However small and insignificant man may appear to be in physical parts and bodily proportions amid the marvelous wonders of creation, and however insignificant in weight, height, and girth, when compared with the cloud-kissed hills or the towering mountains of eternal snows that lift their cones to the cloudless zones, and however light and ponderable he may be, compared to the infinite masses of tangible materialities that compose the universe in which he lives and moves, and of which he is a part, yet he is an ideal and realistic empire within himself. He has not only a realistic and enduring self, but he within himself is a real and ideal empire composed of all those powers and elements and inherent qualities that seem needful to complete the same. As a great steam engine may be built in miniature with its wheels, cogs, pulleys, cylinders, boiler, steam chests, piston rods, and gear, and as such a miniature engine may be as real and as perfect as a great engine which it may represent, so man is as perfect an empire as the little or model engine is an engine. As extension of parts and immensity of materiality have nothing to do with perfection of quality and character, so there need be no real difference in the two engines except in degrees. Indeed, man is a perfect creation in the fundamental facts and constituent elements of his being; and in these respects he is an emanation of the Divine. Humanity is divine, not in its moral purity and perfection, but in its mental capacity and corporal delineations. In everything but moral standing, the mental humanity is made in the image of its Creator. Man's mental humanity is the most real and the most conspicuous, indeed the only real enduring and essential attribute of his being. This mental individuality is in the image of God, the Supreme Mentality, that universal spirituality whose exterior building is the universe. This universe is the temple of God—the empire of the Supreme Mentality. Somewhere in this temple or empire, is the seat of universal government, authority, and power, the central location of one almighty thrilling force that acts upon and centralizes all the forces, energies and activities of all the universe. Gravitation, so called, can be nothing less than the operation of universal mentality in perpetual activity, by whose coercive energy the mindless elements and their infinitely various combinations sustain their harmonious interrelations. Thus God is the life and soul of the universe in the same sense that man's soul is the life and light of his body. In this high metaphysical sense God is the life of the universe, the life of all the worlds, and the light of men. Evidently man is the little God, the microcosm, an image of the macrocosm, which is God's larger universe. I need not dwell upon the indestructibility of human nature. It is as enduring as the ages. The tardy steps of centuries and cycles, the abrasions and indentures of all eternity, will leave the divinely imaged mental humanity fresh and green, forever blooming from its own deathless inherent vitality, because it is the image of God. Man's body is the temple of his soul. It is the splendid super-cosmopolite from the cosmopolitan center, tenting and dwelling for a season on this sub-lunar sphere. Its style and outlines and delineations are from heaven. It is the human form divine from the skies. The body is materialistic, because there is nothing in the universe other than matter of which it may be composed, and, therefore, desolation and decay shall overtake it. Its pillars and columns and towering arches shall fall down, and its stately roof and star-crowned turrets shall be broken and buried, but the image of God—the heavenly Visitant—that dwells within, in all its divine completeness and ethereal brightness, shall remain intact and untarnished amid the wonders of the cycles and the evolutions and transitions of the endless future. Truly man shall live forever. Death is simply a removal from one sphere of being to another, a shuffling off a coarser and earthly coil, and a flight from a lower to a higher, purer and sublimer altitude in another sphere. It is the heavenly mentality abdicating an earthly throne, and reascending to its high place to be in perfect unison with kindred spirits, and vie in the splendors of the ethereal.

I. What is man in his physical constitution?

The psalmist says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” None but God can make man. No angelic fingers nor seraphic handicraft, nor wonderful mechanism, though contrived and manipulated by the skilful touch of angelic operators, can spin into threads and weave in golden looms the warp and woof, and manufacture into grace and beauty the delicate fabric of which man is made. None but God could throw the silver shuttle and bring from the evolving intricate mechanism of nature a mighty product like man. What a wonderful organism is this man empire! In this man empire, there are two hundred and sixty-three bones, five hundred muscles, and three hundred millions of brain cells, about three thousand of which are destroyed every minute. Therefore, every man has a new brain every sixty days. Every man that has lived to be seventy years of age has had, therefore, four hundred and twenty-nine sets of brains. Allowing that the average brain weighs sixty ounces, the man of seventy years would have had two thousand five hundred pounds of the precious thing. Every day there are in each head more than four millions of the brain cells destroyed and replaced by new ones. The alimentary canal is thirty-two feet long. Man has a heart six inches in length and four in diameter, beating seventy times per minute, four thousand two hundred times every hour, one hundred thousand eight hundred times a day, and two billion six hundred millions in three score years and ten. At each beat, two and a half ounces of blood are thrown out of it at the rate of one hundred and seventy-five ounces per minute, six hundred and fifty-six pounds per hour, seven and a half tons a day, lifting it two thousand one hundred and twenty-two feet in the same length of time. We breathe twelve hundred times an hour, using twenty-four gallons of air a day. The breathing surface of the lungs is twenty thousand square inches, equal to the floor space of a room twelve feet square. There are ten millions of silken cables or nerve cords that permeate and ramify the man empire, and center in the brain or the seat of government, making the greatest army of body-guards that ever defended a kingdom or assembled upon the field of battle. The atmospheric pressure upon each square inch of the human body is fourteen pounds, making the weight upon a single human body of medium size forty thousand pounds. There are three thousand five hundred perspiratory pores, one-fourth of an inch long, making a little drainage canal forty miles long. Beyond and beneath all of these there is the great ganglia system of nerve tissues, so fine and minute that the point of a sewing-needle covers a whole system, in which there are thousands of little elastic threads, too fine to be seen except by glasses of the highest magnifying power known to man. Indeed, there are thousands of wonders and marvels in the physical constitution and operations of the human organism that are beyond the power of the mind to comprehend and explain. As God, the Supreme Mentality, presides over the universe, governing all its forces under the reign of law, so man is presided over by the mind, which is the supreme king of the man empire, governing all its parts and forces under the reign of law. As God's mind is everywhere in the universe as an all powerful and infinite activity, so the mind of man is everywhere the infinite activity in the man empire, filling all its parts and ramifications with its own ineffable light and glorious power. The God empire and the man empire are images the one of the other. The first is absolute and infinite in fact and abstract; the second is only absolute and infinite within its prescribed bounds. Both are the same in kind, but different in degrees. Therefore, the mind of man is the reigning king, the monarch and master of the man empire. Hence, man is an empire in miniature, with all the elements and inherent capacities of a kingdom, with its presiding monarch highly exalted upon the throne of the brain. Here lives and rules the mind king from whose dictatorial throne edicts are issued and commands sent forth into all the realms, provinces and the ramifications of the universal dominions. Indeed, man is an empire, having all the realms, provinces and the ramifications of the universal dominions. Indeed, man is an empire, having all the elements, forces and powers of nature in co-operative harmony, with its solids and liquids, and with its flora and fauna. It has lands, skies, seas, brooks, rivers and sparkling rills, that convey life and light and vitality to every part; from its fertile plains and golden fields, the metropolis and seat of empire draws tribute and support. The brain is the throne and seat of government and the mind is monarch. At his command ministers fly, cables hiss, sinews quiver, fluids dash, bones quake and sensations play like electric volts on the strings of the nerves. The mind king has eyes, ears, hands, feet, lips and tongue. He is the real and divine personality, the mind monarch whom God “from old times” has crowned, sceptered and clothed with the royal robe and insignia of state. He has judgment, discretion, tastes, will, choice and sensibility. Around him are his courtiers, diplomats and flaming ministers, hung on threads of gold and cables of silver, ever ready in reverential attitudes to execute his high behests. By these space is blotted out and time annihilated. They fly on wings of thought and dance as it were on the lightning's flame, unifying and binding the states of empire with his arm of glorious power. God's power is absolute, and his government executive, ministerial and dictatorial. “He maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire.” As the empire of God moves about his throne as the center of attraction, so the man empire moves about the brain as the center of will force, rule and authority. This man empire has reservoirs of blood, lakes of water, rills of oil, and repositories of fluids that make up its gulfs, seas, inlets and bays. It has cables of elastic steel that thread and permeate all its parts, wrapt in silken integuments, and of the finest mould. Over these elastic threads and living cables, fiery dictates and high behests from the throne of the mind king dance and play and preach his will and proclaim his laws upon every hill, through every plain and valley, till every leaflet, rock, and tree, and all the deep gorges and mountain passes are resonant with his voice and filled with his commands. Deep in its seas there are flowing currents and boiling springs, from whose agitated waters come pearls of thought, folios of science, books of wisdom, bringing up from their hidden archives curriculums of study, deeper, vaster, broader and higher than ancient sages, approximating the ken of angels and the wisdom of seraphs. There are mountains of bone, hills of cartilage, ledges of gristle, and ropes of sinew, to give form and beauty, and hold intact the rolling, jostling empire, with its leaping rills, restless seas, agitated gulfs and quaking land. It has a fertile soil of flesh and blood where roses blush and lilies bloom, through which a thousand streamlets flow to perpetuate its virgin days of youth, and crown its high meridian with the flora of light, wisdom, and strength, and its hoary years with a diadem of silvery harvest. This man empire has its winds, storms, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons and trade-winds, that roar among its caverns, whistle along its dales, hum among its rocks, play on its seas, shout over its hills, and strew its valleys with awful wreckage and direful ruins of uprooted forests. This man empire has its sun, the central luminary, meting its days and years, shining over its hemispheres, continents, seas and islands, giving light and life to its flora and fauna, producing towering trees of knowledge on its mountains of wisdom, from whose sunny peaks the mind king makes the sunbeams his horses and the ethereal currents his chariot wheels. Or through the lofty constellations of judgment, discovery, and golden thought he flies toward God until his wings of flame sets aglow all the widespread areas of air, sea, and land, until the lakes and rivers and island homes are filled with the life of God, the anthem of the ages and the symphonies of the skies, until every granite bone, elastic cord, and nerve cable is filled with heaven, and suffused with songs of seraphs and the melodies of the spheres. In orbital grandeur, around the miniature empire's sun shine the satellites of truth, virtue, will, purpose and the designs of life, while each planetoid of disease—the fragment of broken worlds—“walketh in darkness” through its cities, states and provinces, corrupting its fountains, contaminating its seas, and planting the baleful seeds of death and dissolution along its flowing currents and prolific soils. By flying fragments of broken worlds many upheavals occur. Rivers overflow their banks, seas forsake their ancient beds, volcanoes explode, islands are submerged, mountains quiver on their rocky foundations, isthmuses sink, the land quivers while all its elements groan at the approach of the great catastrophe—death. Yea, by these fragments of broken worlds (diseases) many a joint is dislocated, cables of elastic steel are broken, and silken links of ligaments, sinews of brass, and bones of granite yield amid the general “wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.” But the text says, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him.”

II. What is man in his spiritual or mental nature?

Whence came he? It is said there is nothing great in the world but man, and there is nothing great in man but mind. Indeed mind is the man—the true hidden man that thinks, conceives, judges and forms mental images; measures time and space, calculates in numbers, weighs even the imponderable masses of materialities, comprehends the sublime majesties of the universe, and has the power of will, choice, taste and thought, and indefinite continuity of individual consciousness. Deeply pervading all the attributes of his nature, the faculty of imagination like an angel of flame in splendid trim, with his golden sandals buckled on his feet, is ever ready to sweep the azure floors of the skies, or pierce the illimitable bounds beyond, where planets, stars and suns revolve on their rounds. By this faculty space is blotted out and time annihilated. It is swifter than lightning, faster than electricity and outflies its volts that dance, as it were, on ethereal vibrations. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye this cherub of the airy deep leaps heavenward or hellward, rejoicing in the happiness of the saved, or revolting at the horrors of the lost millions. It sweeps the tracks of lesser stars, pierces the orbits of planets, the belted splendors of Jupiter, the golden rings of Saturn, and visits “Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the South,” and wraps itself in the fiery sheets of the sun. It delights to flee through “The Milky Way” and the gem studded and constellated highways of God. Above stars, planets, suns, in the zoneless seas and unhorizoned spheres where the wings of seraphs battle for decades with the tides, the imagination lingers not, but lifting its fiery eye as system after system recede and sink in the shaded distances of eternal space he seems to cry to all the children of eternity, “On to Alcyon, on to Alcyon,” the greatest system known to man, and which once seemed to be the center of universal power, and the place of the throne of the Most High. Here alone, at the throne of God, this wonderful faculty is foiled and baffled, but still radiant in its glory; and virgin strength. The wings of this mighty visitant can carry thought no farther. Here all ends meet and all explorations end. And here she cries—

In the transitions of eternal wonders, or those spiritual metamorphoses and evolutions that await us in the future, this faculty will dwell with us as the great photographer that never sleeps, but ever pictures upon the expanding canvas of the memory all the images with their exact forms that have ever been presented to the mental man.

III. But what is man in his moral constitution?

Man is a sinner, for the “Scriptures of Truth” declare that “All men have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Again, “Sin is the transgression of the law.” Not a visionary or arbitrary command, but it is the violation of the law, the high, holy, and eternal law that governs the mental and moral universe. The law here spoken of is the embodiment of those underlying principles by which the universe is governed, and by which it maintains its successive and harmonious relations. By this law all of its elements, physical, and mental, act in concord. Whoever violates this law, or, if you will, these laws, is a sinner, a sinner against God and against all those spiritual beings, or mental individualities that have kept the laws of God, and thereby maintained their perfect estate. But this man empire, like others in which there is sin, is in perpetual throes, discord, and agitation, through all the years of its sublunar existence. Its restless inhabitants, with its rebellious states and provinces, constantly threaten the dissolution and subversion of its earthly domains. They threaten to transplant their interests and move the seat of empire to sublimer realms in those sunny plains of eternal day, where they may vie in the altitudes and majesties that live in their bright abodes. On earth storms arise upon the empire's seas, cyclones move and twist its mountains upon their rocky bases, shake its hills, sweep down its forests, filling its plains and valleys with howling destruction and the broken ruins of his kingdom. This is dying, so-called. As the mind king doffs his crown, lays aside his royal insignia of state, drops the sceptre and abdicates the throne, the silken cables and elastic cords break, the chambers of the king's palace are closed. All his courtiers, diplomats and flaming ministers cease to do his biddings and sink in eternal muteness. The nerve centers with their ten millions of body-guards in decadence die. On come the whirlwinds of death, over the coagulated seas of blood, up the streamlets of oil and channels of fluids. It climbs the vertebrated stairs of the spiral mountain of sinews and the hills of cartilages, crushing the granite of bones and scattering the parts of the magnificent pile. Its sun ceases to shine, its moon is turned to blood and all the stars of his lofty firmament are covered with the thick blackness of the night. The kingdom is demolished and the strength of the empire broken; but “the soul of man, Jehovah's breath,” like an eagle from its cage, soars away on its wings of flame to dwell with God, to live and reign with Jesus, the Christ, “and through eternal ages will shout beyond the skies.”

The text brings before us the two most conspicuous and renowned characters that have ever appeared in the world, acted upon the theatre of life or written their deeds upon the scroll of the ages. The annals of the ancients and the records of the nations cannot produce their equals in the least degree whatever. Indeed they stand out in bold relief of character and incomparable individuality. In their respective relations and natures, they are without a compeer. If all the greatness of mankind that has been displayed in the wisdom of the sages, the sagacity of statesmen, the valor and prowess of heroes, the sweetness of poets, the melodies of bards, were compressed into one great personality, he could not be so great, so wonderful, so matchless in consummate skill, profound wisdom, and exhaustless resources of those principles and things that make up the sum of greatness, as to rival the great characters mentioned in the text. Add to the control of such a personality, the rubies of kings, the diamonds of queens, the scepters of emperors, the gems and gold of princes, the sacerdotal scarlet of popes, the royal splendors of imperial courts, and the wealth of the ages and nations, yet such a character could not be compared to either of the distinguished individuals mentioned in the text. Then give such an individual a thousand years to display all this mighty wealth and dazzling splendor, yet in celebrity and influence, he could not approximate the ideal representatives of the irrepressible conflict—the Son of God and the devil. They both occupy the most exalted, lofty and most conspicuous position in the world, and in their work, influence and relations, they affect every nation, people, tongue and age. Their influence runs parallel with all times, epochs, and dispensations, ramifying all human governments, institutions, orders, fraternities and administrations. They affect the administration of all civil laws and the adjudication of every lawsuit. The one or the other has paved the pathway of every war, feud, conflict and revolution that has swept the zones of human civilizations, and fixed the destiny of men and nations. They affect all events in the world's written and unwritten history; from its incipient civilization and birthday, until in the sable drapery of its solemn requiem, the world shall cease to be aglow with the burning cinders that fly from the two great swords of Beelzebub and the conquering Messiah. Their influence stops not in time, but crosses the dark and trackless sea of death, and, rekindling on the shores of the spiritual world, will continue through all the great millenniums of eternal duration. Heaven and hell, with their crowded intelligences, will feel their potent and lavish influence by which their unnumbered billions of indestructible individualities will be forever swayed. Their imprint of character, for good or for evil, for hell or for heaven, for life or for death, will be made and deeply engraved upon the life and spiritual nature of every man, woman and child that has ever lived, or ever will live. They are not private but public individuals—federal heads—and representatives and embodiments of the two great diversities of the moral universe—good and evil. They are the representatives and heroes of the two great spiritual empires of the world, representing the two great moral ideas of the universe, which are founded upon the immortal principles of right and wrong, and of truth and falsehood, and of life and death. There is an infinite distinctiveness —constitutional, innate and irrevocable—between these two individuals, in their nature, work and the great outcome of their career. This difference is essential, absolute and necessary. Therefore, it is as much impossible to operate them together in harmony upon the same plane so as to produce the same results, as it is to bring the north and south poles together. They are not only antagonistic, but antipodal. Two distinct principles inspire the work of the one, and the efforts of the other. The one is the principle of good and heaven, and the other is the principle of evil and hell, each in battle array, and perpetual conflict. The one is from heaven and the other from hell; one is life, and the other death; one is eternal happiness, the other eternal misery; one is of God and godly, the other is of the devil and devilish; one seeks the good of all, and one the death of all; one dignifies and deifies human nature, the other strips man of his glory, and leaves his prostrate form on the ground—“a splendid palace in ruin.” Ever since sin hath entered into the world, and death by sin, these two great leaders and powers have exhibited themselves in the children of men in all the departments and diversified features of human society. In the courts of kings, in the palace garden, in the halls of justice, on the rostrum, in the realms of legislation, in commerce, field, and store, their prowess is seen. On the battlefield, in prisons and camps of horrid war, in the diplomatic circles, and stealthily along the quiet veins and avenues of thought and learning, all along, and everywhere, these two great majestic powers and principles confront each other and beset humanity round about. Hence, they have made the children of men good or bad, right or wrong, lifting them to heaven, or casting them down to hell. Therefore, whatsoever exists in the moral world, exists under the generic terms of good and of evil. Whatever is good is not evil, and whatever is evil is not good. Good cannot produce evil and evil cannot produce good. Life cannot produce death and death cannot produce life. Out of the depths of falsehood and darkness arise no truth and light, and out of the depths of truth and light come no darkness and no untruth. Darkness flees before approaching light, and falsehood loses hold when truth enters. Both cannot fill the same moral space at the same time, because they are moral spheres, filling the utmost limits of the mighty circles of the moral universe.

But to our conception, good and evil are best known by their effects upon those who follow the one, and pursue the other. If certain actions of moral creatures— whether they be men or angels—render them happy or miserable, we know that those actions are good or evil, and spring from the good or the evil one. The practice of the two principles, in their respective relations and tendencies, always and forever produces and reproduces the same results in every case. They are eternal evolutions, but their evolutions never evolve out of themselves so as to produce something different from themselves. They produce their own likeness and superscription. Heaven is heaven, and hell is hell, a thousand times so in all their intrinsic natures throughout eternal duration. Good redeems her children, washes them clean and white in the blood of the Lamb, and sends them up the shining way to God and gives them the endless felicity of heaven. But evil, hideous, dark, and treacherous, sends her multitudinous squadrons to hell, giving them the misery that hath no end. Every word and work of men and angels, is, therefore, significant. There is a meaning, deep, profound, and far-reaching in every word, thought, and deed that enters the broad realm of being. Our thoughts chisel their forms upon the disc of the soul. Our words are written upon the folds of the heart, and our actions are the pent-up fires that leap out, leaving the dead volcanic cinders within. Like causes produce like effects, and like effects are produced by like causes. For every effect there must be a cause, and the cause is best understood by the results. In the moral world this is a truism. Now, every moral action that takes place among intelligent beings, is actuated by, and receives its momentum from the will and volition. The will is the motive power—the sheet anchor of the soul—that moves and stimulates the actions. Therefore, every moral action must have the consent of the will, otherwise they cannot be moral actions for which men and angels are responsible. All actions, therefore, are good or evil, and must be classified as such. The former lead to heaven, the latter lead to hell. At the end of every man's road stands life or death, hell or heaven, which is the inevitable and final destiny of all the living. When the sundering blade of death shall cut the vital threads of life, the soul—the heaving spirit—emancipated from its house of clay, shall then be transported away and up to God, or away and down to hell, and the day of preparation shall then be closed, when the inexorable fiat of Almighty God shall forever seal the irrevocable life of the one, and the changeless damnation of the other. No man can tell where hell is, but it is, it does exist, and whatever it is, and wherever it is, is a matter of small moment. But we are certain of two things: (1) It is a state and place of punishment. (2) That punishment is eternal in its duration. This arises out of the nature of the case, and the nature of God's government. When the sinner lands in hell, he will then be nearer to God, heaven, and life, than he will ever be again in all the cycles and evolving millenniums of eternity. Every surging wave and fleeing current of rolling years, will thrust him farther and farther out into the mid-ocean of hell's seething and boiling billows. Every turn of the wheel of the centuries will but augment his sins, and enlarge his capacity for transgression and sink him lower and lower.

Man is a progressive being. Progression—eternal progression—characterizes his innate constituency whether in the human body or out of it; whether in a state of bliss or state of misery; whether in earth, heaven or hell, or whether as applied to the three realities of his nature—physical, moral and mental. Change of place or condition cannot change his nature and indestructible selfhood or spiritual identity. Man is man in all the relations and conditions in which he may be placed. The immortal mind, the conscious self, with all the moral sensibilities, are incapable of decay, and therefore, of necessity, he is eternal in conscious duration. It seems, also, a truism, that the functions of the moral and mental man are never in a state of perfect quietism. There is a perpetual unrest, or rather there is rest only in motion, progression, and development. Absolute quietism is incompatible with life, and there can be no such thing as vital energies in absolute quietude. Activity, in a greater or less degree, is the law of all living and is operative in all intelligent beings, whether in a state of bliss or state of woe. The saved will continue in obedience, the lost will continue in sin, since mere punishment has no redeeming qualities, and since obedience has no element of misery. As one wave of the sea produces another, and these produce others indefinitely, so one act of sin produces others through the eternal rounds of the dreadful series of transgressions. One hell will rise above and crowd the burning crest of another, each more dreadful and pressing harder upon the heels of the other, adding force and fury to the mighty avalanche of the fiery flood.

