And men, when they are called upon to exercise the highest truth, the largest and sublimest conception they have of truth, either consciously or unconsciously, always hurst into poetry. In its religion the human mind finds ordinary language too stinted, and must seize upon symbols to express its conceptions.

NEXT to the abolition of all religious ordinances there is nothing so ominous as a hollow and weary observance of them. Nay, this is even worse than violent irreligion, for that is too unnatural to last long, and its terrible earnestness will produce reaction. No movement is so exclusively public as to take away the force of individual responsibility; no multitude is so large as to absorb one’s moral personality; but in the public movement, in the huge crowd, he stands as if he were standing alone in the universe, spiritually naked, listening to the judgment of God and the beating of his own heart.

- THERE never was a man all intellect; but just in proportion as men become so they become like lofty mountains, all ice and snow the higher they rise above the warm heart of the earth. FROM the mountain-top where he has sat in the kindlings of the morning; from the watch-tower where he has gazed into the serene, far heaven; from the forests where he has communed with nature and with God, the poet comes forth into the dusty, trampled highway of human life; he mingles with the rushing crowd, the various, anxious faces, the selfish striving, the hollow friendships, the dry-husk religion of the world. He is not made to be a hermit, committing snatches of verse to the air, and tuning his soul to wind-harps. From the lonely truth be comes to the many-faced reality, from the solitary communion to the eager, blended multitude. He comes and speaks in warm, sweet or trumpet tones, speaks to the desolate and mourning, to the clogged ear and the ’calloused heart, touches some chord that yet lives, and that none but the poet can reach. And the human heart recognizes him the universal heart. No religious ship or sect would like to be responsible for all the barnacles and sea- weed on its hull. THE utterance of truth in the spirit of love is the poet’s mission. This makes poetry. Our age is full of such lyrics, written on a grand scale, played upon all the strings of the human heart. Every noble reform around us is a procession, an outpealing of such sublime poetry. And the true poet of our age is he who sets the key-note, or becomes the voice or expression of this spirit of the times. The chains of sixty centuries are breaking; the veils of night-like ages are rent in sunder, and far through opening valleys rich with the nodding harvest, and far over lofty hill-tops glad with the rising morning, comes the great march of humanity set to triumphal music. And the true poet sees, and feels, and embodies this movement. He discerns below all superficialities; he overlooks all temporal and false landmarks; he speaks to the spiritual and the unseen in man, as one who chiefly values that and loves it; he speaks to the world- wide race as one who has hope for it, and says, "Rejoice! " THE " hours of communion " let in the air and light of heaven upon the soul.

SEEKING Heaven through righteousness is not seeking righteousness, but something else; it is not loving goodness for goodness’ sake, but for its rewards.

MANY people seem to think that is a revival of religion in which a great deal of feeling about religion appears.

I think that is a revival of religion in which a great deal of thought about religion appears. And sometimes when men are outwardly very calm and very collected, and make no extravagant demonstrations, they may be really having an income of religious life, more than when they are simply occupied in expressing the sense of great spiritual realities by a display of feeling. We must have, as the basis of any noble, consistent and steady religious life, clear, profound, and steady thought. THE inner life, with its thoughts, its conscience, is supreme. Its voice is heard above all outward tumult, it projects its light or shadow upon the universe. The natural world is at once its instrument and its instructor. As we become true to our better nature loving and good so do we learn how to use the world aright; so do all the ordinances of life appear to be established for great and wise purposes. The day is not only for labor, and the night for rest, but every hour and every event is that we may learn to trust and adore God, and to love man better, may have faith in adversity, humility in success, penitence for sin, strength in weakness, and support in death. This is the great end of life. THE night comes for the purpose of checking our busy employment, and introducing an interval of repose between the links of our action and our aspiration. It draws its dim curtain around the field of toil. It buries the objects of our handiwork in darkness, and involves them with uncertainty. It comes to the relief of the exhausted body and the tired brain. Our powers, harmonizing with the diurnal revolution of the earth, fail with the failing light, and a merciful Providence casts around us this mantle of shadow, and snatches us from our occupation. The night comes and bestows its "beloved sleep " upon the bowed and the weary, replenishes the veins of health, imparts mysterious nourishment to the feeble, and wraps the sad in sweet forgetfulness, or bears them up for a time above the darkening realities of life into the bliss of dreams. It comes, however, not merely for slumber, but that there may be a change of action.

It calls us in from those tasks that have kept in play all our selfish faculties, to the delights of social communion and the sanctities of home. It woos the body from its work that the mind may take up its implements. It conceals the earth, which all day long has absorbed our desires, and reveals the grandeur of the universe in which we float. It shows a field of activity for the spirit as well as for our material powers, a field whose capacity transcends any worldly occupation as far as thought outleaps the possibilities of the muscles. It bids the strained eye look up and perceive that there are objects of love and adoration above and beyond the circle of the morning purpose or the noonday effort.

WE give such a theological sense to our words that even the holiest precepts ring like counterfeit coin. But if we really knew that to love Jesus Christ is like loving anything else, if theological or religious love would only mean natural love, as it ought to mean, how many would say, "I love Jesus Christ"! Infidels and sceptics, carping at miracles, and cutting out one half of the New Testament, if they could see such a character as that, exemplified in such a beautiful life, standing in the gloriousness of its meekness and the majesty of its holiness, would come to it as if drawn by the law of attraction. NOT nations;- not armies, have advanced the race; but here and there, in the course of ages, an individual has stood up and cast his shadow over the world. WHEN private virtue is hazarded upon the perilous cast of expediency, the pillars of the republic, however apparent their stability, are infected with decay at the very centre.

WHAT marvel, what mystery, what tokens of the divine presence, in this familiar act of slumber! Consider into what regions of wonder it carries you, and how near it brings you’ to Gogl. While you lie there so unconscious you are enthralled by a power which you cannot resist; you have surrendered to it your dearest possessions; you have lost all control over them; your limbs are impotent; your faculties are disheveled, and death’s twin brother presses on your heart. Heroes, statesmen, and kings throw aside the implements of their pomp and power, as a child throws aside its toys, to lie down to rest as a child in its mother’s arms.! the wonderful truth is, that when we lie down to rest we all do lie, as it were, in a mother’s arms; for a love as tender as a mother’s, a vigilance far more tireless, a protection far more sure, during the dark and silent season, is at work for us, keeping the delicate life-springs in motion, and the chords of the mind in tune. There you sleep, and while you rest you and your sleeping-chamber are borne through great segments of space into the realms of the dawn, into the splendors of a new morning. You awake, and new, fresh life rushes through every artery; weariness arises, strengthened for its new labor; poverty is better prepared to meet its lot of toil; and sorrow perhaps lifts up its head with brighter tears, because while it slept angels of faith and hope whispered to it, and wellknown faces have beamed upon it from the gates of heaven. IN this age our religion is too much of the combustibk kind, a sort of light- wood dipped in turpentine, all glow, quick up, and quick down; and too many are confining their experience of religion to the experience of rapture and religious enjoyments. THE dreamer with his strange and splendid conceit, the weary pilgrim by the convent-gate, the untired supplicant at courts, at length attains his wish. The sails are hoisted, the prows are turned, the great adventure lies before. Speed on, speed on, bold Genoese! look straight forward! hold dauntlessly to your thought! The lights of the known land, sink behind you, but the heritage of your fame lies before. The deep is hoary with mystery, the compass turns from its point, but a divine current sweeps you on. Your heart grows faint at mutiny, delay, and solitude; but, lo! Providence tempts you with its tokens. New stars rise to light you; birds sing in your tattered sails; flowers of strange odor drift by your keel; and a new world is found. You sought it to complete the geography of the globe; God opened it to complete the desting of humanity!

LET no one despair so long as he has power over his own soul. THE idea which wrought in the minds and hearts of our Revolutionary heroes in the deep current of those Revolutionary events had its sanction, and its first, clear, consistent utterance, as I believe, in the oracles of Christianity. It found a sanctuary in the breasts of its early saints and martyrs. It passed out into the world, and struck the chord of political action as it blended with the spirit of Teutonic independence. It flourished well in England, and found utterance in Parliament and from Tower-Hill. The cavalier bore it in his haughty consciousness to his new home in Virginia. The Hollander accepted it in his sturdy republicanism. The Puritan brought it in the Mayflower, and planted it on Plymouth rock. Indicated now and then by some isolated enterprise or sharp event, its influence was silently engendered in a people’s history, until at length its latent electricity broke out in one quick blaze from line to line, in one long roll of drums from Lexington to Yorktown. I find that idea at the core of all democracy; I find it at the heart of our national organism; and without it democracy would be only a name, and our nationality illegitimate. That idea, fellow-citizens, is the spiritual worth of every man! In the very personality of a man, it respects that "image and superscription" of God which distinguishes him from all other beings; respects his right unless convicted of aggression against the common right to free circulation in the currency of the universe, with hi? own limbs, mind and soul. 0, it was worth years of revolution, with all the suffering and the blood! worth your precious heart-drops, martyrs of Lexington! worth your cold and hunger, soldiers of Yalley Forge! worth your prayers, Washington! when gloomy clouds hung round the tents of our Israel. It was worth all this to vindicate and achieve the great fact that a man is priceless, and that, poised on the axis of personal responsibility limited by nothing but the curve of moral law he belongs only to God. It was worth all the cost and struggle to consummate a system in which, primarily, the man does not exist for the sake of the State, but the State for the sake of the man. THE idea of the worth and right of the individual man lies at the core of all our institutions. Therefore when this idea is dishonored upon any one point the entire organism of our national privileges is stricken with heart disease. A TRUE individualism is not adverse but favorable to a true nationality. In developing the springs of personal worth and dignity we develop the springs of all public greatness.

EVERY man is two-fold in his nature. He is both individual and social. The necessity of a state is enfolded in and grows out of the very conditions of his being.

PERILOUS is the course of the man who goes out amid the temptations of public life without prayerfulness, without a sense of duty caught from communion with Christ. If in his own heart he has separated his politics from his religion, I know not from what else he may divorce them. IN how many instances does it appear that high public office spoils a man! Put him in Jonathan, he comes out Judas. He enters as a respectable merchant, or lawyer, or farmer, and comes out a politician by profession, and a thimble-rigger by practice.

IF the first line of the Declaration of Independence could have been read just after it was penned, in some old sanctuary of dead kings, and sculptured barons, and drooping heraldries, it would almost haye made the feudal dust and the aristocratic bones shake and rattle in the tombs, to hear this gospel of a new order, in which man was to be recognized apart from his accidents, and held his titles not by inheritance but by achievement. THE better part of our nature gravitates to him who preserves his courage and self-respect. There is a recognized chivalry about a man who is a man. Noble souls know each other, in some degree, as they will know when we no longer see as through a glass darkly. THE fathers of our Revolution abolished orders of nobility! No; they affirmed the true nobility; they rejected the outward patent, and took up the inward claim; they detected the right divine not in the coronet but in the brain, the heraldry of honor not in the crimson hand but the diligent palm, and rated a man by the quantity of his virtue and his greatness, not by his position on some old genealogical tree, stuck into the body of William the Conqueror, with blood at the roots, and gout in the fibres, and idiocy at the top, unless recuperated by plebian sap. Benjamin Franklin wore the most appropriate court-dress I ever heard of. At the Court of Versailles he appeared in the dress of an American farmer.

What did he need of a court-dress whose patent of nobility was written for him by lightning on the clouds?

THERE is but little true learning where nature and humanity have been neglected. Cumbrous and useless is that knowledge which is unbaptized by love and sympathy. THE worst scepticism of our age ’ is not that of expressed doubt or open denial, but that which, in the name of faith and zeal, would hush objection and check controversy, and is so fearful of the present as to distrust the future. THE thinker fears no more the failure of the truth than he fears the failure of God’s own cisterns from which the winds blow. It may do for the ignorant to be timid, whom a fallacy can tangle and a false statement blind; but it is for you, scholar! to see how in the intense heat of trial every film of falsehood melts away from truth, and the severe analysis leaves it alone, in all the beauty of its proportion, in all the harmony of its relations.

THERE is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own. WHEN the sky is obscured, the chart torn, the compass lost, man raises to his eyes the glass of faith, and sees through the mist the thread of love quivering down from the eternal orb and drawing him on.

GEOLOGIST! chip away with your hammer, to the end of time; you cannot strike away one grain of the truth in Jesus Christ, as it comes to my soul. ethnologist! trace back the history of man as far as you can; you cannot’ seal up this spiritual want of mine which Christ satisfies. Each thing to its proper domain: science to interpret material things, to unlock the bonds ’of nature; Christianity to comfort the soul and lift it up. But if there does come a collision between the two, which I conceive impossible, of what have you the strongest evidence: that the world is six millions of years old, or that Jesus Christ comforts you in sorrow, lifts you up when you are bowed down, and brings you to an ideal that answers your wants and aspirations? The soul’s evidence is the highest, and must be heard. Let Newton and Le Verrier unfold the starry heavens, and let us hear the music of the spheres; but at the same time the soul stands up and says, " I, too, am a reality; I know that I have a Father, for I have felt him; I know that I have a Savior, for he has lifted me up and blessed me. Science is doubtless true; but if it is not I know that I am, for I know that I feel."

EACH thing lives according to its kind: the heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature of man by intimate communion wiih God.

CHRISTIANITY reaches down from heaven this golden ladder, by which the loftiest soul and the lowliest intellect can begin to climb toward God the ladder of the truth of God’s paternity.

How many prayers and forms of worship are merely paying compliments to God from the meanest and basest motives, hoping thereby to creep into the favor of God, complimenting him because we think it will be well for us to do so. THE human soul is so constituted that mere power or sovereignty, without regard to the moral qualities of such power and sovereignty, cannot be truly reverenced. We may fear it; we may cower in terror before it; we may defer to it with trembling and abated breath; but the whole sincere reverence of the heart we can give only to goodness, and, in the case of God, to infinite goodness, which by its very nature is infinite holiness, justice, and majesty.

GOD will not forsake you, old sinner; he will not leave even you. You are cared for by him; and though you may be hidden under the rubbish of all your sins, though you may be cast away and scorned by men, he will hunt for you as for a hidden jewel.

ALL men, however low, weak, and vile they may be, may utter the words, "Our Father;" and before this fact all outward distinctions shrivel away, and all sophistries yield to it. Your pompous ethnologists, who decide from the hue of the skin or the shape of the skull, do not go deep enough to mark out the limits between us. The dimmest asteroid of a soul, that here, in its far-away world, revolves in the narrowest orbit of human experience, receives some light from the Fountain of Light, and feels the throb of the same "infinite Sun. However rudely spoken by the child at his mother’s side, by the savage, by the poor, despised, and desolate it is the same. How great that spirit must be, and how surely immortal, that can say to God, "Our Father"! The nabob can say this, and he can say no more. The beggar in the street can say as much. It rises from the same plane of humanity. It has no further to travel, whether breathed in the luxurious chamber, or ascending from the lips of the outcast, up to the starry spaces of the sky. What a bond of unity, which takes the round earth, with all its seasons and climes, and condenses it into one family! when from the territories even of contending nationalities, slaves and freemen, rich and poor, all come together in this! It is the key-note of the prelude to universal harmony.

TRUTH in its most original expression is always lyrical. IN the Hartz Mountains, in Germany, men sometimes see an awful, shadowy, colossal image walking over the heights like a majestic demon; but after all they find it is only the projection of themselves, only the shadow of the advancing man thrown upon the mist of the mountain. So men in their superstition, sensuality, and gross idolatry project a God who is only the shadow of themselves. THE doctrine of God the Father is the central doctrine of the gospel. Around it the entire system moves. Take it away and we should have another a different gospel.

Take away the truth that- comes in the account of the prodigal son, and in other instances of that kind of God’s fatherhood, and you may have a Christianity to preach, but it would not be Christ’s Christianity.

GOD is our Father; and yet this relation, comparatively, is as though it were not until we realize it.

IF you should take the human heart and listen to it it would be like listening to a sea-shell: you would hear in it the hollow murmur of the infinite ocean to which it belongs, from which it draws its profoundest inspiration, and for which it yearns.

MAN is concentric: you have to take fold after fold off of him before you get to the centre of his personality.

You must get below his animal nature, habits, customs, affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down into the heart of the man, before you know what is really in him. But when you get into the last core of these concentric rings of personality you find a sense of the infinite, a consciousness of immortality linked to something higher and better.

IF you could take away every other proof of y the existence of a God, if you. could blot out the universe with all its glorious elements of harmony, order, and wonder, yet, looking into the deep soul of man, and beholding there a sense of sin, a feeling of obligation, of duty, of responsibility, you would be compelled to say, This soul of man proves the existence of a moral, intelligent source, over and above the material world. THE nearest symbolism of God’s mercy is the relation that the mother bears to her child. It is a constant blessing, which flows over our lives, and is still strong even when we become gray, and the dust of the grave begins to settle upon us.

