it is buried: these are facts familiar as any fact of nature; which impress immediately the most careless observer; to question which, with so many annals before us, crowded with thick reports of change, were like denying the atmosphere itself. That the movement which thus is constantly going on, through the centuries, around the world, is on the whole a movement for the better; that the "Things which are not," so far as men's earlier knowledge is concerned, which exist but in embryo, and are only to be developed by a keener observation, or a more profound and exhaustive experience, are yet usually superior to the things which precede them, and more replete with a vitalizing energy; that thus each industrious and thoughtful community is likely to surpass in its later years the attainments of its earlier, and the race itself to be gradually enriched, invigorated, and elevated, as the centuries proceed these also are facts which modern history clearly illustrates, and which, without any indiscreet optimism, we may gratefully accept. But that these things of which the age that is at any time knows not and dreams not, -these powers which exist in it only in germ, and which make no appeal either to its hopes or its sensitive fears that these, while hidden so remotely from man, are all the time present to the mind of the Most High; that they are indeed his preördained instruments, not only for working the changes which shall come in the aspects or in the life of society, but for the higher, grander purpose of establishing supremely his kingdom in the world; that he has incorporated their unseen elements with the system of things in order that ultimately he may use them in this office, and make them auxiliaries in subjecting the world to his truth and his Son: these are facts the declaration of which is peculiar to our religion; yet which it not only affirms with authority, but exhibits and demonstrates, in its actual advancement toward the conquest of the earth; and which it offers to every believer to us who are here assembled this evening-as a basis on which to found the assurance of its ultimate triumph.

So here, as every where, does Christianity vindicate its origin in God's mind, by placing us at once upon the highest levels of truth, and opening to our minds the widest range for reflection. And the words of the Apostle, holding in them a principle so specific and profound, present to us a theme appropriate and adequate to our present occasion.

To this theme, therefore, fathers and brethren, I invite your attention: THE THINGS WHICH ARE NOT❞—which are not recog nized by man, and which subsequent times alone are to develop into power and mastery-THESE ARE FROM THE FIRST GOD'S CHOSEN INSTRUMENTS FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF HIS KINGDOM IN THE WORLD. If this be true, the relations of the fact to the character, power, and government of God, and the bearings of the fact

on our Missionary enterprise, will indicate themselves to all minds.

That we may get the thought fully before us, as it lay at first in the mind of the Apostle, and may receive the perfect impres sion of those illustrations of its truth which were given in the centuries that succeeded, let us call before us in rapid review the scenes amid which the text was written, and then the events which became its immediate and complete vindication. It was written, you remember, from that delightful and populous city planted by the Ionian colony on the hills overlooking" the Asian meadows," along the Cayster. In this city of Ephesus, important and peculiar, partly Greek but still more Oriental in its manners and spirit, the metropolis of a province, and with a commerce that drew to its wharves the representatives of all nations, in which schools of philosophy seem so much to have abounded that one of them was opened to Paul for his labors, yet in which the Eastern superstitions and magic darkly and haughtily con fronted philosophy, and still had a power which they had not either at Athens or at Rome-in this city, the remains of whose magnificent theater yet strew the ground in colossal confusion, and above which then shone in splendid beauty the Temple of Diana, whose graceful colonnades first revealed the full beauty of the Ionic style, and whose columns of jasper still perpetuate among men the vision of its glory-in this city where the East and the West were commingled, and within whose spacious walls and harbor was assembled so busy and so various a life-it was natural that the Apostle, coming westward from Antioch, should tarry for a time, that he might there proclaim the Gospel. And so he abode there for more than two years, and from thence he wrote the epistle before us.

It was written to Corinth; that wealthier, more brilliant, and more luxurious town, planted upon the celebrated Greek Isthmus, and by its position attracting the trade not only of Greece, but of all the countries whose shores were washed by either of the seas between whose almost meeting waves it fortunately stood; above which arose in austere grandeur the precipitous hights of the Acro-Corinthus; around which was spread the loveliest beauty of the land and the water; whose architecture was unrivaled, even in Greece, in its sumptuous elegance; in whose streets all arts that skill could gain, and all the gifts that commerce could bring, were equally at home; and yet whose manners were so licentious that even in that gross pagan age its very name was a synonym for vice, and that from it went a constant influence which defiled and demoralized wheresoever it touched.-To the Christians in this city Paul wrote from Ephesus the letter which contains the declaration of the text.

In effect, therefore, he had before him while writing the whole expanse of the Mediterranean; that "many-nationed" sea, still full of interest to us and our times, but which was to the old world what all the oceans are to ours; yea, more than this: which was not only the cradle and school of its maritime enterprise, and the scene of its naval strifes and conquests, but the constant center of its most powerful civilizations; around which were grouped, as if by a force as necessary as that which forms the crystal around its axis, all the arts and the empires then most prominent in the world, or which now most attract and influence our minds. Upon or near the shores of this sea, the labors of Paul were constantly performed. Born within sight of it, his whole after-life clung to it. In all his incessant missionary tours he scarcely left it; but at Cæsarea, Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Rome, perhaps still further to the gates of the Atlantic, he had it before him, and strove with all the energy of his will, inspired and sustained by his Christian enthusiasm, to stud its shores with Christian churches, and to make it a center of the kingdom of God and his Son in the world.

It is evident, then, at once, from this point of view, what were the institutions which Paul describes as "THINGS THAT ARE:" the great established powers in society, which withstood, or at least did not harmonize with, the extension of Christianity. And upon these things, that we may receive the full impression of the truth which he uttered, it is needful that we pause; till we feel in part the vast strength they possessed; till we see in a measure the "hiding of their power." Then better may we estimate, in comparison with them, the obscure, undeveloped, and unrecognized forces, by which in God's plan, and in the interest of his kingdom, they were all to be destroyed.