This text, like others, gives us the key to the origin of evil in the world, a question long debated by “the wise and prudent,” and philosophic schools of the ancients. “The devil sinneth from the beginning,” “for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die,” is the plain declaration of holy writ. Long was the world in darkness on this subject, and many were the vain and absurd theories entertained by the wisest of human kind. They were greatly troubled, puzzled, and bewildered to account for the advent and work of evil in the world. The fertile imagination of the ancient thinker set about to invent theories and invest probabilities with the habiliments of truth, hoping thereby to explain the mystery. Hence, the necessitarians tell us that evil arises out of the nature and constitution of things; and that the Creator himself could not hinder its manifestation in the world. The Manichean theory is that there are two deities, the one good and the other evil; one the author of the body and the other the author of the soul; and that, therefore, the body is evil because it comes from the evil deity, and that the soul is good because it comes from the good deity. How absurd! But this is the result of human wisdom, when it sets at naught the word of God. “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” This positive command, given to Adam by the Creator, placed him, as a free moral agent in a state of probation and trial, clothing him with power to stand, yet liable to fall, because he could not be free as an agent unless it was in his choice to obey or disobey. But he fell. He “kept not” his first estate. By the influence of the devil, he became a sinner, “and brought death into the world and all our woes,” because: “She plucked, she ate,Earth felt the wound,And nature from her seat,Gave signs of woe,That all was lost,”

Thus sin entered into the world, and death by sin. Death, with all his howling furies came in pompous state, drawing the dreadful phalanxes of hell at his chariot wheels. Here then is that long and dreadful reign of the king of hell, called in Genesis, “The seed of the serpent.” The declarations of the Scriptures, his natural character, and his real work in the world, prove that he is a real being, possessing individuality, and identity of personality. He is endowed with all the properties and characteristics that constitute an intelligent being. He is not the principle of evil personified, as some would have it to be, by assigning to it all the qualities and actions of an individual. He is not a mere myth, a fable or fabulous being—the outgrowth of man's fear, or product of human imagination. He is not an allegorical being without body or parts, but he is a great and astute being, mighty in power, skilled in wisdom, profound in knowledge and is thoroughly acquainted with the history of the world and the acts of the nations. In Genesis (3:15) he is the seed of “the serpent,” and the singular personal pronoun is used to describe his personality and unity of being. In Job he is called “Satan,” the adversary, the great enemy of God. He is called “the prince of this world” (John 10:31), “The prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). He is “a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.” He is called “the God of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). He is said to be a “murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of that which is his own: for he is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44). In Revelation he is the king of hell, for says the Apostle, “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon” (Rev. 9:1.1). Moses, the venerable lawgiver of Israel was well known by the Devil. He knew also his relation to God and to Israel, and that Israel venerated him above all men living or dead. But Moses died, and was buried in the land of Moab, in a valley over against Beth-peor. Satan knowing that Moses was dead went in search of his body, that if possible, he might devise some plan by which the body might be given to the children of Israel, that they might fall down and worship the lifeless corpse of a great man, as was the custom in Egypt, and thus bring down the wrath of God upon Israel, and nip the plan of salvation in the bud. But God in his goodness, foreseeing what would follow, placed an archangel there to watch over the body, and defend it against the violence and intrigue of hell's greatest legate. This is the work of a character, and the diplomacy of hell.

St. Peter declares that “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment” (2 Peter 2:4). Jude substantially declares the same thing, using almost the same words. From these, and similar passages of Scripture, we learn:

1. That the Devil is not a principle personified, but that he is a real substantial and individual character.

2. That he was in a state of happiness and probation —under positive law, well understood by him, and his fellows, or “the angels that sinned” and “kept not their first estate.”

3. That he rebelled, or “sinned” against the laws of God and the government of heaven, and thereby lost his first estate and was cast “down to hell and delivered into chains of darkness,” awaiting the just vengeance of the judgment day of Almighty God.

4. That he is a powerful prince, a mighty king and a great captain with an empire of spiritual darkness of immense proportions, and that he stirs the hearts and minds, and works through and in the children of disobedience.

Let us study his nature, work, and history, its it is written in the history of the world. He is wise, astute, stalwart. Standing up like a spiritual giant of massive proportions, and roaring like a lion when he thirsts for blood, he sounds his clarion voice which, like an electric shock, flashes along all the zones and parallels of the habitable earth, convulsing the nations, and spreading far an intensive discord through all the tribes of men. His footprint and handiwork is seen and felt in every land, state, and age—wherever men live and die. The operations of his hand are simply marvelous—dark deep, intricate, and profound. His devices are multiplex and serpentine. His aim is one. He lives through the ages with illustrious strength and indomitable will that forever spring with elastic and virgin strength which nerves his spirit and inspires his obdurate soul with a fiery zeal that “no langour knows.” Changes in the world of man make no changes with him. Yoking the whirlwinds to his rolling car he traverses the misty deep, plods and plows the surging seas, and as a bold corsair in quest of treasures new and old, he seeks the heathen in his jungle heath island home to pour hell and denser darkness upon his moral and mental day. He throws the somber pall of sin and death high upon the disc of his shield, while his black pinions shade and darken the path and contract the highway of the world's civilizations. As a warrior, he stands at the head and is the dictator of a multitudinous, powerful, and well organized army, epuipped and skilled in all the military tactics of diabolical and spiritual warfare. His soldiers are the bold spirits, the thunder-driven and hell-bred legions from the infernal cave of the damned that kept not their first estate; being goaded on by the hell in their conscience, they are ever ready for the scenes of war and carnage. The weapons of their warfare are mighty, formidable and tried upon the spiritual battle-fields of the nations and ages. Each soldier-devil is armed with barbed spears and swords of adamantine steel whose dreadful play in the air shows that they are in the hands of spirits bold and spirits daring. Their quivers are filled with winged arrows, polished and tempered, and tipped with poison of asps and venom of serpents. Precision and dexterity characterize the engagements of these diabolical archers and sharpshooters of hell. But open war is resorted to only when cunning and intrigue fail. The devil is great in cunning and strategem. Hence the Apostle tells us that “we are not ignorant of his devices.” He stirs the passions, lust and pride, and the baser nature of kings, princes, rulers and potentates, and perpetually foments civil and national strife among the nations of the earth, causing the plowshare of destruction to glide through the flourishing fields of human society, unroofing the temples, of civilizations and flooding their open halls with human gore, and piling high around their fluted columns the broken bones and bleeding bodies of the dead and dying, causing the widow to weep and the orphan to sigh and clamor for bread. Often he seeks his seat in the church of God, throwing discord and confusion among the saints of the Most High. He is not omnipotent, nor omnipresent, but mighty, and is the antipodal force and antagonistic power against Christ, God and humanity. Messiah on the one side and the devil on the other are great leaders and captains. The battle began in the Garden of Eden six thousand years ago. Both have had varying success and defeats upon the arena of the nation and rostrum of the ages. Still the battle rages. Neither has entirely defeated the other, but onward and fiercely rolls the battle cry. But hush! hush!! I hear the silver notes of the golden clarion of Messiah coming with martial tread and haughty tramp. He is “clothed in a vesture dipped in blood.” He rides upon the great white horse of truth and on his head are “many crowns.” By his side hangs a potent double-edged blade of “heavenly temper keen” that never turns back from the blood of the slain. His armies are upon white horses robed in the bright and shilling habiliments of divine purity. Their swords are forged upon the anvil of God in “the house of David,” and made of the best old Jerusalem steel dug out of the mountains of God. Other blades may break or shatter, but these never. Dreadful are the incisions they make in the rank and file of the enemy. “How shall one chase a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight?” “For the weapons of their warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of the stronghold of the devil.” Christ cannot fail. Hell is great, but heaven is greater. Christ is rich in all the fathomless depths and endless heights of eternal power. He is more than a match for the Devil. “He is the same to-day and yesterday and forever,” and on through the eternal series of great and glorious achievements he repeats his mighty deeds and stupendous acquisitions in the redemption scheme. While this and more is true, yet dark and dreadful were the closing scenes of the world's greatest drama, for it is said in Genesis by the mouth of God, “Thou shalt bruise his heel.” The “Thou” here spoken of is the Devil himself, and the expression comes from the custom of pursuing an enemy so closely that the heels of the fleeing are trod upon by the front part of the foot of the pursuer. This implies that the contest was to be close, fearful and irrepressible, and that Satan would pursue the Son of God even to the gates of death. This is also the turning point in the great and long struggle for the mastery, and the ascending of the one over the other. Here the Son of God must conquer or be conquered. Here he must rise victorious over the power of darkness, or he must fall under shame and defeat. Christ says, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.” He felt the dreadful tread of Satan crowding upon “his heels,” while his steps in the Garden of Gethsemane were marked with his own blood, sweat, and tears. He felt the powers of hell surrounding him on every side and hedging in the pathway of the Son of God. Four thousand years of conflict had passed, but now the culminating hour is reached at last. Now is the dreadful hour when his strength and power are tried and hope flickers in the golden sockets of life. Now the Redeemer of the world was to stand off no longer, and from the red mouth of heaven's artillery rain hail and burning thunderbolts upon the hideous head of the demon; but he must meet him face to face, and arm to arm, and measure swords and spears. Ten thousand devils peep up from the bottomless pit and hiss and howl and clamor for the blood of the Son of God. Swift winged messengers pass in rapid transition from earth to hell, and also from earth to heaven, bearing dispatches and news of the dreadful hour and of the culminating scenes of the great and irrepressible conflict. O, dreadful hour, fraught with life or death for the millions of the sin enslaved of Adam's race! The Son of God now falls upon his knees upon the cold ground, while his humanity passes through the fearful ordeal and crucial test and the augmented sorrows of the ages, but amid anguish, pains, sorrows and temptations, he says, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.” The sins of the world were upon him, and for that reason he must be fearfully chastised by the hand of his Father. But he went a little farther, and fell on his face and prayed, saying, “O, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me! nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” This prayer he prayed three times. He begins to sweat blood and bleed at every pore, and his tears thrown up from the depths of an aching heart fell in Gethsemane's Garden. Not only his body, but his soul, the intelligent, the sensitive inner man, was “exceedingly sorrowful even unto death.” How deep was that sorrow, and how painful the situation! He looked up, and behold, Judas with his band of ruffians came with swords and staves, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hand of sinners and taken to the judgment seat of the wicked. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.” Having ascended the hill of sacrificial death, he is nailed to the cross. The rough iron spikes pierce his feet and hands, and he is cruelly transfixed to the rugged wood. Every sinew is stretched, every tendon distended, every joint dislocated, and every nerve cable thrills with pain. Here hangs in agony and blood the Prince of Peace, the incarnate Son of God, the Alpha and the Omega of all creation. But he dies! “It is finished.” But the great tragedy is not yet ended. Another scene is yet to be acted In the world's greatest drama. Joseph of Arimathea deposits the dead body in his new tomb. The disciples scattered and all seemed lost. Nature by her internal throes “gave signs of woe.” Hell laughs and shouts in triumph. Hope seemed fled away. upon the dying zephyrs of the last breath of the expiring Messiah. But on the third day, Messiah calls back and, resumes his ancient power. The bars, bolts, and rock-ribbed jaws of the grave began to swell and heave as if moved by the omnific hand of God. Death and hell heard the rattling chariot wheels of the heavenly legates as they leaped from the heavenly gates and fled to the rescue of the sleeping Jesus. They pour the message of life from God into the dungeon of death, and the Son of God rises from the dead. Heaven laughs, hell is astonished, and, universal humanity is thrilled by the triumphal declaration: “I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive forever more, amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.”

The text is a prophecy uttered by the Patriarch Jacob upon his dying bed to his sons in the land of Egypt. Passing through the troubles of life, he came at last to his dying day. The words that he spoke were inspired predictions respecting the things that should befall the house of Israel in future generations. His prophetic vision being touched by the finger of God, and enlarged by his Spirit, he sang a song of triumph that he never sang before, and threw the verses of its enchanting melodies down through the illustrious line of great princes, priests, and kings, until the great Messiah became haloed and wrapt in the brilliant splendor of his expanding kingdom.

The Shiloh here spoken of is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the son of David. He was the son of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power. Jacob felt that power while the bright rays of its light flashed upon his soul and strewed his pathway to the grave with the leaves of the tree of life and the blushing petals of perennial flowers. Shiloh was his hope. He looked through the kingdom of Israel to the kingdom of Shiloh, that should come in the fullness of time, and by whose power the yoke of sin should be broken from the necks of the nations, and the mild sceptre of Shiloh should sway the life and hearts of men.

We need not produce any elaborate argument to prove that the term Shiloh refers to Christ. From the scope of the prophecy, the depth of its subject, and the nature of its prediction, especially in its application to a person, Shiloh can only refer to Christ, the Messiah of God. David and Solomon were great characters. They were men of God, and in their official capacity were symbols and metaphorical representatives of Christ. The kingdom over which they presided represented that which was to come. Hence it is said, “The Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.” The Shiloh then here spoken of is the same as he who should “reign over the house of Jacob forever,” to whose “kingdom there shall be no end, because unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”

But the text says, “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh come.” That is, the theocratic government of the Jews was to have its kings and rulers coming from the tribe of Judah until Christ should come and take the throne whose by right it was.

1. Let us consider the Christian system as a progressive force.

Christianity is a growth as well as a principle. While its fundamental doctrines are eternal and form the basis of eternal government, yet the application of its principles and practices is adapted to all conditions of humanity, whether collective or individual. It has the same power over a single person that it has over a nation of single individuals. Indeed, this is the first fruit of its operation. It takes hold upon personal life and personal character. It seeks the individual members of a nation and the distinct characteristics of a people. It often begins with the smallest number, and sends them as messengers and forerunners to open a highway in the wilderness and make a royal pathway for our God in the desert. Step after step, it adds one by one to its army of heroes and princely warriors. It appeals to each and every one as a distinct consciousness, and calls upon the perceptive faculties and reasoning powers to consider its claims upon the attention, presenting its attractiveness to the sons and daughters of men. It appeals to personal interest and human consciousness on the highest plane of the eternity of being, and proposes to solve the profound and intricate relations that exist between God and man. It reaches deep into the moral and spiritual entities that relate to the incomprehensible and the incomparable Deity. As a moving force, it threads our being, ramifies the conscious individuality, speaks in thunder tones to the sensibilities and all the properties and potentialities of intelligent creatures. It stimulates, stirs and lifts the legitimate aspirations of man to those sunny altitudes, where alone God and man walk in peace, and blend in the splendors of reconciliation and a glorified union. It moves and propels man upward to his designed dignity and the eternal harmonies of the universal spheres, where the stars of God “forever glow in the fervent warmth of His love.” Religion is a secret power. It plies the currents beneath the waves of human nature. Men may see you, they may think of you, and speak of you, and weigh you in the scale of their judgment. They may reach a true or false conclusion respecting you as a man and a citizen; but there is a divinity that dwells within, whose shape or form they cannot see, whose stately steps and steady march through the deep chambers and hidden receptacles of the soul they cannot measure. It is a thing of personal possession and personal experience, deep and resonant with the music of heaven that fills the soul with the reigning Shiloh, the living Christ of God.

Again, Christianity suits every man, fits every age, and is adapted to every sphere of being in the universe. It is the need of every being, the joy of every soul. It crowns life with honor, embellishes its devotees, makes its followers conquerors and gives light in the darkest night and opens the royal highway to the throne of God. It softens the dying bed, bridges the river of death, and in chariots of fire takes God's Elijahs to the paradisaical city of the Great King.

2. “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah till Shiloh come.”

That is, Christ was to come and grasp “the sceptre” that Judah held. Judah was to hold it until Messiah should appear on the scene and take his rightful authority. Christ did come. He came at the predicted time, and “in the fullness” of the purposes of God. Here he must stay and “reign until he hath put all enemies under His feet.” This is his earthly work, and his great mission in the world. It will not be completed until this is done. “The sceptre” here spoken of is the royal insignia of the Messiahship. It is the emblem, or symbol of His authority, and His right to reign over all the earth. Ancient kings and monarchs had their sceptres, which signified their complete and extended jurisdiction. Before them the millions prostrated the body. With trembling heart and hand they bowed to earthly masters. But their sceptres have departed, their authority has gone, their empires are broken, and their kingdoms calcinated by the hot tramp of the centuries and destroyed by the giant worm of time. Where are they proud kingdoms of old, that rose, towered, and glowed in their might and majesty? Where is the kingdom of David and Solomon, that stretched “from the river to the ends of the earth?” Where are the great kingdoms of the Babylonians, the Medo-Persians, the Macedonians, and the iron empire of Rome? Nay, my friends, they have passed away and sleep the eternal sleep of death. Their sceptres are broken, their crowns fallen, and all their greatness is gone; but the sceptre of the Shiloh of God still abides. Why does it abide? Because it “is a right sceptre,” a true kingdom of righteousness, harmony and peace, and presents to the judgment and wisdom of men God's idea of government. It is stonger than Bessemer steel, harder than adamant, more incorroding than the gold of Ophir, and more enduring than the precious diamond. It is more enduring than the schools and systems of thought and philosophy; for while these perish amid the march of years and the death of centuries, and fall in the grave of time with their dead masters and hoary sages, Shiloh's empire still abides, and its magnetic embodiment in the person of the living Christ, marches on in stately tread, traversing the breadth of centuries, measuring the decades, and wrapping the string of days and the fibre of hours around his hand, and buckling the aged cycles and the countless trend of years to his belt. Columns, arches, mausoleums, pyramids and the immortal sarcophagi of famous heroes and dead philosophers quivered and shivered and tumbled upon their rocky foundations at the command of conquering time; but the sceptre of the “Shiloh” of God still sways in triumph above the din of war, the clash of elements, and the stroke of years. Seas shift their beds, rivers change their channels, continents grow old with the weight of years and hoary crowns bestud the islands, while ocean currents grind their rocky feet to dust and scatter their flinty ribs in the secret chambers of the deep. But Shiloh, in the virgin strength of eternal youth, abides at the head of the marching column and the triumphant phalanxes, all dressed in white and panoplied in the robes of truth. But the kingdom of Shiloh is progressive. It is educative and consequently slow in its progress. It is slow to the ideas and conceptions of men, but not slow to God. An educative process must be slow. The universe is a developing universe. Growth and decay, expansion and contraction, struggles of life and death, are universal, perpetual and ceaseless. Nothing essential to this development stands still or falls to the depth of sound sleep or profound quietude. Nothing slumbers through eternal duration. If death comes, life follows in the wake of years, and that which now sleeps will rise again, and at some period in the life of God, assert its right to live again. Nothing comes but by slow degrees. The oak slumbers in the acorn, the tree in the kernel, and the blade of corn in the grain. The rose gradually unfolds its petals, and lilies blush in the eveningtide. Gentle spring comes after the sleep of winter, and the morning succeeds the night. That which once was is not now, but it shall be again. “The war of elements and the crash of worlds” are constant, general and eternal. The glory of systems fades, worlds in conflagration die, and stars from heaven fall, and catastrophes pile their oncoming catastrophes upon the burning decks of waning suns and dying systems, amid the gush of chaos and the death of stars. All is evolution, agitation and change. Like the empire of physical nature, there is a progressive process in spiritual nature, an agitating element, a native force or propulsion that awakes and stirs the properties and engages humanity in the eternal struggles.

Again, it is conflict, labor, and struggle that make a man as well as a world. Nothing can be made perfect without this necessary struggle and conflict with internal and external elements and forces. No conflict is without results and products. Every conflict, whether in the realm of physical nature or of mind, must have results and products; for there is always some end to be attained. A grain cast into the “faithful bosom of the earth” struggles to break its shell, and by the force of natural selection, or elective affinity, throws off its effete properties and gathers and assimilates those things that are needed for its perfect development. The purpose of the struggle is to make a perfect grain of wheat. The oak struggles in the acorn till it breaks its prison walls. It then arrays its friends against its foes in a struggle for survival, until it is crowned with a green wreath of leaves and acquires a sturdy trunk of wood. The waters are purified by their constant ebb and flow, and the germs of disease are killed in the atmosphere by the jarring thunders. Society is purified and humanity is made better by the revolutions and the conflicts of moral and political forces. Corrupt States and depraved municipalities sink beneath the heavy tread and the iron reign of sin; but the innate spirit of a progressive civilization, electrified by religion and virtue, collects its forces, reassembles its agencies, rises from the dead past, gathers the broken threads and continues on the highway of progress. Nothing can be purified and made better without struggle, and no struggle can be without an end.

Struggle implies three things—time, progress and process; but the end is the perfection of character. Everything has all time to be made perfect; and all the time that is necessary for the process, and the changes and accessions toward perfection are progress. The perfection of character is the ultimate end for which time is given, and the process and progress toward perfection cannot cease until the effort is coronated with the brightest gems of nature. The kingdom of Shiloh cannot stand still, because its very life is in its thrift and activity. Israel's God neither sleeps nor slumbers, but watches the forces of the moving spheres, regulates their order, directs their courses, controls their elements, and forces recalcitrant members into orderly lines and harmonious relations. Therefore, every action in the moral and physical worlds has a meaning that may be interpreted at some time in the future, and somewhere in the line of action and of evolution and change. God scatters broadly, but gathers again, and the focal center of all actions is the ultimate will of God, the intricate designs of the Most High. How, then, can Shiloh's kingdom stand still? How can its propulsive forces, its Godlike energies stand still? Can God sleep, or His Son die? Have the cables of the universal mechanism been broken, its ship stranded and the helm of the universe taken from His hand? Say, ye elements, forces, agencies, natures, and all ye star-crowned immensities and light-begirt intellectualities of heaven, has the King of Saints lost the equilibrium of the spheres, the balances of heaven, or the end of the bright curves? Nay; God reigns as of old, and all the elements are the witnesses of His power and of His presence. He touches the octachord of nature with fingers of fire and hands of power, and at once the thrilling God vibrates the threads, and every part and ramified relation of the universal spheres He fills with His tremendous presence, commands the molecular entities, and the listening sisters and kindred sires to stop to hear and fly at his behests. All things are in His hands. Even the wrath of man, the rebellion of angels, and all the old sinners of the ages are to fulfill some great design or lofty culmination in the executive government of the Most High. Their madness and rage, their hardness of heart and obdurate pride, their lust for place and power, their violent and headlong assaults upon the high castles of heaven's King, and their fierce, demon-like onslaught of the truth and the progress and expansion of Shiloh's empire, are all made to praise the Lord and magnify His wisdom, justice and truth, while unwittingly they are carrying forward the golden threads and silken strands of the Shilohic empire. Fallen devils and wicked men, the devices of hell and whatever spirit, being of character that fights against God and His anointed Shiloh must ultimately fail and sink beneath the direful wrath of “the Thunderer.” But the kingdom of Shiloh is to take the place of all others by the process of hybridization, or that smooth and gentle flow of His love, presence and power that is exhibited in the nature, character, work of the ministry of Jesus Christ. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” His embassy to earth was not in pomp and splendor, nor kingly majesty. He did not come heralded by the sound of trumpets, the blowing of horns, and the metallic clash of loud cymbals and bands of music. No royal robe, nor gem-set crown, nor flash of golden sceptre, nor awaiting throne of ivory marked His coming. No horses and chariots, nor thundering legions of armies, nor tramping hosts of soldiery marked His appearing; but “as a root out of a dry ground” he broke the stony soil of the hearts of men and pushed His way up through the hard and callous surface of human prejudices, hate and depravity, and the meek and lowly Galilean stood forth in the humility of a prophet, the garb of a mendicant and the demeanor of a servant. There was no visible greatness, nor dictatorial air, nor manifestation of earthly power or kingly authority. The silent chambers of the woods were His home, the earth was His bed, the heavens His covering, and His pillow was a stone of the hills. No long-drawn aisles, nor architectural shafts of marble, nor Parian slabs, nor polished flint adorned the temple of His slumbers, nor flashed upon His morning vision; but from the rugged hills and silent plains the divine Master of the ages and the eldest creations, walked into Jerusalem and about Galilee to plant the seeds, and in deeper soil to sow those effervescent germs of truth and nuggets of power and love that were to permeate the nations, cover the hemispheres, ramify the ages, and fill the world with the Shiloh empire.