DAMAGE Revelation! You might just as well suppose that a man could damage the throne of the Almighty as to damage the essential truth of Revelation. What difference does it make whether this world is six thousand or six million years old, to the wounded spirit that feels the balm of Christ’s comfort? to the tempest-tossed BOU! that Christ has lifted up? to the spiritual experience that sees in God its highest ideal, and mounts upward continually? There is no more connection between the two things than there is between duty and a stone, between goodness and a tree, between a thing utterly spiritual and utterly material. THE child’s grief throbs against the round of its little heart as heavily as the man’s sorrow; and the one finds as much delight in his kite or drum as the other in striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame. As mind is superior to matter, so are ideas more potent and enduring than prodigies of physical might. Archimedes’ thought is stronger than his lever. The mind that planned the pyramids was more powerful than the hands that piled them. The inventors of the mariner’s compass and the telescope have outdone the Macedonian, and won new worlds. IN the act of communion with God, in the realization of immortality, in the aspirations and the idea of perfection, there is a depth and scope of being from which all sensual estimates of time drop away. IN proportion to the essential value and the desting of anything it is slow in coming to maturity. The shining insect of the pools is born and perishes in a day. The -alchemy of sun and air, of wet and sunshine, is long in bringing the oak to its climax. Our mortal body this curious casement of the soul grows, decays, and dies while a star, the home of many souls, beats around its orbit, and fulfils but one of its stupendous years.

If this be the law, then we must expect that mind will be long indeed in coming to maturity. In fact it has never reached perfection, even in the rarest individual instances. And its inexhausted capacities, its unsatisfied desires, suggest what Revelation has confirmed, that this is but its introductory state, and that it goes hence to the scope of immortal action. THE intellect is the most neutral of all our qualities It is a light; and no one will object to its being kindled except those who by that objection virtually confess that they fear the light.

THREESCORE years and ten! Were all these adaptations created merely for a life of threescore years and ten? Are these heavens so garnished with beauty, is this earth so varied and fertile, merely to gratify that -which in a little while will die and return to dust? Is it all to pamper a body that presently becomes weak and diseased and crumbles back to its elements? Or does this beauty without speak to a capacity for beauty within? Do these wonderful works appeal to a power of knowing and progressing, that shall know and progress when its mortal tabernacle shall be lost in the processes of change? If this life is all, much is there in it thatTis incomprehensible. We cannot comprehend why we should desire to know, and never be satisfied with knowledge; why we should be tempted and suffer. But if there is another life we can discern a reason for these things. In the fact that we attain to no complete knowledge now, but only such as deepens the capacity and the thirst for more, there gleams out the deeper fact that we shall know more by and by. Powers are developed here until they are capable of higher development in other portions of God’s limitless universe; and suffering and temptation discipline the soul for a sphere where temptation shall no more be needed, and where the spirit shall go forward to practise upon what it has learned. Viewing this life, then, as the vestibule and preparation for another, we can account for many of its mysteries. But if not, why, then, does the body suffer from the wants of the mind? Why, if this world is merely a theatre for human fame or human pleasure, merely a mart for the heaping up of gold and silver, why do we think of immortality, or care for it? Why do the mountain-summits seem near to another world? Why from the depths of night, from worlds of unapproachable glory, come influences that kindle aspirations for something higher and purer? Why do we fancy the loved and the lost walking upon some glorious shore, with palms about their brows? Why do we truly honor an upright man more than a king, and see in patient endurance and forgiving love the highest dignity and the best victory? Why are prayer, and goodness, and faith so much more worthy in our eyes than mere bodily skill or beauty? Because we do not cease to be, at the grave, the outward things of this life are not our chief ends; but our true end is spiritual perfection and immortal life!

I WOULD rather fall into the hands of a good-natured sinner than of a sour old saint. THE reason why men act in masses as they would not act in units, is, that they are not chivalric enough to stand by their own souls.

" ONE self-approving hour whole years outweighs Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas."

It is true. There is more life in "one self-approving hour," one act of benevolence, one work of self-discipline, than in threescore years and ten of mere sensual existence. Go out among the homes of the poor, lift up the disconsolate, administer comfort to the forlorn; in some way, as it may come across your path, or lie in the sphere of your duty, do a deed of kindness; and in that one act you shall live more than in a year of selfish indulgence and indolent ease, yea, more than in a lifetime of such. The poet, with his burning, immortal lines, while doing his work, lives all the coming ages of his fame. From every marble feature that he chisels the sculptor draws an intensity of being that cannot be imparted by a mere extension of years. The philanthropist, in his walks of mercy and his ministrations of love, lives more comprehensively than another may in a century. His is the fathomless bliss of benevolence the experience of God. The martyr, in his dying hour, with his face shining like an angel’s, does not live longer, but he lives more than all his persecutors. THIS is not only the oldest but the best time. It contains tho best life and fruition of all the past. THE mother acts upon the world as surely as the boy develops into the man. She is not a public actor in the drama of human existence, but she appears in all its moving forms, and in all its history. Her influence is the electric life that plays unseen amid it all, and projects and shapes its phenomena. That devoted philanthropy is the embodiment of her spirit; that noble achievement is the crystalization of her thought. The patriotism you admire was kindled by her tradition and her song. The eloquence that thrills you caught its inspiration from her lips. The soul "that climbs the starry paths of science, or explores the crypts beneath, owes to her its direction and its enthusiasm; and the holy life that blesses man and glorifies God is the answer to her prayers. Unperceived, she acts in the bustle of the mart and the aspirations of the forum, from the magistrate’s chair, in the pulpit, and on the throne. And the ordinary mass of life, with its individual joys and sorrows, good and evil, so common, yet so important, is her result.

ALL that Christ is after is the heart. Jesus went about as a man searching for a lost treasure. He went to the poor, downcast sinner, and tried to find his heart.

If he could get that it was all he came from heaven to claim.

GOD is glorious in everything he has made. His glory is revealed in the little blade of grass that begins to peep from underneath the winter ice; in the planet that flames with splendor in the heavens; but by ribthing so much, upon this earth, as in man, a creature of intelligence, of immortal capacity, of ever-growing affections and powers; and in the perfection of man in the full ’ unfolding harmony and transfiguration of his nature is God glorified.

PHYSICAL force is sectional, and acts in defined methods. But knowledge defies gravitation, and is not thwarted by space Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs, its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages. THE man who lives merely for the purpose of pumping gratification out of all the world into himself, and appropriating God’s benefits without regard to others, is the meanest creature in the world, nothing but a sponge with brains, sucking in everything, and letting out nothing. To shed upon men an intellectual light to elevate them by force of thought is the noblest of all missions.

Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets.

They-have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendant conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfiahy to communion with beauty, truth, and goodness. ’

They do a great part of the work that is done. There must be ideas before action. The whole natural world is but the embodiment of ideas. The spade in the laborer’s hand, the plough-share in the furrow, was once an idea.

Once tie steamship was only an airy, bodiless thing, sailing through seas of thought in Fulton’s mind. The idealist dies, but his conception lives in physical agencies that change the face of nature, in moral movements that bless and advance humanity.

You think it was an awful thing for Judas to betray Jesus. How many betray him for less than thirty pieces of silver! You think it was a terrible thing for Peter to tell such a cowardly lie, and skulk from his master.

How many do the same thing, when they deny their religious faith, when they go to places where it is unpopular, and shrink from avowing it, or perhaps disavow it altogether?

ACROSS the sweep of ages come the prophet’s wWds, " Make you a new heart and a new spirit." There is nothing vague or mysterious about it. Change your affections if they are selfish; change your aim I it is low; lift up your eyes to that mark of the high calling to which Christ draws you, and let the spirit that was in him be in you. That is making a new heart. Take your heart with earnest purpose and fervent prayer to the cross of Christ, hold it up as a chalice, and let him fill it with his divine excellence and divine self-sacrifice, and then, in the possession of his quickening spirit, you will have a new heart.

RELIGION is felt to be though often very vaguely, very fitfully a vital interest in the world, something that cannot be voted out of the universe; something that will push its way, and make its claim, no matter what other interests are crowded on the human heart.

CHRISTIANITY is in the van of every movement marching for the deliverance of man. It rebukes and smitea in the very face every sophism that would hold human beings in slavery. It stands for the deliverance of man every body, and soul, and heart of man from all evil thought and evil deeds do not like fanaticism in anything; but if we must have it at all, let us have the fanaticism of religion rather than that of worldliness. For the most fanatical man of the two is he that buries his soul up in bullion, grovels in the earth, and lives like a barnacle on this planet, without recognizing anything higher or better. I would rather see a fanatic in religion than in worldliness. That old fanatic, Simeon, who founded a sect called "Pillar Saints," who stood ten years on the top of a pillar, in sun and storm, drenched and dried, weather-beaten and baked, who lived and died thera, was at least so much nearer heaven than the fanatic who was groping below.

THERE are some who try to preserve a sort of balance between the spirit that makes this world supreme, which of course dissolves all moral distinction between right and wrong, and the spirit that makes God supreme, which claims as right the love of right only. There are some who wish to keep in with both these elements. They want the world and they want heaven. They try to live on both sides of the fence, and they hope to postpone the inevitable collision between the two forces. It is like compromising with a cancer, or holding negotiations with the yellow fever. You cannot cheat six days in the week, and get into heaven with a good, long leap on Sunday.

JUST in proportion as we come near to Christ we do not create diversity, but unitj. For in coming not to opinions about Jesus, but to Jesus himself, we come together. And there is the only source of opinion for the Christian church. Let opinions be ventilated, and forms of examining and finding out the truth be discussed; but after all the church comes together around the bleeding heart of Jesus, as the first church did in the upper room at Jerusalem. It was not opinions about his character it was not schemes of salvation set forth in theological dogmas that boug^ those twelve together; but the central Christ himself. And the great church that streamed out from that little nucleus, through all ages, and in all lands, that great church, with its Roman Catholic complexity and its Quaker simplicity, its Unitarian freedom, its Universalist love, its Presbyterian assertions of the grand doctrine" of God’s sovereignty, whatever its peculiar form, the great church has its only principle of unity in that bleeding heart of Christ and our ability to come to him. } And when you bring each atom of that round world of Christendom to that central life of Christ, you have a unity which you can never have by your dogmas and creeds. THAT which survives, and never dies, and triumphs in the end, is the right, the true only.

0, HOW affecting is that truth God’s sympathy for us revealed in Jesus Christ! You look at the New Testament, perhaps, as an old, dry, hard book, with Paul’s epistles and John’s apocalypse at the end of it, and these beautiful sayings scattered here and there through the gospels, but all the meaning of them worn out and rubbed away, because you have read them with such an unsympathizing spirit. If you would only take up the New Testament as a declaration of God’s sympathy with man, if you would realize that where Christ touches the blind eye thqe God pities human infirmities, where he blesses the little child there God shows his love for those who are so dear to us, and where he looks mercifully upon the debased, sensual man, there God’s mercy is shown forth, it would be to you a living volume, full of regenerating power. THE most authentic type of human depravity is a thoroughly unprincipled politician.

EEAL homage to Christ is not in the apprehension of his rank in the universe, but in the possession of his spirit Of what value are all your waving of palms, and high-sounding hosannas, if your hearts are not cast at his feet?

MEN may attribute the advantages of our civilization to this thing and that thing; but the deep spirit of all the best movements of society comes from the life and teachoccupy a more prominent and interesting station than young men. They will immediately succeed our fathers in the scenes of active life, and they exert a powerful influence upon the country and the age. The aspect of the present takes much of its coloring from them; the hopes of the future cluster around them.

Aged patriotism, philanthropy, piety, turn their dim eyes to them, and behold as in a mirror the promise of coming years. Their hands are already upon those golden chords of society which are its bonds of conservation; and in a little while it will depend upon them whether they shall be marred or brightened, whether they shall be preserved or torn asunder.

HE cannot be the true scholar, the true thinker, who is not a moral, a spiritual man That which biases from goodness, violates conscience, and perverts the will cannot be favorable to true intellectual culture. Only by sympathy with truth and excellence can we climb to the knowledge of them. THE charter of man’s liberty is in his soul, not his estate No piled-up wealth, no social station, no throne reaches as high as that spiritual plane upon which every human being stands by virtue of his humanity.

WHAT is intellectual culture worth without the moral?

What to us the use of poetry, history, of all forms of knowledge, except through largeness of the intellectual vision to purify the heart, and to bring us to spiritual perfection? Without this, knowledge is worse than an abstraction, and in such a case we can conceive of a splendid intellect only as we can conceive of a star, drifting through space without adaptation, without an orbit, without a centripetal law.

TAKING the material standard as the exclusive standard of life, a man becomes a mere instrument in pursuit of popularity, of office, or any other worldly advantage, with a soul to let, and a self- serviceable conscience thrown in, like diplomatists that play all manner of variations upon one selfish string, slimy politicians who have wriggled through every kennel, and left their zig-zag trail upon most opposite measures and most inconsistent platforms.

IT does not require great intellect to see plain, palpable facts; but marshal before a man a truth that strikes at his interest, and you cannot make him see it with all the logic you can link from the morning stars to the earth, because he has a different standard of valuation from yours. THE highest power in the universe is moral power; for the Being who buoys up and sustains all things is a moral being. Once this great truth was revealed to men.

They saw the highest power embodied in a sacred personality. It shamed the brawny grandeur of heathen Jove 5 and paled the intellectual glory of Plato. God, whose power is but symbolized in the material forces, the procession of whose thought is the order and beauty of the universe, is in himself love, which is the synonyme of all righteousness. And he who would climb to the highest knowledge, and share something of its absolute power, must ascend not by intellectual formulas, but by rectitude of heart and affinity of spirit. A MAN that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when- he dies slips out of them as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself into the grave, and is forgotten.

COUNTLESS are the hosts who have yielded to the suggestion of evil lusts. Conscripts drawn by God to fight the battle of life, and to scale Alpine heights of duty, they either know not or heed not the summons, but leap without restraint to gratification, or lie basking in the sunshine of voluptuous ease. Fools of appetite! Floats on the stream of impulse! Deserters from the campaign to which God has called them! How often they drop by the way-side, bruised and torn, victims of their own passions, cast into the fire and the water by the devil within them! Spirits made a little lower than the angels, fallen much lower than the brute. Immortal souls soaked into the flesh, and sharing the corruption of the bones. Dying, it may be, in the streets; and, as the waves of death roll over them, lifting dim eyes to the starry immensity above them, unconscious that it is.more limited than their destiny, and that those lights are glimmering from eternal shores, towards which they drift.

WE know how much is put on purposely for the public gaze, and has no other intention than to be seen. How hollow are many of the smiles, and gay looks, and smooth decencies! And even the complexion of some, with its red and white, is more unsubstantial than all the rest; for it is in danger of being washed away by the first shower.

HOY} many men you see in this world who have become merely. the pack-horses of their own possessions; who go through life the veriest slaves to that which they toil for, wasting their health and strength, and, it may be, their higher powers, even their consciences and souls, in the mere effort to accumulate! How many men of this sort you see stumbling along in life like a camel with his load! In fact you do not see the man himself, only the pack of his possessions on his back.

He finds it hard work to squeeze through the needle’s eye; and when he dies he is hardly missed; for that by which he was known that of which he was the slave, and not the master remains behind.

SIN is the great element of hell, and where it exists heaven cannot be. Its triumphs are deeper than those of time, and more terrible than death. It has swept over the moral world, more glorious than the physical, and blighted the beautiful and desecrated the holy. It has scattered abroad and afar the seeds of envy, war, lust, intemperance, murder, and all abomination and iniquity.

It has drawn man aside from innocence and rectitude, and he has gone forth from the joy of Eden with a bowed head and a burning heart; and, worse than all, it has spread a veil athwart his moral vision, and alienated him from his Maker.

I HAVE no great faith in the man -who simply has a nest of habits without any guiding, settled principle; hut if he can build around him an inclosure of moral habits it will do him good. They may serve the same purpose as a go-cart for a little child to learn to walk by, supporting him while he is weak, until he is able to walk alone.

IT is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death. What is blindness? Is it blindness merely not to see with the outer eye? Was Milton blind when he saw the angels of God and all the beautiful ones of the spiritual world in all their brightness before his soul’s inner vision? Is it deafness merely not to hear the outer world, when you can hear God’s voice of approval, cheering you, and the words, " Well done, good and faithful servant "? But it is deafness, and blindness, and ’death itself, to have all our moral nature utterly dissipated and wasted away. IN this world or any other, the same place cannot be the same place to the sinner as to the saint. WOULD the gamester unlock the springs of his heart that he has pressed down as with iron, would he suffer memory and reflection to do their work, what pictures of his domestic life might they paint for him! The first in the series should be one of calm bliss and joy. Not a cloud in the heaven, save those tinged and made beautiful by hope; the eyes of love looking out upon him, the dependence of a trustful heart casting upon him its all.

Then the scene would change. A tearful and deserted wife, a sobbing, pitying child, keeping watch with the lone night-lamp, till the breaking of the morning. Again, and haggard misery would creep into the picture, adding the keenness of deprivation to the sting of grief, pressing heavily upon the bowed, crushed spirit of that wife, mingling the draught of slighted, abused affection with the tears of starved and shivering childhood, piercing her ear at once with the moans for bread and the curses of disappointed brutality. Once more, and there should be a GRAVE! a green and lowly grave where the faithful heart that loved him to the last should rest from all its pangs, and the child that he had slighted should sleep as cold and still as the bosom that once nourished it; a grave! where even the wide and distant heaven should be kinder than he, smiling in sunshine and weeping in rain over those for whom he, in his mad career, never smiled or wept, whom he in his reckless course, hurried thus early to their death.

