the Church, so far as the Church really exists, one living body of the Lord, pure, holy, full of Divine Truth. With equal truth, the Protestant affirms that this high character demands actual realization through other influences than tradition, through communion more intimate than outward sacraments; with equal truth, he refers every question to the mind applying itself to earnest investigation of the Scripture, let him add, every word proceeding, through nature, through history, through the soul, out of the mouth of God. The Church has been right in charging man with sin, and proclaiming the Saviour, and urging the necessity of Repentance and Regeneration. The very rationalist, let not his service be denied; his is a great, though many may count it a lowly and even mean, task, to search out and state the religious fact, the historical development of Christianity, just as it originally appeared; to bring the past, as if visible, into the present. Not less is the Inner Light a perpetual reality; nor can men truly call Jesus Lord but by the spirit. When, moreover, this light comes as a splendor of the New Jerusalem, when the glory of the Lord arises as the dawn of a higher day, throwing back its beams over the past, and making even its dark pas. sages radiant, as well as laying them over the lengthening future that the whole overflows with gladness, what shall hinder our welcome and our joy? All things, even what may have seemed dead words, and dark, cold dogmas, live and glow in the celestial Love and Wisdom. Severed things are united, the most diverse converge to one centre,

the scattered limbs of Osiris are drawn, not gathered, to the whole body, a secret attraction brings all to their places, order pervades the whole system, all is harmony and beauty. Standing thus, whether we call it at the meeting or the parting of the ways, let us continue to ask for the paths older than churches or the ages; let us inquire where among them all is the good way, waiting for the answer, whencesoever it may come; then, lead it whither it may, through joy or gloom, amidst society or in utter loneliness, through calmness, as of celestial spheres, or through turbulences, as of a stormy world, let us follow it on. Be sure it leads us upward. Walking therein, we shall have guidance through every doubtful passage; even if deserted of men, and disturbed from without, we cannot fail of finding rest to our souls.

SERMON X.

THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY.

III. ETHICS OF THE CHURCH.

MATT. XXIV. 12.

BECAUSE INIQUITY SHALL ABOUND, THE LOVE OF MANY SHALL

WAX COLD.

MOSES, Confucius, Plato, these three may be taken, I have thought, as types of the highest ethics antecedent to the Christian era. Each is distinctly marked; the first, by his perpetual reference of all duty to the divine commandment; the second, by his steadfast acknowledginent of the family ties reaching through the whole commonwealth; the third, by his logical demonstration of the essential and imperishable idea of rectitude. The theologian, the socialist, the idealist, they may be denominated according to modern speech, as they seek respectively to proclaim divine laws, to reproduce domestic offices, and to illustrate intellectual es

sences.

The chemists analyze the various forms, regarded as combinations, which exist for us in nature. They reduce to finer elements, not only solid masses, as earths, metals, vegetables, animals, but

the water as it flows in streams or floats in vapor, and the very air so impalpable and so hidden. Nay, the light, discovering and glorifying all things, itself deep mystery, as if it were many rather than one, paints its myriad hues over sky and earth, over sea and land, giving a separate tinge to each leaf and flower, and divides itself into the seven lines of the rainbow, continuing in its own nature uncolored, unshaded. Such, however, is the order of things, that the forms or powers evolving these several elements are as really one and integral as the elements themselves, as simple, as perfect. So likewise in the moral order. We may separate in our thoughts law, kindred, idea; God, man, truth; worship, affection, reason; but the analysis fails of giving us the real fact as it exists in the universal nature. These are elements into which thought resolves them in its chemical processes; but God holds them united, all whole and simple; nowhere to him divergent rays, severed lines, mechanical combinations, naked and uncombined elements, but each thing and the whole at once, we might say, perhaps, absolutely simple and infinitely complex. Christianity is the religious expression of this law as it develops itself in history. All which there is in Moses, all in Confucius, all in Plato, may be discovered in Jesus the true Christ, when we come to analyze his story, his words, his deeds, his life; and yet he really is neither the one nor the other, more than nature is one or other, or even all, of the elements into which we may reduce its numberless forms, more than the sun is that which

chemistry would give us, if its analysis could be applied to the glorious orb. The Christ comes of God, as radiance of central light; the Christ comes to man, as inflow of holiest inspirations; the Christ appears within the sphere of mind, as ideal of perfect goodness and beauty. He is the Reality, the Substance of all symbol and promise, which the Apostle proclaims, which the Lawgiver translates into edict for the government of society, which the Philosopher loves and searches out as the true wisdom, and the source of human good. I do not find him ever with Moses drawing out a divine commandment into a separate and defined statute; I do not find him, as has been sometimes said of Confucius, cementing mere natural and social relations, in either oblivion or silence of the Divine Presence; nor yet with Plato, speculating on the eternal ideas even of the Just, the Good, the Beautiful. Not the less, but rather the more, do I perceive these all in him. He takes them up, as it were, into himself; they dissolve into his essence; they are raised and transfigured by the elevation and fulness of his perfection. God fills him, and overflows; man he is, living through every deed and every word; virtue with him is neither statute to the conscience, nor rule to the conduct, nor idea to the intellect, but the whole interior life which the limitations of our thought divide into these and other aspects and sections, the Divine Manhood vital in every part, spontaneous and complete in all its movements, penetrating and encircling the entire range of the spheres from heaven to earth,