3. The abstract and concrete empire. “Unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” There is something wonderful and beautiful in the Shiloh empire. It is wonderful both in abstract and in concrete. In abstract there is neither phase nor form nor tangibility of character. It cannot be bought, nor sold, nor bartered in the markets of the world as a commodity in human commerce. It laughs at gold, spurns the diamonds of queens and treads the embossed gems and pearls of kings and millionaires beneath its steady move. Real estate, landed lords, the wealth of dynasties and the gilded splendors of courts and palaces cannot procure it, nor bring it near. But its spiritual dynamos are plenipotent in power, and its strength lay deep in the bosom and nature of Deity. In the abstract, it is the government of God, and has His image and superscription. In every age and phase of civilization it has its magazines of power, its living energies and undying individualism. It is separate and distinct from all other kingdoms that seem to have preceded it, and there are none to follow like it, or comparable to it. In its character, aim and great ends, it stands out in bold relief and incomprehensible individualism. The agencies employed, the elements and principles by which it acts and moves upon the feeling and judgment of men, are absolutely different from and high above the conceptions and calculations of the unaided reason and any discoveries possible for men to make. To “bring forth the headstones” of its expanding empire, with the shoutings of “Grace, grace, unto it,” is the sole province of divine revelation. No man can find out God to perfection. He is the ever present, and yet the ever undiscovered, beyond that degree where the mind of man may rise and take hold upon the things of God and know what are those duties and relations that make for the peace of the intelligent creation. All that we know of God and the divine administration is mostly revealed to the sons of men, either through the elements of nature, or by His Word. All along through the ages and the nations of the earth the Lord hath declared His presence, His goodness, and His power to the children of men. He talks to us by day and by night, in the deep resonant tones of a unique empire of thought and action, whose vibrating circuits and electrifying majesty are as deep as human nature, high as heaven and enduring as the years of eternity. Everywhere Shiloh's empire touches the deep chords of human nature and human hearts, moving, stirring, revolutionizing and unifying its forces and agencies, exhibiting those far-reaching plenitudes of power and throbbing energies and plenipotent activites that make up its irresistible character. Every day the empire of Shiloh is making its onslaughts and encroachments upon the ramparts of sin and hell, gathering its forces, collecting its army, disciplining its troops, drilling its agencies and coercing the erratic sons and rebellious daughters into line, and demanding obedience to the sovereign God and His supreme command.

“Unto Him shall the gathering of the people be.” All people shall come to Him, and the congregating millions shall gather at His feet and crowd to the sacred shrine and bow before the center of universal power and the majesty of the universal King. Here comes Shiloh, skipping on the mountains and dancing on the hills and filling the plains with the bright halo of His awful presence and the roseate splendors of His power. His voice is resonant, round and full, ringing in seraphic tones through the empire of humanity, calling all his subjects and long-lost children back to their ancient estate, and back to their ancient God. Shiloh is coming! Nearer and nearer He approaches. The thunders of music are rattling through the spheres, and the lofty tramping legions and the heavy treading white squadrons are coming down the line spreading through all lands, wrapping the hemispheres with the light of God and the blessing of His presence. He crushes the thrones of kings, demolishes iron empires, breaks asunder republics, subverts monarchies, throws down “the powers that be” and slays the dragon of sin in his ancient isle. Heathen superstitions, rotten philosophy and godless systems of thought and practice fall before His keen, cold steel of “the truth;” and they with their ancient gray-haired sires and grandsires and mitred priests with hoary locks, and all their deluded devotees, sink beneath his wrath and the power of his sovereign rod. Church of God, get ready, stand up; don't be alarmed! Shiloh is coming, he is coming, coming to reign until the stars of God pale their light, “till moons wax and wane no more,” and suns lose their flame and planets die on their track and scatter to the utmost poles their incinerated dust. “Hallelujah! 'tis done,” our king is on the throne of universal empire.

Whoever reads the history of man, weighs his sorrows and measures his joy, will read the history of songs and anthems of his days. Indeed, his pilgrimage through life's thorny mazes is a pilgrimage of song inspired by the lights and shadows that ever shine and shade his pathway. Age or nation, clime or condition, cannot take from him this plaintive or joyous melody that permeates his individuality, and fills his moments with this God-given and heavenly flame. There is in man a golden harp of a thousand sympathetic chords whose deep and resonant tones evolve from the golden strings which vibrate to the music of the spheres and the melodies of the heart. Whether plodding the lower walks of tears and sorrow, or on the joyful wing of prosperity, or hearing the dull thud of the funeral dirge, the carol of the sweetest note will stir the soul, revolutionize the heart and lift the drooping spirit to the altitude of God and the sunny plains of heaven. Song is an antidote of the burdened heart, the laboring soul and the broken spirit. But the song of redemption is preeminently “the song.” It is the song of songs. It is the sweetest note on angels' lips, and the sweetest anthem of the skies. Indeed, the song of redemption is the thrilling cry that has stirred the ages, ramified the centuries, filled the decades, inspired the prophets, fired the tongues of bards, poets and seers and cheered the millions with the music of God and of his Christ. Touched by the omnific finger of God's love, and set to the dulcet strains of joy, the song of redemption shall go ringing through the nations, down the declivities of time, thread the centers of civilizations, cross the howling sea of death, and ring on up to God and heaven through countless ages and evolving cycles of endless duration.

1. But what is song?

Song is the music of the soul, the harmonious vibrations of the deep chords of the heart and the melodies of the spirit life. It involves the elevation of the affections and the utterances of the lips by which some theme, doctrine, or topic is proclaimed aloud and exultingly in the presence of others. In a broader sense, it is the vibration of the musical harmonies of the empire of God, agitated and active. It is the effort of a kindred spark to return to its native sun, and be rehabilitated in its native clime. It is the divinity in man rising to God its source and parent head from whom it came to earth. It is the better and higher nature of man springing forward and leaping heavenward. It is the soul flying through the deep blue ether upon its fiery pinions in search after God its “maker who giveth songs in the night.” Song implies harmony in sentiment and strain. Strain is the vehicle—the chariot wheels of song, but sentiment and doctrine are the life and spirit. But song is more. It is a spiritual animation, a flame that stimulates, revives and quickens the moral, mental and spiritual manhood. It is true, song, like speech, may be greatly improved by the processes of culture and practice, and should be cultivated by the whole human race; for no system of training can be complete without it. Yet there is in man an innate attribute of song, an attribute which when touched by the hand of sorrow or joy makes the chambers of the soul resonant with the symphonies of angels and the euphonies of heaven. It is an essential quality of his spiritual and religious instinct—a part of his organic spiritual constituency. It is organic and God-given. It is a part of his individual and indestructible selfhood. Music is harmonies expressed, song is the vehement act of expression. This attribute of song in man has its counterpart in creation. Creation is a system of musical harmonies combining in a common unity, and that common unity is the unit of all units—God. He is the grand total of all the totalities in the universe. All the threads and lines of days and years, of events, acts, facts, natures, beings, agencies, entities, and things, center in his will and power, glory and majesty. The millenniums, with their creative acts and facts, with their mighty ponderable and imponderable realities, are yoked and linked together by the indissoluble bands and bonds of his high and majestic authority. At his command, angels fly, devils fall, comets flash, suns burn, stars twinkle, and systems live. Around him, all things dance and fly in the inimitable beauties of magnificent harmony, or dash their splintered shafts and shattered spears at his feet, and tremble at his voice. Man is most in harmony with the universe and the music of the spheres when the deep and dulcet tones of the octachords of the soul are attuned and set to the music of God “and of his Christ” by the Holy Spirit. The innate principle of song in man is the gift of God in a like sense as speech is the gift of God. When God made man, he placed within his duplex nature certain elements and faculties that compose his indestructible selfhood, and that are essential parts of him. These elements and faculties were in perfect harmony the one with all the others. There was no clashing, nor discord, nor want of harmony in the diapason, but the octaves of man's being were filled and thrilled through and through with the seraphic flame of love and the music of God. It is true, some of the faculties of his nature were more prominent than others, nevertheless, they all were there. They existed, and will exist as long as man is man. Place or condition, age or state, cannot destroy or annihilate these elements of his being. Man is finished in the fact of his being. He is fully man in all those powers and principles that imply a finished work of God. No new property nor attribute is to be added in this or any other state, because his being is finished in all its parts. It is true, there may be deep and latent powers of the soul of which we are not conscious, and which are yet to be developed in a future state; there may be possibilities of endless progression, development and expansion that await us in the great beyond. Our time in this life is too short, and the hemispheres of earth too narrow, for the excursions and expatriations of the soul—the vital flame of life. Yet these facts do not imply that new faculties and elements are to be added to the manhood of man, but imply progression, thrift, go and indefinite development. Indeed, man is but imperfectly known in the present state. He knows but little of himself and his fellow pilgrims, because this is the twilight of his being, the infancy of his life, and the morning of the primal day of his years. The strongest are weak and the wisest sons of men are ignorant. Therefore, the difference is in the extent of his faculties in expansion, application and development, and not that new faculties are to be added in another and future state. The canon was closed in the first act of his creation. True, there is to be, and must be a change, but only such a change as implies physical, mental and spiritual renovation. This renovation does not take in any new constituency, but is a purification and readjustment of that which was put there in the day of his creation. Yet, it seems true that those faculties and agencies that are best fitted for his immediate uses are most developed, and exhibit a grace and prominence that seem to obliterate, or at least to greatly crowd and overshadow the others, and there is an apparent want of harmony in the extent of their uses. But this does not prove that any new principle is necessary to complete his nature. Speech, knowledge, volition, memory, taste, appetite, and all the faculties come in the totality of his inherent and native selfhood. Every constructive element, every fiber and line of his nature is necessary for the ultimate end and completion of the whole. To extract one of these parts or faculties of his nature would unbalance the unity of his being and destroy its harmonious relations; therefore, man has a whole and completely defined status in the fact of his being. But in this nature there must be an association of each of its parts with each and all of those other parts that compose his being. There must be an elective affinity to penetrate and join together the several parts, and give grace, beauty and symmetry to the finished man. Thus song is the golden sunlight that gilds the horizon of the ages with the gladness of the day of Christ, making every flower of hope bloom, the hills smile, and every lily, rose and violet blush in maiden sweetness amid the universal gush of joys.

But song is old. It is older than our physical earth, and was used in heaven before used on earth. Long anterior to the heavens and the earth that rose out of chaos, it was pressed into the service of the eldest children of eternity who tuned their golden lutes in the empyrean of the heavens and sang glorious anthems to the all powerful and all glorious God. Long before a ray of light had pierced the primeval darkness that covered earth and sky, when, as yet, the morning star had not been hung as a pendant lamp in the orient, nor the silvery goddess of the evening had snuffed her candle on the occident's setting sun, eternal beings were singing the praises of God. Yea, there was song when as yet our earth and heavens were held by the iron grip and sable bands of king Darkness who had reigned for myriads of millenniums, but was finally exiled by the Almighty's irrevocable fiat of his power.

In all ages of the world, mankind has been divided into two distinct classes, “the rich and the poor.” While these distinctions are merely artificial, yet the wisdom and intelligence of the masses have always regarded them as permanent and enduring. Even the Father of mercies has recognized these differences that exist between man and man. These distinctions or differences are not fundamental, but conditional. They grow out of the state of society, and those environments that always accompany every age and phase of civilization. So far as science and revelation go, there has not been found any remedy to equalize wealth, or those belongings and personal achievements that have lifted one man above another in those things that add to their happiness. But in spite of all the precaution, the wisdom, and the foresight of the best and wisest of men, the great majority of the human race will be poor in this world's goods; it seems a matter of impossibility to prevent suffering arising from a state of want, and establish any universal rule by which all men may become equal in the comfort and common distribution of wealth. Hence, there is always room for charity, and the exercise of those noble virtues that not only help the poor, but also add to the greatness of human character and the expansion and development of the noblest faculties of human nature. We need not now argue the fundamental causes of these differences. It is enough for the present purpose to recognize the fact of their existence and possible permanence, at least, until the triumphs of the gospel system shall change the heart of man to that degree where the truth shall force his erratic nature to obey its teaching in the fullest sense of its letter and spirit. It is convenient to be rich, but not sinful to be poor. Nor is it sinful to be rich. Solomon says, “Give me neither riches nor poverty,” and he further says, “If riches increase, set not thy heart upon them.” Both riches and poverty have their advantages, the one in this life, the other in the life to come. Here it may be said that “the rich and the poor” do not “meet together,” though the Lord is still “the maker of them all.”

1. The commonness of origin and character.

The phrase, “the rich and the poor,” refers to our common origin in the creation and construction of our mental and physical character. Man is a genus and not a species. All are made alike in all the constituent elements of their nature. The basic principles upon which character rests are always the same in kind, but different in degree, according to the respective conditions under which they may have lived. The outward appearance and even the varied civil aspects do not affect the mental and moral standing, nor the real fundamentals of character. All have the same number of faculties, or attributes of mind, and the differences we see in mankind are not in the fundamentals of their being, but in degrees of culture and development. If there were any real differences in the nature of humanity as regards the mental ability, then there must have been different laws of both God and man to suit the different capacities. There must have been one law for the naturally superior and another for the naturally inferior. Otherwise, the ends of justice would be defeated, and rewards and punishments could not take place on equitable grounds. But as there is one God and one moral code by which all are to be governed, there is a single and a one humanity standing upon one moral foundation and with one moral responsibility. There is a difference in mental accomplishments and achievements, but this is in degrees, and not in kind. One is as much a man as the other in the facts of his being, but not in the facts of development. Hence, “the rich and the poor meet together” in a common humanity. But “they also meet together” in the common wants and needs of life. Everywhere man is man, and according to the history, practices and experiences of the life of man, he is one and the same in the substantial realities of his nature. Human nature is always the same, no matter in what part of the globe man lives. The various forms of his civilization, or those improvements that come to him by means of his own efforts, are born of the same principles and the same aspirations, and have always the same end in view, namely, the betterment of his earthly state. “The rich and the poor” are conceived and are born alike. Childhood, youth and growth, manhood, old age and death, come alike to all. They have the same tastes, feelings, appetite, passions, desires, pains and sorrows, and are perfectly the same in their physical and natural propensities. In all these things, “the rich and the poor meet together.”

2. But the rich and the poor meet together in a common religion.

They have not only a common fatherhood, and consequently a common brotherhood, but they have a unitary religion. The great thoughts, the high moral ideas, and the lofty conceptions that permeate and pervade the spiritual nature of man, had their germs and inception in the ancient revelations of God, assisted by sober deductions from nature. It is hard to investigate nature without seeing its Creator, or that energy by which all things move and have their being. In some sense, nature reflects God. Creation is the material image of the immaterial God. The universe is a reflector in which the majesty, glory and power of the invisible spirit are displayed. Everywhere an active presence is near, filling the infinite operations with intelligence and the highest ideals of perfections and demonstrations of wisdom. Everywhere the mind is overwhelmed with wonder and amazement, until the living manhood is instinct, ramified and baptized with the spiritual essence. Creation and Revelation tell the same story, and “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” The very personality of our manhood takes in and assimilates the universal “Godhood,” and the life of man is but the product of another and a higher life, and can but reflect its “image and superscription.”

The ancient revelations of God run parallel with the ever-present testimony of creation. So far as they go, both are chapters in the eternal economy, and are the witnesses and loud proclaimers of an unbroken line of control and a unitary system of government. In sentiment and doctrine, the corner-stone of religion is always the same. As there is but one God and Father, there is one government, and consequently, one great religion. As this one government has been perverted by men, so this one religion has been corrupted and perverted by the same power. But its great pillars of truths remain. Idolatry itself is only a fearful perversion of original religion, or ancient Christianity; but as a false coin proves the existence of a true coin, so false religion proves that there is a true religion. The coin may have lost its image and superscription, but the solid metal remains. Here “the rich and the poor meet together,” because on the spiritual plane they are compelled to meet in a common religion.

3. The solemn doom will make them meet.

But Solomon intended more especially to emphasize the solemn doom that awaits all the sons and daughters of men—that awful and tremendous catastrophe that involves the dissolution of the body, the flight of the spirit to another clime, and the silent chamber of the grave. What is more serious? What is death? And why must I die? There is nothing in the mere physical change that we call death, but the issues involved, or consequent upon it, are momentous, tremendous, and far-reaching in their effects. Death changes the estate of man, decides the issues of life's conflict, transports, exports, and dissolves relations and dispatches the spirit as a swift courier to the seat of God, the center of universal power. Death involves a mysterious transition between the spheres, since it takes us from one place to another, or from this to another world. Millions have passed over life's boundary line and made the mysterious exit, but not one has returned to describe the way or the place to which he has gone. No voice comes back to us from that far off country, or that unseen realm where God and angels dwell.

No man has, as yet, discovered any remedy or method to stay the hand of death, or stop his fearful ravage and devastating march through the ages. But step by step, and day by day the grim monster encroaches upon the children of men in every clime, kindred, and people. Triumphantly he reigned from Adam to Moses, and claimed those children of men who had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression. He marched captive an unbroken line across the flood, ravaged the postdiluvian ages, swept through the rising generations, crushed the empires of the Mediæval dispensations, corrupted the streams and broke the trend of modern civilization, and ever defies the discoveries of materia medica and the deep ken of modern sciences. All the sons of men quail before him, bow at his command, and fall beneath his fitful rage and outstretched rod. Solomon descanted upon the science of life, and the wise men of the east fled from him. David sang of him, and the prophets of God heard his voice. Job felt his keen cold lance. The struggling millions obey his behests, grandsires submit to his edicts, queens lay their jewels at his feet, kings lay their scepters in his path, and monarchs pile the ashes of their shattered thrones and the dust of their empires upon his calcinated highway. He stops the reign of empire, numbers the days of the mighty, breaks the oppressing dynasties, strips the beggar of his rags, the rich of his riches, silences the lyric of the enchanter, and hushes the noise of battles and the tocsins of war. His bow is of steel, his arrows are adamantine javelins sharper than the fangs of serpents, and more poisonous than if covered with the blood and filled with the venom of asps. Always his “sword is bathed in heaven,” by whose double-edged blade, tears are drawn and mingled with human blood. His deadly work goes on always, his havoc is universal, and his reign eternal. No king is like this king, no reign so long, no dominion so wide, no lord so cruel, and no ruler of the nations so exacting. All who owe him must pay in full principal and interest in the awful crisis. Every cent must be paid at the time of maturity, every bond liquidated, and every obligation met. There is no forgiveness nor mercy nor long suffering. He is deaf to progress and to the resonant eloquence of song and the golden strains of instrumental music. No bars of iron, nor gates of steel, nor triple-plated armor, nor barricaded palace, though rock-bound and defended by the frowning artillery of all the nations, can stay his awful hand. He is the relentless enemy of all the living, and plants his waving colors of eternal sleep over all the dead. He proclaims no armistice, nor lifts the white flag of truce. Eloquent orators have proclaimed against him; philosophers, sages, scientists and sanitarian councils have fought against him with all their main and might; but as steadily as the flow of time or the roll of the ages, the haughty monarch rides in victory, whitens the bones of the nations in his dreadful wake, and shouts in triumph over the fallen millions. Onward he ever comes crushing the diamond centers of human greatness and laughing at the wailings and bitter cries of the children of men. O death, how dreadful is thy reign! What terrors follow in thy path! Here “the rich and the poor meet together.” In the cities of the dead they shall dwell together until the judgment day. But we are told by the Word of inspiration, “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” But there is a great center to which all things move, and a focal point where all things meet. It is the judgment day, the culmination of all days. Jesus Christ is the supreme Judge, and God the Father, is the eternal Usher. All that move in heaven, earth and “the deep track of hell” are hastening to that day. Every day with its contents, every age with its thought and action, and the centuries with their chapters of blood, violence and death, shall crowd to the awful assize, “For —evil.” “For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.” Every age has its history, every people its records, every man his thoughts and acts. All of these are written in the day-book of time and recorded in the ledger of eternity. Earthly records may disappear, annalists may perish “with their inkhorns dry and their golden styli bereft of their artful touches,” and the dusty leaves of their fading folios may be forgotten, or yield to the ravage of years; but all things come to the judgment, “the day of the Lord.” All the toiling elements, all the groaning factors, and all the faculties of mind and matter, are the servants of God, and the instruments of his executions. His Word must be fulfilled, and the eternal plan of government must meet all the requirements of his ultimate designs. All the universal propellent and repellent agencies, all forces, contingencies, activities and powers of the infinite spheres of being are but the obedient servants of the Most High to bring all things into judgment at the last day. All the high powers of heaven, all the low powers of hell, and all the creatures of space and time are traveling to the judgment. While they sleep, and while they are awake, whether they rest, roll, wabble, or soar, or move on lightning wings, or dart on electric threads, they move on to the great day with irresistible momentum and exact precision. There are no broken tendencies, nor severed relations, nor shivered bonds, nor lost motion in the wondrous whole. Every star, every sun, every shining system and brilliant orb, and every broken planet and burnt-out world, with their flying fragments of hissing lava, with their dying satellites and perishing kings of the deep and “the lost sisters of the erstwhile seas,” shall terminate the long courses of their mighty rounds, fold their wings of flame, stop the flight of their ethereal chariots, break their contracting zones, lose their orbits and plunge into the universal holocaust in sight of the throne of God. Here their forces die, their forms change and their equipoise is lost amid “the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.” Here suns set to rise no more, moons pale their silver faces, stars leap from their sockets, comets take off their sheeny robes, and the trooping steeds of “the milky way” roll up to the end of their long courses, bow at the throne of God, fall in death and leap into the infinite chasm of chaos, and amid the rumbling thunders and howling elements, they sink into the darkness and death of eternal night. Hence, the Saviour says, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” But the judgment is coming and its approach is to be heralded forth by “a shout” and with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and “we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.” The circumstances attending his appearing, and the awful signals of his approach are wonderful beyond the power of human description, and are worthy of the great occasion. Ten thousand thunders rolling and filling the spheres with awful tremors, and the heavy tramp of the martial tread of the judgment millions engage the attention of universal humanity. The universal summons sends its deep thrilling sensations along all the depths and heights of the living and of the dead, and all that sleep in their graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God. “Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.”