INTEMPERANCE is no respecter of classes. In parlors and hovels, in rags and broadcloth, its dupes stumble and die. It strikes manly strength and beauty with untimely rottenness; genius is drowned by it; the brain-links of logic are broken, and the tongue of eloquence utters a tuneless babble. Indeed it has the art to cheat men out of their very personality, and to change them into maniacs and fools Not only has it gained complete mastery over your moral sense, drowned your truest convictions, and perverted your best feelings; but see what a picture of humanity you present, snoring in the barroom, reeking in the gutter, grinning like an idiot, whooping like a savage, tumbled about like a foot-ball, the lines of intelligence chiseled from your face or daubed with blood and bruises, your lips black with blasphemy, "your brow fanned by licentious passion, your heart dry, your brain hot, your memory shattered, a bankrupt in your limbs, a caricature of a man! To every one of us God gives this terrible yet glorious privilege, of doing what we like. THAT is the sublimest condition into which a man can come when he perfectly surrenders to God his will, and does what he likes because he likes to do God’s will. THE great crises of man’s existence do not consist primarily in changes of place, or of external fortune, but in changes of state or inward condition.

WE must not think too much of death, death’s narrow bridge, over which Christ walked in coronationrobes, over which martyrs passed in glorious procession.

Death in itself is p, mere physical change, after all, and we must not make too much of it. Any experience that a man may have in this world or any other can hardly be greater than when over his dead soul there moves a divine influence, and in him are quickened holy aspirations; when he stirs in the grave-clothes of evil habit, and breaks the bands of wicked will; when he leaps from the sarcophagus of sensual indulgence, and comes into spiritual light. When the familiar earth shines in the brightness of immortal sanctions, and faith tears away the veil of the unseen, and he realizes that he is a denizen of eternity and a child of God, then is there indeed a resurrection from the dead. To me there is something thrilling and exalting in the thought that we are drifting forward into a splendid mystery, into something that no mortal eye has yet seen, no intelligence has yet declared. THE old simile of the butterfly and the chrysalis I never thought a very forcible one, so far as it is used as an argument in proof ’of another world; but take it in another view, and I think it is one of the most astonishing analogies, one of the most astonishing proofs of immortality you can furnish. The sages of the ancient world had about as many natural arguments for immortality as we have. The human intellect struck at an early period upon the great points of analogy. And when they took up this beautiful simile of the butterfly they taught a great truth; though, I repeat, they did not prove the existence of another world by it, but of another state. Look at it; the butterfly is in the same world as the worm from which the butterfly is evolved; but, 0, how changed, because of the new capacities unfolded in its own being! So the resurrection of man may be regarded as the unfolding of inner capacities, the development of his spiritual being, rather than a translation to some distant.sphere. The wings may be growing in his soul all the while, which shall spread when he bursts the chrysalis of his mortality; and when that chrysalis bursts he may find himself in no strange place, but moving with larger powers among familiar scenes. THE man who went as far as he dared to go is as bad as the man who dared to go further and did go. THE essential thing in the resurrection is not the scenery or the method, but the uplifting of the human spirit from sensuality and sin.

CLOTHES, rank, social position, are rags and nonsense compared with the essential quality and quantity of man’s being. It is life, degrees of life, that makes the essential difference between men. Is not this the reward of all effort for truth and goodness, that we thus acquire new life? The more acquaintance man gets with facts the more he lives; he forms a vascular connection with them, and they become parts of him. He lives the past; he is Plato and Newton, Shakspeare and Channing; his mind sweeps the w,ide orbits of Saturn and Neptune, and the splendor of the Pleiades glitters in his thoughts. And the more he sympathizes with excellence the more he goes out from self; the more he loves the broader and the deeper is his own personality; until his life fills the compass of the world, and he is quickened by the very heart of God. IN politics men start not from the platform of ideal and spiritual realities, but from party. It is the Buffalo or the Baltimore platform, and not that of Mount Sinai or the Mount of Olives. THE great fault of man’s reasoning is not in the process, but in the premises. We say of a man that he cannot reason well because he is wrong in his process. That is not the fault: his mistake consists in his not starting well, in his premises rather than his process. The knave reasons as well as the saint, but he does not start from the same premises. The insane man often reasons most acutely, most wonderfully. If you get into the stream of his logic he tryps you up. So sharp, so subtle is he, and so ready to meet your objections, that you have to go back to the false premises and conceptions in the chinks and crannies of his brain, which weaken it and make it morbid. Starting from these he makes the mistake. The sane man differs from the insane man not in the process, but in the premises. And so it is with regard to the reasoning of men generally. They start from false premises, and, reasoning from them, at last come to the conclusion that anything they do is right.

If they once can make themselves believe that it is right to uphold a certain traffic, then it is easy to come to the conclusion that anything by which they sustain it is right.

If they believe they have a right to consult expediency, then it is but another step to believe in the right to pick a national pocket just as much as a private pocket, to steal an island as much as to commit a trespass upon private property. Start with wrong premises, and all manner of conclusions will follow. THE radical differences between men are comparatively few. If we classify them by temperaments, manners, degrees of culture, we may draw up quite a catalogue. But if we let them fall into rank, according to essential tendencies, people wide apart in external conditions will file into the same group. Indeed, in the last analysis, it is only a truism to say that everybody is full of human nature. THE essential life of heaven first breaks upon us when we rise from sense and sin and go forth with transcendent vision and unworldly aims. IN asserting the claims of the State against the protests of the individual conscience, it is absurd to strike away the ground on which rests the stability of the State itself, the ground of private moral principle. It is absurd to make the State unseat the very power to which it appeals. The best men in community are the men who feel that the final ligature in our nature is that which binds us to God. A TRUE man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.

TRUE justice has regard not merely to selfish ends and to literal right, but to the good of others and the great law of love. of which he is developed, that which constitutes the very sap and fibre of his manliness, is his moral sense. This alone, when upright and pure, makes him a compact stability in society as well as in his private relations.

LAWS are nothing, institutions are nothing, national power and greatness are nothing, save as they assist the moral purpose of God in the development of humanity. THE gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cannon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line.

IF anything is made clear in the New Testament it is that the best affections of this earth are not changed when they are translated to heaven.

STAND, in imagination, of a summer’s morning, upon a field of battle. Earth and sky melt together in light and harmony; the air is rich with fragrance, and sweet with the song of birds. But suddenly breaks in the sound of fiercer music, and the measured tramp of thousands. Eager squadrons shake the earth with thunder, and files of bristhng steel kindle in the sun; and, opposed to each other, line to line, face to face, are now arrayed men whom God has made in the same likeness, and whose nature he has touched to the same issues. The same heart beats in all. In the momentary hush, like a swift mist sweep before them images of home; voices of children prattle in their ears; memories of affection stir among their silent prayers. They cherish the same sanctities, too. They have read from the same Book. It is to them the same charter of life and salvation; they have been taught to observe its beautiful lessons of love; their hearts have been touched alike with the meek example of Jesus. But a moment, and all these affinities are broken, trampled under foot, swept away by the shock and the shouting. Confusion rends the air; the simmering bomb ploughs up the earth; the iron hail cuts the quivering flesh; the steel bites to the bone; the cannonshot crashes through serried ranks; and under a cloud of smoke that hides both earth and heaven the desperate struggle goes on. The day wanes, and the strife ceases. On the one side there is a victory, on the other a defeat. The triumphant city is lighted with jubilee, the streets roll out their tides of acclamation, and the organ heaves from its groaning breast the peal of thanksgiving. But under that tumultuous joy there are bleeding bosoms and inconsolable tears; and, whether in triumphant or defeated lands, a shudder of orphanage and widowhood a chill of woe and death runs far and wide through the world. The meek moon breaks the dissipating veil of the conflict, and rolls its calm splendor above the dead. And see now how much woe man has mingled with the inevitable evils of the universe! See now the fierceness of his passion, the folly of his wickedness, witnessed by the torn standards, the broken wheels, the pools of clotted blood, the charred earth, the festering heaps of slain.

Nature did not make these horrors, and when those fattening bones shall have mouldered in the soil she will spread out luxuriant harvests to hide those horrors forever. THE essence of the gospel its great peculiarity is not in any statement of God’s nature, or of man’s nature, of the Trinity, of the unity, of human perfectibility, of total depravity. The essence of the gospel is in its spirit of restoring, of long-suffering, of inexhaustible love, claiming its objects, waiting for them, and welcoming them at the last.

FANCY yourselves standing on the banks of the Delaware more than a century and a half ago. The "winds have stripped the leaves from the primeval forest, save where the pines lift their dark drapery to the sky. The river travels silently on its way. All around lies’ the solitude of nature, unbroken by the wheels of traffic or the triumphs of civilization. Apart from the roar and the conflict of nations, apart from the hurrying tides of interest and passion, this lone spot in the western wilderness, beside the calm river,’ is a spot for peace and love, a spot where the children of humanity may come, bury their war weapons, and embrace. Lo! it is that spot. An instance of brotherly love is displayed here, such as the world had not seen since the days of the Redeemer. From the recesses of the forest there glides a file of red and naked men, wild in their strength, and uncurbed in all the native impulses of humanity. As they cluster beneath the arching elm, or brood in dusky lines along the wooded back-ground, their eyes glisten with the fires of their fierce nature, and here and there a hand grasps more closely its weapon; yet in the grave silence and studied repose the old men bend forward their scarred faces, and the young incline their ears to hear. He who stands up to speak to them is a white man, unarmed, and almost companionless, yet in his mein there is neither hesitation nor fear, and his face, where mildness sweetly blends with dignity, banishes the suspicion of deceit.

Consider him well; for in the true record of his life his name is enrolled higher than those of heroes. Bred up in all the amenities of life, he has come to try a "holy experiment" in the depths of the wilderness. Trained in various learning, he feels that love is the best knowledge and the best language. Unawed in sculptured minsters, unfettered by ordinances, he calls the great earth a temple, and finds in all the humanities forms of worship.

Unbending before kings, he reverences the rudest savage as a man. Rejecting human creeds, his soul is full of the gospel. Guided by the "inner light," the law of conscience and of truth, the Indian’s rights are sacred as the white man’s, and he asks no force to aid him but the force of love. And as he utters those simple words of peace and justice, those savage bosoms grow warm with the Christian law, those glittering eyes melt with charity, around those dusky circles throbs the pulse of the one humanity, and the panther of the forest becomes as the lamb. The child of the red man clasps the hand of the white stranger, the belt of wampum is made a beautiful symbol, and the words of solemn promise go forth, the winds lift them higher than any shout of victory, the woods repeat them far inland, and the Delaware bears them rolling by, "We will live with William Penn and his children as long as the sun and the moon shall endure." It was an honest compact. It was a bloodless conquest. It was the triumph of peace and right. The historian records it with a glow. The philanthropist quotes it, and takes courage. The Christian remembers it, and clings with new faith to the religion that accomplished it.

" FIRST pure, and then peaceable." That is the great order of things; for there is no peace without purity; and a man cannot effectually make peace in the world unless he is at peace in himself; and he cannot be at peace in himself unless he is pure and right within. CAN you conceive of anything that so represents the glory, and truth, and marvelousness of God’s nature as the idea of peace? When you come back to your best evidences, what would constitute the beatitudes of the divine nature but peace and harmony at the centre of all things, undisturbed fulness of life? As in the family circle the return of the wanderer his penitent and willing return is received with a burst of gladness, so the return of the sinful to truth, to holiness, to God, fills all heaven with bliss, and thrills with joy angelic hearts. As when one has been shut in some gloomy room, some tainted, sick chamber, some dark, narrow enclosure, and gets out into one of these glorious spring days of open "nature, and the broad arch of heaven spreads over him like a benediction, and the wind breathes upon him like a new life, and all the harmonies of nature multiply and gather around him, so one goes out from the narrowness of human conceit, and the perplexities of human discussion, and little mean bigotries of human conclusions, into the broad, free atmosphere of Jesus Christ. It always has that effect upon me. It comes upon me like a breath of nature, to turn away from the distracting discussion of men, the little pin-point differences, the mean, dark, gloomy bigotries that creep over religious discussion, and to come to Jesus Christ, who uttered the Sermon on the Mount, who gave me the beautiful parable of the sower going forth to sow, who teaches me by the suggestion of the vineyard, who points to the wild bird flying through the air, and the lily clothed in raiment more splendid than that of Solomon. THE trumpet of God is blown against evil, and it is only a question of time. The black night-hawks go swooping under the Southern cross to strike their beaks into bleeding Africa, but they will fail as surely as night is smitten by God’s morning.

NEVER did any man, who comes to it rightly, go away from the New Testament with anything like a gloomy thought. With shame, penitence, and a solemn sense of life with a quickening of that which is deepest and brightest in us we go away; but never with anything like gloom from the teachings of Jesus Christ.

JESUS CHRIST is the reflection of the divine love.

There is nothing tender in him who blessed little children, there is nothing lovely in him who walked so kindly among the sorrows and wrongs of humanity, there is nothing that attracts us to the heart of him who sat at the marriage-feast in Cana, who mingled with the poor and suffering, who cleansed the leper and raised the dead, there is nothing in all that love that draws us to him that is not in the Father’s nature. If we only could see God’s love, and realize it as expressed in Jesus Christ, we could not help longing for it, and praying that such, according to the finite capacity of our nature, might be the essence of our spiritual being. OUR post is not the Mount of Vision, but the Field of Labor; and we can find no rest in Eden until we have passed through Gethsemane. IN a mother’s heart there is a love that cannot be altered and exhausted, and that will claim that abandoned sinner when he comes back. So in the Infinite bosom, and in the bosoms of all heavenly beings, there exists the same love. The spirit that sent Jesus Christ on earth ia that spirit. The purpose of Christ’s mission is to declare that spirit. That is the peculiarity of the gospel over and above everything else. Precisely where man’s faith falls and man’s hope falters is it that the gospel becomes clear and v strong. It is not the announcement of the doctrine of evil to the sinner, and good to the saint. That doctrine might stand upon any basis, even the basis of worldly morality. But it is the announcement of the doctrine of a good that will forgive the sinner, that will watch over its objects, wait upon them, and welcome them at last. That is the sublime originality, that is the practical power of the gospel. And this sympathy is a sympathy that prevails among the purest and best beings of the universe; that is the point. It is not in proportion as a man is a sinner that he sympathizes with -the sinner, but in proportion as a being is pure and unsullied is there a sympathy, not for the sin, but for the sinner, which is deep and lasting.

LIFE itself suggests a higher good than life itself can yield.

I SEE nowhere in nature the personal God. I see a God of law, a God of order, a God whose footsteps are marked in all the bright stars which sprinkle the heavens, whose work is seen in the characters of the long-finished ages beneath my feet, all moving orderly, calm, splendid, cold, austere. I recognize God in every grass-blade that springs up to-day, in every star that travels in glory; but it is the God of order, the God of law; a God who is as near to the butterfly that flits with embroidered wings as to you and me; a God who cares as much for the gilded wheels of Mars or Uranus as for the tribes of suffering, weak, wounded humanity. But when I come to Jesus Christ, I find a father; I find not only a God of law, but a God of love. I find not only an abstract, general God, but a personal God. I find not only a God who cares in general beneficence for the forms of outward nature, but who has a peculiar care for humanity, who looks to it as to his own image, and sees something in it to become more like him, to rise nearer and nearer to him, and wear more gloriously his likeness. I behold a Father who goes forth continually, striving to bring humanity to himself; seeking for the poor, lost sheep; searching for the lost piece of silver; yearning over each man, the poorest, the lowest, the vilest.! God’s love, God’s personal contact, God’s fatherhood, I find in Jesus Christ, and there alone! You know that the men who have uttered the subhinest strains of philosophy, who have given us the wisest codes of morals, have never stood in this position. It is Christ alone who has given us the truth of humanity and the truth of God, and who has given us an illustration of it. As it is in nature so it is in the Bible, the great truths are on the surface. They are not for scholars only. It would be preposterous, would it not, to suppose that God gave a revelation to man bearing upon his highest duty and destiny, and then made it so that only scholars and learned men could comprehend it, something we must shovel after with our dictionaries and lexicons, delving into ecclesiastical history to get at the great saving truths of the gospel?

I WOULD not dare to preach if I did not have confidence in the Love that is watching over us, if I thought I was the minister of some awful power or mystery. If I thought that I must carry to dying beds and to scenes of mortal need only the great dark shadow of mystery, I could not preach. It is because I think I have to speak of infinite love, of love greater than we can fathom, broader than we can compass, more full than we can express; because I feel that there is a power back of the humble words which I speak to flow into the hearts of men and lift them up. THE best commentary upon the New Testament is the New Testament itself. The best way to understand it is to go right with your naked human heart and soul to it.

