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Nor was this all ;-one drop of His blood had been sufficient to satisfy for our sins; He might have offered His circumcision as an atonement, and it would have been sufficient; one moment of His agony of blood had been sufficient; one stroke of the scourge might have wrought a sufficient satisfaction. But neither circumcision, agony, nor scourging was our redemption, because He did not offer them as such. The price He paid was nothing short of the whole treasure of His blood, poured forth to the last drop from His veins and sacred heart. He shed His whole life for us; He left Himself empty of His all. He left His throne on high, He gave up His home on earth; He parted with His Mother, He gave His strength and His toil, He gave His body and soul, He offered up His passion, His crucifixion, and His death, that man should not be bought for nothing. This is what the Apostle intimates in saying that we are "bought with a great price;" and the Prophet, while he declares that "with the Lord there is mercy, and with IIim a copious" or "plenteous redemption."

From "Newman's Sermons."

THE ENDURANCE OF FAITH.

J. H. NEWMAN.

FAITH alone reaches to the end, faith only endures. Faith and prayer alone will endure in that last dark hour, when Satan urges all his powers and resources against the sinking soul. What will it avail us then to have devised some subtle argument, or to have led some brilliant attack, or to have mapped out the field of history, or to have numbered and sorted the weapons of controversy, and to have the homage of friends and the respect of the world, for our successes,― what will it avail to have had a position, to have followed out a work, to have reanimated an idea, to have made a cause to triumph, if after all we have not the light of faith to guide us on from this world to the next? O how fain shall we be in that day to change our place with the humblest, and dullest, and most ignorant of the sons of men, rather than to stand before the judgment-seat in the lot of him who has received great gifts from God, and used them for self and for man, who has shut his eyes, who has trifled with truth, who has repressed his misgivings, who has been led on by God's grace, but stopped short of its scope, who has neared the land of promise, yet not gone forward to take possession of it!

From "Newman's Sermons."

THE MILLENNIUM.

ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.

IT is a great consolation to us to look forward, as I think we are authorized to do, to a time when not only the knowledge of the gospel will be greatly extended, but also the influence of the gospel on Christians' hearts, and tempers, and lives-" the knowledge and love of God," and the "fruits of his Spirit,”—will be still much more increased; when those who are Christians in name, will be much less disposed to content themselves with the name, -much more careful to be Christians in principle and in conduct, than the far greater part of them are now-when Christians, generally, will not look, as they are apt to do now, on the apostles and others of the early Church whom it is usual to distinguish by the title of saint, as possessing a degree and a kind of Christian excellence which it would be vain and presumptuous for ordinary Christians to think of equalling; but will consider and practically remember, that all Christians are "called [to be] Saints," and endued with the Holy Spirit of God; not indeed to inspire them with a new revelation, or to confer any miraculous gifts (which do not either prove, or make, the possessor the more acceptable in God's sight), but to enable them to purify their own hearts and lives. The wicked Balaam was a prophet; and the traitor Judas worked miracles. These extraordinary powers, therefore, are 'neither any proof of superior personal holiness, nor any substitute for it in God's sight. Nor is the absence of these miraculous gifts in ourselves, any argument that a less degree of Christian virtue will suffice for our salvation, than was required of the apostles.

Let us hope that the time will come when Christian privileges and duties shall be generally viewed in this manner, and when such views shall be acted upon. Whether any of us shall live to see the beginning of such a change, is more than we can tell. Nay, we cannot tell whether each of us may not even be enabled, by his own example, and his own exertions in enlightening and improving others, to do something towards bringing about this change. But this we do know most certainly; that each of us is bound, in gratitude for Christ's redeeming mercy-in prudent care for his own immortal soul,-to labor carnestly for such a change in his own life and heart. We are, each of us, bound, at his own peril, to think, and live, and act, in such a manner, as would, if all Christians were to do the same, bring about, and indeed constitute, this Millennium of Christian zeal and holiness. And each of us who does this, whether others follow his example or not, "shall in no wise lose his own reward."

From "A View of the Scripture Revelations concerning a Future State."

PATRIOTISM A CHRISTIAN VIRTUE.

HUNTINGTON.