High above the ancient tracks of planets and the burning paths of melting worlds and incinerated systems, the great white throne of Jesus, the Christ of God, appears. Around him bright conclaves and concatinated files of the unbroken ranks of the eldest children of eternity glitter as if colored by the lightning's flash. Millions of angelic golden leagues, like threads of fiery currents and tongues of liquid flame, girdle the throne of the eternal with the congregated citizenry of heaven. Around him cherubic legions and the ever deepening trains of seraphic files radiate the circles and cover the widespread seething seas of living spirits with the scintillations of their wings and the beamy splendors of heaven. The deep rolling thunders shake the mansions of the dead, stir the sleeping millions, and “from the center to the utmost poles,” universal humanity, both living and dead, breaks the adamantine links of its long slumber and rises to the judgment bar. No names will be forgotten, nor lost sight of, but every dead son of Adam's race shall be there. The lost thought and the scattered memory of the whole circle of all humanity shall come up with the precise characters and individuals to which they belong, and every man, woman and child shall still be a real conscious self, an eternal moral personality. “All things” shall be brought into judgment. Kings shall bring their crowns, monarchs the histories of their reigns, conquerors their bloody swords, and annalists the records of their people. All the works of the human race, both public and private, shall be brought into judgment and weighed in the balances of truth and equity, and judged by the justice of God and the inexorable law of righteousness. Oh wondrous day! It is the day of days, the culmination of all days, the center where all things meet, the place and date of all final decisions, and the destiny of all men.

Originally, this Psalm has reference to king Solomon, the great son of great David, because the kingdom of Solomon, as well as Solomon himself, represented the spiritual and physical empire of Messiah. Solomon in his glory was a fit anticipation and prefiguration of the Christian system in its progressive development and universal sway. Though Solomon was great, yet a greater than Solomon is here spoken of. The name to be perpetuated through all the coming ages is not the name of Solomon, but the great name of Jesus Christ. As the sun, with its piercing and brilliant rays gilds the horizon with its bright light, and fills the world with his golden splendors, so Messiah has arisen upon the dark sphere of human depravity. Though slowly and gradually, yet steadily he will climb the ecliptic of the world's civilizations until a halo of saving grace shall electrify, purify and save the millions from sin and ruin.

It is said of Christ that “on his head were many crowns” and “that he had a name written that no man knew but himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; and his name is called the word of God.” So he is distinguished by sublime titles, indicative of his nature, work, and character. Like the stars of heaven, they beset and bestud the oracles of truth, and will forever shine and glitter through all the ages of the nations until every tribe of man shall be bedecked with the gems of truth, and every lip and tongue shall glow with his praise. How wonderful is his name! In Genesis he is said to be “the seed of the woman.” He is called also “Shiloh.” In Job he is called the Redeemer. In Isaiah he is called the “child born,” “son given,” “and his name shall be called, Wonderful Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Is. 9:6.) In Zechariah he is “The Branch,” for, says the prophet, “Behold the man whose name is the Branch; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord: Even he shall build the temple of the Lord; and he shall bear the glory and shall sit and rule upon his throne; and he shall be a priest upon his throne, and the counsel of peace shall be between them both.” (Zech. 6:12, 13.) In the prophecies of Haggai he is called “the Captain of our salvation.” In Daniel he is called “the most Holy.” (9:24.) In Jeremiah he is called “the Lord our Righteousness.” In Hosea he is called “David their king.” In Matthew he is called “Christ.” In Luke he is called “the Day Spring from on High.” In John he is called “the Lamb of God.” In Acts he is called “Lord of all,” and “Prince of life.” In Hebrews he is called “the Captain of our salvation.” In Romans “the Deliverer.” He is called “the Alpha and Omega,” “the beginning of the creation of God,” “the faithful witness,” “the root and offspring of David,” and “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” But the especial and preeminent name of the Redeemer, is Jesus, and in connection with this, is “Christ,” the anointed of God. He is appointed of God to fill a great office. He is a Priest to offer up sacrifices for us—for all the sinning nations of the ages. He is a King, for, says the prophet, “Behold a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment.” He is the Prophet of God to man, to teach him the deep things of God and the mystery of salvation.

I. His name is great because it is significant of a great character. “What think ye of Christ?” Who is he? and whence did he come? For what did he come? His word records the work of human redemption. He came to seek and save that which was lost. He came as the God-sent, the heavenly Legate, with the instrument of peace written by the finger of the King of heaven. He came to bind up the broken-hearted, and to cheer the millions with the music of God and the message of love. He gave sight to the two blind men at Capernaum by the word of his power, and at the same place the dumb demoniac was healed. At Gadara he made the deaf and dumb man hear the sweet accents of love and speak the praise of the Most High in Decapolis. At Nain he gave life to the widow's son and joy to a mother's heart. At Samaria ten lepers were cleansed of the most loathsome of all diseases. At Gadara the legion of devils fled at his command and plunged headlong into the sea. The raging storm upon the sea of Galilee heard his invincible fiat, and the waters ceased to dance to the music of the winds. At Jericho blind Bartimeus saw the bright light of heaven for the first time by the healing power of Messiah. At Bethesda five thousand were fed by the incarnate Son of God. He raised Lazarus from the grave, expelled the palsy, scattered fevers, dried up issues of blood, and restored the withered hand. But his name is to be perpetuated because of the doctrines he taught, “for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the Scribes and Pharisees.” It is said that “he spake as never man spake,” but no man knew the truth as he knew it. He taught the truth—preeminently the truth of God. His doctrines dropped “as the rain,” and his “speech” distilled “as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass, because he published the name of the Lord; ascribe ye greatness unto our God.” What would we do without the words of Christ? To what school of science and law should we go to learn what we have learned from the blessed words of Jesus? Can human wisdom find out God to perfection? The world without a Christ! How dark and desolate! “Thou hast the words of eternal life, unto whom shall we go?” Nay, the world belongs to Jesus Christ. It is his by redemption: “Ye are bought with a price,” and that price was the blood and tears and sorrows of the Son of God; “being rich, he became poor, that through his poverty ye might be made rich.” He is at work to-day for you and for me—for every child of man. His doctrine is being distilled as the dew upon the delicate violet, the fragrant lily, the blushing rose, the lofty pine, and towering cedar. His sweet words of truth and love still play on the harp of life, and ring out and spread over the world, crossing seas, oceans, islands, piercing continents, sweeping through the gates of kingdoms, and the melodies of his name are chanted in palace halls and ivory temples. On his name flies as if winged with the zephyrs of Ceylon's isle, laden with the breath of flowers and the melodies of the spheres. The name which angels adore and worship, the name so full of consolation to the sinning and lost race of Adam is Jesus, the Christ of God.

“I will make thy name to be remembered in all generations, because all great events are connected with it.” “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water . . . . . When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.” (Prov. 8.) The Apostle, in Hebrews says, “By whom also he made the worlds.” Thus he is identified with the creation of the world. In Revelation he is styled, “The beginning of the creation of God,” and “the first born of every creature.” He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. He was with God the Father when he said, “Let us make man in our own image.” He is the Angel of the covenant which appeared to Moses in the burning bush in the wilderness, and said, “I am that I am.” He it was who smote the first born of Egypt's rebellious sons and overwhelmed her haughty king and his hosts in the Red Sea, He was the rock smitten in the wilderness which gave the sons of Israel drink; for says the Apostle, “That rock was Christ.” He was the fourth one that looked like the Son of God in the fiery furnace with three Hebrew children, and by his power he quenched the violence of the fire, so that they came out without the smell of fire upon their garments.

As the Great Redeemer, he “cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah.” He “is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength” and hath trodden in the winefat alone. As the Redeemer, he came to establish his church by organizing its spiritual forces, uniting its energies and inspiring the millions with hope, causing them to call him blessed. Onward he drives his chariot wheels. They are thundering and rumbling along every commercial channel, darting into every little trading cave, and rolling through the streets of the great cities, while rural plains and flowery dells rejoice at the sound of his coming. He is the Hope of the world, the Light of the nations. He is moving and stirring the public heart and changing sentiment and thought. Ancient superstitions and modern infidelity are trembling at his approach, while the evolutions of society are moving upward to the mount of a purer faith and a higher standard of morality. The lightning carries his word, and winds transport his name across the seas, and ocean cables quiver with his truth and dance with his praise. But the remembrance of his name cannot be blotted out. It cannot be lost or forgotten among the vast assemblage of great names. He stands not as a star in the zenith that bestuds the “Milky Way,” but as a great shining sun superlatively luminous and alone flying along in his own glorious orbit, and with an undimmed lustre he shall shine on through endless days. But few names have outlived the centuries and none have been so universal as Christ's. Many whose names have been remembered by posterity have been remembered because of their wickedness, monstrous crimes and diabolical acts, as Nero, Antiochus, Domitian and Herod. Others have their names kept alive because of military prowess and warlike achievements, as Cæsar, Hannibal, Alexander and Napoleon. Some are remembered on account of discoveries in science and art, or because of their philosophical and literary productions; others on account of their virtues and philanthropy. The nations extol their heroes and praise their greatness in verse, song, and national airs. They celebrate their birth and death, and perpetuate their memories in shafts of marble, pillars of stone and monuments of bronze. The mother endeavors to perpetuate the memory of her darling child by wreathing its grave with garlands of flowers and softening of the sod by showers of tears. The children of dead fathers carve in solid marble, enduring epitaphs of love and esteem. But verse and national air shall cease amid the clash of nations and the wreck of kingdoms. Shafts of marble, pillars of stone and monuments of bronze shall tumble and crumble and perish under the heavy tramp of the ages. The graves of parent and child though wreathed in flowers and wet with tears, shall be forgotten, yet the name of Christ shall be remembered in all generations. It shall be remembered because of his personal purity, his gracious words, his wonderful miracles, his unbounded love, his sufferings and vicarious passion and death, his glorious triumph over men, devils, earth and hell. He will be remembered as the Founder of Christianity, the universal Saviour, and the ever reigning King. His name cannot be blotted out by any earthly power. Earth and hell have conspired against his name. Kings and rulers have covenanted against him. Learning, philosophy, power, wealth, influence and the arms of nations have all been employed against him, but all in vain.

But says the text: “Therefore shall the people praise thee forever and ever.”

Some men have said in effect the time will come when the name of Christ shall be forgotten! This cannot be. God has said, “His name shall endure forever.” Again he says, “Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever, a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom, therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.” How can his name be forgotten, when “the people shall praise him forever and ever?” Can the sun be forgotten while he pours his burning rays on the earth? Indeed, his name is the sympathetic chord in the octachord of the ages and nations. His praise vibrates all the fibres of the heart, plays on every string, flashes on every nerve, quivers on every golden thread and fills every chamber of the soul with his love. He has been praised by prophets, lawgivers, priests and kings, by shepherds, seers and bards. From the temple hill of God, his praise rang out from the hosts of Israel, and thrilled Judah with the music of his name. Solomon calls him “the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valley.” David said of him, “Thou art fairer than the children of men; grace is poured into thy lips; therefore hath God blessed thee forever.” The celebration of his name began of old. Each generation will continue to praise his name. The fathers will die with his praise upon their tongues, but his praise will not cease. Where the fathers may leave off, their sons and daughters will come forth with youth's enlivening fire and chant his blessed name to the next generation; and then that generation will swell the high sounding chorus until at the base of the imperial throne of the judgment day, all the choruses of the ages, though old and gray with the weight of centuries, will fall upon the ear of an assembled universe. Nay, more, they shall go ringing on through the cycles over the mountains of God, and over the hills and wide extended plains of heaven, until again all the morning stars shall sing together, and all the sons of God shall shout for joy. Where will the celebration of his name stop? Who can set bounds to it? “Sirs, if these hold their peace, the very stones would cry out.” Sweet carols would spring from the earth, and songs of praises from the rocks of the hills. The rivers would murmur it, the rills would dance it, the seas would hum it, the storm would howl it, and the winds would whistle among the trees of the wood, until leaf, bud, flower, and trunk would quiver with the melodies of his name and the joys of his salvation. Before his name should cease to be praised by “the people,” Jehovah, his Father, would evoke all the powers of the universe, because he hath declared that “the people shall praise thee forever and ever.” Yea, he would raise to life every dead prophet and sleeping saint, gather the broken strings of every harp, reassemble every choir, call up from the dead past every lost song, and revive afresh all the melodies of the centuries and the anthems of the ages. He would touch all the golden strings of nature's great harp and fill them with the music of his name and the praises of his great Son. Think what it would require to erase his name. Every Bible must be burned. Every book, page, and tract that contains his name must be destroyed. Every church must be torn down. The tongue of every Christian must be hushed in death. Every Sunday-school must be banished and its songs annihilated. All the harps of heaven must be broken and all the angels destroyed. All the saints in heaven must be silenced in eternal muteness and the heavenly tabernacle of the most high left without a note of praise. David and Asoph, the sweet singers in Israel, must be brought up from their long repose, their hymns and songs gathered and burnt to ashes. What will you do with Milton and Watts, Toplady and Charles Wesley? Their songs will outlast the ages, and are to-day ringing around the globe, warming the hearts of believers, inspiring the laboring sons of God, and filling the world with joy and gladness. What will you do with the Te Deums of the ages and the melodies of the spheres? Before the name of Christ can cease to be praised, seraphs must lose their joys, angels their songs, and all the symphonies of the redeemed in heaven and on earth must be struck dumb with silence of the grave. Bards and prophets, philosophers and sages, must all be annihilated, and their names and songs and melodies wiped off the face of creation and erased from the annals of the ages. But man is a harp of a thousand strings. In his redeemed state this harp, with all its strings and scales, vibrates the name of Jesus Christ. His name fills all the sympathetic chords in the octaves of his soul and in the octachord of the nations and ages. We are taught in the Scriptures, that if men are repressed from praising the name of the great Redeemer, the stones would cry out. The idea is, Christ's name must be praised, for the word and promises of God must be fulfilled, and therefore, before his word is allowed to fail, he will make the stones praise the name of his great Son. Yea, my friends, before the promises of God can fail, he would give every rock a harp, every tree a song, every flower a melody, every hill a verse, every breath of ether a symphony, every sunbeam a carol, and every streamlet, river, sea, bay and gulf an anthem. He would fill heaven and earth with hymns whose choruses would praise the name of Jesus Christ. Stirred by the breath of God, the saints would arise from the dead, take up afresh the name of Jesus and thunder it through the vaulted mansions of the skies. The stars would hand it down, the moon would kiss it, and the sun would shine it through all the planets, while ethereal currents would waft it away, until “Arcturus, Orion, Pleiades and the Chambers of the South” would start all the celestial inhabitants of the “Milky Way” to the celebration in sublimest strains of the name of Jesus Christ.

But his name is to be remembered in all generations, in the sense of including all the nations of the earth. His name is to be as widespread as the human race itself. The millions of earth's inhabitants are to join in the universal jubilee and know the universal salvation. The wheels of commerce are to roll it along their iron highways. The steel-clad “grayhounds” of the seas, dancing on the foam-crested paths of interoceanic traffic, must bear his name to millions who have not yet learned all the verses of the mighty chorus. Cables that sleep on the pebbly bottom of the deep must hum the syllables of his name to China, Japan, Africa, Australasia, to the “Latin States” and the great islands of the seas. Telegraphy and Telepathy are his winged messengers that stand ready to do his biddings. These fly and dart at his command and quiver with the celebration of his name. Shall the praises of his name stop here? Nay, my friends, in heaven it shall be continued, while the millenniums shall roll on their eternal cycles. Moons may wane, suns change, stars perish, and the centuries burdened with the weight of events, may die, but his precious name will still be the theme of angels and all the redeemed children of God.

The text is designed to cover all those periods and dispensations of time through which and over which the Gospel kingdom should extend, and to cover those ages and arenas that compose its fields and areas of activity. In its organized capacity and character, the heavenly kingdom has its external and visible coalition of forces and its confederation of progressive and active entities and elements, as any other kingdom. Consecrated manhood with its wisdom, experience and achievements, makes up a great part of those factors that must always be an essential part of the visible body of the church of Christ. In one sense the church is a kingdom of men, since men must constitute its subject and present that plan of operation in which the splendid rule and power of the living Christ is manifest. But this part of the heavenly kingdom in which man is the active subject is but a part of the invisible and far-extended empire that covers the deep steps of the Infinite and that lives and acts upon the broader planes and the boundless spheres of being. On earth we only see and comprehend a diminutive phase of the power and majesty of that glory that lies in the beyond. It is only in the ages to come and in those wonderful transitions of power; goodness and grace that the whole kingdom of the Most High can be revealed. As creation rose by the touches and successive wonders of the hand of God, so His spiritual and visible empire must rise until the evolutions and relays of His hand “make all things new.” As creation had its incipiency—its first step and its first day—so the expanding “kingdom of heaven” has its beginning in the bosom of the children of men. Rising from the darkness of the past, like the first morning star of the oldest creation, it began its upward climb upon the ecliptic of the world's humanity in the shadows and mists of mental night. Though apparently slow, yet upward amid the din and roar, the hiss and clash of displaced elements of reigning sin and triumphant hell, the Son of God piles stone upon stone, arch upon arch, until golden turret and flaming spire gild the universal horizon with light and truth, and the majesty of His love. As all the stones in a building are cut, polished and fitted, so every one who becomes a member in this heavenly kingdom, must be changed by the operations of His grace, love and power, and made to fit his place in the heavenly temple. There must be a perfect harmony of parts with parts, and a perfect harmony of relations. There must be a homogenizing of heterogeneous parts, principles, natures and agencies with divine equanimity and the invisible fullness of Deity. There must be that plenitude of power and cohesiveness of elements to solidify all parts and immortalize the whole. This kingdom must be God-made and God-given. It must be like God.

But the text says: “Repent ye, therefore, and be converted.”

1. Repentance and conversion. In what do they consist? And why are they necessary? In the very nature of the laws of God, and in the very nature of man, repentance is absolutely and indispensably requisite. The illustrations in the above show the reasons why there must be a change in human nature before entering the kingdom of God. Not only do the Scriptures declare, but history, fact and experience declare, man to be a sinner, a woeful sinner, and therefore needs repentance and conversion that there may be a peace-offering and reconciliation between him and his God. Nothing can be done for human redemption and the peace and happiness of mankind unless there is some way, means, or plan by which man and God call be brought on terms of reconciliation. We are taught in the holy Scriptures, that “sin is the transgression of the law,” the violation of God's command, and the natural consequence is the punishment of death, “for the soul that sinneth shall die.” And this applies to all the intelligences of the universal empire of God, whether they be men or angels or any other rational creatures. If angels sin, they are cast down to hell and overwhelmed by the burning floods of death and darkness to await the judgment day of Almighty God. If man sins, then he also must be punished, because for every transgression and disobedience there must be a penalty attached, and as surely as there is a law to be obeyed or violated, there is of necessity, a penalty, a sure penalty, that will fall where it belongs, unless through mercy there is made a way for forgiveness. Mercy, therefore, is the gateway of man's escape from death or that punishment due his sins. Now, mercy is not an attribute of Deity. It is not a single inherent quality or part of God, but it is rather a combination or mingling of some of the attributes of Deity. It is an invention of God, to reach and save the lost. Wisdom, power, love, goodness and pity united and formed the splendid scheme of redemption, and selected the Son of God as the living embodiment of the divine combination. Hence, mercy is a harmonious combination of deistical elements so attuned and balanced that the universal diapason plays in unison in the government of God without friction. Every wheel and cord, every band and cog, with all the listening elements and obedient forces conspired to reach the ends of government, save the sinner, and “justify the way of God to man.” Therefore, the plan of salvation, is a plan of mercy, the best of schemes, the crowning work of God, and the divine ultimatum in the skill of government and the loftiest and the sublimest executive wisdom. Power was infinite and stood ready to create worlds or to execute the vengeance of God and spread his wrath upon the heads of the rebel compact, but power could not save the sinner. Love, the sweetest, the softest, the superlative attribute of God had no power to save the sinner. It had the will, the wish and desire, but had no means to reach the sinking culprit. The will of God was chained by the dictates of Justice who clamored for the death of the sinner. Omniscience, on his speedy wing of flame, swept the spheres, sounded the depths of space, weighed the elements in the balances of judgment, but could not reach the sinner. The Eternity of God, robed in the belted splendors of the cycles, with the dead centuries and the broken wheels and severed cables of the decades piled at his feet, spoke and said, “Nay.” But Love called a council of all the Attributes of God, and Wisdom said, “Let us form Mercy,” and at once all the splendid qualities, faculties and harmonies of Deity glittered around the shining center of Love and Goodness, and gave birth to divine Mercy, and then crowned her the Darling of God, the Queen of heaven and the conquering Mistress of the centuries. “Repent ye, therefore, and be converted,” that you may obtain this mercy, that is, be sorry for your sins, forsake them, “and do work of righteousness.”

2. But what is conversion? It is regeneration. The making of a new creature in Christ Jesus. It is a reformation or a work done in us by the Holy Spirit. It is the impartation of the divine nature to that of the human, and is instantaneous. Man repents, but God regenerates. The work of regeneration or conversion is, therefore, divine and superhuman. No man can regenerate, or recreate, or pardon sin. This is the work of God alone. Every pardoned soul must be conscious of it, he must know what the Lord hath done for him, otherwise he would be devoid of that knowledge that is essential to his keeping the law of God and living obedient to his commandments. This is the groundwork of salvation, the beginning of the kingdom of God in the hearts and lives of men. It is the essential badge and seal by which we enter the kingdom of God, both in earth and heaven. Sin expatriated man from the family of God, regeneration matriculates him, and brings him into naturalization with the government of God and the family of heaven. Hence, the Saviour says, “Ye must be born again,” that is, “born” from above, so as to reflect the perfect image of the invisible God. “If any man be in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature,” or a new creation.

3. Each regenerated soul is an image of God. This is “the restitution of all things” mentioned in the text. The declarations of God must be fulfilled. His word cannot return unto him void, but it must accomplish that whereunto he hath sent it. Every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess. Now, “the restitution of all things” is a process. It is the outgoing of the divine power, the manifestations of the truth of God in human life and in the ages of humanity. The ultimate design of the gospel system is the radical reconstruction of human nature, and consequently the predominant reign of the truth by organized Christianity. The things to be restored are the things lost. Christ came to save the world, to regain the long lost ones, and to reestablish God's ancient authority over the children of men.