Christ speaks the people’s language. He speaks not only to the people of Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but to the people of America now. And to every needy heart his language is plain and simple. While the Pharisees saw something to cavil at, and the Scribes to abuse, the common people heard him gladly, and the common heart felt him and owned him; and so spontaneous did it become at last so did their sense of the duty of recognition swell that at last it burst through all bounds, and they scattered their palms, and strewed their garments, and thundered their hosannas, in the acknowledgment of Christ’s authority and his truth. WHEN you can jam a man up against a great fact of life, and ask him, How now? what does this teach you? what does that say, man! to the deep heart within you? what does that speak to the aspiring, thirsty soul? When you can do that, there is power in preaching; and if it is only the leaf of the lily or the wing of the wild bird, it has infinite power the moment it presses home the great reality of the truth which it contains. As Christ passes before us as he rides through the ages as his glory -with every advancing year culminates in new operations of his spirit, and new demonstrations of his truth he compels from us such an acknowledgment as that which poured from the lips and waved from the palm-branches of the people on the road to Jerusalem. As he rides through the ages, a vaster throng far more vast than that which gathered around him upon the slope of the Mount of Olives gathers about him, a great multitude that no man can number: the morally blind, whose eyes have been opened; the spiritually deaf, who have been made to hear; the worse than physically dead, who have come into newness of life; tearful mourners, who have felt the greatness of his powers and the peace he has conferred; poor, crushed hearts, who have known the balm of his consolation; all who have been touched and have been blessed by Jesus Christ, swell the long retinue, and give homage and honor to his name.

Wherever the church-bell rings out to-day wherever it touches the hearts of men with any suggestion or any meaning there is truly a Palm Sunday, not of outward offering, but of inward homage, just as men can appreciate the real greatness of.Christ, and know what he has clone for them, and what he has done for the World.

WE do not need simply to think and feel about Christ upon the Mount of Olives, when the world lies beneath us, and the great Jerusalem of traffic, strife, and temptation, yonder. We want to honor Christ by our action down in the streets of Jerusalem, right down in the mire, toil, dust, and heat of daily traffic; in the midst of the selfish worldliness of life. We want something of that kind; not merely a swell over a congregation of the thought of his sorrows, suiferings, and agonies, that passes away like a gust of wind. We want to honor him, not as he rides in pomp, or as he is presented before us in a point of rhetorical attraction, but as he walks down in the Jerusalem of daily life. THE Christ of our youth, a personage standing mild and beautiful upon the gospel-page, a being to admire and love; how he develops to our later thought! how solemnly tender, how greatly real he becomes to us, when we cling to him in the agony of our sorrow, and he goes down to walk with us on the waters of the sea of death!

DOWN below all the crust of human conceptions, of human ideas, Christ sank an artesian well into a source of happiness so pure and blessed that even yet the world does not believe in it. No such words as those of Christ have come from any other source in this world. No such words from any other creature have been wafted upon the stream of ages. There are no passages which mean so much, which open into such unfathomable depths. There are none whiclj, so expand in their nature, which so meet the most vital wants of man. There are none which shed such light upon the great problems of existence. There are none which are at once so divine and so human, presenting the exact balance of duty, and guiding the doubtful feet.

There are none which, so marked with the file of the ages, keep ahead of all human achievements and ideals. There are none which are so full for the thoughtful man, and yet so fitted to the little and the ignorant. There are none which so strike upon the deep malady of sin. There are none which so enter into, and lift up, and give rest to the sad, and heavy, and weary heart. THE work of modern chivalry is the work of humanity. Not a work such as called the old chivalry to battle for the Holy Sepulchre, but a work for the help and uplifting of those for whom He who triumphed over the sepulchre died; not taking the shape of that sentiment which "groined cathedral isles," but a work for that which is more truly God’s temple, and which his spirit fills.

THERE is no condition in life of which we can say exclusively "It is good for us to be here." Our course is appointed through vicissitude, our discipline is in alternations; and we can build no abiding tabernacles along the way. THE multitude had been so long used to the dry, husky, technical teachings of the Scribes and Pharisees that when they heard the Sermon on the Mount they drew a long breath, and said, "Never man spake like this man;" and no one ever did. Why? Because he saw radical truth everywhere. He took a little lily, growing in the summer light, and what a missal of divine glory it became! what a lesson of God’s goodness! He saw the bird steering its way through the air, and it became at once an illustration of Divine Providence. He took nothing but a grain of mustard-seed, and the whole kingdom of God was involved in it. Wherever he turned his eye he found central and radical truth, and struck out of it something right before the people that they could take hold of. Now, my friends, this is the power of all effective preaching. It comes home to the heart from realities.

THERE is an entire magazine of working forces in that one great law, " Love thy neighbor as thyself."

I HAVE no fear of the power or of the influence of the pulpit so long as it applies God’s truth boldly and freely; so long as the old prophet utterances of past ages are borne from it or breathed through it; so long as the true apostolic descent which comes from the soul’s serving God and being baptized in the spirit of Christ is represented in it. I have no fear of the power, or efficacy, or standing of the pulpit. I have no fear of the true respect that will come to the preacher so long as the people are convinced that he is loyal to his own convictions. There are tens of thousands of people now, who rather dislike that the preacher should teach his own convictions, who would dislike him ten times more if he did not do it. If they thought he was truckling and squeezing down upon the pressure of public opinion, although they might approve his actions, and call him a judicious man, they would be disgusted with him. There is no power left to the preacher the moment you think he is not uttering his real convictions. When you think he is trimming his sails, has his eye upon the public, and cares more how the people receive his doctrine than what he shall say, there is no more respect for him. Those preachers, although they may be called conservative, wise, and prudent, never will move the public heart or do God’s work.

MODEST expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius. ON the wall of the Vatican, untarnished by the passage of three hundred years, hangs the master-piece of Raphael, - his picture of the Transfiguration. In the centre, with the glistening raiment and the altered countenance, stands the Redeemer. On the right hand and on the left are his glorified visitants; while, underneath the bright cloud, lie the forms of Peter, and James, and John, gazing at the transfigured Jesus, shading their faces as they look. Something of the rapture and the awe that attracted the apostles to that shining spot seems to have seized the soul of the great artist, and filled him with his greatest inspiration. But he saw what the apostles at that moment did not see, and in another portion of his picture has represented the scene at the foot of the hill, the group that awaited the descent of Jesus. The poor possessed boy, writhing, and foaming, and gnashing his teeth, his eyes, as some say, in their wild, rolling agony, already catching a glimpse of the glorified Christ above; the baffled disciples, the cavilling scribes, the impotent physicians, the grief-worn father, seeking in vain for help. Suppose Jesus had stayed upon the mount, what would have become of that group of want, and helplessness, and agony? Suppose Christ had remained in the brightness of that vision forever, himself only a vision of glory, and not an example of toil, and sorrow, and suffering, and death, alas! for the great world at large, waiting at the foot of the hill; the groups of humanity in all ages; the sin-possessed sufferers; the cavilling sceptics; the philosophers, with their books and instruments; the bereaved and frantic mourners in their need!

So, my hearers, wrapped in the higher moods of the soul, and wishing to abide among upper glories, we may not see the work that waits for us along our daily path; without doing which all our visions are vain. We must have the visions. We need them in our estimate of the" world around us, of the aspects and^destinies of humanity. There are times when justice is balked, and truth covered up, and freedom trampled down; when we may well be tempted to ask, " What is the use of trying to work? " when we may well inquire whether what we are doing is work at all. And in such a case, or in any other, one is lifted up, and inspired, and enabled to do and to endure all things, when in steady vision he beholds the ever-living God, when all around the injustice, and conflict, and suffering of the world, he detects the Divine Presence, like a bright cloud overshadowing.

! then doubt melts away, and wrong dwindles, and the jubilee of victorious falsehood is but a peal of drunken laughter, and the spittings of guilt and contempt no more than flakes of foam flung against a hero’s breast-plate.

Then one sees, as it were, with the vision of God, who looked down upon the old cycles, when a sweltering waste covered the face of the globe, and huge, reptile natures held it in dominion; who beholds the pulpy worm, down in the sea, building the pillars of continents; so one sees the principalities of evil sliding from their thrones, and the deposits of humble faithfulness rising from the deep of ages. Our sympathy, our benevolent effort in the work of God and humanity, how much do they need not only the vision of intellectual foresight, but of the faith which, on bended knees, sees further than the telescope!

.WE should not quit the world to build tabernacles in the Mount of Transfiguration, but come from out the celestial brightness, to shed light into the world, to make the whole earth a cathedral; to overarch it with Christian ideals, to transfigure its gross and guilty features, and fill it with redeeming truth and love

Nay, even for the Redeemer, that was not to be an abiding vision; and he illustrates the purport of life as he descends from his transfiguration to toil, and goes forward to exchange that robe of heavenly brightness for the crown of thorns. What if Jesus had remained there, upon that Mount of Vision, and himself stood before us as only a transfigured form of glory? Where, then, would be the peculiarity of his work, and its effect upon the world?

PETER and his fellow-disciples were called to follow Christ not that they might see visions, but were permitted to see visions that they might follow Christ. It was well that they should see their Master glorified, that they might be strengthened to see him crucified. It was well that Moses and Elias stood at the font when they were about to be baptized into their apostleship of suffering, and labor, and helping finish the work which these glorious elders helped begin. But that great work still lay before them, and to rest here would be to stop upon the threshold; to have kept the vision would have thwarted the purpose. Upon a far higher summit, and at a far distant time with fields of toil and tracts of blood between would that which was meant as an inspiration for their souls become fixed for their sight, and tabernacles that should never perish enclose a glory that should never pass away. No father’s love, no mother’s affection for a child, is greater than God’s love for it. And if in a moment of darkness of a succession of sad crushing calamities we are disposed to doubt God’s love, if we are disposed to murmur at his dispensations, interpret him by yourself, father! mother! interpret his love by your love; and remember that you, the stream, cannot care more for that child than he, the fountain and ocean of all love. IN order to see our business in its highest relations we must get above its level. If we would make it subservient to religious ends and to tke moral law we must descend into it with superior influences The man who makes his business the noble symbol of a true life at times goes apart from it. The divine refreshment which he carries with him into the heat and burden of the day, and with which he keeps his aim elevated and his vision clear, he imbibes not in the market or the street, but from mountain-heights of thought and well-spring, of prayer. Let him show his religion in business, but let him use the means that he may find a religion to show. THAT religion has done very little work that has merely made a man feel easier, happier, and better contented in life. It ought to arous’e a man up. You know the anecdote of Louis and Massilon. After Massilon had preached rather an agitating sermon, I suppose, Louis sent for him. "Massilon," said he, "you have offended me." "That is what I wished to do, sire," said the preacher. And I would not give a centfor a minister who did not offend two-thirds of his congregation, at times, arouse them up, smash against the conscience of the bigot, and balk party prejudices, and touch the secret sin, which, if they do not confess, they still feel.

IF we might adapt God’s nature at all to our poor human conceptions, we should feel that even waves of gladness must go over the infinite sea of his nature at the exercise of mercy, and that even he, in his unapproachable greatness and infinity, feels something of that joy which runs through all heaven at the exercise and exhibition of mercy.

PERHAPS the most restless being in the world is the man who need to do nothing but keep still. The old soldier fights all his battles over again, and the retired merchant spreads the sails of his thought upon new ventures, or comes uneasily down to snuff the air of traffic, and feel the jar of wheels. I suppose there is nobody whose condition is so deplorable, so ghastly, as his whose lot many may be disposed to envy, a man at the top of this world’s ease, crammed to repletion with what is called " enjoyment; " ministered to by every luxury, the entire surface of his life so smooth with completeness that there is not a jut to hang a hope on, so obsequiously gratified in every specific want that he feels miserable from the very lack of wanting.

I DO not know of any other church standard than this, the life of Christ the spirit of Christ.

"WHO can adequately describe the triumphs of Labor?

It has extorted the secrets of the universe, and trained its powers into a myriad forms of use and beauty. From the bosom of the old creation it has developed anew the creation of industry and of art. It has been its task and its glory to overcome obstacles. Mountains have been levelled and vallies exalted before it. It has broken the rocky soil into fertile glebes, it has crowned the hill-tops with fruit and verdure, and bound around the very feet of ocean ridges of golden corn. Up from sunless and hoary deeps, up from the shapeless quarry, it drags its spotless marbles, and rears its palaces of pomp.

It tears the stubborn metals from the bowels of the globe, and makes them ductile to its will. It marches steadily on, over the swelling flood and through the mountain clefts. It fans its way through the winds of ocean, tramples its hoarse surges, and mingles them with flakes of fire. Civilization follows in its path. It achieves grander victories, it weaves more durable trophies, it holds wider sway than the conqueror. His name, becomes tainted, and his monuments crumble; but Labor converts his red battle-fields into gardens, and erects monuments significant of better things. It writes with the lightning.

It sits crowned as a queen in a thousand cities, and sends up its roar of triumph from a million wheels. It glistens in the fabrics of the loom, it rings and sparkles from the steely hammer, it glows in shapes of beauty, it speaks in words of power, it makes the sinewy arm strong with liberty, the poor man’s heart rich with content, and crowns the swarthy and sweaty brow with honor, and dignity, and peace.

CONSIDERED in its broadest sense, Labor is the chosen sphere of God himself, through which he continually manifests his attributes, and which testifies to his glory. In the great field of the universe he has wrought from the beginning until now; and beneath his instant control creation is ever at work in all its parts, and in it’s great whole, from the ducts and valves of the human frame, to the motions of the solar system, and the mazy circles of the firmament. It is the price of all attainment, the appointed medium of all true power. Men may exist and not work, but without it they lack the essential vigor of life, they exist as the sponge on the rock, or the weed by the wall. Without the braced action of the brain or the muscles, ornament covers only emptiness, and wealth encircles only feebleness; while there is no sovereignty like that which is born of resistance and achievement, there is no sceptre like the strong and cunning right hand. THE purest people are the most charitable. All noble natures are hopeful. THE Christianity of our age is not merely the Christianity of the cathedral or the cloister, but of the machineshop and the sidewalk; it sets the pulpit over against the shrine of mammon, and, as it were, upon the deck of every vessel that goes steaming out to sea. It does not favor merely a little number, in exclusive sanctity and consecrated form; it sends out its messengers into the streets and lanes, the highways and hedges, and the poor, the lame, the dumb, the blind feel the breath of sympathy, and come creeping their way into its blessed light.

Earnest men are actually finding their way to the Christian faith through the working of Christian utib’ty.

They discover what Christianity is out in the broad life of practical action, when that life has long since ebbed away from the shells of creeds, and left only its wavemark on the strata of tradition. A CITY is, in one respect, like a high mountain; the latter is an epitome of the physical globe; for its sides are belted by products of every zone, from the tropical luxuriance that clusters around its base to its arctic summit, far up in the sky. So is the city an epitome of the social world. All the belts of civilization intersect along its avenues. It contains the products of every moral zone.

I WILL tell you where there is power: "Where the dew lies upon the hills, and the rain has moistened the roots of the various plants; where the sunshine pours steadily; where the brook runs babbling along; there is a beneficent power. THE great saints the men whose names stand highest in the calendar of the church universal are not the ascetics, not the contemplators, not the men who walked apart in cloisters; but those who came down from the Mount of Communion and Glory, to take a part in the world; who have carried its burdens in their souls, and its scars upon their breasts; who have wrought for its deepest interests, and died for its highest good; whose garments have swept its common ways, and whose voices have thrilled in its low places of suffering and of need; men who have leaned lovingly against the world, until the motion of their great hearts jars in its pulses forever; men who have gone up from dust, and blood, and crackling fire; men with faces of serene endurance and lofty selfdenial, yet of broad, genial, human sympathies; these are the men who wear starry crowns, and walk in white robes, yonder.

GATETY is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.

" SWEAR curse Christ," said the proconsul to Polycarp, " and I release you." " Six-and-eighty years have I served him," replied the venerable disciple, "and he has done me nothing but good; and how could I curse him, my Lord and Savior?" His was a vision that pierced the barriers-of the grave, and saw far beyond the principalities and powers of the earth. Above the martyr’s fire hovered a glory beneath which the splendors of this world grew dim, and his dripping garments turned to coronation robes. The dreadful amphitheatre swam away from before his sight, the ranged spectators faded, the pinnacles of the celestial city gleamed upon him; and he saw the angels casting down their crowns; he saw martyred Stephen with his beatific face, and the long line of prophets, who before him had gone up from the ordeal of blood; and amidst the taunts and the accusations, and before the open jaws of death, he was able to " rejoice," yea, to "be exceeding glad." Do you want proof of immortality? If you do not feel it; if your heart and consciousness do not tell you of it; if some great fact of life has not brought it to you, some great loss the open grave of some friend, or the consciousness of some limitation against which you chafe and beat, if that does not bring immortality home to you you will never be convinced of it.

CHRISTIANITY is not a religion of details. It is not a religion of codes, precepts, maxims. It is a religion of great principles, all imbued with the self-sacrificing life of Christ Jesus. Away with your nonsensical sophistries, ’that Christianity did not meddle with the social institutions of its time, that it did not meddle with the wrongs of its time. It meddled with them just as the acorn meddles with the barren soil when it sends up the oak; just as the seed meddles with the superincumbent earth, as it quickens slowly and surely and sends up its harvest.

