and to direct your life that it may be a blessing to yourself and to the world? And are you doing all that in you lies to make her noble expectation good, and all you can to cheer her anxious heart? and in all doubtful ventures do you go to her with frank confession? and do you keep for her especial joy some little portion of that store of nice consideration with which you are so lavish with your newest friends? The amount of blessed motherhood that there is in the world at any given time depends very much upon the self-asking of these simple questions, and the answers made to them in will and deed. Happy are they who ask and answer them aright before it is too late. The blessed mother! The history of greatness knows her by a hundred and a thousand names: in the fifth century, as Monica, the mother of Augustine; in the eighteenth, as Susanna, the mother of Wesley; in the nineteenth, as Hannah, the mother of Parker. It has been Mary more than once since she of Nazareth was glad of heart. Once it was Mary Washington. The words of Parker have been made good in many instances more obviously than in that* of which he wrote: "When virtue leaps high in the public fountain, we look for the spring of nobleness, and find it. far off in the dear breast of some mother who melted the snows of winter and condensed the summer's dew into fair, sweet humanity which now gladdens the face of man in all the city streets." But greatness is a rarity. Goodness is not so rare. And goodness, even more than greatness, comes from the mother's influence. So thought the ancient rabbis when they said, "Paradise is at the feet of mothers." The blessed mother! Blessed in that hers is the largest opportunity to shape the issues of the life that shapes the future of the planet in some glorious fashion. But well I know that, as I have proceeded with my sermon, its recurring title-phrase has been more suggestive to your minds and hearts than anything that I have said. It is even possible that much that I have said has quite Daniel Webster. escaped you, because you have been thinking nearly all the time of one blessed mother in particular, even your own, of whom I have not said a word. Well, I shall not regret such gravitation of your thoughts. They have been drawn thereby through larger circles than my thought has swept, where a more stainless ether beats on every side. The blessed mother! Across the busy years has come to you the vision of her bending face, the accents of her guiding voice, the memory of her thousand "little" thank God! not wholly-"unremembered acts of kindness and of love." You have been asking yourselves if, while it was still yours, you knew the gift of God and prized it at its worth, and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision shining in her beloved face. And some of you have been rejoicing that she is not yet a memory only, but a living presence, and that some years, it may be many, still remain to you to make her life more blessed by your thought and care, and make it still more sure that at the parting of the ways you shall be haunted by no vain regrets for duties ill-performed and debts of love unpaid. But for the mothers, also, there is a tonic word remaining in my mind. How often do they move about in worlds not realized! If they are not blessed, how often they have none to blame but their poor foolish selves, wasting upon a hundred frivolous aims the strength that might avail them for the building up of such a fair estate of womanhood as would not only be a blessing to themselves, but to all who came within the circle of their influence! Hail to the spirit that can find in humble tasks and narrow ways the stuff from which successful womanhood can be achieved! It is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. You know the story of the Venus of Melos, the noblest form of woman ever shaped in stone. The owner of "the little Melian farm," plying his humble task, came suddenly upon that wonder of the ancient world. So doubt I not that, under the hard and commonplace experience of many a wife and mother, and many a woman who is neither wife nor mother, is hidden an ideal, a possibility of womanhood, compared with which the Venus of Melos is not to be named. But the hard and commonplace experience must be worked in some high way to bring to birth this happy consummation. The Venus of Melos, her whom they once called "Love," they now call "Victory." But love is always victory when it is love and service of the best. And what she serves let every woman mother, wife, beloved maid demand in those who seek her love and bring to her their own, and human life will be transfigured in that hour. "Ah, wasteful woman, she that may On her sweet self set her own price, How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine, Just to thyself, been worth's reward. "Awake, O queen, to thy renown, Require what 'tis our wealth to give, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS TOGETHER. "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men! LUKE ii. 14. HOW CAN I hitch my anniversary wagon to this Christ mas star? Nothing is easier than to do it. Indeed, were it my custom to introduce my sermon with a text, I doubt if I could possibly have found from Genesis to Revelation one better suited to the time. For it expresses perfectly the twofold character of the work that I have had in mind and heart these five-and-twenty years, which twofold work has corresponded to the twofold nature of religion. This was the subject of the first sermon that I preached to you after my ordination. It has been the specific subject of more than one sermon since. But that would be a little matter if the whole course of my ministry had not illustrated and enforced this twofold unity. I could almost say that every sermon I have preached has had for its subject "Glory to God in the highest" or "Peace on earth, good will to men," or it has blended into one these loving oppositions of the angel song, the first corresponding to the God-side, the second to the man-side in religion; the first to worship, the second to morality. Of the 823 sermons I have written here from first to last, a very large proportion has been purely ethical. A different impression has frequently been got from the average character of the sermons I have printed in the successive series, the fifteenth of which is now well under way. But that is because for printing it has seemed good to choose more frequently than others sermons of a doctrinal or critical or theological character. There has seemed to be more demand for these, as shown by the running out of the edi tions. I have sometimes smarted, just a little, under the suspicion of my critics and my friends that I was mainly theological and controversial. It would be strange if this suspicion were not soon effectually quelled, were not the effect of giving a dog a bad name proverbially known. For, of late, the character of my preaching has been almost entirely ethical. As between what you might call "life-sermons" and what you might call "thought-sermons," the former have for some time been getting more and more ascendency. Since I came back in September, I have not written a single theological or critical sermon, and those of last year were extremely few. It is, I think, because my theological and critical conceptions have now become so perfectly assimilated that I am almost as forgetful of them as of the sunlight and the air. "I can't tell you," said an orthodox clergyman to me,—he was picking at his shell, preparatory to a higher birth,-"how delightful it is to hear you speak of Jesus as if you had never thought of him as being anything but purely human." I am glad that it has come to that. But I recognize there is a danger here. For a long time yet there will be room and to spare for doctrinal, critical, and theological sermons; and every now and then, if one doesn't come naturally, I must pull myself together and write one with supreme deliberation. This statement of the case must not be understood as an injurious reflection on the doctrinal and critical and theological sermons I have written. I am not ashamed of the gospel of rationality that I have preached. The ethical function is not the only function of a spiritual church such as we have been fain that ours should be. The spiritual is intellectual and emotional as well as moral. For a lofty worship and an intelligent morality alike, we must have intellectual clearness. The universe is the manifestation of God. The more complete our intellectual apprehension of the universe, the more wonderful it will appear to us, the deeper will be our awe, the more profound our reverence, the more serene our trust. And awe and reverence and trust are |