The language of the prophet involves a deep concern respecting the Zion of God, the spread of the truth and the extension of an organized Christianity. Every true believer in the gospel of Christ, and especially every minister, should feel the same impulse and burning desire for the extension of the kingdom of Christ that glowed in the prophet's heart and flamed upon the prophet's tongue. It is a most healthy and significant fact that characterizes all the true children of God, that they have an ardent desire and a consuming zeal to spread the truth and make others feel, hope, and live as they do. The first impulse of the young Christian is to tell others that he has found the Christ of whom the prophets wrote, and who, in subsequent years died upon the cross to demonstrate and seal the truth of his mission and doctrine by his death. “Zion” and “Jerusalem,” are used as representative of the earthly city of God—the capital and metropolis of the Jewish theocratical kingdom. It was Jewish, because its subjects and inhabitants were of that race. It was theocratic because God was the only and legal King thereof. As a capital and metropolis, it represented more than its mere own existence and form of government. In the highest and fullest sense it represented a kingdom yet to come—a spiritual empire that should fill the whole earth with the glory of God in the triumph over sin and the salvation of universal man. “Zion” is the templed hill from which the divine word and laws should be issued for the government of man and the propagation of those edicts and stern decrees that claim the allegiance and obedience of all intelligent beings. For says the Scriptures, “The law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

1. Let us consider the spiritual “Zion” with Christ its reigning King.

We must repeat here the fact that Christ is the reigning and true king of Zion, though not reigning in a human or physical sense. In this sense, he does not appear in regal splendor and as dictator over the earthly affairs of men. As yet, he has neither throne, nor crown, nor earthly dominion. These are to come in his glorious future. For the physical earth and heavens, with all the elements and resources of endless nature, belong to Christ in as true a sense as the spiritual and invisible. The seen and the unseen, and even the unseeable, with all their tangible and intangible entities, are in the range of his touch and his controlling power. But for the present, and a specific time measured by centuries, his operative forces are those that lie in the field of spiritual power and that divine energy by whose formative and mysterious operations creation sprang into being and man into light and life. How long his reign is to continue spiritual and invisible as it is at present is a great and profound question that the great future alone can fully answer. But according to the Scriptures, he is to reign until “he hath put all enemies under his feet.” “Then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Again, says the Apostle, “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” So that from the Word of God we learn that the spiritual reign of Christ is restricted to the length of certain periods or centuries, when in some vital form the phase of his kingship shall be changed, or, in other words, “He shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father,” “that God may be all in all.” Christ will not cease to reign, no matter what may be the change or peculiar transformation of his spiritual and physical empire. Evidently, the Scriptures present to us at least two forms of his reign. The first form is purely spiritual and invisible, and is the formulative and transforming period of the human church state. This is the state in which we now live, familiarly known as “the gospel dispensation.” This gospel dispensation was fully developed on the day of Pentecost, when an organized Christianity became intensive and extensive by being endued with power from on high. This is the beginning of the mediatorial reign of Christ in the shape and capacity of a redeemer. This mediatorial reign is to continue to “the end” of the restricted period when he shall have finished the work of human redemption, in the destruction and overthrow of every foe and every opposing element and power that hinders the spread and success of the gospel system. Now, Christ is the Apostle and High Priest of our salvation under whose direction is the organized church, with its living ministry, with the silent, yet powerful spirit operating in the world, reproving “the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” The processes of the redemptive scheme to human conception seem slow, creeping along the paths and highways of the ages and the civilizations of man, contending with perverse human nature, and the obstructive forces of sin and Satan. Yet gradually and surely “the end” cometh when he shall put down all rule and authority —all organized forces, powers and elements—of wicked men and devils, and at “the end” of the prolonged struggle, Christ shall present to his Father the world redeemed and the finished church as a chaste virgin without spot or wrinkle.

In the wide realm of human thought there cannot be any questions of profounder concern than those involving the great and absorbing themes of life and death, and their fearful consequences. Life and death are the antipodes of our existence upon the face of the earth, and constantly appeal to our consideration of their great moment and awful concern. The tongue of man, the pen of the philosophic scientist, the rapt visions of seers, the songs of the Muses, and the anthems of angels cannot bring to the contemplation of man a greater theme, more engrossing or charming than that involved in the text. Indeed, it is not possible for the mind of man to dwell upon matters of more interest and deeper importance than that of life and death. Like a shock of electricity it flashes on every wire, plays upon everything and ramifies all the deep gorges and labyrynthian chambers of the moral, physical and mental man. It directs the thoughts and mind to those solemn realities, and those fascinating conditions and relations that meet him in the present, and await him in the endless future. It is worse than useless for man to attempt to reject those premonitory thoughts that open to his view the stern decrees of God, the Irresistible, the Inevitable. Life is the normal condition of man, death is the abnormal. Man was made for life, and not for death. He was made to live and not to die. Death is the result of sin and disobedience. It is condign punishment for crime committed against the majesty of heaven and the law of God. A state of perpetual felicity, with the faculty of progression and development is the law of his being and the object of his creation. This view is anticipated by the wonderful construction of his physical constitution. The upright bearing of his body, its symmetrical beauty and enchanting charms, the radiance of the sparkling eye and beauty of the glowing cheek, the wonders of the human foot, and the greater wonders of the human hand; the astounding miracles of the voice, the communication of thought and feeling by word, the towering mind, the massive, expansive, and versatile intellect, all present man as the masterpiece, the highest ideal of God's conception of all his earthly creations. Indeed he is the crowning architrave of heaven's architectural skill. By these high attributes of greatness he stands at the head of all earthly creations and sublunary wonders.

But the dignity of man is augmented and multiplied many times when we consider that ethereal spark and diviner subtle force which we call the soul. And this soul is the master of sovereign man.

Whatsoever the soul of man may be, as to its nature and functions and those peculiar powers enabling it to subsist apart from the body, it is the source, the foundation and spring of life. While the soul is not life itself, yet there can be no life without it. Thus the soul of man is the precious gem, the indestructible jewel “that keeps two worlds at strife”—the world of hell and the world of heaven. In fact, there is a constant and perpetual struggle between heaven and hell for this precious gem, this substantial, yet spiritual entity. Two spiritual powers —antipodal and antagonistic—assemble their aggressive and gigantic hosts in battle array upon the broad arena of every man's existence, and with jarring tread and heavy tramp of war, seek to lift the soul to heaven or cast it down to hell.

But there are many theories as to what the soul of man is, in its nature, attributes and origin. The materialistic theory is, that the soul of man is not a substance or reality, but a mere result of the combination of matter so attuned and refined as to produce results, and therefore, is not a thing with sensible properties in the sense that matter has properties. The manistic theory is substantially the same, in the final logical results, both denying the existence of spiritual substances in the Scripture sense. But the Scriptures declare that “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” This “living soul” in man, was created by the breath of God, a flame kindled within by the power of the Creator. We observe, too, that it is a distinct creation from that of the body, the two creations being distinguished by two separate fiat acts of power. He first made his body “of the dust of the ground,” and made his soul by “the breath of his lips,” so that both body and soul are creations proper, and not the mere result of any peculiar combinations of matter, so adjusted as to produce all the phenomena and wonders of the human mind. Then man has two parts, the mind or the soul, and the body. This makes man an ideality, in eternal entity. He cannot be more than he is, he will never be less as to the nature and number of his faculties. Time or eternity, condition or place, can never change the nature of man so as to make him anything other than he is—man.

The abolition of death is the hope of man.

This is the work of Christ; and Christ alone. He has abolished death, in the sense that death can do the believer no real harm. It is the abolition of that death that involves the punishment for sin and transgressions committed against God and the moral code of the universe. This abolition of death involves the forgiveness of sins, the reconciliation of God and man, and the redemption and salvation of all who come to Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world. Christ came as God's Interpreter, a heavenly Legate with plenipotentiary powers to make plain the will and laws of God to sinful and rebellious man. He uncovers the mystery of God that could not be explained by the wisdom, research, and learning of man so as to annul the power of death and take away its terrors. He does not come to destroy natural or corporeal death, but to remove the sting of death, and release us from punishment eternal, and give us joys everlasting. Hence, “he taught them as one having authority and not as the Scribes.” Death, then, is the first great foe to be overcome or destroyed. This was a work that all humanity combined could not do. It was not in the capacity of the dying to remove or destroy a power greater than itself, and there was no process or method known to mankind to remedy the defect or evade the results of sin. The sinner cannot heal himself of a spiritual malady that requires more skill and power than was in the sinner. Again, Christ has a complete knowledge of the state of man. He had the most perfect and minute comprehension of all those principles and elements that existed in man, and which had been disjointed and confused by transgressions and sins. Being man himself as well as God, he comprehends the remedy as well as the disease. To destroy death he must die himself, and to raise the dead, he himself must rise, and to break the force of the grave, he must enter its dark and cold precincts and tread the dark “valley of the shadow of death.” To save man, he must become man with all his pains, his sorrows, his tears and all those death agonies through which every man must pass. “For as much then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same, that through death, he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”

But what is death?

The author of this epistle is the Apostle Paul, who was, at that time, in the great city of Ephesus. He had spent nearly two years of his apostolic life in Corinth, at which place he had planted that important church, to whom this first epistle was addressed. Having lived in Corinth for nearly two years, and having become familiar with the people, he was peculiarly prepared to instruct them in all the doctrines, principles, and practices of the Christian religion. There was much in the church that was contrary to the plainest principles, doctrines, and precepts of Christ. Under these conditions, it became the imperative duty of the Apostle to correct those errors which were then prevalent in the Corinthian church. Parties and divisions had grown up among them, and schism and discord began to do great damage to them as followers of the meek and lowly Jesus. For those who recommended to the unbelievers the great truths of Christianity which they professed, should themselves show it by their well-ordered conduct. “Every one of you” says the Apostle, “saith, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.” Here we have four distinct parties in the Corinthian church. The first party was made up of those Christians that had been converted from Paganism. This was the St. Paul party. The second party or division was that of Apollos. These were made up of those who wanted to mix religion with Grecian philosophy, and engraft upon the Christian system those philosophical tendencies that then prevailed in Greece and Alexandria. The third party was for Peter. They favored the mixing of Judaism with Christianity. They thought that a little sprinkling of Judaism over Christianity would make the doctrine and precepts of Christ more acceptable to the unbelieving Jew. How much like our modern ritualistics. They are blind to the substance, but grasp at the shadow, and are content to live in the mere shade of the tree of Christianity without enjoying its wholesome fruits. The fourth party was for Christ. They wanted no leader but Christ. They seemed to have thought that Paul, Apollos, and Cephas had transcended the powers delegated to them by Christ, and, therefore, it would seem best to them to throw off and discard their authority. Some of our modern religious partisans still retain this fourth party spirit. Extremes are dangerous, especially when driven by the storms of partisan interests. When we follow men, we should follow them only as they follow Christ. When they cease to follow Christ it is the part of wisdom, and will add to our happiness and peace to leave them to themselves. Paul, Apollos and Cephas were all servants—ministers of the word. They could sow and plant, and they could dig the soil and cast in the seed, and water, but Christ alone must give the increase. How different is this from the Corinthian idea of propriety! Corinth was a place noted for its learning, wisdom, and erudition, but it was “the wisdom of men.” It consisted in philosophizing upon those wonderful and profound subjects that belong alone in the province of Revelation, into whose mysterious precincts none but God can enter. The city was renowned for its wealth, luxury and refinement, as well as for its learning and the ingenuity of its citizens. Equally noted and attractive was the magnificence of its buildings. Splendid palaces, theaters, elegant temples, and other public buildings, beautified and adorned with the greatest architectural skill, rose to the height of sublime altitudes in every part of the city. Statues, columns, capitals, and bases, were the pride of the inhabitants, and the admiration of strangers. The citadel was built upon a mountain which overlooked the city, and was called “Acro-Corinthus.” The temple of Neptune, celebrated for having a thousand slaves, or prostitutes, devoted to licentiousness and the lewdness of the people, had its influence upon the morals of the Christian Church, and gave it lax ideas respecting the true spirit, nature, and practice of the precepts of Christianity. As Corinth was celebrated for its marvelous schools of philosophy and rhetoric, it was easy for the church to suppose that the great truths of the gospel should at least be clothed in the magnificent paraphernalia of philosophical and rhetorical diction. The sciences and the arts were carried to such great perfection, that Cicero terms it, “The light of all Greece.” Florus called it “The adornment of all Greece.” When we take a survey along the centuries of Grecian life and civilization, taking in the city of Corinth as the best specimen of that civilization, we form some conceptions of the true character of its being and life. While looking into the social, civic, and religious life, two things are particularly prominent, and that is, that learning and licentiousness, both great in degree and kind, should be so closely wedded, and go hand in hand, amid great learning and social refinement. In other words, it is remarkable, how, under the influence of so much learning, that there should continue to exist so much debauchery among its learned and intelligent inhabitants. The temple of Neptune, situated in the central part of the city, with its thousand vile prostitutes, threw its dreadful and polluting contagion over the whole of that populous and proud city, contaminating the entire social state. Strangers from all parts came to her as to a mart of science, law, and art, and likewise fell under the moral plague that was then destroying their great civilization. Splendid orators, magnificent public speakers, made the great halls of the theaters ring with powerful eloquence upon theories of science, law and art. Symphonious notes of the muses and melodies of the spheres, throbbed and thrilled the enchanted souls of the spectators, and wrapt and ravished their spirits in visions of pleasure and ecstasies of delight. Situated on an isthmus between two seas, she became a great commercial emporium, and in consequence of which her merchants became princes, and her people opulent, while luxuries poured in and held universal sway, bringing with them that ease and fulness of bread which accompany a debased, profligate, and declining civilization. Taking this view of the subject, how reasonable and appropriate it was for St. Paul, being fully acquainted with Grecian life and the errors and the weakness of Grecian philosophy, to exhort: “Your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

1. The wisdom here spoken of is called “the wisdom of this world,” “the wisdom of men.” This wisdom consists in the theories and the philosophical reasonings that obtained in the Grecian schools respecting those things that can be only subjects of Revelation. The rules that govern it, the subjects discussed and the conclusions reached by the unaided faculties of man, are “of this world” in contradistinction to the wisdom of God set forth in the Scriptures of truth. The mere term, wisdom, is of great latitude, and includes the wise application of knowledge so used as to reach and accomplish the best ends. Wisdom and knowledge are often used interchangeably, when, in truth, they are two distinct things. Knowledge is to know, or understand the relation of things, while it is the province of wisdom to select the best means to accomplish the best ends. In the Scriptures it often means “right judgment and feeling” respecting “religion and moral truth.” “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” (Job XXVIII. :28.) A man may have a great deal of knowledge and yet be imprudent, impractical, and unwise. He may see the ends to be reached, but how to reach them he cannot tell. Knowledge hews the rough stones for the building, wisdom piles the whole into a majestic temple of beauty and symmetrical proportions. Knowledge is the prepared materials, wisdom is the house built and made ready for habitation. But “the wisdom of men” here spoken of may mean any system or code of ethics, or moral philosophy, taught by “the wise and prudent” of this world, and in this particular case, has reference to the systems of religion and philosophy that then prevailed in Alexandria and the Grecian cities.

2. There is a profuse religious tendency existing in the moral nature of man that cannot be smothered or eradicated. Its voice is stentorian, continuous and electrifying in spite of the wickedness of his heart. It is a part of him—an element of his moral stamina. It is natural for him to be religious, and unnatural for him to be irreligious, and he comes nearest to occupying his original and ancient relation with his Creator, when he is worshiping God in spirit and in truth. Since the fall of man, this relation can only be attained by the atonement of Christ and the plan of reconciliation instituted by him. Since man is a sinner, and has departed from God by his own chosen way, he must, if ever he does, return to God according to God's plan, for except God directs his return, he can never get back again to enjoy the smiles of his countenance and the warm sunshine of his love. He is a worshiping being, and an adoring servant. He will seek and give his affections and esteem to some real or supposed supernatural being, whether such be real or imaginary. He has adoration to give; to whom shall he give it? He has petitions to be presented; to whom shall he present them? He has sorrows, pains, and grievances to be redressed; to what power or authority shall he present them? He has a heart and a whole nature to give; to whom shall he give them? He has an eternity to spend; with whom shall he spend it? Some one has the property right in man, and it is the design of revelation to direct him through the meshes and labyrinthian windings to his rightful Lord and legitimate Master—God.

The insufficiency of human wisdom to make the world wise unto salvation, appears in its efforts and nature, and in the fact that it has always proved a failure to supply the moral and spiritual necessities of the human kind. We are taught that “the world by wisdom knew not God.” It could not attain unto the Most High. Such wisdom was too great for the world to discover and digest to the satiety and satisfaction of the hungry soul of man. Nothing can be more important to man than his eternal destiny and spiritual interests. The philosophy of the schools and the wisdom of the wise and prudent utterly incapable of managing the moral and spiritual interests of the human race, and in such things the wisest of men have made the greatest blunders. In the midst of so many religious proclivities, it would amount to the greatest catastrophe to commit the world's spiritual, moral, and religious interests to the vague, subtle and unreliable theories of human devices and philosophical calculations; besides there are a thousand reasons why our “faith should not stand,” or depend upon “the wisdom of men, but in the power” or capacity “of God,” “who is able to save to the uttermost” every sinning and repenting child of Adam.

3. Religion is man's avocation. It is his chief work on earth, and there is nothing for him to do in the great world to which he must go, but to worship and adore that Supreme Being who is the author of his existence, and by whose power and will he will be perpetuated through the endless cycles of his being. The highest designs of his creation, the inspiring and noblest ends of his personal entity and eneffaceable identity, fit him for the place of eternal service in the ever expanding phalanxes of the worshiping and the adoring hosts. His nature—the attributes and faculties of his being— cannot fulfill their functions and operate in their legitimate sphere if he is otherwise engaged. He is made for, and suited to worship, and when in true devotion to God alone, it is the only possible relation which he may sustain to the Creator and the universe for the development and highest evolutions and possibilities of his being. Time and place, and even the mode of his existence cannot nullify these natural, organic, God-given and eternal relations between the Creator and the created. The modes and methods of his service to God do not touch the indissoluble bands that hold him in eternal relation to his Maker and preserver. Lost spirits with changed state and conditions are still the servants of God in the sense that they still belong to him, and are a part of his kingdom and dominion; because, in a high and important sense, they still glorify the great Creator by demonstrating to the universe the justness of their punishment and the equity of his government. Even in their state of sin and rebellion they not only feel the power and wrath of God, but they must admire, if not adore, that inexorable fiat of justice and equity that sent the rebel hosts pell-mell into hell. His justice is as great as his goodness. He is infinite in both. And the goodness of God is as wonderfully demonstrated in the punishment of the finally disobedient as it is in the saving and the protection of the obedient; for when the sinner —be he man or spirit—is punished for crime, the interests of the intelligent universe are protected thereby and the executive God is vindicated in himself and by the judgment of his moral creatures. The great end of creation is the glorification of its creator, and this object can best be attained when the physical and moral elements are coerced into line and made to reach their original designs. Of course God loves all his creatures. He takes no pleasure even in the death and punishment of the wicked. But since they are wicked and disobedient to the laws of God, his own love of order and righteousness demands that force and restraining power be exercised to preserve the union and peace of his empire. This is to be done at all hazards and in any sphere of the universe where there are sins and outbreaks against the laws of God. All intelligent beings are necessarily and constitutionally religious, because wherever such creatures or beings exist, their existence is dependent upon a higher and pre-existent being. Since their existence depends upon a pre-existent being, they must be under certain laws known to them as the product of a higher power. Intellect carries with it the conceptions of the rule of actions and its author as the giver of that rule of action. None can live in absolute ignorance of God since they are in contact with tangible objects and mental conceptions, both of which can only lead up to the Creator, in a greater or less degree. The heavens declare his glory, and his invisible parts are seen in the creation of the world; yet the wisdom of man, unaided by the light of the Bible, cannot find out God to perfection, or in those details and degrees of his will and nature to that extent that is necessary to approach him in a manner that is most conducive to his glory and the happiness of man.

4. “That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” That is, we must not rest our hope of salvation upon the philosophy, the theories and conclusions of men, no matter how wise, learned, or erudite they may be, because after all they would be certain to be in error respecting the most important things that can possibly enter the mind and being of man. In short, in the very nature of things, if we would be saved, we can only be saved by a reliance and trust in the atonement of Christ and the mercy of God.

Christianity begins and reaches its ends in faith, because “it is impossible to please God” without faith, for “he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” Again, says the Apostle, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is that belief and trust which brings us to God, and causes us to live according to the precepts of Christ and his Apostles. It implies: (1) That the teachings and doctrines of Christ are true; (2) That since they are true a reliance or a trust in them for salvation, through Christ, as the atoning Saviour of men, is true faith, or that faith that saves. The fruits of faith are the inner consecration of man to Christ and his teachings, and a consistent life in the world. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” says the Saviour; for if there be no fruits there cannot be any true faith, or that faith that saves. Faith, then, is necessary to human salvation, since, say the Scriptures, without it, “it is impossible to please God.” The grounds and reasons for faith are in the very nature of man and God. God is necessarily a spirit—an incomprehensible and indivisible substance. He is intangible in spirit and essence, and consequently cannot be grasped by the human mind in any possible state or condition in which the mind of man may be placed. He always was, and is, and always will be the incomprehensible Jehovah, and when the disembodied spirits of men shall ascend the scales of a thousand billions of rolling cycles in their advancive and serial development, they—the mind of man or angels—will never reach that stage in their intellectual evolutions where they might become familiar with the Infinite. He is the intangible, the unknowable, the immeasurable essence of all space and time. He is so near, yet he dwells in an infinity so vast, deep and broad, that no lofty creature's thought has ever descended to his depth, measured to his height, or crossed the seat of his high and holy place. To what degrees the intelligent mind of a creature may know the Creator in the onward wake of mental progression, is an unknown quantity in the cycles of endless ages. The question itself is astounding and overpowering. It is the unthinkable part of eternal progression. Its endless threads of evolutions and translations are ungatherable and hide in the unzoned and nameless future. How then shall men or angels or any, draw near to God? How shall they reach the unreachable and know the unknowable? How shall they approach unto the dwelling-place of the Most High? “Not by might nor by power, but by” faith. On its bright pinions we can soar along the great outlines of his ineffable parts, cut through the clouds of darkness and doubt and sit down under “his banner of love” in his bright abode.

But man himself needs faith. What is impossible to knowledge, wisdom, and philosophy, is possible to faith. Human wisdom is what we do for ourselves, but faith does for us, through God, what we cannot do for ourselves.

5. This faith must stand “in the power of God,” and not “in the wisdom of men.” “The power of God” is his ability or capacity to do, and to execute his will, and fulfill his pleasure. Nothing is of greater pleasure to the Almighty than the salvation of sinners, and the redemption of that part of his intelligent offsprings that have violated his laws and rebelled against the government of heaven. The moral “power of God,” (or those convincing and persuasive methods which he has adopted) shows that man has the power of choice, the ability to accept or reject any proposition laid down by the Almighty. This, of course, makes man largely responsible for his own salvation, since he cannot be saved unless he does as God commands, and comply with those requirements set forth in the gospel system. In the nature and fitness of things, the gospel system presents for man's acceptance the only possible plan of salvation, and to stand aloof, or go outside of that plan, leaves him in a state and condition where divine mercy cannot reach him. Christ is the only Saviour of men, the only gateway to God, to heaven, and reconciliation, and all must come through or by this way if they be saved at all. Hence “he tasted death for every man;” that is, he has prepared the way for the salvation of all whether they accept it or not. Not only has he made provision for the salvation of all men, but has made it most ample, full, and free. And in the wisdom and plenitude of this provision, the worst of rebels and “the chief of sinners” can be saved.

“The power of God” here spoken of, is not mere physical, arbitrary force, that acts upon the material world with propellent and repellent forces, but is that capacity that inheres in the Divine Being by which he sustains those of his offsprings that obey his law and “keep his commandments.” When we “keep his commandments,” then he engages his infinite and exhaustless resources to “save to the uttermost” all who “call on the name of the Lord.” “The power of God,” then is the foundation upon which the man of God hangs the cable of hope and the threads of his salvation. These are strong, uniting God and man together in the strong bands of his love and power, forming a spiritual compact of harmonious relations, unanticipated by the wisdom of man and unknown to the philosophical research of the schools and the keenest conception of the wise men of the ages. Many have established themselves upon their own wrought systems of religious thought, while ignoring the truth of God, that great system of Divine Revelation which presents to men the only solution of the mighty problems of life and death, of the present and the future. Everywhere, the power of God is exhibited in his works as the wonderful and all-resourceful governing creator. “The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom ruleth over all;” over all things in the visible, invisible, and the spiritual divisions of the universe, from the highest heaven to the deepest hell. Creation in its marvelous amplitude, with its contending and extending forces of precipitant elements, is held in space and place by “the word of the Lord,” and the invincible fiat of his power. He is the coercive God that throws around rebellious planets, broken systems, and sinking suns, his golden arm of power, and adamantine peripheries of hardest and unyielding bands of steel, triple-decked and serrated with mountains of flint and valleys of flame. At his command, shattered suns, corroding orbs, and dead planets mount from their “funeral pyre on wings of flame” and sing on their eternal rounds as fiery arrows from the bow strings of God. From his hand a thousand moons, the pale princesses of a thousand worlds, dazzle into space, kiss the hem of burning circumferences and fly on their cold silver tracks in the unfathomable bosom of space. God speaks again, they hear, skip, leap, and move along their bright curves forever, the maid-servants of radiant orbs, the sisters of kings and the daughters of God. But this is a changing universe with an unchanging God. Eternal ages corrode and melt the hardest bands of steel, break asunder every cable, shatter every cog and bolt, take off the rim of every wheel, destroy every connecting link, crush in the keel of every floating world, blow out the fires of every orb, unhinge every star, dim the lustre of every sun, cut the wings of every comet, cast down every moon from her silver track, put out the fires of heaven, and take the lights from every soaring beamy car, and every sparkling gem from heaven's high dome, and every glittering pearl from the unmeasured palace of God. Yet he is king over all.

