known or alien families; with foreigners and nations distant, if not hostile. Even the virtuous we may be deemed to confound with the vicious, as entitled to no higher regard, to no friendlier offices. But this objection simply mistakes the principle. The sensual affections are of course elements of our nature; but they are not the supreme and perfect law of our nature. They are subordinate; and when they break loose from the higher law, they become, no longer servants, henceforth tyrants of the soul. In their due subordination and harmony, they are at once ennobled and exalted; humanity goes up with its Redeemer into the mountain, and is transfigured. Natural affections, penetrated by divine radiance, shine sunlike ; their robes of descending thought become white as the light. As the bodily life with its appetites surpasses and subjects the mere body itself; as the human affections regulate the body and its vitalities; so does this divine love preside over and control all inferior propensities and powers. The heavens, with their sun and stars, are above the earth; let the earth disturb the serene order and break loose from its orbit, then all above and below mingle together in undistinguished confusion and chaos. Be thankful to thy benefactor; but let him never win thee to forget thy relations to the Eternal Truth. Love thy parents, thy children, thy wife, thy brother and sister; but suffer them never to seduce thee from thy filial love to the Highest, and thy fraternal communion with the great family in heaven and on earth. Be true to thy friend; be none the less true to that law which commands both him and thee. Allow thy country to be dear to thee; but meet its demand of thee to uphold its injustice with resolved denial. And when benefactor, friend, parent, wife, child, country, seek to excite in thee hatreds of their own, and to merge thy life in their self-will, then obey the voice which calleth thee to go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the higher region which it shall show thee. Such the discrimination of thine impartial love; and so reveals it the nice precision with which it severs the evil and the good, virtue and vice. So the man becomes perfect. And now, after what may seem a circuitous course, I return to the word of Jesus from which we have proceeded. This I apprehend to be his real meaning. He is not suggesting every aspect of perfection; but from the point of its contrast to the false maxim, Love thy neighbor, hate thine enemy, proceeding by a striking series of antitheses, and by appeals to the Divine Character revealed in nature, as well as by intimations of the insufficiency and incompleteness of partial affections, to enjoin that true perfection, that completeness of the human being, which consists in a love which enmity cannot overcome, which no curse can hinder from blessing, whose beneficence no hatred can stay, whose prayer despiteful usage and persecution do but excite to fervor, and in which we become sons of the Father, whose sun shines and his rains fall whether men serve or reject him. So, quickened by such a life, even we, raised above all selfishness and limitation, grow to be perfect, even as our Father who is in the heavens is perfect. SERMON XXII. THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. EXODUS Xxv. 40. LOOK THAT THOU MAKE THEM AFTER THEIR PATTERN, WHICH WAS SHOWED THEE IN THE MOUNT. THERE is an ancient thought which assigns all existing forms as analogies or correspondences to certain ideas, substantial and permanent in the creative mind. Detaching the thought from those mythical images which have sometimes surrounded it, Christians of a meditative cast have not unfrequently reproduced it in their attempts at the solution of the great problem of creation. That which is seen, proceeding from that which is unseen, corresponds to it as copy to original, as symbol to idea, nay, they tell us, as effect to cause. It is but repetition and expansion of the thought, that within the Divine Mind, one with its very essence, dwell those eternal principles, those sunny and undeclining ideas, to which nature and life perfectly correspond, as from them nature and life for ever proceed. More truly we might say, not principles, not ideas, as if they were manifold in the first Being, but the principle itself, the absolute idea, one and unchangeable in his infinitude, which produces numberless types and aspects of the one essence in its everlasting developments. Thus, from its own central fountain Infinite Love for ever flows, forming sphere after sphere, and filling each with its influence. From that radiant centre, out to the dim limit of its circulation, the harmony is complete amidst the boundless diversity. The highest heavens receive and image forth the Love which, as sun, warms and quickens their immense cycles. Transparent as the air, they let the irradiation flow through them into lower celestial and intellectual spheres. To the dimmest region of mind, where it seems scarce to have emerged from the clouded abyss, softened and shaded to the feeble sense, it flows on. Down into the darker realm of animal instinct; lower still, into the circles of unconscious growth; onward thence through the successive appearances of the mineral kingdom to the atom which seems almost to unite the severed states of existence and of nonentity. Deep calling unto deep, is for ever answered, from the height to the abyss. The Word which utters itself in perpetual creation, receives evermore the echoes it awakens in suns and worlds going on their sounding and majestic path. The Life whose efflux quickens all existence, inspheres itself in the myriads on myriads walking their earths or, unseen of us, dwelling in their spiritual mansions. The Love which is parent of all lives through the worlds, and glows at once in the wor |