loftier thought. The canvass brightens with the spiritual splendor of a new inspiration, as it pictures the form of him of Nazareth. Music is invoked to celebrate his name, and is transfigured in the office. Great temples spring, aspiring like exhalations, solid as hills, to be themselves an incorporate praise to him whom the earth which they rest on once held, whom the heavens which they point to now enthrone.

The old hopelessness has departed; the estrangement from God; the icy darkness of long eclipse, in which the race wandered and moaned, despairing and destroying, finding truth a mirage, and sanctity a myth, consecration impossible, and suicide a good. And henceforth there is courage, a buoyant expectation, a vital, fore-seeing, conquering spirit, over spreading the earth like the spring-tide itself. Where the ancients looked back to the beginning of time as the golden age, since God has been revealed in Jesus, we look forward to the future, as the time of perfected light and peace. No development of progress but seems natural, now. No combat so deadly, but the Christian anticipates in its result the triumph of good. And sometimes the critical points in history seemed touched already with a dawn-light from above. The sounds of an industry more various and rewarding, the discussions of statesmen more wise and humane, the diplomacies that curb war, and the commerce that knits nations into inter-dependence, bring with them all preluding murmurs, prophetic of the songs of peace universal.

Civilization itself, the new Civilization, is thus founded upon the corner-stone which was laid in the Incarnation of God, in the person of Jesus. And though, as yet, this Civilization is only like the Temple walls, hardly lifted above the surface of the valley-where columns and capitals do not appear, where the beautiful gates are not yet set, and where battlements and roof are still to be drawn from the distant quarries where they sleep-yet we can see enough, already, to show us what it shall be in its time; when the prayer, and toil, and heroic endurance, of all Christian centuries, have come to fruition, and a perfect society puts the crown on the earth: at once a fortress, a palace, and a temple; in which all races shall

be kindred; in which all beauty shall surround them; in which the God made manifest in Jesus shall be the Universal King! The age which sees that structure finished, shall see the work of Christ accomplished; shall see the fulfilment of ancient prophecy-the head-stone, at last, brought forth with shoutings of 'Grace unto it'!

Is it not, then, apparent, that vast and amazing as is the premise with which the religion God has given us starts, the subsequent structures of truth and of grace, erected upon it, are still commensurate with itself? They match it in their majesty, their mystery, and their glory. Of the system of Truth revealed in the Gospel; of the system of Salvation, there brought to exhibition; of the peculiar system of Experience contemplated there, and shown as realized in believers; of the positive Institutions established upon the fact, in the Church that springs from it, and in the new and prophetic Civilization of which it is the base-of all these, is it not plainly true that according to the corner so is the structure, and that only harmonious with the majesty of this is the edifice solidly planted upon it ?

Herein is, then, the primordial truth, in which he who holds. it will find suggestions of all things else that he needs to know, of all for which he may properly hope; which, if he denies it, will carry down with it, in inevitable consequence, all else that is transcendent in the Gospel, and in the culture and hope of the world. Blessed be God, that this is declared to usnot a dream, but a fact, not a theory or fancy, but the most substantial reality of time-by prophets, who saw it in God's plan before it was actual; by apostles afterward, recording what they saw, and sealing their witness with their blood! Blessed be God, that the world, which has lost so much that was precious, has never lost the remembrance of this, but clasps it still with a widening faith, and dates from it the brightening years! Blessed be God, my friends and brothers, that to you it is given, as it has been aforetime to others, so many, to proclaim the religion which is founded upon it, and which in all parts is so august-so illustrative of God, so ennobling to man!

Immense is the power with which are clothed the hands that carry the tidings of it! The great "Churches," so called, the vast establishments of hierarchial prerogative and priestly pretense-which have desolated the earth wherever they have ruled it; which have fought one another, with mutual anathemas, till the very air seemed hissing with hate and black with curses; which have wrested the Gospel from the hands that had clasped it, and have done to his disciples, a million times over, what the Jews did to Jesus; which have made the finest peoples of the earth, on its fairest scenes, so corrupt that description hardly can paint them, and so passionately infidel that truth itself can scarcely reach them-even these have found their power, in great part, in the fact that they have presented the Incarnation as the primary principle in their colossal organizations; and that from it they have claimed to derive the virtue which they afterward have asserted-without witness from experience, without warrant from Christ-to be distributed on their sacraments. Except for the appeal which thus they have made, through their hold on this sublimest of facts, to the imagination and heart of mankind, the revolt of reason, and the terrible upburst of the instinct of justice, would long since have dethroned them, where still they have power; as they have made them hateful to the best part of Christendom; as they are unloosing their mighty bands, where yet they reign.

