Christianity, which, before his death, within thirty years from the date of his conversion, from being apparently a mere schism among the Jews, had shown itself a separate and world-conquering power, and had as such become recognized and feared, wherever it was not hailed and accepted. At first it was a heresy at which Pharisees sneered; at last it was a power with which Emperors had to grapple, and before whose onset their tyrannies went down into bloody destruction. And in part this was owing to the method of the apostle. To strike at the centres of trade, of population, of fashion, and of influence-at the points from which all forces radiated, and where one standing could touch the whole series of interlinked provinces-this was not Paul's method alone. It was the wise and inspired procedure of those who wrought with him. And for all time their example remains to those who in faith and in works do follow them.

Antioch itself, that most luxurious and licentious of towns, became the mother of churches for Asia. Ignatius, its chief pastor, represented its faith in the Roman amphitheatre. Chrysostom was born in it, and trained in its schools, and disciplined by the austerities of the hermits who surrounded it, to be the bishop of Constantinople. In the reign of Theodosius, its Christians numbered a hundred thousand. A peculiar school of theology sprang up in it, stimulating to more thorough study of the Scriptures. Its liturgy divided the East with that of Alexandria. It was read and sung, and its canticles were chanted, throughout the provinces inhabited by Greeks. The influence of its patriarch was recognized and felt from Byzantium to the Euphrates.

The primitive disciples taught in THE CITIES; and at each of them they PREACHED CHRIST: with such earnestness and constancy that they took from Him their very name among men. That Jesus of Nazareth, whom Pilate had crucified, was the very Messiah of ancient prophecy, the proper King and Lord of the world, through whom Israel was to rise to its spiritual supremacy, and in whose reign the whole earth should be blessed; that having from the beginning shared the glory of the Father, He, by a true and divine incarnation, had come into the world to manifest God to it, and to introduce into it a new principle and power of spiritual life; that in his words God's wisdom was revealed, and in his miracles, God's omnip

otence; that by his mysterious suffering and death, atonement was made for human sin; and by his resurrection from the dead, the gates of heaven, opened before, were shown wide open, and the luminous pathway to them revealed, along which all who believed him might follow-this was the substance of the teachings of Paul, and of all the apostles. It was not the Church, and its authority, which they preached. It was not a system of scientific theology. It was the story of the Divine Lord. In it were those transcendent facts-surpassing all fancies and dreams of men, making the very Hebrew expectation, to say nothing of the heathen, look dull and dark before their splendor, exalting the world to new relations to higher spheres, inaugurating an era glorious and final in the history of mankindin it were these facts, which at first had softened and quickened their hearts, and inspired their minds, and which afterwards they proclaimed as the means of converting and transforming the world.

The philosophy of human nature, and of the Divine being and government, which was indissolubly associated with these facts, and which on the one hand interpreted them, while equally on the other illustrated by them-this, also, was involved of course in their teachings; and its complete and clear exposition constitutes a large part of some of their epistles. But still the facts themselves were their chief theme; to which they ever returned with joy, from which they derived their most stimulating motives, which they found most effective over men's hearts. And therefore they proclaimed them. Before philosophers and soldiers, before governors and the populace, on the crowned and glittering heights of Athens and on the level beach at Miletus, before Paulus, before Felix, and at Cæsar's tribunal, Paul preached of Christ. It was the theme which occupied his soul from the hour when he saw the glory out of heaven, and heard the words in the Hebrew tongue, till the hour when he joined with prophets and psalmists in the song of the Lamb. And in the last epistle which he wrote, just before he was beheaded, to the youthful Timothy, his son in the gospel, he could say, as he looked back on all the course of his earnest ministry, rough with the toils and manifold vicissitudes of an arduous experience, yet brightened all the way by his love for the Master: "I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of

righteousness, which THE LORD, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day. And not to me only," he adds, in that spirit of boundless benevolence which never forgot his brethren of mankind, "and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing." His noble course of wise endeavor thus nobly ended, he went from the city which Nero ruled, to the new Jerusalem in which Christ was the Lord; from the prison to the palace; from the service of Christ, to His vision and reward.

In both the particulars which I have thus indicated, and which are suggested by the record of the text, the example of Paul, and of the teachers associated with him, demands, my Brethren, our imitation. And speaking to-night to this Christian Association, on its twelfth anniversary, I have thought of no theme more pertinent, more important, cr more practical than this. As they did who were earliest the representatives of Christ, in a world which was set in antagonism to him, and in which all the powers of evil had gained such vast and fixed ascendency, so we who follow them, in these later ages, and in these remote lands, must continue to do, if we would fulfil our duty to the Master, if we would make his Gospel of truth supreme in the earth. We must preach of HIM, by lip and life, by word and book, in churches and through charities, publicly and in private; and must preach Him IN THE CITIES, to which God has brought us, and in which by his providence our residence has been fixed.