No; Christ said nothing against the priests and doctors of the law. He did not challenge their authority. But, by and by, somehow, men who took from the life of Christ stood up before the priests and magistrates, and said, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you rather than unto God, judge ye. Though Christ did not say a word about democracy; though Christ did not speak against Caesar, but says, Render ’ unto Caesar the thing^s that are Caesar’s; though he did not challenge the right of kings, yet somehow kings’ crowns have grown dim ever since Christianity came into the world. I have no doubt there were many tons of Christianity in the hull of the Mayflower, and its text was written large in the Declaration of Independence. Christ said nothing; but every text he uttered was a grain of gunpowder, to crack, and shatter, and establish the life; because it is life and not death; it is spiritual in form; and it works its way, slowly but surely accomplishing its ends. THE baffled hopes of our mortal state, what are they but vain strivings of the human soul, out of the path of its highest good? The wandering bird, driven against the branches, and beaten by the storm, flutters at last to the clear opening by which it mounts above the cloud, and finds its way to its home. This life is not ordained in vain; it is constituted for a grand purpose, if through its lessons of experience we become convinced that this life is not all.

IF we look upon the future state merely for its outside garments of white, and its crowns of gold, its privilege of running from star to star, and being here and there, we degrade our conception of it. If we think of it as a nobler state of soul, a rising spirit, an inlet of moral light, of moral power, then we get the grandeur of the future state; for that is its essential element. Come crowns of glory, if God gives them, raiments of white, and grand palm-branches. I know not what the scenery of that state may be; but I know that the most blessed element of that state is a spirit like the spirit of Jesus Christ, who lived and died that we might live.

WHATEVER is inevitable is beneficent. Whatever lies in the constitution of nature or the order of Providence, and not in the scope of human agency, we may believe is essentially wise and good. The law of growth and decay, in its comprehensive operation, unfolds.a benevolent design. The autumn-phase of nature is but. one form of an ever-streaming life, a preliminary of reproduction; and the falling leaf is not only a herald of winter, but a prophecy of spring. When we look at it aright we detect the same good power, the same beneficent agency at work, stripping the branches of the forest and blighting the grass, as that which scatters enamelled glories through the meadow, and unlocks the babbling brook. And though here the operation of this law comes more plainly into the scope of our vision, and more rapidly unfolds its intent, we see the benefit of its working even in wider circles and in grander forms. The earth on which we dwell holds a record of the same great law. Here, in these "sunless deeps," have been changes inconceivably vast, wrought out with flood and flame. Here lie effigies of being long since passed away; the medallions of successive dynasties set in solid stone. And as with the falling leaf, so with vanishing epochs, each buried form has been the seed of a higher life, each changing state the preliminary of nobler conditions. So with nations, with empires, the elements of human progress, the Providential ends of history, have~been served in their decline and fall, no less than in their rise. A richer growth of civilization has sprung up in their ruins, and their perished forms have made room for ampler institutions to embody nobler ideas. And no doubt in whatever shape we trace this process, could we detect its profoundest purposes, and grasp all its relations, we should still discover beneficence and beauty. The mere light of nature shows such glimpses, even in that stern fact which troubles us so much even in death. It is not without its natural explanations and comforts. When it comes in what appears its due season it seals up worn-out powers, and gives release from decrepitude and pain. The old man is as a withered leaf, and death gently removes a fixed incapacity, a worn-out usefulness, in which the juices of life are all stagnant, or mixed, it may be, with unfit prejudices, and gives room for the vigor, the new thought, the fresh and more timely action of another generation. And sweet and kindly are all the appliances of nature, kindly the film that gathers over the failing eyes, the touch that softly stops the weary heart; sweet the clods into which moulders the mortal dust, the sky that bends over it, the flowers that deck, the dews that consecrate it, as it mixes with the larger elements, and, may be, " turns to daisies in the grave." THE public sense is in advance of private practice.

I WILL tell you -what to me is one of the strongest proofs of an immortal life. It is a true, good, blessed life, in this world. I see a man, a woman, a child, or a friend living a life of purity, of love, of holiness, aspiring continually to something higher and better, putting aside every weight of evil, overcoming temptation, rising above guilty passion, becoming pure and refined; and in such a person immortality becomes to me an assurance. Now, of all beings Jesus Christ stands before me as the emblem of purity of such excellence that immortality becomes to me a possibility and an assurance. And thus, in the personal resurrection of Jesus Christ, we get a strength of conviction that we could not derive from abstract reasonings. That is the value of historical Christianity. That is the value of a personal Jesus.

NOTHING is more grand than man’s relation to spiritual beings, than the fact that the universe is filled up with blessed intelligences. I do not need to see them, or hear them, to be convinced of this fact. I know by surer sight than the eye, by more certain hearing than the ear, that they exist: I know it by my vital consciousness of a God and of a heaven. And Christianity interprets that fact. It shows man, poor, wretched, vile as he may be, linked with these innumerable relations.

WHATEVER in the system of things is inevitable is beneficent. The dissolution of these bonds comes by the same law as that which ordains them; and we may be sure that the one, though it plays out of sight, and is swallowed up in mystery, is as wise and tender in its purpose as the other. It is very consoling to recognize the hand that gave in the hand that takes a friend, and to know that he is borne away in the bosom of Infinite Gentleness, as he was brought here. It is the privilege of angels, and of a faith that brings us near the angels, to always behold the face of our Father in Heaven; and so we shall not desire the abrogation of this law of dissolution and separation For who is prepared at any time to say that it was not better for the dear friend, and better for ourselves, that he should go, rather than stay; better for the infant to die with flowers upon its breast than to live and have thorns in his heart; better to kiss the innocent lips that are still and cold than to see the living lips that are scorched with guilty passion; better to take our last look of a face while it is pleasant to remember serene with thought, and faith, and many charities than to see it toss in prolonged agony, and grow hideous with the wreck of intellect? And as spiritual beings, placed here not to be gratified, but to be trained, surely we know that often it is the drawing up of these earthlyties that draws up our souls; that a great bereavement breaks the crust of our mere animal consciousness, and inaugurates a spiritual faith; and we are baptized into eternal life through the cloud and the shadow of death.

WHAT do the grand capacities of our nature, always hungering and thirsting, and never satisfied,.signify?

What does this conviction of man, that burns like a lamp in the darkness of the shadow -of death, and will not hear of such a fact as annihilation, signify? What does all that achievement of the human races, of ever higher attainment, its constant development of a higher ideal, signify? Such a mind as that just gone out in Europe,* casting a light upon so many other minds; who has kindled within us some of tfcfe grandest intellectual conceptions; who has written books which, however false in detail, yet, as a presentation of English history, as bringing before us, in the grand gallery of the past, the noble, wise, and beautiful forms, will live as long as the English tongue lives; what means a mind like that, soaring up out of time and sense, in the midst of a glorious work all unfinished, and standing, like some of those old cathedrals, with half the towers down; what means all this aspiring, unfinished capacity, if the tradition of scepticism is true?

* Lord Macaulay. A GREAT peculiarity of the Christian religion is its transforming or transmuting power. I speak not now of the regeneration which it accomplishes in the individual soul, but of the change which it works upon things without. It applies the touchstone to every fact of existence, and exposes its real value. Looking through the lens of spiritual observation, it throws the realities of lifo into a reverse perspective from that which is seen by the sensual eye. Objects which the world calls great it renders insignificant, and makes near and prominent things which the frivolous put far off. Thus the Christian, among other men, often appears anomalous. Often, amidst the congratulations of the world, he detects reasons for mourning and is penetrated with sorrow. On the contrary, where others shrink he walks undaunted, and converts the scene of dread and suffering into an antechamber of heaven Jesus himself weeps amid triumphant palms and sounding hosannas, while on the cross he utters the prayer of forgiveness and the ejaculation of peace. No wonder, then, that the believer views the ghasthest fact of all in a consoling and even a beautiful aspect, and death itself becomes but sleep. Well was that trait of our religion which I have now suggested illustrated at the bed-side of Jairus’ daughter. Well did that noisy, lamenting group represent the worldly -who read only the material fact, or that flippant scepticism which laughs all supernatural truth to scorn. And well did Jesus represent the spirit of his doctrine and its transforming powei when he exclaimed, " She is not dead, but sleepeth."

Yes, beautifully has Christianity transformed death To the eye of flesh it was the final direction of our fate, the consummate riddle in this mystery of being, tho wreck of all our hopes, " The simple senses crowned his head; Omega! thou art Lord, they said; We find no motion in the dead."

Ever, though with higher desires and better gleamings, the mind has struggled and sunk before this fact of decay, and this awful silence of nature; while in the waning light of the soul, and among the ashes of the sepulchre, scepticism has built its dreary negation. And though no mother could lay down her child without taking hints which God gave her from every little flower that sprung on that grassy bed, though the inexhausted intellect has reasoned that we ought to live again, and the affections, more oracular, swelling with the nature of their great source, have prophesied that we shall, never, until the revelation of Christ descended into our souls, and illuminated all our spiritual vision, have we been able to say certainly of death, it is a sleep. This has made its outward semblance not that of cessation, but of progression, not an end, but a change; converting its rocky couch to a birth-chamber, over-casting its shadows with beams of eternal morning, while behind its cold unconsciousness the unseen spirit broods into higher life.

I AM just as sure of spiritual things through the faculties of m y soul, as interpreted by. Christianity, as ever Newton or Humboldt were sure of material things through the faculties of the brain and senses, interpreted by science. Scepticism stands on no basis at all, only as it stands on that of the senses, and they themselves are verified in their last result by consciousness alone.

EVERYTHING around us shows a plan and a purpose; outward nature is orderly and harmonious, moves steadily to certain ends; and we cannot suppose that humanity, and all the spiritual relations with which humanity is involved, that this is any more disorderly; we cannot suppose that in any department of God’s working there is an aimlessness of purpose, of end, of plan; and if not in the material world, much less in the moral world and the realm of human action.

INDUCTION is simply confidence in the integrity of nature.

THOUGH many powerful appeals, many solid arguments, cannot break our affections from this earth, the hand of a departed child can do it. The voice that calls us to unseen realities, that bids us prepare for the heavenly land, that says from heights of spiritual bliss and purity, " Come up hither," that voice is the voice that we loved so on earth, end gladly can we rise and follow it. Behold, then, what a little child can perform for us, through its death! It makes real and attractive to us that spiritual world to which it has gone, and it calls our affections from earth to that true life which is the great end of our being, which is the object of all our discipline, our mingled joy and suffering here upon earth. That little child, gone from its sufferings so early, gone, " Gentle and undefiled, with blessings on its head," - has it indeed become a very angel of God for us, and is it calling us to a more spiritual life, and does it win us to heaven Then shall we behold already the wisdom and benevolence of our Father breaking through the cloud that overshadows us. Already shall we see that the tie, which seemed to be dropped and broken, God has taken up to draw us closer to him, and that it is interwoven with his all-gracious plan for our spiritual profit and perfection. And we can anticipate how it will all be reconciled, when his own hand shall wipe off our tears, and the bliss of reunion shall extract the last drop of bitterness from " the cup that our Father hath given us." THE grand sweep of science, in this day, is all pressing toward the conviction that there is one central plan at the heart and core of the universe; and it is beautiful, out of these diverse operations in the various fields of human thought, to see the unity toward which men are tending.

Take that one idea of typical forms, that a whole class of animals is constructed upon a single plan, so that you find in the paddles of the whale, the long fingers of the bat, and the hoof of the horse exactly the same bones and outhnes that you find in the arm of a developed man; showing that God has worked upon a great plan, and a beautiful proof not only of the unity but of the existence of God; for what complicated means man has to use to attain his ends, even in his highest mechanical achievements, while God takes one simple plan, and behold the diversified results that come out of that simplicity!

IT is a mistake to consider marriage merely as a scheme of happiness. It is also a bond of service. It is the most ancient form of that social ministration which God has ordained for all human beings, and which is symbolized by all the relations of nature.

You cannot put your hand on a plant or a stone, or upon anything, and say this is an end in itself. It is serving some other end. It is a great conduit in God’s processes. It is a medium through which God works.

Dig down into the bowels of the earth, and there are instrumentalities which have done their work, which have served to bring about the present result. So everything now is a process, helping God’s work onward, an agent, an instrumentality, tending to some result we do not yet see.

OUT of our joy and our acknowledged good the Supreme Disposer works his spiritual ends. But especially how often does he do this out of our trials, and sorrows, and so-called evils! Life is God’s plan; not ours. For often on the ruins of visionary hope rises the kingdom of our substantial possession and our true peace; and under the shadow of earthly disappointment, all unconsciously to ourselves, our Divine Redeemer is walking by our side.

ELOQUENCE is a kindling process, and it is always difficult for a speaker to make an impression upon an audience who feel more than he does. "When the locomotive is fired up, and snorting for a start, it is useless to attempt to pump more steam into the boiler from a tea-kettle. THE greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once; for all these successive failures induce a skill which is so much additional power working into the final achievement The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys Every disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of success, and makes it easier to find. We should thank past ages and other men, not only for what they have left us of great things done, but for the heritage of their failures. Every baffled effort for freedom contributes skill for the next attempt, and ensures the day of victory Disappointment is the school of achievement, and the balked efforts are the very agents that help us to our purpose. THE Apostle’s injunction, " Let no man think of himself more highly than he ought to think," implies that there is a certain lawful limit of self-esteem. In short, humility really contrasts with no great and good thing; only with a folly which is as transient as it is giddy; with a pride which forgets the Almighty; and with that liquid self-satisfaction which, in a universe of unlimited progress and possibility, affronts both God and man. THE sheep are not always led through green pastures. The path is sometimes bestrewn with craggy rocks; sometimes over precipices. Sometimes the storm hangs dark, the whirlwinds blow, the hail cuts, and the lightnings flash. But keep near to the Shepherd, keep on upward through the darkness. The storm will pass away, the rugged path will end, and the Lord who is our shepherd will lead us at last into the green pastures and beside the still waters.

TKIBULATION does not come in as something that walks upon us " like a thief in the night." It is part of God’s plan. Nobody can read this universe in its comprehensiveness, or take up life in all its parts, without believing that trial of some kind is a part of the plan of God in the ordering of our lives. THAT shock * rent the surrounding air, and scattered death through that terror-smitten group, and startled a nation. But it did not rend the serene vault of heaven, nor shake the planets from their courses. Even thus around all forms of evil lie infinite depths of love, and infallible wisdom weaves the vast cycle of destiny.

* The explosion on the steamer Princeton, 1844.

AMID surrounding gloom and -waste, From nature’s face we flee; And in our fear and wonder haste nature’s Life! to thee.

Thy ways are in the mighty deep; In tempests as they blow; In floods that o’er our treasures sweep; The lightning, and the snow. o Though earth upon its axis reels/ And heaven is veiled in wrath, Not one of nature’s million wheels Breaks its appointed path.

Fixed in thy grasp, the sources meet Of beauty and of awe; In storm and calm all pulses beat True to the central law.

Thou art that law, whose will thus done In seeming wreck and blight, Sends the calm planets round the sun, And pours the moon’s soft light.

"We trust thy love; thou best dost know The universal peace; How long the stormy force should blow, And when the flood should cease. And though around our path some form Of mystery ever lies, And life is like the calm and storm That checker earth and skies, Through all its mingling joy and dread, Permit us, Holy One, By faith to see the golden thread Of thy great purpose run.

IT would be a sad thing if, when we had arrived at the conclusion that the universe works by law, we should stop there. Law is a very bleak thing to us. Law has a very disconsolate relation to us. But what does law imply? A purpose; a lawgiver. And when by a law of this life calamity comes upon you, think that there is a Lawgiver above the law. Whatever may be to you a problem and a dilemma, there is One solving it out, and the very perplexity in the case is, that your eyesight is narrow, that you cannot see all God’s plans.

LET every man be free to act from his own conscience; but let him remember that other people have consciences too; and let not his liberty be so expansive that in its indulgence it jars and crashes against the liberty of others.

0, SUBLIME, glorious faith for faltering, disappointed man to fall back upon! that Almighty God sits at the helm of the universe, and steers the mighty ship through all ages; that his will is sure to be done; that the ordinance that has gone from his mouth will not be balked; that Before the brightness of his glory all darkness will pass away that before the infinitude of his love and goodness all evil will come to an end, and in due time he will regulate the earth to his purpose, and gather together in one all things in Christ Jesus. Do we feel that we are unworthy because we are totally depraved, because there is no good in us? I don’t know why a man should feel bad about that. He can’t help himself any more than an insect can imprisoned in a stone. WHEN we undertake to embark in a great work it will not do to depend upon ourselves alone; we must feel that we are placed at our post but for a day, and that there is One who steers the ship, who guides the event, and will bring it out all right, though we may not behold it in our day or generation. Our duty is to be diligent at our post, but to trust to One who is over and above us, and who will accomplish his purpose in his own good time. To say that because of wild fanaticisms and absurdities the whole mechanism of religion is all superstition would be to say that the white mist at Niagara indicates only a mist, instead of bearing witness to the awful depth of the torrent-sweeps that are below. So out of the soul of man comes the mists of superstition; but, instead of proving that the whole is superstition, they prove the awful depth, the legitimate flow of the great God-given, God-kindled love that is in the heart of man.