Foremost amongst these "Things that are"-these powerful institutes of the day of the Apostle, opposed to Christianity-we must reckon, of course, that haughty JUDAISM, dogmatic and secular, imperious in its claims and impatient in its hopes, into which the religion given by God to the people of his election had by degrees been transformed, and which now had the seat of its dominion in Palestine, but the outposts of its influence in many cities of the Empire. Into collision and controversy with this, Christianity came at the very beginning: since the more essentially harmonious it was with the ancient religion truly interpreted, the more positive and vehement was the contest urged against it by that arrogant system which now clothed itself in the robes and occupied the place of Moses and the Prophets; a system not content to be recognized and honored as Divine in its sphere, yet introductory to a higher, but claiming for itself to be final and universal, and challenging for its own supremacy in the world.

Unconscious of imperfection, and intolerant of change, this bred a temper domineering and defiant in those who adhered to it toward all other faiths, but most of all toward the faith which adored a crucified Nazarene. And immediately, continually, in every city, and in almost each village, it met the Apostle; at Ephesus or at Corinth, no less than at Jerusalem; among his own kindred, as well as among strangers. It lay in wait for him by stealth, and assailed him with violence. More often far than it touched his person, it overshadowed and darkened his thoughts. And always it fronted him as an urgent, ancient, and inveterate power, enthroned supreme among his own nation-the most religious of the peoples of the earth-and systematically withstanding, with all its energy, the advance of Christianity.

It is one of the most significant illustrations of the drift of human nature this character of Judaism in the day of the Apostle, and the position it assumed toward the doctrines he proclaimed. Ennobled and vitalized as it had been at the beginning, by the supreme truth of the being of God, eternal and holy, almighty and wise, the creator, moral governor, and judge of the universe; receiving a yet mightier practical impressiveness from the discoveries which it made of his presence and providence, and of his perfect law; becoming pervaded through and through with a divine glory, as it showed to men something of his hea venly empire, rehearsed the history of his dealings with mankind, and even unfolded through prophecy and psalm the scope and splendor of his purposes of love; bringing all these manifold elements of power into contact with men, through a mechanism of worship unequaled in its majesty, and its fitness to its end: the religion of the Hebrews was intrinsically adapted, not only above all other religions, but to the highest degree then possible, to educate the mind, to stimulate the conscience, to implant and develop the holiest affections, and to make the nation which had its oracles for their constant possession the purest, noblest, and most devout on the earth. No other result of it could have been anticipated by those who should have assumed as an axiom the moral integrity or the moral indifference of the nature of man. And doubtless such effects, through the grace of the Spirit, were realized in many, whose faces now glow in the vision of Christ.

Yet from this religion the nation had early and persistently swung away, into grossest idolatries; reproducing in gold the Egyptian Apis beneath the very pavement of sapphire on which the feet of God were treading above the mount; in their subsequent history, polluting the hills which looked out upon Jerusalem with the fury and lust of sacrilegious observances. And when they had at length been driven out of these, by the stern words of preachers and the sterner strokes of providential visitation. -when Assyrian oppressions, fulfilling God's plans, had forced

them to a new recognition of Him, and made them loathe at last the idolatries whose cruel craft had so torn and despoiled them-they only turned their religion to an occasion of pride, and nurtured beneath it the very arrogance and ambition which it was especially designed to subdue. Its mystic, high, and moving truths, the venerable associations it derived from antiquity, the precious and kindling memories of the fathers by which it was consecrated, the wonderful interventions of God in providence by which so often it had been vindicated or rescued, the unique impressiveness of the ceremonies and offices by which it had been conveyed through the ages, the resplendent array of miracles which it wore as the breastplate of gems and the golden miter on the front of its records, the very endurance and faith of the martyrs who had died beneath the hands of rulers or people in allegiance to it all were together perverted by the Jews to minister more abundantly to their national pride, and to make them less. willing to receive the Messiah whom from the beginning their religion had foreshadowed, unless he should come as a conquering Prince, reigning visibly at Jerusalem, and carrying his ensigns with squadrons and navies to the ends of the earth."

This influence had now for many generations been working in the nation; and, as we know, it had reached its climax when Paul was proclaiming Christianity in the world. The very political calamities of the Jews, stinging and irritating their unsubmissive minds, had only intensified their fanatical expectation of victory through their ritual and law; had only exasperated their scorn of a Messiah who should seek to rule by the truth and by love. The partial successes which they had realized--in establishing synagogues in many of the cities to which their restless enterprise had impelled them, in gaining numerous proselytes from the heathen, in compelling the admiration of some of the higher philosophical minds for the grand simplicity in which their faith contrasted the mythologies, in adapting through the Alexandrian school their doctrines and rules to the language, and even in some degree to the spirit of the Greeks-these had still further invigorated the tendency. And so they stood, divided among themselves in many particulars, yet unanimous in a fierce hostility to the Gospel: the Sadducees denying angels and the resurrection, and almost it would seem the existence of the soul, as independent of the body, while still holding among them the office of high priest, and some posts of chief influence in the national council; the Pharisees superadding their traditions to the law, and austerely exacting the most rigorous and literal observance of both, in disregard often of the obvious principles of equity and of charity; the Essenes delighting in pietistic seclusion and remote meditations; the Herodians affecting foreign manners, and maintaining the supreme authority of the civil ruler in mat