should cease to inspire our hearts.-It is shown us in nature; not so much amid phenomena the most dazzling or vast, as where he makes the force which looks smallest the lord of the greater, and where he sets the unseen energies to construct and control the combinations of matter; where he leaves the great laws which regulate the worlds mere invisible conceptions and melodious ideas of his archetypal and tranquil mind; where he poises the Universe, in the final analysis, on a globule of ether, beneath which stands only his "word of power." It is shown us in miracles; where the prophet's rod opens paths through the waves before whose recoil the chariots are as chaff; where the dust and the spittle are omnipotent through his will for removing the blindness that no surgery touches; where the tones of the voice are indued with a potency that masters the storm and raises the dead. It is shown us, as brightly as any where else, in this progress of the Gospel; where the humblest of energies become clothed with supremacy, when auxiliary to his aim; where is suddenly brought to light what had lain deeply hidden, that it may work his wondrous will; and where what appeared to have no existence is invested in his plans with irresistible efficiency.

What a resource for our hearts; what an unfailing stimulus to our too often fainting faith; what a ground of awe, and love, and wonder, more vivid and vast than the theophany upon Sinai, is the discovery thus made of Him! How plainly does prophecy become possible to him, who knows from the beginning all these occult forces which he is to marshal and make to determine the history of the world! And what a privilege is prayer shown to be, when we place it in its relation to his supreme mind, to his all-controlling and absolute will!

And further, let us notice THE INTERPRETING POWER OF THIS SAME DIVINE ELEMENT in more recent history; the light which it casts on the subsequent changes that have marked the advance of Christianity in the world. Every where we shall find it, if we search for it aright, gleaming as a thread of heavenly gold throughout the tangled and bloody annals that cover the interval between Paul's day and ours.

After he had long ascended to his rest, and the Christian temple long had stood on the very site of Nero's circus, there came that time beneath whose darkness history yet shivers, when all the fearful agencies of ill, which had apparently finally been scattered, seemed to rally again and recombine, in different forms but with the same spirit, once more to withstand and overpower the Gospel; when Romanism was supreme the old Heathenism over, though baptized with new titles and adorned with new splendor-over Western Europe; when Western Europe and Romanism through it, was as mightily predominant

as the Empire had been in human civilization; when Mohammedanism confronted it, with flaming sword and fanatical zeal, in the very seats where Judaism had been; and when Heathenism, bulwarked behind this false faith, remained undisturbed and even unquestioned over the remaining area of Asia. Again the whole power of the world seemed compacted, to crowd back the truth from the minds of mankind; and again there appeared, looming darkly above this, an almost unworldly malignity and energy, working tireless and triumphant for the same drear result. And again it seemed, as it had done of old, like looking to see the Alps melt away, or the continents and seas exchange their conditions, to expect such powers of ill to be vanquished, such prodigious establishments to be remolded.

But again the possibilities which men had not considered, the germs of things which they had not discerned, were God's chosen and adequate instruments for his end; and he brought them out from their silent retreats, and made them victorious over all that opposed him. Kindling the primitive fires again in the souls of his faithful, by the word of his Gospel and the touch of his Spirit, he made their lips and lives to be vocal, as had been those of the primitive martyrs. He shot an inspiration over the nations, from the prisons of Lollards and the stake of John Huss. He stirred new longings in Rome itself, after a higher Christian life. He made the progress of scientific thought contribute to the movement which thus constantly broadened. He awakened and invigorated, and brought to powerful development and action, the elements which worked toward national liberation and popular freedom, and made these auxiliary to his august plan. And then he gathered around these forces, nascent only as yet though full of promise, such an armory of instruments, suddenly revealed, as no other age had ever possessed. He unfolded the mystic might of the type, which makes human thought palpable. He brought to view other worlds by the telescope, and disclosed the true stellar and planetary system, to shake men's faith in the "infallible" Church which had passionately denied this. He picked up this continent out of the seas, by the touch of that needle which is as his own finger of light, guiding the mariner through the darkness. He put the Bible, in the speech of the people, into the hands of all who could read, and made powerless beside it the priestly establishments which were based upon ignorance and bulwarked by force. He wrenched at last the whole of Northern Europe from the grasp of the Papacy, put a commerce into its hands wider than the ancients ever had dreamed of, and inspired it by degrees with a devotion to the truth unknown till then since the era of the Apostles. He peopled this continent with a Christian colonization, insignificant in its beginning, apparently almost accidental in its direction, but providential in its

movement, and amazing in its growth. He drew out the energy from that Southern Europe which still remained Romanist, and equally from that fierce and aggressive Mohammedanism which so long had arrested the advance of the Gospel. And so he brought the world to this stage in which it meets us with Protestantism prevalent and Romanism weak, both in Europe and here; with Mohammedanism shattered in the centers of its power, and Heathenism pierced at multitudes of points by the progress of the Gospel; with the whole world now open to the march of the truth. And in all the long progress, his method has been that which the text first declared. He has conquered the powers that seemed irresistible, and overturned the establish. ments that looked solid as the earth, not by great forces at which all the world wondered, by monarchies and their might, by uni versities and their learning, by military movements and magnificent diplomacies, but just as of old by the things which "were not" till he bade them to be; which existed but in germ, unrevealed to the knowledge or the hope of mankind.