We must preach Him IN THE CITIES; for nowhere else is the need of this greater, and nowhere else are the opportunities for doing it more numerous and inviting, and from no other points on earth will the influence of it extend so widely. A new sense of responsibility, and of privilege as well, should be born within us, and should quicken our hearts, as we contemplate the fact.

All the causes which conspired to build up CITIES in the day of St. Paul, to make them powerful as the agents of civilization, or splendid as its exponents, are now operating, remember, with greater energy, celerity, and extensiveness; and are coming to their result in towns more brilliant, and more influential, and hardly less vicious, than those in which his ministry was performed. Take this metropolis in illustration of the truth.-Where the narrow Mediterranean spread

forth before Antioch, there stretches before us the expanse of an ocean, to the men of that century terrible and unsearchable, but which, in all its coasts and islands, in the coral reefs that rise through it, in even the sunken rocks which it enfolds, is now known to navigation. And not this only: there spreads forth also, connected with this, that other mightier and less turbulent sea which heaves its tides across three sevenths of the circumference of the globe, and washes shores to which the arms of Antigonus or Antiochus, of Augustus himself, had never sent a single rumor. All the world is thus opened to that out-running enterprise which here has its seat. Every fourth day through the year there come to us voices from the whole area of the inhabited earth. The political, commercial, and social influences which here are established, send abroad in reply their powerful impression.

We have the most marvellous apparatus of instruments with which to assist and to consummate these tendencies. Instead of the few and timorous boats which tardily descended from Antioch by the Orontes, till they tremulously tossed on the Mediterranean, there go from us with every morning those statelier ships that shall wrestle with seas and wildest winds, and from the contest come out unharmed; there go those almost animated ships, more tireless and swift than the old triumphal chariots of the games, within which pants that swarthy giant who rears so much of all that is proudest, and moves so ceaselessly all that is swiftest, in our civilization. And instead of the solitary pass of the Taurus, along whose narrow and rocky defiles the caravans descended to bear to Antioch their scanty burdens, there flow to us through liquid channels, hollowed by man or framed by God, there rush upon us, over ways made level and smooth as floors, in caravan-trains whose tread thunders equal and steady as a star's, from all the expanded districts and states that make the interior, their exuberant wealth.

Here then shall grow-it is inevitable, my Friends, we see already the presages of it-more swiftly than at Antioch, a population more vast, heterogeneous, mighty, and far more effective on the destinies of the world. From every land shall come travellers to this centre. They come already; from Indies, whose messengers never found the Greek cities; from regions more remote than Tarshish and its isles,

or far Cathay. From Southern spice islands, where winds breathe balm, and the heavens sparkle with a tropical brilliancy; from polar snows, where freezing winds chase wild beasts to their lair, and congeal the currents of human life; from both alike they come to us, and daily jostle in our thronged streets. More rapidly, and more variously, shall this great centre be filled with its inhabitants than was possible anywhere before Christ came; till millions shall be needed to compute the population which hardly two generations ago was sixty thousand. Irishmen, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Welshmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Switzers, Danes, Norwegians, Russians, Hungarians, Turks, Syrians, Egyptians, Chinamen, Africans, South Americans, Sandwich islanders, Singalese-all these are included to-day among the multitudes to whom this city gives room and rest; while the eager and teeming American people, from east and west, from north and south, throws in each year fresh thousands to increase them. Already, it has been estimated, that eighty dialects are spoken in this democratic air; and in six of them, at least, daily or weekly newspapers are published, which have ready sale and a wide circulation. Idolatries have their shrines here, as well as Christianity. The Chinese joss-house coufronts the church; and the costumes and the customs of far-scattered tribes are equally familiar upon our streets.

Nor only in population are these cities to grow thus; are they beginning to exhibit this vast augmentation. In wealth too, in splendor, in all that can minister to luxurious ease, and all that can tempt or stimulate appetite, in all that can nurse the viciousness of men, in all that can give commercial power, as swift and great shall be their increase. You see it already. Amid these very years of war the surge of wealth rolls out around us, square after square; and the crests of that wave are mansions so splendid that the princes of Antioch might well exchange their palaces for them. All wealth must be accumulated under free, democratic, and commercial institutions— where production goes on incessantly and most widely, where labor is honorable, where invention is tireless, and where the government of beneficent laws is equal and uniform-all wealth must accumulate with a speed, to an extent, impossible in those ages when war was the le and peace the exception, and when the capricious tyranny of