But to us it is given to set forth the system whose solemn and stupendous corner is in this fact of Incarnation, without the iniquitous later inventions by which such establishments have turned it to a means of their secular aggrandizement, and made it the instrument of despotic ambitions. The Gospel to us-as unfolded in the writings through which the Divine Mind teaches the human, and as now interpreted by the Spirit who gave it, to the soul suffused with his grace and light-is "all glorious within;" and from the fulness of its supreme Lord it sheds inspiration to all that is noblest on those whom it reaches. It is not a theory, of morals, or of theology. It is not an evanescent variety, among equal religions. It is the one Religion of the world; the primitive, the ultimate, and to

be the universal; because it rests on the one Incarnation, and the glory of God, revealed in his Son, dwells in it ever. In all the grandeur which it derives, and all the authority which it draws, from that supreme fact, it is ours to proclaim it; setting forth, in discourses, its principles and laws; revealing its spirit, in our renewed character; walking ourselves in the brightness of it; and making the glory of him who is its Head more apparent to men, through praising lips and a consecrated life, than it ever has been by statues or pictures.

How great an office! How mighty, and how far-reaching a work! What impulses of the Spirit press us toward it! What a call to enter it comes from the Lord, revealing himself in vision to us, and waiting for the world to be ready for his reign! No human authority can empower us here, and none can hinder; for service to him becomes, as we think of him, the necessity of our life! No despicable hands, of gluttonous, miserly, profligate prelates-no hands that are dripping with kindred blood, as those of pontiffs have sometimes been-are laid on our heads. No dainty hands, of mitred men, are to us mediators of this Divine grace. We seek, and receive, no superfluous benedictions from those who take titles which Christ disallowed, and who follow most faithfully the erring apostle who would not have others cast out devils. More direct, more imperative, is the summons we answer; and better than this is our 'succession'-of souls inspired by that one light which all along the ages has shined, from the face of him who was fairer than men !

We think of him, in his meekness and his majesty, girded with power, and yet for us transfixed with pains, agonizing alone beneath the olive trees, submitting to the torture and gloom of the cross, and then ascending from the earth in a glory that leaves it more radiant forever-we stand in tender and breathless amaze before his wisdom, grace, and power, and feel Divinity touching us in him, and yet hear him calling us his brethren-and whatever would thrust itself between him and our minds becomes worse than an impertinence! We do not need, we will not have, ringed fingers and ruffled wrists professing to drop His grace upon us! We stand already in

the line of apostles, as we meditate on and testify of him. We reach back and touch hands with all the holy, who have loved and honored this one Divine Lord; with those who died for him-burned, or starved, or buried alive-but who would not deny him; with Perpetua in her prison, and with Polycarp at his stake; yea, back of them,-with all who saw him before he came; who saw in the sacrifice his atonement, in the lawgiver his prophet, and in the king but his fore-runner. Illustrious, indeed, have been his servants; a multitude uncounted; a 'cloud of witnesses'! And a baptism from the power and fire of their spirit should fall on us in our work! No power we have, but they impel us to consecrate to this! No culture we can gather, but here is the use whereby to exalt it! No energy of mind, no grasp of will, no insight of reason, and no uplift of faith, but all are needed, and all are ennobled, in setting forth HIM, who humbled himself beneath the angels, that he might make us their instructors; who could wither the fig-tree by a breath from his lips, and before whose glance assailants fell in sudden awe, and yet who submitted for our salvation to Cross and Tomb; who bent to the acanthine crown' the head on which are many diadems, that his pangs might exalt us as his miracles could not; and who, though now withdrawn from our sight, still watches our work, and with his pierced and kingly hands has lifted empires off their hinges, and turned to new channels the stream of centuries.'

Wherever we accomplish this grandest office, in our own land, or in others-teaching in the tongue into which we were born, or in those which our zeal impels us to master—he still is with us; no act unseen, no word unheard, by him to whom it offers tribute. And as we make his glory felt, we lift the levels of human welfare. We open to men all wonders and splendors that are hid in his person, or promised through him. We make the eternal wisdom known, which has in him its highest expression. We set men forward, toward that supreme view of him which shall make the immortal brightness of heaven.

God grant us grace to recognize as we ought the greatness of our mission, and to fulfil it, while life remains, with an un