But high above the crash of “the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds,” the mighty God, whose “kingdom ruleth over all,” maintains his power, keeps his own in perfect peace in his bright abode, in a clime whose elements and entities and component properties are incapable of dissolution and decay. Amid the transition of matter and the clashing of diverse elements and forces “the power of God” is pledged to keep him in perfect peace whose mind is staid on him. “Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.” These are the blessed words of the Christ. Oh! brethren, your faith should stand, not in “the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

The gospel of Christ is a system of divine ethics. Its philosophic and fundamental principles are few and simple, and it has its claims upon the attention and consideration of mankind, because it affects his happiness in the present and for all time to come. It is a system reared upon few pillars, yet these are but the stronger and more enduring and far-reaching because of their foundation and simplicity. It is not a mass of unintelligible enigmas whose intricacies cannot be understood or explained; but it is simple, convincing, comprehensive teaching, fitted to instruct, elevate and save the race of man. Its scope embraces the moral code of the universe in its governmental theory and practice, and is a transcript and photograph of its moral phases. The system, as such, is presented to our judgment, and appeals to our reason, and then demands our faith in its Author and in its doctrines. Faith is essential to its acceptance and fair consideration, for “without faith it is impossible to please God.” It is a system that breathes “the spirit of life from God,” and quickens and brings into lively play all its parts, spirit and elements of that life. It defines the moral faculties, and locates God and man in their native and true relations. As a code of morals, it is best understood when we examine its separate parts and primary principles, and observe those results that flow from its practice. It has three great properties— morals, doctrines, and faith. We can have no proper conception of any ethical code without its elements and primary principles. These compose the bone and framework upon which sinew, flesh and skin are laid, and then the purple current of life is seen to ramify, vivify and dance through every part, diffusing light and activity and filling its spheres with God. If we would be the devotees of any system of religion, we must first partake of its spirit, become imbued with its life, learn its idioms, dogmas, and demands. The life and power of the one must be infused into the life of the other, and then the outlines of our life and character must accord with the spirit and teachings of the same, otherwise we cannot be true disciples of the system. To meet the spiritual necessities of the devotees, the system must not only be true as to its real existence, but must be true within itself. Its promises, doctrines, and predictions must rest upon truth in such a manner as to bring sure and certain realization to its followers and adherents, and thereby verify itself as true. If there is a failure here, all else is failure, intrigue and irreparable loss. This position is more apparent when we think of the stupenduous fact that it may promise more than it can verify. That is, it may promise us heaven and give us hell. It may promise us life and give us death; promise good, and give us evil instead. It may pierce the heart with a thousand pangs of demons, and pour into the soul the poison of asps and the venom of serpents, and leave the soul with blasted hope and withered spirit. For instance, Mohammedanism is a system of error mixed with truth and gilded with glittering promises that it cannot fulfil; yet it is a fact that such a thing as the system of Mohammedanism does exist, but its existence or power to be does not prove that its doctrines, dogmas and idioms are true. Yet it has the same persuasive effect upon the mind, life and civilization of its millions of votaries as the system of Christianity has upon its followers. Both obtain their hold and power over their respective followers upon the same principles of faith, theory and practice. The one is as conscious that his religion is true as the other, notwithstanding the one is false and the other true. Because of these conditions the followers of Mohammed are as devoted to their religion as the followers of Christ are devoted to theirs. If a man believes a thing to be true, when at the same time it is false, the same devotion and earnest faith is given to it as if it were true. Therefore, a system of religion does not destroy the faith and devotion of its candid believers, whether true or false within itself. How important then it is that a system of religion, presented to the world of man for his faith and practice, should be true in itself, and true in its promises, predictions and realizations. We need not enter here upon the divine originality, truth and authenticity of the Christian system. Its reasonableness, its powers, nature, and adaptations to meet the spiritual needs and the practical necessities of mankind in all ages and conditions, are a sufficient refutation of the infidel and those who doubt its truth. Mankind will seek only that that they believe to be, and such exertion depends upon faith and hope and realization. Faith is the connecting link between God and man, between heaven and earth, between the visible and invisible, between the finite and infinite. By this we see the unseen, and approach the unapproachable. It brings us to God; it brings God to us. It humanizes God without making him less God, and deifies man without making him more than man. Christianity then is more than a name, more than a theory, more and greater than even faith and practice. It is a revolution, a transformation, and a process of redemptive restoration, by which man is evolved from and out of himself, to, and into God. This redemptive restorative process not only changes the moral status between man and God, but imparts to man a new life, a new nature, and the infusion of the Deity himself. If, then, we would be Christians, we must go farther than a mere profession, a mere assent to and practice of the formulas of the religion of Jesus. My friends, without the work of God in the soul, there can be no true, vital, spiritual and soul-saving Christianity on earth. True, we may read its history, memorize its language, repeat its dogmas, and chant its melodies and shout with its heroes, yet there are depths and heights, lengths and breadths, still farther on in the great redemptive, restorative process, which by mere formalities can never be attained. Still farther on, beyond sky-blue tops of the cloud-covered mountains and the deep gorges of repentance, are the sacred precincts of a perfect salvation. We cannot be half Christian and half alien. We must be the one or the other. In the shining phalanx of the living God, there are no mongrel progeny, half-breeds and cross-bloods, but all are shaped in the same heavenly mold, and healed by the same cleansing blood. In this earthly pilgrimage of song, there are no mutes, no unstrung harps, or silent choristers. You must sing the enchanting melodies of heaven, or the bacchanalian songs of sin, moving up to heaven, or moving down to death. There are no neutral grounds in this great warfare, but fight you must. And you must fight for God, and against the devil, or fight for the devil and against God. Two kings cannot reign upon one throne; neither can God and Satan reign in the same heart, for they are antagonistic and antipodal principles. If ever in the onward wake of the ages the world shall ever be redeemed from the thraldom of sin and darkness, it can only be accomplished by the gospel of system. Christ alone supplies all the wants and necessities of man in this and in the future state.

The Jewish people are a standing miracle and living attestation to the truth and Divine authenticity of the holy Scriptures. They are the most peculiar and most remarkable people that have ever lived upon the face of the earth. God selected them from all the idolatrous nations of the earth to serve him, and to preserve the oracles of truth as delivered to them from time to time. Amid the moral and mental darkness that covered the earth, the Israel of God had light from heaven to guide them in the way of truth and moral rectitude, and in this respect the Jew served a great end in the salvation of mankind, though this “peculiar people” has been scattered, and its polity broken into a thousand fragmentary parts. Their kings reign no longer. Their temple hill is desecrated by the Mosque of Omar and the abomination of the Mohammedans. They have been driven by the storms of persecution into every land and clime, from the cold north to the torrid south, and from the orient to the occident. The Jew lives with every nation, but mixes with none; and under all the varied conditions that have tried him through the ages, he maintains his identity and is still what he was three thousand years ago—a Jew. Though his people have been despised, rejected and slain by the hundreds and thousands, and their blood has flowed down the declivities of the ages; though aspersions, calumnies, and vile indignities have been poured in fury upon their heads, still he lives amid them all—a Jew. The Jew can trace his historical pedigree through the fleeing circles of the ages and the dispensations of the past. The storms and howling tempests have rained hailstones upon his quivering bark for three thousand years. Empires have arisen, kings have reigned, states have grown up, towered and fallen, hoary dynasties have been broken upon the wheel of time, great rivers have changed their beds and have cut their pathway through the hardest rocks, filling seas and gulfs with their drifting matter. In the wake of the ages and the march of time, the bodies of the millions have fallen, and their bleaching bones and “cities of the dead” tell the sad story of death. The tall cedars of Lebanon, and proud oaks of Bashan, have withered by the blight of age; still the Jew is the same. He has outlived the ages, outlived the ravages of war and persecutions. He has lived through flood and flame, through famines, pestilences, endemics and epidemics. Like the Gulf Stream, he flows on in his own channel without mixing with contacting elements, whether they be Japhetic or Hamitic. They are God's ancient people—the repository of the oracles of truth—and he will punish the world for the slain of his chosen Israel. In the economy of Providence he stands as a gigantic tower of strength to attest the truth and the Divine authority of Revelation. This is the standing memorial of Christianity and the miracle of the ages. Infidelity may rage and vent its keen shafts of spleen against the ramparts of God, but here is a truth whose impregnable parts stand the rage of the enemy and the assaults of hell.

“Then, one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Let us observe then, three reasons why we should love God: (1) Because he commands us to love him. (2) Because we cannot be happy without loving him. (3) Because he first loved us.

We should love God (1) Because he commands us to love him.

God is a sovereign. He has the undivided authority to command all creatures in earth, heaven and hell to do his biddings—to do or not to do certain things. He possesses the unquestionable right to dictate to the consciences of men and all intelligent beings. It does not affect the case whether we understand the reasons why or not. These may be given, or they may not be given. They may be positive moral commands or mere edicts of the king immortal, yet if they are from him and apply to us, we cannot disregard them without condign punishment and destruction to our happiness. As a Father, Master and Ruler, he commands. As a Father, we are his children; as a Master, we are his servants, and as a Ruler we are his subjects. Whether he speaks to us as Father, Master or Ruler we are his subjects and are bound to obey. We may not know at all times why he commands this, that, or the other. To know this is the province of the sovereign God, and not the province of his subjects. With consequences and results we have nothing to do; these belong to God alone. Christianity is a temple of truth of sublime proportion and changeless principles, whose stones have been hewn and polished by the hands of God, and placed in glorious beauty and symmetry one upon another in ascending scales and eternal harmony. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” is the changeless and faultless command—changeless because founded upon the equity, the justice and will of the Creator. “The law of the Lord is perfect.” Nothing can be added to it or subtracted from it. There can be no review, supplement, nor second edition, nor amendments. It “is perfect” in all its parts, parcels, and ramifications. His “statutes are right” in their native and constitutional inherent qualities. True, they are the dictations of a Sovereign, yet they are none the less righteous and equitable within themselves, since they involve the “eternal fitness of things.” Thus we should love God—(2) Because we cannot be happy without loving him. This is axiomatic. We have every evidence that the race of man was made to be happy, that the Creator originally designed that all his intelligent offspring should remain in such a state, and pursue those lines of avocation that would redound to his glory and the greatest degree of their perpetual well-being. Consequently, happiness is the natural and universal desire of the human race. This also applies to all sentient and intelligent creatures, whether they be men or angels, and it may not be going too far, when we assert that even devils and lost spirits would repent and regain their lost estate and revert to bliss, if they could. Misery and pain must be utterly at war with the feelings and desires of all intelligences, no matter in what part of the universal dominion they may live. Even the lower animals and the non-intelligent parts of creation, give evidence that show that they have the instinct of happiness impressed upon their nature. The worm of the dust wriggles beneath our tread; the wild beasts of the forest flee at the approach of man, and the finny tribes of the deep elude his presence; all have some natural means of defense and exercise a vigilance that shows their apprehension of danger. They fear death because of the pain and misery that is connected with it. If this is true respecting the non-intelligent, it is so in a larger degree among those who are “made in the image of God.” Man desires happiness. It is the natural prompting of his heart and the proclivity of his being. The Creator made him to live, and not to die; he made him to be happy, and not to be miserable. The faculties of the mind, the attributes of the soul, the construction and ease and grace of the operations of the physical and perceptive attributes are splendidly fitted to promote his peace, ease and comfort upon the plane of his being. It has been very properly said, that “death is a foreign foe,” an alien and an unlawful invader into the kingdom of life, except as man forfeited the protection of God by his rebellion and the violation of those laws and uncompromising principles upon which alone his continued prosperity depends. If we would be happy and fulfil the natural proclivities of our nature—as it was originally intended—we must obey the laws of God, “and keep his commandments.” If the subjects of earthly governments cannot be happy without obedience to the laws under which they live, much less can we be happy without obedience to those laws and changeless rules that the all-wise and supreme Creator has prescribed as the norm of action laid down for us. The end of law, therefore, is the glory of God in the happiness of his creatures. One of the plainest things in the world is the fact that no intelligent being can be happy when he is violating the principles in the universe by which alone it is possible to reach the goal of bliss. The Christian system presents to the world the only foundation of substantial peace and enduring bliss, because there can be no such thing without reconciliation with God. Whether in heaven, on earth, or in any other place in illimitable space, the same principles and facts must apply with undiminishing and equal force to all localities and beings. God is God, truth is truth, love is love, and fear is fear. Time or place or conditions cannot alter or change these. Truth on earth is truth in heaven and in hell. Christianity, therefore, is not the religion of men on earth only, but is the only true God-serving and God-adoring system that can exist, because it absorbs all those great underlying principles of love, obedience, and truth upon which the government of the Almighty is founded. No, my friends, there is but one remedy in all the wide domain of God for human misery and human recovery from sin and death, and that is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” It is not possible for any intelligent creature to be happy without Christianity. Let a man be placed in the most propitious condition possible in this life, yet he would be unhappy without the love of God and man. He may recline upon couches of down with ivory posts, studded and bedecked with rarest gems and precious jewels and hung with the richest damasks of the east, while frescoed walls and fluted columns ascend in awful grandeur, covered with gold and glinted with silver. Let him eat the lambs of the flock and feed upon the fat of stall-fed beasts. Let his steeps be washed in butter, and his teeth be white with milk. Let his maidens sing, and with sweetest voice and dulcet strains of harp and organ lull their enchanted lord to soft slumbers. Let him be a king upon a royal throne whose empire covers a continent with teeming millions to do his biddings. Let him be secure from fear and danger and the ramparts of his rocky castle be defended by the invincible legions of the Cæsars and the Napoleons. Let his granaries be filled, his wealth boundless, and his cattle cover a thousand hills, feeding upon the living green, richer in beauty than all the productions of the Persian looms. Let him in the splendors of courts quaff to uttermost satiety the cup of pleasure. Let obsequious millions bow the knee to honor and admire their great Lord and master. Let annalists with pen in hand and ink horn by their sides stand to record the words of wisdom and the mighty acts of the king. Yet with all this, and more, he cannot be happy without the love of God, and the power of the religion of Jesus. For amid all this marvelous wealth, honor and greatness, there is an accusing or excusing monitor—conscience—within that tells him that he is a sinner going to death and to hell. “The wicked fleeth when no man pursueth” and “are like the rough sea when it cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and dirt.” Nay, there is no place, no real substantial happiness and peace without God in the soul, Christ in the heart and life, and the whole man converted, changed, and thoroughly consecrated to God, and separated from the pollutions of the flesh, and the contaminations of the world. How can you escape or set at naught these obligations? How can you or I throw off the yoke of God and evade the momentous issues? Go, take the flight of the eagle to his lofty aerie, and build your secret chamber in the highest cleft of the granite peak, and dwell solitary and alone out of the reach of your fellows. Leave your feet in the cloud and stand upon the celestial pyramid with careless indifference as to human affairs, yet without Christ in the soul there is a burning hell within that is incompatible with peace and ease of conscience. Even in heaven, were it possible for the sinner to be carried there, he could not be happy without the love of God, because he could not enjoy the glory and pleasures of the redeemed and sanctified. There congenial spirits meet in the raptures of redeeming love to celebrate in lofty anthems the praises of God and the Lamb, saying, “Amen.” Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be unto our God forever and ever, amen. And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, “What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?” And I said unto him, “Sir, thou knowest.” And he said unto me, “These are they which came out of great tribulations and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Here are the congregated millions of congenial spirits. They “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” They have passed through “great tribulations,” swept through the zones of life's fiery trials, entered the city of the great king, wrapped in the shining robes of beauty and clothed in the bright habiliments of eternal salvation.

(3) We should love God because he first loved us.

“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.” What a lofty title is this, and yet it is true—“The sons of God!” John says, “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us.” But “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him, should not perish but have everlasting life.” “He first loved us,” with that love that stirred his heart and moved his arm of power. But man is a sinner. He is wretched, vile and polluted, lost, ruined and broken by the fall. An outcast alien under just condemnation. A smiling heaven and a laughing paradise receded from his vision, since God, the gracious Father, was offended. Epochs and dispensations rolled on, chronicling the rise, growth and death of ages and nations. Darker and blacker grew the mental and moral night of the world, and as man multiplied sin did much more abound. Now and then a meteor flashed across the dark hemispheres, and here and there altars glowed and priests officiated. The ages, old and gray, traveled slowly down the declivities of time and space until the dying Jacob heard the rumbling of Messiah's chariot wheels, caught the whispers of his coming and the flash of his eye. When he said, “I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord,” he spoke the sentiment of universal humanity. But the law must be given and the foundation of the Jewish polity of types and shadows must be laid, and its superstructure reared, and the blood of sprinkling must antedate the blood of cleansing. Jehovah descended from heaven in clouds and flaming fire. The trumpet's awful blasts and the jarring appeals of thunder announce the awful presence of God in his kingly majesty. Onward, in appaling grandeur descends his chariot of flame. Louder, longer, and louder still, swells the high trump of God. Israel looks up and the heavens are dark with sable bands and thick clouds. Lightning sparkles in fantastic and vivid glare, and play upon the burning waves of the air, as if the atmosphere in chaos trembled under the mighty tread of Deity. The legislative God descends, the earth quakes and an empire of solid granite dances beneath his feet, while wreathing columns of smoke mingled with flame are the curtains of his sanctuary. The walls of the royal sanctuary were amber flames, fanned by the swift moving wings of mighty seraphs and great archangels, attending the royal presence. And so terrible was the sight that Moses said, “I exceedingly fear and quake.” “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” The law could not save. Jesus alone can do that. He loved us first and pointed out his soul unto death. See him as he lays aside his crown, his kingly scepter, his robe, and the glory of heaven for you, for me, and for all the sinning race of Adam. O, come to Jesus and be saved. Why not? Hath he not loved you? Did he not give himself for you? O, ye sons of Adam, arise, stand up and flee the coming wrath of God. O, praise his name, ye his saints!

When we contemplate the history of man and view him in his physical, moral and spiritual relations and conditions, and then compare his nature and career with the dealings of Divine Providence and the requirements of Revelation, we must admit that there is “an enemy” strong and mighty, cosmopolitan, universal and profound in his operations, affecting every age, people, and individual. Whether we stem the tide of the rolling ages and ascend the stream of time, or take our stand upon some lofty eminence of the present dispensation, and view the whole circle of earth's teeming humanity, the same verdict will be reached by the impartial mind in regard to the existence and work of an enemy in human society. His name is carved on every brow, his hand hath touched every heart, his image is stamped on every soul, and his footprint is in every land, and his blood-curdling banner floats over every stream and on the rolling waves of every sea. All along through the ages, malevolence, destruction and the utter subversion of human happiness have characterized his diabolical designs and distinguished his mighty operations. He it is who hath sowed tares among the wheat and corrupted the whole field of the moral spheres. Who can count the millions slain by him, or number the carcasses of the bleeding victims and the fallen tribes? What stream can contain the tears of the heart-broken and sorrow-stricken? Behold! men count the stars, number the planets, measure the sidereal heavens, traverse the wilderness, pierce the profundities of earth's deep bosom and weigh the mountains in scales, but they fail to compute the misery of man and the number of the dead slain by our great foe. On a thousand battle-fields, in the political arena, in the palaces of great kings, in the revolutions and evolutions of human society, and on the broad fields of false religion, of investigation and discovery everywhere, the great foe is active, wise, astute, and sways the hearts and consciences of the nations. Let us beware of his artful hand, of his nimble power and widespread and all-permeating influence. Let us contemplate the great foe under the following divisions: I. The origin and advent of the enemy.II. His nature and powers.III. The ends designed.IV. The agencies employed.

I. The origin and advent of the enemy; that is, of Satan or the devil. 1st. He is a being, a living creature, because he was created by the Almighty. 2d. He was in heaven, in a state of bliss and happiness, but in a state of probation and trial, and consequently the perpetuation of his happiness was contingent upon his obedience to the divine command. 3d. Being in this state or condition, it was possible for him to sin, which he did, and thus he lost his place in heaven among the sons of the Most High, and by the Almighty power was cast down to hell, and with him legions of other mighty flaming spirits were cast out; for, says St. Peter, “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them unto chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.”—II Pet. 2:4. Jude makes substantially the same statement. The time of his fall and advent is not known, but the fact of both his advent and fall is a stern reality, demonstrated by all his dreadful and terrific acts and mighty doings upon the face of the earth.

Every system of morals and ethical science presented to the judgment and consideration of men has its supposed or real central truths. It matters not whether the doctrines taught be true or false, good or evil, they come, resting their claims upon pillars of brass, blocks of marble, or banks of sand. But it may be asserted, without the fear of contradiction, that every system of religion, philosophy, or science is best known by the effects it has produced upon society and those followers and devotees who obey the mandates and precepts of such a system of doctrines and teachings. This is the rule laid down by our Saviour when He says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” As a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, so a good system of religion or philosophy cannot produce evil converts and a corrupt or pestilential progeny, since the religious faith, views and practices make up the moral life of peoples and individuals. A man's theory of morals and religion may be right or wrong, and in results may be destructive to the best ends of society, yet he will follow the theory upon which his faith is founded. So deeply seated are the religious faculties and proclivities in human nature that they demand not only faith and belief, but demand that in their essentials they should be correct and true within themselves. If we look into the history of the past ages, and scan the religions that have existed and contemplate their forms and aspects, we shall find that their theories and practices went hand in hand, and the development of the religious life was a recapitulation or reproduction in tangible form of their faiths and beliefs.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a system of revealed religion, presented to us with claims of divine authority and divine originality. It matters very little as to the mere authenticity of the divine Revelation, for a thing may be true, and yet not authentic. As to the essentials of Christianity, it matters not who wrote or compiled the Pentateuch, or who wrote the book of Job or the books of the New Testament; but it is a matter of infinite concern whether the essentials taught therein are true or false, right or wrong, since the life and character of men and nations are to be shaped and governed according to the doctrines and commands therein revealed. On the other hand, if men can shape and form and even reform the essentials of the religion they profess, it shows the falsity and insufficiency of the system to meet the eternal and substantial needs and aspirations of men. No man or set of men, nor school of science, nor of philosophy, no matter how wise, ancient and venerable they may be, has the right or capacity to make a religion and present its claims to men. They could have no authority nor power to dictate the faith and consciences of men. And even if they could go that far, yet their systems would fall short of that high and awful sanctity that God has bestowed upon the divine revelation found in the Scriptures of truth.