WE have not the innocence of Eden; but by God’a help and Christ’s example we may have the victory of Gethsemane. ON the burnt wall of one of those churches,* beaming distinct and clear through all their defacement and delapidation, stand these words: "THE LORD SEETH." It is a great truth which through all the convulsions of time and the revolutions of men has blazed athwart the everlasting heavens. It is a truth not only to rebuke but to encourage us with the thought that the great Overruler is merciful, weaving often his beneficent schemes under clouds of blackness and storm.

* After the riot in Philadelphia, 1814.

You never can upset religion. It is one of the grand, prominent faculties of human nature. That is demonstrated. It is one of the most foolish acts of folly in the world to talk of religion as some superstition that is going to pass away in time, and of a period that will arrive when all men shall depend merely on their brains for what human nature wants; and when all religion will be looked upon just as strangely, and with just as much ridicule, as we now look back upon the most groveling superstitions of the world But man’s everlasting, deep experience contradicts all that; for there are times when, out of something that is more profound and more radical than reason or intelligence, breaks forth the deep, earnest prayer, "Lead me to the rock that is higher than I! "

IF there are sounds that we do not understand, sights that we cannot explain, how do we know that those sounds come from any superior spheres, or that those sights are spirit presentations? It is a mere adjudication and verdict of the senses. Man has something within him deeper than the senses, which demands in a revelation something that authenticates itself to that deeper faculty within him; and therefore strange sounds and sights would not bo a satisfactory form or process of revelation. THE glory of Christianity is not merely the lifting up of those who are low to that which is high, but the coming down of that which is high to that which is low; strength ministering to weakness, purity to impurity, holiness to sin, God to man. That is the great peculiarity of Christianity, the revelation of the condescension of God.

Mercy; that is the gospel; the whole of it in one word. There are great truths gloriously beaming around the horizon of that revelation forever; mighty sanctions are there to i’nspire us and to lift us up; but the essence of the gospel ’is its mercy. It is a revelation of exhaustless love and power unto man; the brightest light in the darkest spot; the greatest condescension in the lowest estate; the holiest brought to the basest; the all-pure to the deeply sinful.

How many look upon a Presbyterian, to-day, as a man who is all blue-fire and bitterness, and who looks upon the world and humanity at large just as Jonathan Edwards did! And on the other hand, how many people think that a Universalist believes that, " Live any way you please, you’ll land in glory the moment you die"!

Now, is it not a shame indeed that one should not know better what the other believes?

MERCY is the essence of all love. The mother of the little child at first feels strange instincts in her heart. Her love has taken no form other than that of mercy to a little helpless being cast upon the heaving billows of her own bosom. If you find a family where there is a poor, little, weak child, it is beloved more than all the rest.

If you want to love your fellow-men have mercy on them. When even an enemy comes before you, and all power to hurt you is gone, you can forgive and love him. And so I suppose we may say that the love of God for poor, weak man is mercy for him. Guilty, sinful, degraded as he is, the infinite mercy throbs for him. Loving mercy is the spring of all right feeling, as doing justly is of all right being.

SLING a lexicon and the Bible at the head of every Universalist and Unitarian you find, if you choose. But how dare you break open the sanctity of his heart? How dare you judge his soul, and say that because you think there is a veil between his reason and his right judgment, therefore God has no access to his heart, and he has never been baptized with the spirit of Jesus Christ? Is not this saying, " Because I am right in opinion, Universalist and Unitarian ft I am better than you. You are a poor, miserable, and morally depraved being, because you are intellectually wrong"?

I DON’T ask a man to fellowship my opinions, nor to fellowship me personally. Perhaps such a fellowship would be as disagreeable to me as to him. I might find it as inconvenient and as unpleasant to be associated with him as with a lump of burning sulphur or a lump of ice. But no man has the right to disfellowship me or any other man from Christ Jesus our Lord, because of what he deems to be a falsity in my intellectual conceptions of Christ, imperfections in my verbal statements of Christ.

There is no man, from the Pope down to the humblest Christian, that can make that assumption for any man that walks upon the face of the earth.

OSTENTATION is the signal-flag of hypocrisy. The charlatan is verbose and assumptive; the Pharisee is ostentatious, because he is a hypocrite. Pride is the master-sin of the devil; and the devil is the father of lies.

THERE is the large-souled brother, who preaches in Brooklyn, and who will permit every honest man to call him brother, however much he may differ in opinion from him; why, his great heart, at every pulsation, leaps sixty degrees beyond the logical Kmits of his creed.

" The voice is Jacob’s voice," " though the hands are the hands of Esau." THE larger the nature the larger the love. Little, mean natures are uncharitable natures The man that always has a hopeless, sarcastic sneer for his fellowmen, who is in perpetual fear that he will be cheated by them; look out for that man. But the man that hopes or trusts, though none sees the evil more keenly than he; the man who sees something brighter than the sin, who sees the light shining around all; that man has a noble nature, a larger and more persistent love.

THERE is less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats. THAT son of infamy is still a man, though his manhood is crushed and disfigured; he is still the offspring of God, not unwatched by him, not outside the circle of his help.

Why, then, should you and I cast him off, and stand aloof?

Daughter of shame! representative of discrowned womanhood! as that pure and pitying heaven stretching over thy alien head does mercy regard thee, with sorrow, yet with trust, as one in whom the sanctities of thy nature have not all perished; as one for whom, through the blackness and the fire, and through penitent tears, there is yet redemption.

HUMANITY is so constituted that the basest criminal represents you and me, as well as the most glorious saint that walks on high. We are reflected in all other men; all other men are embodied in us.

" WE have known and believed the love that God hag to us." What is it we know and believe? A fact that is unalterable; not a theological conclusion which would make God love for the saints, and not for all. Right or wrong, saint or sinner, here it stands, that God is love.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God so loved what? So loved the Jews? So loved the peculiar Christian? So loved this man or that? No; " God so loved the world." Hear it, narrow theologians, with your cramped notions of God Almighty’s grace: God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to die for us. The primary fact is love, and it is beyond all human recognition or acceptance of that love.

HUMILITY is not a weak and timid quality. It must be carefully distinguished from a groveling spirit. There is such a thing as an honest pride and self-respect.

We should think something of our humanity, and not cast it under men’s feet. Though we may be servants of all, we should be servile to none.

CHRISTIANITY was a revelation, not a revolution.

Christ came to show us what eternally was; not to make an alteration in God’s economy. He came to show us an eternal fact, which man did not comprehend; not to alter the nature of God’s government, or the aspect of God toward man God loves man, and loved him from the foundation of the world; and out of the springs of this love came forth all the phenomena of Christianity, and all the vehicles of his grace.

WHAT is that announcement of love which shines in the gospel?! it is the expression of God’s love for the sinful, his care for the cast-a-way, his reaching out for the far-off, his pleading with the obdurate, his calling the prodigal to come to his arms. It is the proclamation of God’s sympathy with all that is human, his care and love for it, his searching for it through Christ Jesus, like the shepherd for his lost sheep, or the woman for the lost piece of silver; it is the consorting of Christ with the poor and depraved outcast, while he turned away from the formal, and self-righteous, and respectable, his going among those that were far away from the right and the truth; it is this which makes the peculiarity of the gospel. It is this which is its divine power. It is all confirmed and all explained in the Apostle’s declaration that God is love.

MAN! when that Christian truth blazes in upon your mind, through the mists of the darkness of your sin, in the blind groping in your own evil -ways; when the love of God streams in upon you Irke the light of the morning; when your whole soul wakes up to it, and you surrender to that love, and know it, and by it are regenerated and brought into new relations to God; that is religious life. They may cram a creed upon you; they may try to bind you up in ceremonies and ligatures, to lead you to the true church. That consecrated cord binds you to the great living heart of God, and makes it vital to you. That is the passport to heaven, and the essence of religion.

IT is the privilege of true souls to believe and know the love God has to them. It is the sadness of sinful, guilty souls that they do not know and do not believe the love God has to them. So long as you are conscious enough of evil propensities, of bad passions, to think of them even as an antagonist, so long as they loom up here and there, suggesting evil, so long have they some sort of victory over you. But when you rise into the pure impulse of moral affection, which sets you to gravitating and sweeping toward the right, evil has lost all power over you. WHO but woman when Judas^ betrayed, and Peter denied, and the weary slept, and the fearful fled could summon energy to linger around the cruel and despised spot, to mingle the tears of pity with the blood of suffering. Who but woman, when man turned coward, and his trust grew faint, could stand until the last by the dying Savior, and then go to trim the lamp of her devotion at the door of his sepulchre?

IF we are not sure of God’s love we are sure of nothing.

If this is not the central truth in God’s universe we know nothing of God or the immense realities which surround us. If this is not true, welcome any theory, any creed, any form of faith. But if it is true all things fall into their proper order, and nature has its interpretation, which we are encouraged to pursue to the utmost limits. History has its explanation; and in the darkest crisis, when the hearts of men fail for fear, when nationalities crack, when conflicts arise, when the earth rends and the heavens darken, we have no fear of him who sends over all the arching bow of promise, and guides the nations in the working of his unfailing love.

THERE is often a way of warring with the wrong which is as unconsecrated and as bad as the wrong itself.

CHRIST demands something more than public and formal honors. To-day he will be honored in I know not how many churches. There is a grandeur in the old Roman Catholic service that, when you take the mere poetry of it, heaves a man up almost above this world. And to-day, all round the globe, from the white-crowned Andes to the hot plains of Africa, millions and millions will be chanting the same great theme, and in spirit, as it were, casting palm-branches before Christ. There will be a great acknowledgment of his name and his dignity; but how much of him, after all, in the heart, how much real life-surrender and loyal service? He does not want merely public and formal honors, such as come from the rituals of churches, a traditional and ceremonial acknowledgment, but that of the heart.

EVERY man has at least this gift, this one charge to keep: his own soul to take care of and look after. High or low, rich or poor, God endows him with that.! no coronet that in his providence he sets upon the brow of a king; no weapon that in the course of events is put into the hands of a conqueror; no gift of eloquence, or poetry, or philosophy, or science that moves the world, is to you so great, and in God’s sight so essential and so important, as your own soul, with its immortal destinies, with its limitless capacities, with its deathless affections.

MEN show their respect for the Bible by bringing it into courts of justice, making a statute-book of it, and reading it before judge and jury. Why don’t you make it the oracle that will prevent such acts as lead to courts of justice? Why don’t you cherish it in the private sanctuary of the soul, adulterer and murderer! man in the evil hour of temptation! Why don’t you read it, and make it an oracle there?

ALL the distinctions that are thrust upon you do not prove that you are living as a true man. They may prove quite the contrary.

TERRIBLE is the electric force which thunders through space and blasts all opposition; but stronger still is that affectionate magnetism that unseen heart of nature whose pulses mix with all things, and that draws all things into beautiful obedience to its law. It is an overwhelming energy with which a comet sweeps along its track; but it is not so great as that which holds the planets to their centre, and binds them in glittering harmony forever. And this is the ultimate power, the power of being, rather than of doing. A majestic repose, a silent strength, is the highest mood of nature.

IT seems to be thought that the essential quality which constitutes a Christian is a kind of phantom excellence, which keeps in the back-ground of life, or glides timidly among its realities; and that if a man is going to grapple with this tough, old, dusty world, and hammer his way through it, and get anything out of it, he must do it by dint of the earth-spirit that is in him. This is all a mistake. On the contrary, the fibres of all real manliness are in Christian discipline; and a good deal which passes for power in the world this blustering, passionate energy is essentially weakness There is always a greater mastery evinced in the control than in the exercise of power Chaos is a condition of unrestrained forces; order is a condition of forces held in obedience to law. And so it is with that world which every man carries within himself, his moral or spiritual nature. Tho angry man may evince more energy than he who keeps calm in the heat of provocation; but evidently the latter, who gives not way to passion who controls it is the man of most power. Again, we may call that man a masterspirit of his age who rides on the ^ whirlwind of popular sentiment, and even directs it; but he is stronger who resists the spirit of his time; who stands up and steadily bears against it; and who, firm in his conviction of principle, cannot be carried away by all the tides of faction. The one merely yields to pressing facilities; the other has to exert moral nerve and resist them. Indeed, all vehemence and impetuosity is a quality of crudeness, and a sign of imperfection. It belongs to anarchy rather than authority; to declamation instead of argument. As illustrated in individual life, it pertains to the period of the passions, and to the lower development of character.

Boisterous activity is the fitting expression of childhood; the demand of predominating and unfolding nature; and the control of sensual impressions is evident in hot energy and emphatic gesticulation. But. the strength of true manhood, when deep springs of experience have opened within, when wisdom has bound its cincture about the forehead, and when the soul has the clear vision of faith and prayer, is indicated by a majestic repose. This is the idea of power expressed in the highest art, not the awful front of Jupiter, nor the exuberance of Apollo, nor in any salient virtue even; but the calm rapture of the martyr looking upward from the fire; the face of Jesus crowned with thorns. And when one has reached that degree of spiritual attainment in which appetite is chained and passion controlled; when love, which is the highest attribute, the very essence of God, has become transfused through one’s being, so that he can forbear, and forgive, yea, even pray for an enemy; when his vision has become so steady and clear as to God’s workings and his providence that he can meet all the stings and sorrows of life with submission, and overcome them with trust, it is only through labor, through long conflict and great spiritual energy; and there is no higher manifestation of human power.

I DO riot want any of that kind of respect for the clergyman that Avill check a man from swearing in his presence: " Ah, I beg pardon; I see there is a minister present." Never beg my pardon for swearing. If you don’t care about offending God you need not trouble yourself about offending me. 0, this miserable, mean kind of respect that is felt for the mere formalities and decencies of religion, when Jesus Christ is turned out of doors!

THOSE who have moved the world’s heart, and changed the aspects of humanity the apostles of truth and of love have acted strenuously; yet their real life was not in action, but endurance. They learned to overcome themselves, to endure as well as to hope all things; and thus were enabled to act powerfully upon others. Within themselves they nourished the still seeds of thought in the eunshine of reason and with the dew of prayer. Is there anything so wretched to look at as a man of fine abilities doing nothing?

MEN differ in strength and capacity of heart; so that some men are distinguished by the fact that in all calamities, in all trials, they gather out of their hearts the resources of a new and better life It is just like a perpetual spring within them. If one form of contemplated good perishes, if one hope drops away, if one resource fails, down they go, down into their hearts again, and call up something else. A great, strong heart is never overcome.

It finds its own resources, and falls back into its own possibilities. It is sad to find a man who says " I have no heart;" to see a forlorn creature who says "I have no power to struggle any more." But as long as there is no blight or taint the power, the possibility of the man. is left. There was our gifted historian,* who died so suddenly the other day. See how that physical calamity which occurred to him in his early years would have affected some men. They would have crouched literally by the way-side of life; and even if they had had that man’s powers they would have made their calamity an excuse for a life of idleness and waste. How was it with him?

He fell back into his own great and noble heart, and out of it he brought up new life, which became to him a strength and power that perhaps he never would have exhibited had not that misfortune happened to him. But for that he might have been a scholar, or, much worse, a

* Prescott. politician; but the twilight of almost total blindness having fallen on him, he called up those powers and concentrated them upon the great work of history; and when building up this historical structure just as an architect builds up a great cathedral, like that at Cologne, standing forth majestic and glorious he profited by the very calamity that excluded him. from other pursuits and aims.

Yea, and with a still nobler spirit, when others lamented his calamity, and sought to condole with him in his misfortune, he sang songs in the night, and spoke noble words of cheer and encouragement. Now, I say it was not out of the intellect, but out of a noble and faithful heart streamed forth that beautiful life which made this man one of the stars in the constellation of our literature. THE soul possessed with endurance appears as we have seen the moon on a gusty night, gliding amidst rack and shadow, yet brightening the clouds through which it passes; and ever and anon sailing upward, with a calm sorrow on its face, into clear spaces of the sky. THE great power of the gospel to me is its immediate application to my wants, to my soul’s life, to my best desires, to my immortal prospects. That is the everlasting verification of it to me.

THESE restless wheels of nature this toil and travail of humanity have an end beyond themselves. Were the working of things fitful and uncertain we might infer otherwise. But this vast machinery of change, bound about with eternal unchangeableness, this incessant moving to and fro, this steady swing of order, now and always, indicates design; reveals a power and a plan, by which and for which it moves

Surely, all this movement this regular working is not aimless. The sun climbing and descending his daily path, the wind sailing in its circuit, the waters drawn up into the atmosphere and poured back into the sea, these valves and arteries of force do not confirm a dreary scepticism, but they suggest faith in the spiritual energy which moves them, and in the moral ends for which they move.

If we would but clear our eyes, and gaze with fresh vision up into the night, this very routine of obedient, silent nature this incessant roll of worlds itself would suggest a high destiny, a great object in life, something far beyond the indulgence of the flesh or the limits of the grave.

