Youth is often, I fear oftenest, the period of most fervid enthusiasms. It shrinks instinctively from baseness, from servility, from injustice. Let the tale be told of cruelty and oppression; the young spirit burns with generous indignation and spontaneous sympathy. Let the prophecy be announced of a brighter epoch, of freedom and of peace descending in a new baptism on the crushed heart of humanity; the spirit, if unperverted by falsehoods of education and society, leaps forth with jubilant echo to greet the glad future. Selfish pursuits have not yet clouded its vision. Cold words and colder deeds, the bitter sneer and the boast of pride, and the hatred or neglect of the world, have not yet frozen into the flowing life. Noble attempts have not yet been baffled by the oppositions of men, associates it may be, nay, bosom friends. These come later; and too often the fervent youth passes into the icy man; the flowering enthusiasm withers and becomes sere, lifeless, a forgotten thing among the rank weeds which ignorance and selfishness cherish in the faded and fruitless Eden. Happy the young man who escapes the doom; whose youth flows unchecked, with full stream, into the pure and serene currents of a wise and humane manhood; whose enthusiasm is only gentler, not less earnest, only deeper, not less strong,

only wiser, not less fervid, through the influences of advancing years, and even through the disappointments and contradictions which assail it, as well as the successes and the sympathies which sometimes greet it. Soul rejoicing now in the youth of thy hopes, on! Be undismayed. This

mountain of the Lord is not thy place; thou must down into the cloudy and rough ways of men. But the vision thou hast seen in this divine solitude, carry that in thy soul for ever. The spirit that hath breathed and brooded over thy soul, let it quicken and shape thee as it will. The idea which has shined into thee of a redeemed and glorified humanity, let it grow in thee to manly freedom and celestial glory. Temple of God thou art; let him fill thee with his own holiness.

I know well that the life spent in the lowliness of our common business and relations seems a little thing, and that common, every-day duties look mean. Especially, one would say, this is a great degradation, from the mountain to the valley; from the splendors of the Lord to the obscurities of man; from the vision of celestial ideas to the doing of petty deeds; from worship before the mysterious pattern sanctuary to the raising up, piece by piece, of the small tent-work set for the daily task. A day of this lifetime of ours! How poor! To awake with the morning sun, to clothe and feed one's self, to go out and work, or buy and sell, through the many hours, to return at evening, and soon sleep again till morning, this the history of a day, the history of life. Resemblance slight enough to the building and consecration of a temple to the Infinite Father! Such the first view. But it is all superficial and scanty. A day is larger and deeper than this. And the life, made up of watchful days and nights of rest, reaches out into higher relations, and its least of things do

really become infinite through the spirit in which they are wrought. There is the wonderful analogy before us always. The day with God, how passes that? He is for ever doing things, how minute to the sense, how small and insignificant. He does not sit enthroned in some magnificent palace, rolling out vast systems of suns and their earths; all complete and infinite. Suns and worlds flow from him indeed, but not the less does he spend himself on the minutest thing upon their surface; the particle of air, the ray of light, the petal and scent and hue of the flower, the atom which floats in the air or lies on the cold earth. He does not decline to open the snow-drop, because he has worlds waiting on his word; he lets not the mistwreath pass untinted, because he has suns to lead on their bright tracks, nor stays he the soft evening breeze, because he has planets to send out on their everlasting circuits. Nay, there is to him no great, no small; no high, no low; rather, all is great through the grandeur of his presence, all is high through the attraction which draws the whole within the circle of his love. The leaf is as an earth; the flower, as a solar system; the cloud, as a globe; the ray, as a sun. Just so does our life, seeming little, become really great by being godlike, and its least and lowliest deeds cease to be small and low through the inspirations which fill and ennoble them. A gentle word, a kind deed, a truthful thought, a loving affection, are no longer mere word, deed, thought, affection, but are expanded and elevated into gentleness, kindness,

truth, love, the very soul and unconfined essence of goodness. The tabernacle we rear may be made up of earthly materials, but not only is its pattern celestial, even its structure and form are product and image of the One Spirit which fills both heaven and earth. Perfection of character is thus wrought of the spirit of love coming down from the heavens, resting on the earth, blessing even the smallest action, that, however it may seem to the eye, it is great in the divine holiness, and reproduces in us and in every deed the Life once revealed from heaven, which, in solitude, in the family, in society, in temptation or victory, in joy or sorrow, in action or in rest, in birth, in growth, in death and ascension, has become the consecrated archetype, the prophetic symbol, of our regeneration and our perfection.

SERMON XXIII.

THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY.*

I.

ACTS xxiv. 14.

THIS I CONFESS UNTO THEE, THAT AFTER THE WAY WHICH THEY CALL HERESY, SO WORSHIP I THE GOD OF MY FATHERS.

THIS day closes the service to which, a few years ago, you invited me. I shall endeavor to improve these, its last hours, by bringing into some general statements the principles which appear to me highest and holiest, and which, in one form or another, I have sought to illustrate and apply during my ministry. I am far from offering them as a creed which any man is authorized to impose on others, or even to prescribe for his own future acceptance. Sure indeed I may be, that the great Ideas are Eternal Realities: the assurance, however, does by no means extend to the several forms into which the Faith grows. The truth is one thing, and everlasting; the conception of it is another, the expres

* Delivered in the First Church, Salem, February 22, 1852.