As the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a system of divine truth and morals, instituted and revealed to man by the infinite Deity as a standard of faith and conduct, so it has its fundamental and essential truths and principles. As such it comes to enlighten, cheer, strengthen and guide the judgment and tastes of men and nations, and to lift up, sanctify and save. As the sun is the essential force of light and heat in the planetary system, so Jesus Christ, shining in and through the gospel system, is the essential element of force, light and heat by whose bright rays and shining gems of truth and power the whole race of man is stirred and stimulated to seek that life and salvation which He came to make manifest to all the children of men. But, says the text: “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” For convenience we invert the text.

“The holiness” here spoken of as an essential of the Christian life, “without which no man shall see the Lord,” is that moral purity that is absolutely and indispensably requisite for the redemption and salvation of every man. It is that high and holy state of moral purity and sanctification that every man, woman and child, and all the intelligences of the universe must possess, before they can reach or obtain that happiness and peace that make up the present or the future state of bliss. It is the sanctification. The sublime, unique and eminent truth, lifting its lofty cone, as Mount Everest, high and alone, towers in gigantic form and heavenly majesty up above the clouds and storm-line in the serene and clear atmosphere of a happy realization of its spiritual power and vital force. The new translation has it, “Follow peace with all men, and the sanctification.” “The sanctification” is the great act in the redemptive process, because moral purity is the only ground upon which it is possible for men ultimately to be saved. A pure life, a pure heart, a thorough consecration of one's self to God and his service, as well as a purification of the heart and soul, must be obtained. Hence sanctification is not a process like the growth of a tree or plant, neither is it the collection or congregating of those accretions of decent acts and amenities that give the life a consistent and an agreeable appearance. But it is the deeper work of the Spirit of God in cleansing of the Adamic soul, or the cleansing of that nature that is imputed, and really given to us because of our descent from Adam, our sinful father, and Eve, our sinful mother. We cannot grow into holiness any more than we can grow into regeneration. Both are acts in the redeeming process, but acts that none can perform but the Holy Spirit. Regeneration or justification is the work that God does for us, but sanctification is the work done in us. The former is the pardon of sins, the latter is the washing out the inbred or Adamic sins. When God pardoned us of sin, he did not pardon us of Adam's sins, or that sinful nature which we have received from him as his children, but God did pardon us of our own sins, those sins which we have committed against His law and against His revealed Word. As to the acts of justification and sanctification, they follow each other as the acts of a judge upon the bench follow the justifying of a prisoner who, having been indicted for crime, was cast into prison by the public authorities. But when the judge pronounced the sentence of “not guilty,” that is justification. This is one act. When the sheriff opens the prison doors, takes off the chains and shackles, and lets the prisoner out, this is analogically sanctification. The prisoner is, therefore, free. He is not only pardoned, or justified, but free. Free from natural, inbred or Adamic sin.

Thus far the great majority of Methodists are agreed upon this fundamental doctrine of the Bible. But, as to the time between the acts in the process of redemption, there is a great controversy and constant agitation. Some believe a man is both pardoned and justified in the same act, place and time, while others believe that after justification, the act of cleansing, or purifying, must take place; that in the act of justification there was no cleansing or purifying, and therefore, the cleansing, purifying, or the act of sanctification, must be sought after justification. But it seems to me that the truth lies between the two extremes. A man that is converted to-day, or justified, may be sanctified in the next hour, the next day or next year, and, therefore, sanctification is to be sought as we sought regeneration or justification; for he may be justified and not have a perfect and distinct knowledge of it. No man knows that his sins are pardoned until the Spirit “bears witness with his spirit that he is a child of God.” The knowledge of our acceptance with God can only reach us by His Spirit informing us that we are sanctified, and, therefore, pardoned. Why do I say this? Because the Holy Spirit of God will not come into the heart or soul when it is unclean or unsanctified. I am not so anxious to prove the method of procedure in the redemptive process as to prove the fact and philosophy of the case, as it is taught in the Bible. We want to know the Word and will of God, so that we may do his will and conform to the requirements of the divine commands.

We might take up the subject and treat philosophically, or from a metaphysical standpoint prove the truth of the Bible doctrine that “without holiness no man shall see the Lord,” or enjoy that perfect love and reconciliation with Him and in His holy and divine presence that are the only inherent and fundamentals of happiness. What is demanded of men in respect to moral purity is also demanded of angels and all spiritualities of the universe. The conflict of elements and the war of forces are inharmony, and however that strife or inharmony may come, and no matter whatever else an intelligent being may have, or whatever may be his exalted station in the degree and dignity of being, we cannot see how he can be happy or enjoy God unless he is in harmony with the great “I Am.” Hence, holiness, or that moral purity that God demands, is the only ground of harmony, of happiness, and of heaven. There is no place in the universal dominion of being for the unholy, the impure and the unsanctified heart or soul to be happy, neither in this present state of being nor in that which is to come. The wicked and polluted soul could pot be happy, even in heaven; for he would be without those principles and elements of character that are indispensable for his peace and the enjoyment of those pure, holy, and thronging millions that compose the company of heaven, who came “through great tribulations,” and had “washed their robes, and made them white (pure) in the blood of the Lamb.” We believe that it is possible, and in many cases a fact, that thousands are sanctified without ever having sought for it or having any knowledge of it, since we must suppose that many ignorant and illiterate people are truly Christians, lived and died as such, and went home to heaven. There are thousands to-day, as of all past time, who are incapable, and who have neither time nor opportunity of understanding fully the essentials of Christianity, yet they love God, love their neighbors, belong to the church and are willing, obedient servants of the Most High. They have a vivid experience, if not a perfect knowledge of their conversion; they well remember the struggles, groanings, sorrowings under the heavy load of sin; they well remember the day and place when and where they felt their hearts changed, and their feet plucked out of the mire and the clay and a new song put into their mouths, even praises unto God; but they know nothing of the special and specific work of the cleansing, or the act of sanctification. They are the children of God as much as the theologian who, because of his calling and superior advantages, understands many of the deep and intricate things of God and the religion of Jesus. Shall we say that these poor, ignorant and uncultured children of God are not saved to the uttermost, because they were unlearned and untutored in the philosophy and fundamentals of Chistianity? No, not all. But since they must be holy before they can enter heaven and enjoy God, they must have been sanctified and made pure, as well as pardoned somewhere and at some time, between the natural birth and the moment of entering the paradise of God. But you say God winks at ignorance, and that when we have the opportunity to seek sanctification and fail to do it, He will hold us responsible for it, and, therefore, we should seek it. That is true. Every word of it is to the spirit and letter of God's commands; but that does not alter or change the fact that many are sanctified without their having any specific knowledge of either seeking it or having obtained it; yet they have it, because they show all the fruits of the Spirit, and gain heaven in the end. The predominant idea of holiness, or moral cleanness is that it fits us for the awful presence of the Infinite Deity. It is the clean clothes, the pure and “bright raiment” “without spot or wrinkle,” that fits all comers to the heavenly tabernacle to enter and to be entertained by Jesus Christ, who is “the Prince of the kings of the earth,” and “the bright and morning star.” What elaborate preparations are made by the great men of earth to meet their kings, emperors and crowned heads! What studied programs, magnificent pageantry and splendid equipages to meet their earthly masters and human leaders! These are men of state, governors, lawyers, doctors, judges, clothed in the bright ermine of their office, senators, representatives, and statesmen; laborers from field and forest, artisans from shop and forge, the painters from the studios of art, women and children and old men bent under the toils of life and the weight of years; philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and metaphysicians, old and gray with struggling thought, whose souls aflame have “walked the solar paths” and driven their chariots of silken sunbeams over the high domes of the “Milky Way” hard to the universal center. All, all, come to meet their earthly lord and reigning king, and amid booming cannon, and stately cordons of national armies men stand in awful silence, with bated breath and uncovered heads. The king is passing by.

But what is this compared to the infinite and high presence of the King immortal? How weak and insignificant is this earthly grandeur and majestic display of a nation compared with the greatness of the majesty of the court of heaven? If an earthly monarch demands such high and respectful allegiance from his subjects as to awaken the keenest interest and profoundest attention, how is the interest and attention heightened when our moral and mental manhood shall stand in the awful presence of the Infinite Creator, before whose all-discerning eye every heart is open, and all the inner consciousness is discovered in its multiform and intricate actions, relations and conditions! But a clean heart and a pure, blood-washed soul can tread the holy courts of God and dwell in His high, holy and majestic presence.

II. What is implied in peace?

As holiness is the fundamental and the cardinal principle of reconciliation between God and man, so peace is the product or resultant factor in the redemptive scheme. It ushers in that period and brings us into that relationship with God where there is perfect harmony, and that parental relation that is more real, more splendid and beautiful than that of the tender babe and the loving mother. It is the deep and abiding consciousness that there is nothing between God and ourselves but an unclouded vista, wreathed with flowers all fragrant with His love and replete with the bright and beaming sunshine of His face, filling the soul with the radiance of heaven and the music of the angels. This is personal peace, spoken of by the Saviour, when He said, “My peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth”—a peace that ramifies the soul, filling all its chambers and deep recesses with an unearthly calm and heavenly assurance that belongs only to the true children of God. Whoever has this peace is a child of God; for none can have such a priceless jewel but the true children of the Most High. But as there was a struggle before personal peace came, so there must be a struggle and a conflict of forces before national, international and world-wide peace shall fully prevail on the earth. There must be a conflict of opposite and diverse elements, agencies of spiritual, mental, civil, social or economic forces. Christ came to stir, agitate, and set in active operation all the attributes, natures, things, principles, and powers that pertain to all the great concerns of the glory of God in human redemption. For he says, “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, nay; but rather division.” Again, “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” Again, “There is no peace to the wicked saith my God.” That is, there can be no compromise between good and evil, between the forces of Christianity and the forces of sin and the Devil. There must be a struggle, a long and dreadful conflict for the mastery and control of human hearts, human governments, and all the spiritual, moral and mental empire of the children of men. And this struggle for the mastery, in the very nature of the case, is necessary and indispensable. It is a natural consequence of the long and dreadful reign of sin. It is the irrepressible conflict of the centuries, that cannot cease its fearful hostilities until peace is declared in favor of that just and holy administration which Jesus Christ came to establish. This universal peace cannot be established until the Word of God shall have been preached in all the earth; until all the vile and depraved and black squadrons of sin and hell shall have been overthrown, and the beautiful and majestic reign of Messiah shall cover every land and sea, and sit enthroned in every heart, and in every tribe and nation; “for He must reign until He hath put all enemies under His feet.” But how? “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.” Not by the might of nations, nor the concentration of armies, or stringent laws, nor yet by national and international treaties; not by fire, war and blood, nor the arbitrament of the sword, but by the preaching of the Gospel, the conversion of sinners, and the Spirit of God permeating, reforming and sanctifying human hearts and consecrating the mental faculties of intelligent humanity to His service and His love. These may be deemed the spiritual energies and those deep and silent forces that act beneath the surface of society and human tastes and agencies. But as man has a tangible existence as well as an intangible reality, the physical and mental forces and powers must coöperate in the redemption of universal humanity. Not only will the people of God coöperate with His Spirit with this end in view, but the widespread physicalities of nature, under the control of inter-racial and international barter and trade, are to be the able, although not efficient, agencies under real and sentimental Christianity. But the relations of nations, with the interchange of thought, learning, and all the powers of increasing civilization, are to be swift-running couriers to bear to distant lands the glory of His kingdom, the greatness of His truth, the sweetness and melodies of his name.

Let us remember that “the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof,” and that we are looking for “a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” “Let not your hearts troubled, ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

O, ye saints of God, look up, He is coming, he is coming to do justice and judgment in the earth. Hell is great, but Christ is greater. Behold, he cometh skipping over the hills and mountains of broken decades, dying years and dead centuries. Before Him the dead and stupid gods of the nations are falling and the empire of sin upon its ancient base is trembling and rocking. I see Him rising above the surging waves of space and time and ascending the horizon in His chariot of flame, with the greatness and the indescribable majesty of His kingdom following in his train. I see men, women and children, with harps and cymbals, drums and golden lutes, and all stringed instruments of music playing with nimble fingers, and singing the great doxology of triumph. “The Lord God omnipotent reigneth.”

In the second chapter of this epistle the apostle begins it by saying, “And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God,” etc. Again, he speaks of the wisdom of this world as being “foolishness with God, for it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness,” etc. But let it be understood that neither God nor his inspired apostle designed to discourage the culture of the brain nor the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom. But the apostle designs to show the folly, the uncertainty, and the mental darkness under which the ancient schools of science and philosophy labored; and that because of human weakness, and mental depravity, the learning and product of Grecian philosophy then prevalent, could never solve those religious and profound questions that have, in a greater or less degree, stirred and agitated universal humanity. In this sense, “the wisdom of this world,” or the old system of Grecian dogma and philosophy, “is foolishness with God.” On the other hand, God designs and religion comes not to make men fools or less wise, but it is sent from God to man to enlarge his sphere of knowledge, quicken the mental faculties, clear with the bright sun of righteousness the moral atmosphere, making mankind “wise unto salvation.” Indeed, among the forces and agencies of God which he has put into operation on the human plane, none is more essential, befitting and resplendent with the redemptive elements than the mental faculties. Knowledge is an essential element in human salvation, as much as it is an essential element in human progress and the world's civilization. Christianity comes to expand and extend the moral, mental, and physical horizon, to lift the mists and clouds, giving to the honest and true believer an untrammelled highway and an unshaded view in the deep vistas beyond. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” Knowledge is given us to know the right, to comprehend the majestic, and to fathom the ways of God, that we may praise and adore him. Indeed, the universe is his grand temple, the court of his justice, the field of his power, and the gilded empire of his glory. Far, far beyond blazing suns, shining orbs and trembling systems, he rides the winged flame, treads their burning currents, buckles the systems to his belt, wreathes his brow with stars, and chains the sisters of the Milky Way to his feet, and bids them do his will. Also, “he maketh his angels spirits and his ministers a flame of fire.” Spirits are his servants, and angels are his messengers. Around him they stand as if hung on threads of silver, play through all parts of the universal mechanism as sunbeams play on the face of the earth. At his command they ramify his wide domains, sweep the studded chambers of the vaulted dome, and chain the swift-running lightnings to their native spheres. Around him, the universal Center, systems play and cast their shivered crafts, and flying boulders, and splintered worlds at his feet, and in awful chaos praise the eternal thunderer “that bids them roll.” “Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” But, says the apostle, “All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apolos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's.” That is, the church with its living ministry, its divine oracles of truth, or all the forces, elements, and agencies of organized and unified Christianity, with the physical and civil creations belong to you. They are all your servants and your friends to bring you to God, and perfect your manhood, advance your happiness and give you heaven in the end, while they give humanity glorious perpetuity and resplendent activity throughout the ages to come.

1. The unity of Christianity.

Nothing proves the divine originality of Christianity and the authenticity of its cardinal doctrines more than its unity and perfect harmony with itself and with the ends and aims that it has in view. All through the ages, and all through the nations and the world's greatest civilizations, religion has been the universal and most prominent factor in the tastes, feelings and aspirations of men. The political, national and social forms that have obtained in human progress and developments have circled around its standard of morals, and received their force and propulsion from the germ seeds and grains of truth that have been evolved or brought from the great mine of the world's great religions. Though often mixed with error and covered by the dust of ages, though its symbolisms and external faculties have been perverted, prostituted and made to reach unholy ends, yet these religions carry with them some grains of truth, and in their fundamentals, when properly interpreted, point to God as the great Author and Founder of their central truths and vital principles. They show a unification of nature, intent, and purpose that make up a consistency and harmony in their respective parts which declare themselves to be of the one God. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord,” and so it might be said, “Hear, all ye religions of the nations and ages, the Lord thy God is one God and one Father.” From him all truth must come, since he is “the only true God,” and the only One in the universe that can dictate to the will and conscience and moral and religious proclivities of men and angels, and whatever other intelligences may reside in his dominions. All truth is from God, and must lead to God. Every thread and line and living cable that ramifies and thrills the living entities, though sometimes hidden and broken and covered with the débris and scoria of the wear and tear of the centuries, will take us back to God, the great Original, chaining all to the rock-ribbed mountains of the eternal shore. If there were ten thousand religions, and ten times ten thousand forms of worship, to be true and beneficial to mankind, they must all point to God and own him as the true and only proper and rightful object of prayer, praise and adoration. “All things are yours,” to lead you to God and plant you on the solid rock of truth and the eternal shore.

2. As there is a unity in Christianity, there must be a unity in the government of God.

As there is but one God, there can be but one universal government, founded upon principles of oneness, uniformity and justice. The eternal form of government is nothing compared to its principles, those fundamentals upon which the kingdom may rest. God's Government is always right, and just, and uniform. In the simple ground-principles upon which it rests, and by which it is perpetuated, there is a complete, full, and perfect conformity. It is a system of universal harmonies, so full and replete with its own Creator, that no true government can exist except the government of God. Human governments, because of their weakness, depravity and sins, are not true governments, but are merely legalized mobs and perversions of the great original—the government of God. As religion becomes corrupt by the additions of men, so human governments become corrupt by a departure from moral rectitude and the administration of justice. There should be no difference between the government of God and the government of men, except in degrees. But in nature and kind both should be the same, and steadily maintain the same ends in view, namely, the happiness of the governed. Now, the government of man is an image or a reflection of the kingdom of God. He is the great ideal, the ne plus ultra of mental, moral, and physical conception. He, with his government, is the highest standard of excellence. No thought, act, being, form, or conception, can go beyond him. He dwells in the loftiest altitudes and the sublimest wonders of the possibilities of being. Manhood is a struggling image of the infinite and triumphant God, and perpetual struggle is the price of eternal life. We reach the immortal fixedness by labor, toil, and the fierce ordeal of death.

3. But the government of God is dictatorial, ministerial, executive.

He dictates, he sends forth his ministers and agencies, and by them he fulfills his will in the armies of heaven, earth and the myriads of the deep. He dictates to all the elements, forces, agencies, and the incomprehensible majesties, both material and immaterial. His will is the law of being and his commands are the immovable statutes of their mode and motions. Whether they roll, rest, or soar; whether they sing, hiss, or sigh—they are his servants and trembling ministers, bent on their eternal rounds to bring to their noble and glorious ends the great designs of his love and power. Every angel in heaven, every man on earth, and all the devils, lost men and fallen spirits in hell, are his ministers, and in some mysterious way fulfill his high behests and his wise commands. Men may rebel, infidels, sceptics and scoffers may swear and oppose the truth, and hate the kingdom of God; they may make war on the Bible, persecute the saints, and seek to destroy the whole of the united forces of Christianity and subvert its organized forms; yet their madness and rage can only intensify the friends of the truth, unite the armies of God, and solidify a nascent and an advancing Christianity. The will and purposes of God cannot be defeated, nor fail to reach the ends which his wisdom, love and goodness have proposed. Hence the government of God is dictatorial, ministerial, and executive.

4. We are in the presence of some great agency, power, or personality.

We are in the presenc of an influence and an expanding energy, that are stirring, agitating and moving the forces and elements of nature as never before in the history of the world. The nations are all aglow with the ardent flame of progress, development, and expansion. This age is the culmination of ages. The concentration of centuries is shaping and fashioning universal manhood into a total unity of a personification that is wonderful and unique. This great agency is Christianity, this power is God, and this great personality is Jesus Christ. This triune character or trinity of forces is drawing “all things” toward the center, to a social, civil, political, commercial and interracial manhood, whose empire of brotherhood must and will rule over all. Indeed, we are living in an age of blending interests, when the great capitals of the world are getting nearer and nearer, and by reason of rapid transit and the quick transmission of thought, time is blotted out and space is annihilated. New York, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Pekin, and Canton, the great commercial centers, speak to each other daily and on hidden cables of elastic steel. The lightnings vibrate the sympathies and feelings of the nations, as if universal humanity were hung on one solid nerve cord, or as if there was but one great heart of the world of man. Racial prejudices, national hate, tribal distinctions, together with all frivolous conventionalities, must yield to the martial steps and massive tread of a newer and better civilization, quickened and made resplendent by an active and reformative Christianity.

5. “All things are yours,” to make you a man.

Men are not made in a day, nor a year, nor a dozen of years. It takes nearly a half of a century to make a man. His physical constitution matures in less time, but the real man, the true, hidden man, is made by slow process and by degrees. As the skilled mechanic frets and belabors a piece of pig iron into a useful and beautiful instrument, or as he makes all the parts of a steam engine or some other mechanism with its delicate and intricate parts, wheels, cylinders, springs, axles, cogs, pulleys, bands, steamchests and piston-rods, and as they are properly adjusted, each working in perfect harmony with all other parts, so all the faculties of humanity must be fretted, belabored and cultured, until the full, matured and perfect man comes from the hands of the master. It is true, man is finished in the fact of his being. He is finished in the nature and number of the mental, moral, and physical faculties. Nothing new in kind can be added to his being in this or in another state. He cannot have two memories, two or more judgments, or have a duality or multiplicity of moral ideals. Neither can he have comprehension or perceptions differing from those that he now has, because this would be to change his being, divert him from his original channel, and throw him out of himself where he becomes another or a different self. If such were possible with the nature and state of a personal, conscious being, moral responsibility would be impossible, and the rebellious and intelligent would escape punishment, and the righteous lose their reward. As, also, the justice of God would be a more sham, the ends of his government would be defeated, moral order subverted, and his kingdom which should rule “over all,” a failure. No, the complex mechanism of humanity was completed in the number of its faculties and essential elements in the first fiat act of his creation. Hence, no property, faculty, attribute, or fundamental can be added to his being. Again, he is made in the image of God. His mental and moral manhood is like its great Creator—spiritual, ethical, fixed in its statutes, and dwelling in altitudes and on a plane above all other things and powers that may produce death or bring decay. Hence man, as are all intelligent creatures, is naturally and constitutionally immortal and imperishable. What, then, is culture? Culture is the enlarging and expanding of those faculties and powers already given. It is development and the bringing out and putting into useful activity all that mental manhood that we call mind. The advancements and improvements of the intellect are not the attachments of new essentials or fundamentals achieved by culture, but they are old powers and latent forces put into activity. The intellect, then, is capable of perpetual and indefinite improvements and advancements. Step by step, evolution after evolution, the mental humanity ascends the rounds of the ladder of development, gaining in experience and self-force, until in the galaxy of its own perfect nature and purer light of God, all the powers and faculties will be in perfect balance and in full and endless harmony with all of its self and with its perfect ideal— God.