It is the key which unlocks for us history. It is the method which shows God supreme, and still active in the world, and which associates distant ages in the long triumphal procession of his plans. He uses most these minor means, that we may hear his sounding steps reverberating on earth. He brings in ever the ultimate triumph of his truth and his Son, through the humbleness of the manger and the sorrows of the mount. He leaves the earthquake to shake the lands, and go vibrating on to the caverns where it hides. He leaves the wind to whirl over the surface, and mingle again in the quietness of the azure. He leaves the fire to blaze ineffectual into the heavens, and expire amid a smoke which the star-beams soon pierce. But he utters Himself in the "still small voice."

We can not, I think, be content without noticing the relation which the truth thus declared to us by Paul sustains to OUR OWN LAND AND TIME; the light which it casts on those purposes of God which already we feel to be wheeling through the mists, and articulating themselves amid the uproar and tumult, with which we are environed.

What is the lesson it teaches here? Is it that the Government which so long has been powerful is to be overturned by the startling Rebellion which so recently was not, but which now has expanded to colossal proportions? that God thus designs to exalt the mean thing to a might unexpected, and to vindicate his supremacy through the triumph which he gives it over that which it seemed inadequate to shake? Nay! but the line in which he chooses to do this is the line, you observe, in which his ancient plans advance to the reduction of the world to

allegiance to his Son. The things which are mighty, and which he overturns, are those which obstruct, not those which assist, this beneficent progress. And the feeble and obscure things to which he gives effectiveness, are those which are adapted by their nature to his work; which are marked from the beginning by a radical righteousness, though at the beginning most faint in development; whose expansion is therefore harmonious with his character, as well as directly auxiliary to his aim. And so this is not the lesson which is taught for our times by the text. A diverse application is that which it has for them.

Our Government in the past, so broad in its basis, so noble in its frame, builded so grandly on primordial truths, and seemingly riveted to them so firmly by the terms of its charter and the traditions of its founders, has still been confronted, and to some extent combined, in unnatural alliance, with another its opposite. Perverted by this, in many of its officers, laws, and operations, it has been rendered in some degree, it has been in peril of being rendered more largely, a bulwark of bondage, and not a grand power for popular liberation; the ally of a force which would shut the book of God to a race, and not of the faith which would open it to all men; the minister of a rule before which the family-institute is nothing, and not of the great idea of the Scriptures that the family inviolate is the solid corner-stone of all civilization, the first and most sacred of governments and of churches. It has seemed sometimes that this abnormal system-this marvelous complication of legalized lies, fronting the heavens in our late century-was so established in all our seats of ancient renown and national power that nothing could shake it; that every institution, officer, law, must be subservient to its behests. Strong in the wealth produced for it by millions of laborers unrequited; crafty in the policy and effective in the tactics which leisure gave its leaders opportunity to master; domineering in its spirit and tenacious in its will as was the Roman Empire first, and the Papacy afterward; aiming at incessant renewal and expansion, and even with a certain religious fanaticism confusing its conscience and intensifying its passion-it has looked to those who have studied it in the past too vast to be avoided, too strong to be subdued; almost certainly the master of our national policy for generations to come; whose pride and might would be only cemented with the progress of time, and to shake whose dominion were like breaking the Alleghanies into a prairie.

But God has taken the impalpable powers of thought and prayer, which alone remained to set against this, and has made them mighty as of old on his errand. The weak and despised, and the base things of earth, yea, even the things which "were not" when he commenced, he has made in part victorious already over this gigantic and inveterate system. He is carry.

ing them forward, let none of us doubt, to their certain consummation. If we are true to ourselves and to Him, it is SLAVERY that is going down, not our benign and venerated GOVERNMENT, in this fierce struggle which agitates the land. It is Slavery which is to disappear in the end from its last stronghold within nominal Christendom. The truths that started in so much feebleness, that gained so tardy and reluctant an acceptance from even the minds which most were attuned to them, that have had to encounter such constant opposition, and whose power to overcome it has seemed so slight-they have mastered many mechanisms, and enthroned themselves in pulpits; they have found multitudinous voices in literature; they have organized themselves by degrees into statesmanship; they have had their martyrs here and there, as all great truths must have to be vindicated as such; they have reached and grappled the popular conscience, inspired and directed political action, and at last have placed their nearest representatives among public men in the chief seats of power, and have crowded the imperious and exasperated system which has watched their advance, and has frantically resisted the approach of its end, to a point where it snatches up arms in rebellion, and makes civil war to blaze and thunder for the first time in our history-and also for the last!-along the mid line of our peaceful confederacy.

And here, as of old, other instruments that were not till God bade them to be, are now made auxiliary to the spiritual forces of the truth and of righteousness. The wondrous uprising of an intense patriotism, which flashed with actual lightning-speed from New-York to the Pacific, from the shades of Katahdin to Californian valleys, when the outcry went forth that by bullets and bombs the old imperial starry flag, riddled and rent, but undisgraced, had been hurled from the bastion; the amazing military development that has followed; the unexampled enthusiasm of the whole Northern mind for the maintenance of the government, and the extent to which already it is impregnated with a principled and determined detestation of Slavery; the immense expansion of the culture of cotton beneath the vast stimulus which now is applied to it, preparing it every where to spring up more profusely, till it binds in the filaments of its delicate fibers that system which thought to command the world by a monopoly of its staple-all these are things which were not at first, which were not a year since, which not the most prescient could have antici pated, but through which and by which God will vindicate his supremacy, and overwhelm that which would hinder his Gospel from largest publication.

As in all our career-wherein a faith that seemed so obscure surmounted at first the obstacles that were mighty, wherein the scattered and fragmentary colonies humbled the empire which