PATRIOTISM, that is, when it is a principle, and not a mere blind instinct of the blood, is an outgrowth and a part of the faith and honor of the Almighty. Analyze it, and you will see it so. For patriotism is only disinterested devotion to the justice, the power, the protection, the right, embodied, after a certain fashion and degree, in the state and its subjects. It is not attachment to the parchment of a constitution, to the letter of an instrument, to the visible insignia of authority, to a strip of painted cloth at a masthead, to a mass of legal precedents and traditions, nor always to the person of the sovereign. It is not a personal interest in the people of the nation, for the most of one's fellowcitizens are unknown, and the few that are met may awaken no special regard. Instituted ideas,-as justice, power, protection,--organized into a national government, and lifted up for the defence of the country, are what inspire an intelligent loyalty, and the same ideas have their perfect embodiment in the person of God. On the other hand, religion, veneration for the Creator, involves a consistent regard for the welfare of great bodies of his family. By the laws of the human nature he has fashioned, this will mount to enthusiasm, as our relations to any one body grow intimate, or look back to an antiquity, or own a history of common sufferings. Less elevated elements may intermix. But whichever you take first,—the feeling for the state, or for the God of states, -the other clings to it, and comes logically with it.

KIND LISTENERS.

F. W. FABER,

THERE is a grace of kind listening, as well as a grace of kind speaking. Some men listen with an abstracted air, which shows that their thoughts are elsewhere. Or they seem to listen, but, by wide answers and irrelevant questions, show that they have been occupied with their own thoughts, as being more interesting, at least in their own estimation, than what you have been saying. Some listen with a kind of importunate ferocity, which makes you feel that you are being put upon your trial, and that your auditor expects beforehand that you are going to tell him a lie, or to be inaccurate, or to say something which he will disapprove, and that you must mind your expressions. Some interrupt, and will not hear you to the end. Some hear you to the end, and then forthwith begin to talk to you about a similar experience which has befallen themselves, making your case only an illustration of their own. Some, meaning to be kind, listen with such a determined, lively, violent attention that you are at once made uncomfortable, and the charm of conversation is at an end. Many persons,

whose manners will stand the test of speaking, break down under the trial of listening. But all these things should be brought under the sweet influences of religion. Kind listening is often an act of the most delicate interior mortification, and is a great assistance toward kind speaking. Those who govern others must take care to be kind listeners, or else they will soon offend God and fall into secret sins. From "Spiritual Conferences."

THE DESIRE OF DEATH.

F. W. FABER.

FROM the fear of death let us turn to the desire of it. What we have said of the fear of death we may say also of the desire of death, only we should say it still more emphatically, that the desire which is part of holiness must be rather a desire of God than a desire of death. World-weariness is a blessed thing in its way, but it falls short of being a grace. To be weary of the world is very far from being detached from it. I am not sure that there is not a weariness of the world which is itself a form of worldliness. World-wearied men often think and speak of death in a poetical, voluptuous way, which is most ungodly. They talk as if the turf of the churchyard were a bed of down, as if the grassy ridge were a pillow on which to lay our tired heads and slumber, and as if the grave were a cradle in which we should be rocked to sleep as the earth swayed, and so voyage unconsciously through space, like a sleeping child in a ship at sea. None but atheists could speak thus of death, if those who so speak really weighed their words. Such men habitually regard death as an end, and not as a beginning. It has been observed of intellectual men, that such talking of death is often a symptom of incipient mental aberration. It is certainly true that happy men more often desire death than unhappy men, and desire it more strongly, and that their desire is more truthful and more holy. An unhappy man desires death rather than God. He desires it with a kind of heathen despondency. He quotes the Odyssey and the Eneid. The pathetic imagery of those poems is more congenial to him than the straightforward realities of Christian theology. He fixes his eye morbidly on death; but he is anxious it should not look over death and beyond it. Whereas a happy, light-hearted, sunnyspirited Christian man, who has no quarrel with life except its possibilities of sinning, somehow feels its burden more than the unhappy man, who clings to life with a sort of morose, sulky enjoyment. Yet, while the happy man feels its burden, his happiness inclines him to be eager for beginnings rather than to be impatient for conclusions. Thus death is to him less the end of life than the beginning of eternity. He desires God rather than death; for it is the gift of a joyous heart to find short ways to God from the most unlikely places. From "Spiritual Conferences."

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And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay:
Then, as the touch of his loved instrument

Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his theme,

First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent
Along the wavering vista of his dream.

Not only around our infancy

Doth heaven with all its splendors lie;
Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,
We Sinais climb and know it not.

Over our manhood bend the skies;
Against our fallen and traitor lives
The great winds utter prophecies;

With our faint hearts the mountain strives,
Its arms outstretched, the druid wood

Waits with its benedicite;

And to our age's drowsy blood

Still shouts the inspiring sea.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in ;
At the devil's booth are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;

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