IT is better to sell to the intemperate than to the sober, to the degraded than to the respectable, for the same reason that it is better to burn up an old hulk than to set fire to a new and splendid ship.

WHAT should we do in times of civil discord and political corruption, in hours when truth is shamed, when righteousness is balked, and rampant and violent wrong stalks in our midst, if we did not believe that the kingdom of God is yet to come through all changes and over all opposition? As sure as there is a God, it is to come. It is to manifest itself in a sweeter love, in a broader truth, and in a more radical righteousness.

THERE is not a result in science which does not rest upon faith. There is not a trophy in the material w r orld, without faith in the New Testament sense confidence back of it Here are the ships which breast the ocean’s foam, and toss the Atlantic into diamonds of spray, freighted with commerce; and this is practical. It is not searching into an old, musty theology for visionary views.

It is practical. Very well; what does it rest upon? Confidence, trust. If you do not trust the man yonder at the end of the world in China or Japan snap goes the thread of commerce. If you do not trust your neighbor in Broadway or Wall-street, away goes your intercommunication. If you believe every man you meet to be cheating you, what kind of a social life should you have? Everything rests upon faith the same as in tho New Testament confidence.

SORROW itself suggests something better. Common experience will testify that affliction does not fall upon us as a final blow; not as an end but as an agent; oping for us new springs of consciousness and of power. Life assumed a greater meaning for yonder mother her soul became a more eloquent interpreter when that babe first rested in her arms, and reflected indefinable love and wonder into her eyes. But still more grand became the meaning of existence still more emphatic the oracle of her soul when that innocence and beauty were taken from her sight. For then she felt the deathlessness of affection; then she became assured of immortality. And for how many does sorrow break up the surface /of life, like a strong plough-share, and lay open those depths which are hidden by the calmness of prosperity!... Through its ministry there comes a profounder vision, more solemn but nobler thoughts, and the blossoming of better hopes. The exposure of finite weakness lets in the concption of the infinite. The sense of dependence leads us to God. In fact, the touch of affliction awakens a feeling of the supernatural. In its presence frivolity grows still, and the worst men think of prayer. IN this world the disposition to do things is of more consequence than the mere power.

IF we give to this life of ours only a material interpretation, such an interpretation as thousands practically do give, then the entire mechanism of things.is an inexplicable monotony.

IF we estimate things by a spiritual standard a man’s earthly being may contain more than all the cycles of the material world. From the best point of view, life is not merely a term of years and a span of action; it is a force, a current and depth of being Has not each one of us at times realized that he lived a year in a single day, in a moment, in an emotion or thought? Nay, could the experience be measured by any estimate of time? And if we should compute the length of any life by such experiences, and not by a succession of years, would it not be a long life? At least, would it not be a full and immeasurable life?

I FIND in one of our papers a grievous complaint because some rum-seller has set up a portrait of Washington in his bar-room; and it is called a desecration. So it may. be; but is there not a greater desecration there? la there not a desecration of the image of God set up among those rum-casks and liquor-barrels? The image of God there becomes degraded, polluted, and cast down.

BOOKS! the chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds, the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us.

Books! they are the garners in which are stored the wisdom bought by toil and study, the gorgeous dreams of the poet, the maxims of the philosopher, the skilful delineations of the true observer, the histories of mighty deeds, the wonders of distant lands, the records of precious facts, the messengers which the wise and the good send to us, laden with treasures for every mental want, and precepts for every duty. THE man we read of, whose personality is so hidden in dirt that the assessors rate him as real estate, the man who beats the feat of writing the Ten Commandments inside the circumference of a dime, and gets the Law and the Prophets, the Decalogue, New Testament and all, a great ways inside of a ten-cent piece, such men do not live. THE autumn-season of the year and of human life are alike from the hand of God; and a beneficent purpose unfolds itself through all these passages of change. "We know that the first, notwithstanding its melancholy and decay, discharges a beneficial office in the economy of things, presenting the fruits of the earth for ingathering, affording to nature a period of recovery, and in its work of desolation preparing for new life and beauty. And surely it is thus in our mortal lot. In the entire circle of being, death is an inevitable yet transitional process. Go forth now into the woods and the fields, where with a strange stillness nature is passing through glory to decay, and think of the autumn-seasons of this world, and all that pertains to it, from the cycles of the ancient earth to the perishing stubble and ’the dying leaf. Think of the forms of beauty, the expressions of love, the symbols of power, that have budded, and ripened, and gathered to themselves attractiveness and splendor, and sunk away.

Think of the empires that have overshadowed the earth, as the forests overshadow the hills, but whose brilliance and refinement, like the pomps of October, were the symbols of a waning glory, and whose dead trunks and rotting foliage now lie scattered around the dim shores of Time. Think of the relentless process that has stopped the sap of enterprise, and shook down the clustered trophies of the great. Think of the generations of the earth gathered in like harvests. Think of the old inevilability pressing upon the tenderest relationships of life, snatching here a half-opened flower, and plucking there a ripened sheaf, until all went back to dust, and strangers occupied the forsaken hearth-stone. Think of the individual man slipping from the hey-day of youth into the sober fulness of maturity; and then the hope, and the enjoyment, and the intense hold of life, in a rusthng, crackling feebleness all whirled away. See how every sphere of earth has its autumn-seasons; but see, also, how these are merely transitional passages of decay leading to renovation. In the place of vanished splendor rise fresher glories; out from the mould of empires grows a better civilization; the heaped graves of generations are the furrows of a wider, grander life; and new affections, new sanctities come to bless the earth and take the place of the departed. THE largest love is that which probes tho very heart it loves, pierces the very depths of the soul to which it is attracted, and shows to it the evil within it.

THERE are interests by the sacrifice of which peace is too dearly purchased. One should never be at peace to the shame of his own soul, to the violation of his integrity or of his allegiance to God.

INTO what boundless life does education admit us, and the discoveries of every day, and the ordinary lessons of the world! Tell me, is this life to be called merely a brief and worthless fact, when by a little reading, for instance, I can make the experience of other men, and lands, and ages all mine? When in some favored hour I can climb the starry galaxy with Newton, and pace along the celestial coast to the great harmony of numbers, and unlock the mighty secret of the universe? When of a winter’s night I can pass through all the belts of climate, and all the grades of civilization on our globe; scan its motley races, learn its diverse customs, and hear the groaning of lonely ice-fields and the sigh of Indian palms? When with Bacon I can explore the laboratory of nature, or with Locke consult the mysteries of the soul? When Spencer can lead me into golden visions, or Shakspeare smite me with magic inspiration, or Milton bathe me in immortal song? When History opens for me all the gates of the past, Thebes and Palmyra, Corinth and Carthage, Athens with its peerless glory, and Rome with its majestic pomp? When kings and statesmen, authors and priests, with their public deeds and secret thoughts, are mine? When the plans of cabinets, and the debates of parliaments, and the course of revolutions, and the results of battle are all before my eyes, and in my mind? When I can enter the inner chamber of sainted souls, and conspire with the efforts of moral heroes, and understand the sufferings of martyrs?

Say, when all these deep experiences these comprehensive truths ma,y be acquired through merely one privilege, is life but a dream, or a breath of air? Thus, too, do immeasurable experiences flow in to me from nature, from planet, flower, and ocean. Thus, too, does more life come to me from contacts in the common round of action. And I repeat, every truth thus gained expands a moment of time into illimitable being, positively enlarges my existence, and endows me with a quality which time cannot weaken or destroy. A PEEVISH sensitiveness to the sayings and doings of others indicates real poverty of soul or miserable timidity, or else a spirit which is mastered by the body, and lies at the mercy of diseased and jangling nerves.

MEN sometimes, in their eagerness to act, act too far, act by wrong motives; and in their impatient fussiness overlook the processes of God, and the harmonious working of all things. It is a great thing, very often, to be patient; not to talk much about it, not to try to do much about it, but to wait and trust. And this is all, sometimes, that we can do. THE evening of the day possesses many advantages for meditation. The objects that are upon the earth are then growing dim and passing into shadow; and with them may well fall away all our secular images. The most familiar things assume strange aspects, and the darkness slowly swallows them up. How suggestive this of the unsubstantiality of those forms to which we cling, of the superficial acquaintanceship there is between us, of the isolation in which as spirits we really stand, and of the mystery all around and within us! And how vividly then can we realize that there is but One in whom we live, and move, and have our being! In the mean time the veil of day is "withdrawn from the firmament, and innumerable worlds break upon our vision. How does this revelation of immensity increase our conception of him who bounds and fills it all, who has sown abroad those worlds of light, and shown forth his handiwork in those glittering constellations! The objects which we see by day, to be sure the varied forms of earth declare him: the mountain, the ocean, the way-side weed. But with these we are more familiar. They do not illustrate his attributes, and shadow forth the majesty of his being so strikingly as this spectacle of the heavens. In that sublime architecture we can best discern his infinite wisdom and his divine skill. From that vast space, all peopled with being and blessed with light, we may guess how inexhaustible is his benevolence and how extensive his care. In those serene depths, those steady orbs, we have a symbol of his own calm eternity overhanging all our transient forms. In that procession of stars, that seeming irregularity of orbits, reconciled, however, by a higher law, and producing most beautiful results, we see r as it were, the stupendous march of his providence, and the sure though immense cycle of his purposes. And considering these glories as but the lamps of his throne, the upholstery of his pavilion, the material veils of his pure essence, how awful must be our sense of his holiness, how deep our feeling of humility, upon this little earthly atom of mortality and sin! But if, lost in this unfathomable vision, we think he is far from us, and heeds us not, the reflection of that ray of light from its far distant source into our uplifted eyes, the soft touch of the night-wind coming we know not whence, should convince us that he is closer to us than any outward thing, and numbers all the hairs of our head. THE shadow of the night also strikes a shadow upon, the dial of our life, and every evening falls upon the figure of a later hour. As the wise merchant, then, posts his books at night, and knows the state of his fortune, so will the wise man at the close of the day sum up the account of life, and scrutinize his doings and relations. As to the spiritual life of man, the real, substantial life which man is placed in this world to live, I suppose that Abraham on the plains of Mamre, and the old patriarchs who had no steamboats, and railroads, and balloons, nor any of our modern facilities which we glorify in such sparkling terms, got really as near to God, in the heart and essence of true life, as we do, and as men ever will in any age.

IT would be very singular if this great elastic shad-net of the law did not enable men to catch at something balking for the time the eternal flood-tide of justice. THE brightest lineaments of woman’s character appear as the shadows of life grow darker. In hours of sickness, in homes of pain, in weary vigils she rises with a sublime fortitude. The spirit that shrinks with sensitiveness in calmer moments gives out rich music in the storm. When impending danger, pitiless calumny, or cruel persecution assails the object of her affection, she gathers her virtue around her for a shield, and with a power that makes the weak things of the earth stronger than the mighty, and lends to the timid a bravery that defies all peril, she goes forth to share his fortune to the last, exhibiting a constancy that is more eloquent than words, and a love that cannot die.

ALAS for that man who keeps always in the bustle of life, who knows nothing of his own soul, and never stops to reflect upon the highest realities! Alas for him, also, in this world of infinite relations, who never looks upward, but confines his gaze to the earth; who, placed amid solemn mysteries, never questions about life, or death, or God, or eternity, but suffers the sheen of material interests to obscure the stars, and drowns the still, small voice of Heaven with the jingling of his harness and the clank of his labor! Alas for him who, launched upon this sea of life, lies becalmed upon its waters easy, selfcontent or drifts unreckoning before the wind, but who never changes his tack or adjusts his methods, because he takes no celestial observation, and knows not the science of his voyage!

WE only attain the true idea of marriage when we consider it as a spiritual union, a union of immortal affections, of undying faculties, of an imperishable destiny.

IT is one of the grand results of modern science that it not only reveals its own harmony with religion, but it also demonstrates the essential religiousness of the physical world. It shows us that every work which God has made is holy, and not to be despised. THE evening of life is peculiarly appropriate for meditation. There are those who are spared to an age that ia well expressed by this term. A shadow is upon their eyesight and upon their memory. A shadow is lengthening before them, the shadow of fast-coming death. The order of their thoughts indicates an evening position. The nearest things are but dimly seen and quickly vanish, while they behold in clear prominence their earliest and remotest years; like the departing sunshine, which shows last what it saluted first, and lingers upon the distant summit while the near valley lies in darkness. Old age is an evening. The day-time of life is passed, the hours of labor are over. And how beautiful that evening is when clothed with the serenity of virtue! To be sure, melancholy thoughts will naturally steal in, as they do in the evening of the day. When the old man reviews his conduct in the mellow light of experience he detects many an imperfection which he would now avoid. He mourns over many a downfall of which he thought too lightly in the hot pursuit of life. He wonders at the presumption with which he was once cheated in the name, of knowledge and bravery. In this rectifying hour, too, he discovers how his energies have been too much invigorated by selfishness, too little animated by love. Indeed none so clearly as he discerns how short a time we have to love in, as well as to hope and to labor. How swiftly, like shadows, in that evening hour, pass before his vision the friends of his youth! How vividly, though all else has grown dim, do those familiar faces gaze upon him! How distinctly stand up those gray and silent stones that mark the spots in his journey where they dropped and died!

How impressively, in that evening hour, with its last murmurs falling upon his ear, does life appear like a tale that is told! And yet to that old man the evening of life brings the evening’s consolations rest and hope; rest from the toils of this world’s to-day, hope from the resources of the everlasting to-morrow. The most of his friends have fallen asleep around him, and he is willing to lie down with them. And though the things of earth are vanishing from him, and the noise of the world breaks solemnly at his feet, as at evening breaks the murmur of the gray and retreating sea, lo! above him "is outspread a celestial canopy; and all that was best in his lot, worthiest his love and his faith, is gathered up there in immortal constellations. THE cry of degeneracy is the oldest of cries. Take up any London journal of a hundred years ago, and you will find remonstrances and satires against the same follies and vices as those which are denounced to-day. Therefore these parallel cases in our time show us, not that we are going into the swamp, but that we have not yet got out of it.

WHY is there such an abundance of beauty? We can conceive of a world destitute of it. We can argue no special need why the leaves before they die should take the hues of the rainbow. They might shrink at once into their yellow shrouds and fall. ’ We find no reason, in the necessity of things, why our atmosphere should be thronged with such gorgeous tints as those which gather at the gates of sunset. In all this there is nothing which we can convert into food, or clothing, or money. And yet something in us responds to it. We will rear flowers because they are beautiful, and gaze long upon a landscape because it thrills us with delight. Doubtless, then, God has a purpose, through these, to awaken in us pleasures that the dust and drudgery of life cannot yield, and to train us for regions where we shall never grow weary nor bow down to mourn; where there are treasures of joy not involved with earthly vicissitude, and manifestations of beauty which the soul can apprehend only when it has thrown off its mortal veils. And so, even now, the misanthrope’s philosophy and the fanatic’s creed are rebuked. The world is not dreary.

There are bars of sunlight upon it; there are revelations of beauty in it; and through changeful phases and alternating seasons runs the Creator’s purpose, by these agencies, to win us to know and to love him better.

CHRISTIANITY converses with the third heaven, and opens the great prospect of the immortal world, but makes earth the platform of its teachings, the theatre of ita efforts.

FEELING after God, if haply they may find him. That is what all nations have been doing long before Christ, and what all nations in darkness and unbelief are forever doing. Every prayer put up, however blindly uttered, however superstitiously conceived, is a feeling after God; and every breath of altar-flame and every sacrifice has been a feeling after God and for him. Out of this primary conviction of God in our nature all the religions of the world have started; and therefore we realize, even in heathenism, this primary conviction of the reality of the truth of one God, and thus get rid of an atheism which is not natural to man.

THERE is no happiness in life, there is no misery, like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a home. THE sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wineglasses in ftie parlor; and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter.

Two gifts God has bestowed on us that have in themselves no guilty trait, and show an essential divineness.

Music is one of them, which seems as though it were never born of earth, but lingers with us from the gates of heaven.

Music which breathes over the gross, or sad, or doubting heart, to inspire it with a consciousness of its most mysterious affinities, and to touch the chords of its undeveloped, unsuspected life. And the other gift is that of flowers, which, though born of earth, we may well believe if anything of earthly soil grows in that higher realm, if any of its methods are continued, if any of its forms are identical there will live on the banks of the River of Life. Flowers, that in all our gladness, in all our sorrow, are never incongruous always appropriate. Appropriate in the church, as expressive of its purest and most social themes, and blending their sweetness with the incence of prayer. Appropriate in the joy of the marriage hour, in the loneliness of the sick-room, and crowning with prophecy the foreheads of the dead. They give completeness to the associations of childhood, and are appropriate even by the side of old age, strange as their freshness contrasts with the wrinkles and the gray hairs; for still they are suggestive, they are symbolical of the soul’s perpetual youth, the inward blossoming of immortality, the amaranthine crown. In their presence we feel that when the body shall drop as a withered calyx the soul shall go forth as a winged seed.

