strong with its strength. To him ancient ages and nations unroll their divine volumes, modern ages and nations give forth of their deed and thought. To him the future is inspiration and hope; from the present, which fills him with its life, he goes calmly on, neither staying in the old nor hasting to the new, sure of the final issues. Christendom, with all its spiritual ideas, survives in his soul. As it goes from the banks of the Jordan to those of the Tiber; simple as in its early heralds, grand as in its later growths, signified by the upper chamber or the open field in which it once spake, or by the vast cathedrals and the solemn pomps of its triumphal day; there is never a divine idea which it announces in words or bodies forth in emblems, but it enters into him, and rises in his soul to the high and comprehensive sphere of the Life in God.

Nor is he prophet only. The man of business does not more readily, more constantly, more decisively, convert all his skill and all his resources into means of achieving his ends, than he whom this spirit fills converts all his perceptions and powers into methods of universal improvement. He is true saint; asking no retirement, for God is ever with him; seeking neither temple nor wilderness, for he is alone temple of the Highest; practising no austerities to chastise himself, for his whole nature is sacred; performing no penances, for he has only to raise his eye, and see the Father; cursing nothing, for his soul rejoices in the universal benediction. The Holy Spirit which teaches and

hallows him, separates him from men and the world, not by exhausting his human sympathies, but by gathering them all, alive, fresh, powerful, into his soul; that, be there joy or sorrow, good or evil, vice or virtue, wealth or want, he is touched by it; blessing oppressed innocence, denouncing enthroned wrong; remembering the forgotten, honoring the despised, receiving the outcast, and, even when the leprosy of vice has driven the guilty from the presence of men, prepared to take them to his bosom, fearing no pollution from the touch. His saintly pureness not only surrounds him with a protection against evil, so that if he were to pass through flames as of a fabled hell, they would part in sunder and leave him unscathed, but empowers him to communicate of his own life a blessing to mankind, so that if the bad repel him, yet open souls will accept his presence and drink in its peace.

It may be secretly felt, after all, if not openly said, that this is a want which, supposing it to exist, can never be supplied; either the delineation is altogether shadow, or no man can ever fulfil the destiny to which we seem appointed. Be it so or not, let each seek to come as near it as he can; remembering always that the possibilities of manhood are far from having been determined. The resources of any soul are as yet greater than we have learned. There has been one Son of man, at once presenting the ideal of perfection in his life, his deed, and his word, and strengthening us by his immortal spirit to live even as he lived; one Son of God, empowering

us also to become children of the Father; one Messiah, through whom we, too, may be consecrated as kings and priests; one Prophet, in whom the Everlasting Truth shines into our souls that we may give it free course; one Image of God's Presence, revealing the perpetual reality; one quickening Power, wherein we are dead to sin and alive unto God. So we may never despair. Honored of men for intellect, for action, for eloquence, we may not be, perhaps; nothing can hinder us, if we but strive earnestly and without ceasing, from attaining the conscious union with the Lord, which shall make us fruitful in every good work and word. And if no single person makes the ideal complete in his own life, yet each may receive his own gift, and all united in the harmonies of infinite diversities may round and fill the entire circle.

This conducts us to the great want. It is not of one holy prophet; it is not of many such; it is of no man as an individual; —it is of that which speaks through the prophet; which lives and blesses in the saint; which unites men in one aspiration, one hope, one destiny; which is alike beginning, and midst, and end of all: the Spirit of the Living God, connecting us indissolubly with him, and quickening us to obey for ever his own law of love and service to mankind. This, this present inspiration, is the precise want of the age; the first and perpetual want of each human soul. Let the many, toiling for outward conveniences

19

or for selfish pleasures, say, with restless anxiety, Who will show us good? Be ours the earnest prayer, which alone breathes out the inmost instinct of man, Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us!

SERMON XV.

THE PROPHETIC POET.

DAN. xii. 3.

THEY THAT BE WISE SHALL SHINE AS THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE FIRMAMENT.

AMONG the later announcements from Europe, I have noted this one: The Poet Wordsworth is dead. The fact is noticed, that is all. No comment on his character; no statement of his age; no other allusion to his history than is conveyed in that one word, the Poet. There was a time when that word had a sanctity and grandeur. In the simplicity of earlier ages it indicated a relation to higher spheres of the soul than those of the earth. The poet was thought to derive his power from a celestial source; it was gift of the Muse who loved him; nor did he sing but in obedience to the energy which wrought in him. The Hebrew bards, with a simpler conception of the invisible powers, uttered their songs and their prophecies- so we call them — with a seeming consciousness that they were not their own, but words of the One Mysterious Being; and when the Jewish Christian came to quote the language of Grecian poetry, he referred