HOME is the seminary of all other institutions. There are the roots of all public prosperity, the foundations of the State, the germs of the church. There is all that in the child makes the future man; all that in the man makes the good citizen.

WE see the western sky, when the sun is up, sending up its clear reflections, and every building and steeple stands out clearly and distinct. And so the sky and the horizon of the nineteenth century has a clear reflection of intellectual light thrown upon it, and every ghastly wrong, every forbidden error, every formidable evil stands right up against it. Because we see more clearly now we say there is more wrong. But that is a very doubtful, if not a very erroneous conclusion. The conclusion should ratter be that the very intellectual progress and the diffused knowledge of which we speak have made the evil more apparent; and that is one step toward subduing and overcoming evil.

LIKE Peter on the wave, we walk along in life very well so long as we look to God, or to Christ, the image of God; but the moment we begin to think of ourselves of our perils, and dangers, and sacrifices that moment we begin to sink.

ETHNOLOGIES may break up mankind into a dozen tribes, each with distinct progenitors; and though the earth be striped all over with diversities of color, shape, capacity, condition, the conviction only deepens, till it becomes the tritest of doctrines, that this wide banyan-tree of ranks and races has one deep root, one central stream of life, one human heart. In this fact we feel more and more the claim of every man, in the fact that he possesses this capable and mysterious heart. We ask for no other sign. We care not what limitation of intellect, what degradation of morals may be found, what analogies may be detected between something lower than man and he. Here is the only question we ask: Does he love, and fear, and hope, and pray with the common ground-swell of humanity? Show us the poor Indian woman who lays down her child in the woods, and folds the little palms together, kisses the dumb lips that will never prattle more. Show us the slave mother, hounded, fang-torn, with revolvers cracking behind her, and the rolling flood before, holding in her lacerated hands her babe close to her breast, with a grasp that only death can loosen; and in this spectecle there is that which climbs over all castes and bulwarks, enters radiant and perfumed homes, transmutes all distinctions, and strikes straight into humanity, with that "one touch which makes the whole world kin."

I THINK you may doubt the authority of any creed, of any faith, which requires you to be a philosopher before you can understand it; any creed which is so metaphysical that the common mind cannot receive it. That is the great objection to Calvinism. Before you can comprehend the scheme of salvation of that church you must become a man of considerable intellect. But the central truth of God the Father a child can take it in. Sometimes when I stand by the dying bed, the ear is growing deaf from the booming waves of eternity, so that but a few words here and there can reach it; but I can shove out one plank to the dying man, " One God, the Father;" and with that he can take the sweep of the sea of eternity.

It is a great truth to be embosomed in the heart of man.

Some men believe this for themselves. That is not the Christian doctrine. You must go further than that. It is one God, the Father of all. When you pray, "Our Father," remember it does not mean your Father especially, but our Father, the Father of all humanity.

THERE is a necessity for setting apart one day in seven for religious thought, meditation, and religious action generally, in order that we may have a reservoir, so to speak, by which to water and sprinkle the other six days in the week.

No, not less knowledge, but more knowledge, to expose the evil, to condemn the shame and abominations of the time. More knowledge, mated in its essence with God’s everlasting love, exalting in its revealing splendors the immutable law, until men shall learn the fatal incompatibility of sin with any good, until the golden scales shall be shivered from their eyes, until their hands shall be unmanacled from all mean policy, and to know and to do shall be as the arterial unity of brain-throb and heartbeat. Silent is the force which controls the material world, sure and relentless as its burning wheels. And so flow on, flow wide, unfolding truth and knowledge of the times! Shine, genial as the sunlight, terrible as the lightning, until wrong shall shrivel, and selfishness be put to open shame! Shine into the crannies of this strange old world, into its mould, and rust, and rot! Shine, until indifierence grows warm, and prejudices burn away, and for our pity and indignation we shall see all fetters and tear-stains, and sorrows! Shine straight through our brother’s rags, our brother’s uncouthness, our brother’s nationality, until we discern the same natures, the same heart, the same red blood as our own! Shine, bright and beautiful, in toleration and comprehensiveness, giving hope to the future and significance to the past, like the sunlight, which, streaming through cathedral windows, kindles up the features of heroes and martyrs, and reflects their expression upon the living crowds below! Warmly shine, until liberty shall grow as every man’s vine and fig-tree, and the tendrils of sympathy, running by every creek, and carried by every ship, shall be rolled around the globe! And then if, with all this, man proves worse, we shall be sure that knowledge will not make him so, but show him so.

You would feel that it was a great thing to stand upon the walls of a lonely fort, with your country’s flag floating over you, knowing, perhaps, that your country’s freedom depended upon your vigilant eye and quick ear. You would think it a great thing to stand upon the deck of a ship, keeping watch at night, knowing that the safety of all those on board depended upon your alertness and activity. Stand at the portals of your own soul, with the signal-flag of God’s law floating over you, and feel what important results depend upon your care and watchfulness; stand upon the deck of the great social ship, watching the interests committed to you, and feel how much depends upon you. Drive every nail you drive, do everything you do, however small and insignificant, as though God’s eye was flashing upon you. No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.

WE hear people talk of correct notions of Christianity.

What do their notions amount to? What is their Christianity, with those notions they hold? It is like an imitation of fruit that we see carved in stone: it is an exact imitation to the eye, but it is impossible to bite it, and it is without juice. It is made to look at, to arrange in a cabinet, to set on a mantlepiece; but beyond that, of no manner of use. And how many believers there are who are only stony fruit, imitations of Christianity, without any juice in them. They have very correct notions of Christianity: they are very sound, just as sound as a stone apple or peach, and just as hard.

They set their stern, flinty faces against lax sentiment, and all those infidel notions that they tell us are rife and prevalent at the present time. You find no class of men so rampant against what they call heresy as this class of stony, hard believers, whose whole power of Christianity consists in correct notions. Every man who does not come up to the line of their creed is an infidel. The name has almost become honorable in this way; for a great many who are called infidels are simply men who are searching for the spirit and truth of religion, and they believe in Christ as that spirit and truth; and if you can make the essence of Christianity consist in spirit and truth, rather than in fact, they are nearer to Christ than a great many of those who hurl anathemas against them. THE philosopher can never convince us that our little earth is the only home of affection and intelligence like our own, and that the systems which burn and roll around us are only sparkling Saharas of incompleteness and desolation. No more can the historical sceptic make us believe that the largest measure of knowledge is unfavorable to the noblest types of excellence, that the richest virtues wilt in the brightest civilization. Argue as we will, our moral instincts, our faith in Providence assure us that knowledge tends to goodness. They are not identical, yet in their highest realization they are inseparable.

CHRISTIANITY is a spirit flowing through every channel of action, consecrating all we do, making every day holy and every spot sacred.

THERE are mysteries which, if they are not solved by the truths of Christianity, darken the universe. There are griefs which, if we do not receive them as divine chastisements, are too much for our humanity. There areties sundered here below which, if we do not hold immortal relations, are inexplipable. And nothing but the power of religion enables us to use our afflictions as the instruments of our spiritual advancement, to convert the crown of thorns into a diadem of victory.

IT is a very singular fallacy, it seems to me, that takes the present condition of the world as the rectification of a mistake on the part of God, instead of being a development of his steadfast intention from the very first until now.

WE live in an order of circumstances where not an atom is insignificant. A pebble shakes the huge fabric of the universe. A leaf shudders in sympathy with the remotest constellations. If we act we touch the spring of an endless consequence; if we refuse to do anything our negation circulates itself. If we move we quicken the pulses of the common being; if we stand still we poison the air or enrich the soil. THE worst manifestation of a bad spirit is joy in the fall of another, joy when sin prevails, joy when a brother trips and stumbles into ruin. THE material and the spiritual are not in the here and the hereafter, but in the senses and the soul. When Christ made the distinction between the temporal and the eternal it was not between what is now and to be hereafter, but the distinction of quality.

THERE is an upward joy that blessed spirits feel when another spirit becomes blessed. It is the joy of redeemed souls when others have become redeemed. It is the joy of those who have fought the good fight and achieved tho victory when others come drenched, as it may be, with the blood of their wounds, but saved and delivered. It is a joy that flows from earth to heaven. As there ia light in the morning that goes shimmering up the clear upper sky, so there is a light that goes shimmering up to the white robes of the blessed, making their crowns brighter, when the faces of the penitent are upturned in prayer. As when the breath of the summer air begins to stir the leaves of the forest they all shiver and lift themselves with rejoicing, so when the soul of the penitent begins to move, when the guilty heart turns from sin to Christ, there goes forth a breath, an impulse, higher and higher, deeper and deeper, stronger and stronger, until it becomes a sweet hallelujah sweeping all round the courts of heaven. Do not make personal beauty a boast or an idol. Do not set your heart upon it. Would you treasure up all your regards in a flower? That frail plant! the next rude hand may snap it, to-morrow’s burning ray may scorch it, the first frost may blight it, and leave you desolate.

THERE is one Volume which is greater than all other books; which contains precepts that are to knowlege thi base of the pyramid, the flame of the altar; a Volume that is the sun in the system of truth, around which glide all the bright and beautiful orbs of human wisdom; while those that stray from its light wander darkly abroad, or glimmer and fade in the distance. No one can rank so high in the scale of mental excellence that it will be a letting down of his dignity to guido and inform any of his fellow-creatures.

IF Napoleon pointing to the tall and mystic pyramids could say to his army, "Lo! fifty centuries look down upon your deeds," young men of America, of you it may be said that fifty unborn generations abide the issue of your works.

" OUR life is what we make it!" an insignificant game or a noble trial; a dream or a reality; a play of the senses worn out in selfish use, and flying "swifter than a weaver’s shuttle," or an assension of the soul, by daily duties and unfaltering faith, to more spiritual relations and to loftier toils, to the company of the immortal, to the presence of God and the fellowship of Christ. THE Psalms of David are the thought of to-day and forever. They are the hymns, the prayers, the confessions, the sublime meditations of men in the nineteenth century, and right here in the city of New York, as of the men in Judea three thousand years ago. THE true idea of Christianity is help from God, freely given; the sympathy of God, flowing out even unto the death on the cross, trickling in the blood-drops from the thorn-torn brow and the pierced side of Jesus Christ.

CHRISTIAN! the great revealing of life does not make life meaner, but grander, It does not make your work, your familiar home duties, of little consideration, but of great consideration. That is its beauty. It is like our modern astronomy, which, while it reveals the littleness of the earth, reveals its grand connections, and showa it linked together in a grand chain of being.

THERE is a sweet anguish springing up in our bosoms when a child’s face brightens under the shadow of the waiting angel. There is an autumnal fitness when age gives up the ghost; and when the saint dies there is a tearful victory. NOT only is music a beautiful and sublime science, the study of which ennobles and purifies the mind of its votary, but how many and excellent are its ministries to others!

It occupies hours that else, perhaps, they would employ sinfully. It wins them from low and sensual pursuits.

It fills the home with melody, and helps recreation and social intercourse. It breaks into the monotony of life with a kindling enthusiasm, and interrupts the weary periods of anxiety and toil. It soothes the dull pauses of disease; it twines its magic spell around the fevered heart; it steals into the troubled spirit with uplifting and with peace. Its harmonies drop through the gloom of confinement like links of sunshine, and draw us up to the canopy of the free and unbounded heaven. It is the key of memory and the messenger of hope, awaking us to all that is dear in the past, and all that is worthy in the future. For in its sweetest and loftiest moods music is eminently a moral and religious agent. It touches our best feelings, rebukes o f sins, and confirms our virtues. It is the natural advocate of freedom, peace, and every sacred work.

It is the best expression of faith and prayer. It moves like a magnetic current over our souls, and suggests our mysterious kindred with higher realities. THE worst kind of Christian literature is the morbid analysis of Christian consciousness. A BREATH upon the mirror, a stone in the brook, and the fair and seemly appearance that made them comely in the eyes of men is destroyed; nay, there is not a star that walks in heaven but the least particle of cloud shall render it rayless and hide its beauty. Breathe not even an idle word, then, much less a contrived aspersion, against that which to all honorable men is dearer than gems or gold.

GOD is the explanation of things, and nothing but God, the infinite God, the good God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. THE fire-brand which you unthinkingly wield may burn but a single stubble, but it is capable of enwrapping a city in flames. Therefore meddle with it not at all. So it is in regard to the principle that leads you from the strict path of integrity. THE moment a man says, " I will not believe so and so, for I must go with the majority," then he would be, not a Presbyterian or a Roman Catholic, but a Buddhist; for I believe they have a majority among the religious believers in the world; and in the track of the majority he will go to any extreme, and believe in any error. THE truth of Christianity a man can carry in the palm of his hand, or close to his heart; and yet it spreads out broad enough to cover all the necessities of this life, and opens a prospect wide as eternity.

MOST men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts; but out of the truth of things - truth of character and vision grows true life. We need not deplore the naturalistic spirit of our time. The development of the great natural agents gives the good man more to do. The fires of steam-ships that rise and dip far out on lonely seas herald a new era of faith and love. Increased knowledge is a conduit of fuller life.

CHRIST stands close to all the hearts of poor, suffering, bleeding, tempted, dying humanity. Put no church, no creed, no symbol, between any man and Christ Jesus.

He alone, filled with human experience, can fill all souls with his divine love.

PEACEFULLY and silently roll the chariot-wheels of salvation, and by the beat of every consecrated pulse, by the breath of every noble voice, by the strength of every brave, honest, heroic effort, the kingdom of God is advanced. THE popular sympathies are very apt to strike at the core of truth. The people were right to spread their garments and cast their branches in the way of Jesus.

Although a temporal form, it symbolized an eternal fact, that he was the king of the truth; and the broad church sanctions it to-day and in all time. Come, men of science, bring your implements and cast them at his feet, and say. Thou art the centre of all that is beautiful and glorious in nature, and in the spiritual significance that comes from the Bible. Come, worker in the field of humanity, and confess that your inspiration is in the truth of Jesus. Come, strong, thinking, brave, heroic races come glorious hearts of all ages down the mountain of time. Scatter the branches; strew the garments at his feet. But, 0, yon lowly heart! feeling the need of his truth, feeling the penitence which his utterance against sin awakens, feeling the comfort which his soothing words bestow, you honor him better than all when you bring your heart and cast it at his feet. THE creature you term a chattel, and affect to treat as an ape or a monkey, you do not treat as an ape or a monkey. When guilty of an immoral act you denounce him as guilty; you hold him morally responsible; and the very punishments you inflict refute your mean theories of his being nothing more than a brute. THE foundation of the kingdom of God is in the human soul; and if the deep instincts of our nature reluct at any plank in the platform, you may be sure that that plank does not belong to Christianity. WHEN evil comes to us, sorrows occur, calamities break in, they never come, or occur, or break in as the root and substance of things. Evil never stands before us as that which we discovered as seeming good; but good often comes to us from that which we discovered as seeming evil. What seems to be exceptional, dark, and cruel, when further explained and placed in its true relations is brought into harmony with the great whole, and is transfigured into a blessing. The dark fact, when we go deeper sends out veins of light.

I SHOULD not like to preach to a congregation who all believed as I believe. I would as lief preach to a basket of eggs, in their smooth compactness and oval formality. WHEN truth comes it must speak by its own authority.

There is no outside evidence greater than it. There is nothing that can more convince of its truthfulness than the truth itself.

NATURE satisfies my thirst; it feeds my hunger; it finds me clothing; it affords me shelter; it wraps me around when I sleep with beneficent and watchful care; and it takes me at last to its great bosom, where my ashes mingle with their kindred dust. These are not all of human wants: not in nightly sleep, in daily action, in the arms of death. There are deeper wants than these.

There are capacities for endless progress, love which nothing can quench, a desire which ’mounts beyond the stars. Now, where nature fails to supply, Christianity comes in and takes up my higher wants and ministers to them, just as physical nature ministers to my lower order of wants. It is the other hemisphere to nature. Does not that indicate its origin that both are from one source?

THERE is nothing more disproportioned in humanity than a hard-hearted and ill-natured young man.

NATURE becomes interpreted when you set the cross of Christ in the centre of it. That divine, self-sacrificing love lights it all up, illuminates it, makes it something new. Every star that shings in heaven receives a brighter significance in that, and every quivering of dim life that lies under the lenses of the microscope illustrates the great law of love and self-sacrifice.

GOD never alters his methods. We may hurry ourselves, but we cannot hurry him. After all, the grass takfes just as long to grow, and the oak-tree to develop, and the great processes of nature to unfold themselves. And we may be sure that just so much effort must go to just so much result. The great laws of God must be obeyed, or the rewards which follow the obedience of those laws will not come.

" IN like manner will he come again." How? Calmly, serenely, gradually as he rose into heaven so, calmly, serenely, gradually will Christ come again; come in the slow progress of ages in the world; come in the triumph of every truth; come in the victory over every falsehood; come in every right that shall lift up its long-scarred and abused head; so will he come to the world. And to you he comes in every influence that leads you to him; in everything that makes you more like him; in everything that causes you to exalt his law in your heart, and to surrender your lives to his will. Serenely, calmly, within, Christ comes to each of us, and gradually, even as he went up into heaven.