6. But “all things are yours,” to bring you to a better and higher self.

The world was made for man and God. The Garden of Eden was made for Adam and his sons, and for Eve and her daughters. The universe was made for the temple of God, and a house and dwelling-place for all his children. The vaulted dome, bedecked with gems and cities of stars with the countless “hosts of heaven” that make up “the shining frame,” were made for you. They were made to lift your aspirations, inspire your hope, nerve your effort. The rainbow bends over you, and spans the cerulean arch to give you patience and hope, and the lightnings flash to quicken your steps and clear the physical and moral atmosphere of the pestiferous seeds of sickness and death. The thunders remind you of the presence of the awful God, great Jehovah who makes “the clouds his chariot” and the winds his horses. The thunderbolts are his winged arrows from his bow of fire, and his grape and canister from the pent-up magazines of the skies. The dewdrops are gems of blessings and silver crown of glory set in heavenly trim upon leaf, bud, petal and ripening fruit to remind us of the crowns of heaven. Seed time and harvest, spring and summer, the alternating seasons with their refreshing changes, are all yours. The sun shines to warm you and give you light, the winds blow to waft you on to God and make you a perfect man and a perfect woman; the seas roll, and rivers play on their rocky beds, and like cables of gold, tie the mountains to the seashore, that you may know there is an eternal anchorage hard by the throne of God and held by his hand. For you the stars revolve, comets flash and meteors fly in the open skies. “All things are yours.” Deep in the bowels of the earth there are mines of richest ores and living veins of gold and silver. There are beds of jewels, sleeping diamonds, and undiscovered urns of brightest gems to crown our queens in brilliant stars, and bedeck the royal insignia of our kings with the beauties and studded grace of angels. There are magazines of oil, empires of iron, and kingdoms of coal to keep us warm in winter, cook our food, move our machinery, turn our wheels and spindles, propel the mighty iron-clad monsters and “swift-running greyhounds” across the surging seas, that we may speak to our sisters and brothers of the islands and continents. There are mountains of stone, with giant bones of granite and massive ledges of unpolished marble to cover our streets, build our houses and temples of honor, and halls of pleasure. At the voice of the thunder and the flashing of the lightning, the melting clouds pace along the skies on the chariot wheels of the wind and play upon the heaving bosom of the air, as if they were the fleecy cars of heaven, drawn by troops of angels, that there may be seed to the sower and bread to the eater. The whole kingdom of nature, with its scenes of beauty and charming embodiments of delight, with its robes of living green, and crowns of brilliant flowers, blushing lilies, and bursting petals of fragrant roses, is for you and for me, to help us on to God, and to the sublime heights of a better, even a perfect self. All the listening elements, the faculties and sleeping propensities of the universal spheres, with their countless billions of molecular entities and atomical relations, unite their forces and combine their energies to make a sinless man, a sinless humanity. Every thread and fibre, every string and wire, every cord and cable, and every golden nerve and silver strand, and all the wheels of the universal mechanism, are our willing servants and God-driven steeds to land us all in heaven and crown us with immortal green and the blushes of eternal youth. Civilization, with its forms, relations, institutions, achievements, and discoveries, is made for you and all the sons of men. Its flourishing cities, its moving millions, its laws and customs, its codes of wisdom, books of learning and folios of experience with the arts and sciences, are the beacon lights and polar stars to catch the radiance of the Sun of righteousness and scatter its warmth and sparkling beams to the utmost length and breadth of the royal highway to the city of God. Organized Christianity, with its living ministry, its temples of song and worship, with millions of consecrated men and women and little children, is your helper and comrade on the highway of light and truth. All things in the heights and depths and the rimless and measureless expansions, with their unknown and infinite capacities, realities and possibilities, and whatever else may exist in the concrete or in the abstract universe, are ready and waiting to gather up the reins and buckle up the habit and yoke on the pinions of flame and cut the belted and burning peripheries of the outermost glories of ethereal currents, that they may crown the royal hosts of Christ with the wreaths of conquerors and the gems of kings.

But Calvary is yours, with its dying Savior, its forsaken Son, its bleeding Victim, its smitten Shepherd, its scattered flock, and the uplifted sword of the executive God. “All things are yours.” Amen and amen! So let it be.

Again, we say there is no event in the history of man and God, whether physical or mental, that can be compared to the advent and birth of the great Messiah. The fall of the great Lucifer from the imperial empyrean, succeeding the great conflict of the loftiest majesties of the spheres and of the towering intellectualities of the universe, was a great event. It was the battle of the eternal ages, the culmination of majestic insolence, the beginning of the sinful era, and a desperate effort of rebellious, sagacious, and powerful intellectual activities to take the reins of empire and the seat of God. It was the battle of gods in the heart of the empire, and at the seat of government. Proud Lucifer had been the tall archangel, the prime minister of the court of heaven, crowned with the belted cycles. He wore the robe of honor, the insignia of state—a thousand suns pinned together by a thousand comets, which threw back their burning tails in majestic folds and wide-spread seas of pyramidal light from pole to pole, high above his head; and expanding over all was the rainbow, radiant in the beauties of its seven colors, the God-given and sacred memento of universal and eternal peace. But the crisis is approaching. The relation between the oldest and mightiest sons of God is strained. The cables break, civic volcanoes explode, and the internecine and political convulsions unhinge the harmonies of the centuries. Fiery conclaves on steeds—ethereal currents, like flashes of lightnings—thread and ramify the kingdoms, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers. All the heights, depths, lengths, provinces, and eternal eras, with all their multitudes, are summoned to the battle of the cycles. But proud Lucifer, the first, the greatest and the oldest of sinners, fails, as all must fail who fight against God and challenge the throne and authority of the Most High. “How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.” This is a great event, the beginning of sin. But Christ is born, and a greater event enters the record of the ages and the history of being. His nativity marks an era more distinguished, more interesting, and more universal than the loss of planets, or of the sinking suns and lost systems. In the starry frame of the constellated tracks of space, suns have ceased to shine, moons have waned to calcined dust, and old worlds have been honeycombed by the giant worm of decay. In the mid-ocean of the galaxies of sidereal systems, our proud earth, with her cold, chaste moon, the uncrowned pale empress of the night, is making her trip on the high seas of time. She belongs to an immediate system, and with each of her sisters is moved and warmed by the great sun; but the best message that ever fell upon her heart, in her onward flight through space, is the nativity of Christ, the Annointed of God, the Heavenly Legate, the Savior of men, and the Preserver of angels.

His name is the charm of centuries, the wand of the ages, the anthem of the nations and the inspiring melody of the spheres. God says, “I will make Thy name to be remembered in all generations, therefore shall the people praise Thee forever and ever.” Quickly and strongly down through the days of the onflow of the multitudes of aspiring millions, His name, like burnt incense ascending from the golden censers of adoring seraphs, shall be the chorus of the redemption anthem, the life of every song and the sweetness of every verse.

Annalists and recording scribes may forget the name of the Cæsars, the Napoleons, and the noble founders and protectors of empires. Peoples, nations, monarchies, and republics may pass from the drama of nations. Bards, poets, and seers, and the skillful touchers of the organ keys may forget their national airs and the names of their glorified and deified heroes of a thousand battles, and their quivering strings of gold may lie silent upon their broken harps and lutes. The eternal shafts and marble piles of fretted stone and towering columns, and all the dreamers that sleep in “the rock-ribbed” and bronze-bound sarcophagi may be forgotten, and the letters of their illustrious names erased by the abrasions of centuries; yet the name of Jesus—the Christ—will never be forgotten, but will go ringing down the declivities of the world's civilizations, sweeping on in the radiant splendors of its own effulgent brightness, until every lip shall lisp His name, every tongue spread His fame, yea, until every heart is a throne, every soul a temple, and every child of man a polished gem to stud and bedeck a trophied empire, gathered and sorted out from the perverse and rebellious majesties and actualities of sin and darkness.

But the time was approaching for the great nativity. The purposes of God were ripening fast. The prophets had waited long, sung of His coming, dreamed of His triumphs, descanted in solemn lays upon their stringed instruments and played on their high-sounding cymbals the preludes to His dramatic majesty upon the public stage of nations. The magi in far distant climes of the East had calculated upon tablets of golden plate the time of His appearing. The flight of stars, the flash of comets, and the position of planets, were studied and catalogued, and the lost Pleiades, called up from the infinite plentitudes of their long disappearance, read the predictions of His coming from their fiery rings and the flitting phantasmagoria of their sheeny trails. The philosophical archives of ancient lore, and the hieroglyphics of occult syllogisms were laid open to the calm visions and the cold judgment of the deepest and the keenest occultism. The fall of meteors, the dance of the aurora borealis in awful display around the, northern hemisphere, the dull cold thud of earthquakes, the howling seas and the hum and stately tramp of receding centuries were marked, and the hands upon the dial plate of time were watched, and their epochal relations measured and weighed until the high-born beauties and majesties of the universe spoke to men in the language of the stars, and told of His coming. The last of the four great monarchies—the four great acts in the drama of human government—Rome— was quivering upon its ancient foundations, and the kingdom of the Tiber with its hoary locks of the ages was stooping to the weight of years. “The scepter had departed from Judah,” the Jewish polity was broken, and the throne of David and Solomon was a thing of the past. Up, up, the days of the centuries climb, angels watch, cherubs drop their wings, all harps are unstrung, cymbals cease to vibrate their symphonies, and the diatonic chords of the universal diapason lose their music in the sea of silence. The court of heaven is open; awful muteness that could be felt myriads of leagues from center toward circumference seals every lip and tongue, relaxes every harp sting, and the immortal celebration is hushed.

So He came, and so He was born in Bethlehem of Judea. “And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not, for behold I bring good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, for unto you is born this day in the City of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.’” * * * “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men.” Blessed nativity! blessed birth of “the Prince of Peace!” Blessed Legate from the court of heaven!

But what of His work? He is here to stay, not in His physical manhood, but in spiritual power. He is here to deal with the nations, to elevate humanity and purify the civilizations of the world. Christmas ever calls to memory His advent, nature and work. But how sweet is the name of Christ, and of Jesus! It is associated with human happiness and human redemption. It is the light of the nations, the guiding star of the millions, and the balm for every aching heart. Some man has said in effect, that the time would come when the name of Jesus Christ would be blotted from the face of the earth. But how can it be? Who can blot it out? Who can hush the millions and erase from their “heart of hearts” the beauties of his grace, or the melody of his name? Sirs, if men should hold their peace, the very stones would cry out. Sweet carols would spring from the earth, and songs of praise from the rocks of the hills. The rivers would murmur it, the little rills would babble it, the seas with a thousand bass drum would roar it, the storms would howl it, and the winds would whistle among the glades and valleys and trees of the woods, until every leaf, bud, trunk, fruit, and flower would quiver beneath the melodies of His name and the joys of His salvation. Yea, every dead prophet, bard, seer and evangelical poet would leap from his grave, tune his golden notes afresh, call up all the choirs of the nations, and gather the broken chords of the centuries. Before His name can be blotted out every Bible must be burnt up, every church torn down, every Sunday-school annihilated, and every minister and working saint and pious heart crushed to insensibility. What will you do with David and Asaph, the sweet singers in Israel? What will you do with Milton, Watts, Toplady, Charles Wesley, and the other tens of thousands who tuned their harps on Calvary, and from its crimson summit caught the inspiration of heaven in their hearts, and poured their anthems with plastic fingers in the bosom of the rhythmic rills of heavenly lays? What will you do with the redeemed soul fresh and green in the transcendencies and beatific transitions of the new life? When rightly played man is a harp of a thousand strings, keyed, and attuned by the holy name of Jesus Christ. This harp was made after the heavenly pattern. It is the lyre of God. Its strings are of the loftiest cast and of the finest mould, whose threads never break, whose music, though old, is always new. Its songs are long, deep, melodious, sweeping down from heaven to Calvary in melting softness and dulcet strain which thunders in awful refrain in the depth of the spheres, causing to vibrate every quivering thread and living octave. Blot out the name of Jesus? It cannot be done. No! The stars would hand it down, the moon would kiss it, the sun would shine it through all the planets, and ethereal currents would waft it on wings of flame, and the lightnings of God would hurl it and burn it across the bosom of “Arcturus, Orion, Pleiades and the chambers of the South.” Then let the inhabitants of the earth take up the thrilling cry and with lip and tongue, with harp and fife and drum, chant the Te Deum of the ages and the melodies of His name forever and forever.

It is evident from the teachings of the Bible, and spiritual and physical activities, that there is but one moving, all-pervading, central, living energy. Deep down beneath and passing through and rising above all principles, things, and agencies, there is an intelligent reality, a forceful, inherent and active life. This active life is before all things, in all space, permeating every particle of universal matter and spirit, guiding, directing and controlling the countless and eternal activities. There may be rest, but not real quietism. There can be no quietism in a moving universe. Life itself is activity, and that that acts is life. Since life is activity there is nothing else to act. The life of the universe is the central or universal mentality, and is the unit of force. Force is only a part of the universal mentality, that part, or that property, or faculty, that agitates, oscillates, or stirs the elements and constituencies. Nothing can move or vibrate except as it is moved upon or vibrated by the universal mentality.

One of the most wonderful and distinguishing properties or faculties of the universal mentality is wisdom, that perfect knowledge of all the entities, results, and facts of being. State or condition has no effect upon universality. State or no state, condition or no condition, cannot destroy or annul the property of universality any more than state or condition can destroy or annihilate being. Nothing can anihilate being. It is an eternal, an indestructible, and divine entity. Being is a reality that is independent of matter, even in its highest possible mode of existence, or in its greatest volatile or ethereal vitality. There is no living factor in the universe but mind. All else is dead, mute and inert. The universe around us, above us and beneath us, acts only as it is acted upon by the spiritual, universal intelligence—the incomprehensible mentality. Matter acts, therefore, because it is acted upon by a power that is above it in degrees of those constituent properties that characterize its superiority belonging only to itself. If there were a mental force equal to another mental force, with equal intelligence, there could be no unity of force any more than there could be “the unity of nature and the reign of law.” Hence all the phenomena in nature harmonize with the highest concepts of wisdom and lead us unto the temple of the enthroned and incomprehensible intelligence. There is no real inherent force, life, or action in matter, and consequently none in the universe, except this, or the universal intelligence, and all that we see or comprehend in physical nature is the product of universal mind. To comprehend the measure and the mode of the existence of mind, or even to hint at the unknowable and infinite deeps out of which it rises in resplendent unity of being and action, would eventuate in nothing, and a thousand billions of centuries would leave us as far from the solution as we are to-day. It is not a province of thought or comprehension, for in these mighty deeps and unzoned seas of mental reality, the wing of thought, or the pinions of the imagination never can rest, roll, or soar. The presentation of metaphysical syllogism teaches us that there is but one reality in the universe, and that is mind. There is no other reality in the sense that it has its own inherent and self-activities. Nothing can be a true reality but that which has self-action and unified personal proclivities and spiritual individuality.

The doctrine that teaches the unity of force does not in any sense teach the doctrine of monism, because the unit of force has intelligence that is plainly to be seen in every part of the universe. There can be no design without intelligence, or that power that designs and chooses the best and fittest means to accomplish the best and fittest ends. Wisdom is the property of mind, that mental unity of character or individualism; and since mind must act in harmony with itself, it is of necessity a unit. Monism teaches the unity of force, (but a force that is in itself blind, and has no intelligence, no personality of being or design,) and that the vast results and products of the universe arise out of the precipitant elements and the fortuitous vibrations of its parts. It denies all mental intelligence and spiritual activities, except such as arise out of the fortuitous combinations of precipitant forces and vibratory elements; it denies that there is any such thing as mind or mental character beyond that which has been produced by physical nature, and asserts that the mental faculties of man (or spirits, if there be any) are the products of mere molecular force or action with chemical combinations under happy conditions. This view leaves the universe without a designing mental individualism that we call the universal intelligence, and shuts us up to ill fatalities and capricious chance, and allows the universe, like an unguided ship upon some vast sea, to float in space without chart or compass, leaving the boundless and unnumbered worlds to ply on their own chosen orbits without let or design. Think of it. A universe running away with itself. Possibly it may come in contact or collision with another. Then what? The thought is ridiculous and also stupendous. Under it, the stoutest must quiver and the souls of towering spirits must quail as the unthinkable catastrophe photographs its shapeless image upon the undying mentalism.

So far as science is concerned, the unity of force is proved by the form or shape of all the known systems or worlds that float in space. None of them are yet proved to be square, oblong, ovate, octangular, or rhomboidal, but all are round, or spheroidal. And so far as we know, the very molecules, or the atomic aggregations of bodies, in their most subtle particles, and in themselves, are round. One is made to correspond to all of the others in the vast machinery of the universe. It seems apparent that in no other way could perfect harmony be produced and maintained. It is believed that planets have, by some marvelous and eruptive force, been broken to pieces and forced into space, and that in process of time they have become round, because in no other way could they regain and maintain those harmonious relations and conditions that are essential to the order and happiness of the intelligent universe. If nature was the author and creator of itself, which is incapable of designs, why is it that all these worlds and systems of worlds are made round? Why is it that none of them are square, oblong, rectangular or some other shape besides the globular? Why they are formed thus, is because the universal intelligence, the infinite mentality so designed them that the beauty and harmony and glory of the universe might be a dwelling-place and a magnificent temple for “the Father of Lights” and His intelligent offsprings, the shining phalanxes and legates of His love.

This, the youngest branch of American Methodism, was organized under the auspices and authority of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in the city of Jackson, Tenn., December 15th and 23d, 1870. As for back as 1866, its organization was contemplated and desired by both classes of those who composed the membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In this year (1866) the General Conference of the Mother Church requested their bishops to ordain colored men to the ministry, form them into conferences, preside over and superintend the colored work in assemblies, separate and distinct from those of the whites. It was also provided “that when three or more annual conferences of colored ministers were organized and presided over by the bishops” of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; and that also when thought befitting and agreeable to both classes of members, “a separate and independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction should be established for the colored people,” with all the regularities and outfits of established Methodism.

These initiatory provisions, being agreeable to both classes of persons concerned, and being consistent with what was conceived to be the harmony and best interests of both and all, the separation was authorized—legal, formal, and productive of the best feelings and results.

It is simply justice to state that the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, at the beginning of the late war, had over two hundred thousand members of color within her pales, having churches of their own, and ministers sent to them regularly from the conferences. Often one pastor served both the white and the colored members, preaching to the whites in the forenoon and to the colored in the afternoon. Of this two hundred thousand, the great majority informally dissolved their relationship with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and went into other branches of Methodism, the African Methodist Episcopal Church receiving the largest share of them. However, there still remained about forty thousand who adhered to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and who could not be induced to disband their church relation and enter others which came upon the ground immediately after the emancipation. For some years after the war the reduced number of members of color who still remained adherents of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was looked after and cared for as was the case during the years of slavery. As the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which met in New Orleans, May, 1866, had authorized the bishops to organize conferences of colored ministers, so, four years after, the same body held its quadrennial session in Memphis, Tenn.; and upon the petition of some of the leading colored ministers, the General Conference of the Mother Church delegated their bishops, with other distinguished ministers and laymen, to organize the colored members into a separate and distinct body, which was satisfactorily consummated in December of the same year (1810).

The organization of this branch of our common Methodism seemed necessary for several reasons.

Among them we may note the following: As a result, the war had changed the ancient relation of master and servant. The former, though divested of his slaves, yet carried with him all the notions, feelings and elements in his religious and social life that characterized his former years. On the other hand, the emancipated slave had but little in common with the former master. In fact, he had nothing but his religion, poverty and ignorance. With social elements so distinct and dissimilar, the best results of a common church relation could not be expected. Harmony, friendship and peaceful co-operation between the two peoples in the propagation of a divine and vital Christianity, were among the essential elements of a successful evangelization of the people of color. Social religious equality, as well as any other kind of social equality, was utterly impracticable and undesirable, and coveted by neither class of persons composing a churchship.

With this state of things steadily in view, we had but one horn of the dilemma left us, and that was a free, friendly and authorized separation from the mother body. Although we are become two bands, yet it is, and was understood that this does not, in any sense, release the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, from those duties and obligations that Providence seems to have imposed upon her, in aiding the American African in his Christian development.

The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America has had a remarkable career. As a branch or product of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, it has been opposed by strong hands and accomplished leaders among the colored people, from its birthday to the present; though, happily for us, these oppositions are now subsiding and the young organization is taking on a firm and expanding aspect that is most interesting and extraordinary. To sustain and propagate such an institution amid so many opposing forces as those that have presented themselves for the last twenty years, seemed, at first, to be a forlorn and hopeless undertaking. Green from the fields of slavery, raw in the experiences of church tactics, in membership and ministry, without houses of worship or literature, with many of its organizing feats being performed out of doors and under trees, it overcame difficulties that make it more than a mere experiment. Being in the dews of its youth, it has not yet attained its destined dignity and power for good among the colored race. But it is advancing in every department.

Its aim is the evangelization of the colored race. First, by preaching the pure and simple gospel of Christ to the masses, in the simplest form of speech. Second, to do this in the best and most effective manner, we aim, as far as possible, to establish and maintain schools for the impartation of Christian education among our people, and especially among the ministry, and that part of the race who are expecting to be teachers. As we cannot expect to do a great deal at present, by way of educating the masses, we begin with preachers and teachers, carefully and patiently training and indoctrinating them in those great moral and religious principles that lie at the base of an elevated and sound moral manhood. It is said that man is naturally a religious being. The sense of a Supreme Power intrudes itself upon all his spiritual and moral functions, and if men in general are thus religionists, the colored man is particularly so. He seems especially susceptible of religious culture and of reaching those spiritual climaxes and benedictions that have characterized the most pious of men. While these seem apparent facts, it is also apparent that all these safeguards of the gospel, and those that have grown out of the experiences of men, should be thrown around him, lest his Christian or religious zeal should subvert, cover or hide the weightier matters of the moral law, and those principles and practices that constitute the vital flame of the reformatory moral power of Christianity. Christianity pure and simple is what he needs. As a church, we came upon the stage of being to propagate the gospel along these lines and no others. To sustain this position we have always stood aloof from politics, not as individuals, but as officials representing an organization for a certain and specific purpose.

While our ministry and members represent all political parties and creeds, yet, as ministers of the gospel, we make no stump-speeches and fight no battles of the politicians. We think it better to “let the dead bury the dead,” while we follow Christ. Of course we have no control over any man's vote; whether he be minister or member, he is free to vote as he pleases. We regard Christianity not only as reformatory and redeeming, but as a moral power of civilization. At present, it must be acknowledged that Negro civilization is yet in its infancy and crude evolutions. He is now laying the foundations upon which future generations are to build those institutions that are to make him and his progeny solid Christians and valued citizens. We regard him as a part of the people, a permanent fixture in the United States of America. It is true, we hope, that many of the race will, some day, go to Africa—their native land—but the masses will fight the battle of life here, and live and die on the American continent. We also recognize the fact that he is, and will be, singularly and collectively, a separate and distinct race from the others.

Friction in church or state cannot be productive of good to him and his children, and we think it is a legitimate part of Christianity to ameliorate and soften those cruder conditions under which he finds himself as an element in society; hence, we seek the friendship of all, and especially and particularly the fatherly directorship of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Beyond and behind the immediate work of the christianization of the colored race, there lie a faith, a principle, and a practice, that seem peculiar and interesting; and as these factors have done much to unite the races in harmonious co-operation and exile any hostile feelings that may have existed in the South between the two. Their aim is to bring about peace, and perpetuate the era of mutual brotherhood and concert of action.

We claim that the spirit, nature and practice of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America have done, and are doing much in this direction. Some have thought that Providence has placed it where it is for this purpose. Already it has enlisted the special attention of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which by legislative action has appointed a Commissioner of Education for the purpose of establishing and maintaining schools for “the education of preachers and teachers,” for the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America. This educational interest is controlled by the two churches jointly for the benefit of the Colored Church. It is the aim of this church to prosecute the work along these lines in the fear of God and in the love of a common humanity.

Religion may be defined as that service, consisting in worship, adoration and sacrifice which man renders to a supreme, or some being or beings that he supposes to be superior to himself—superior to himself in wisdom, power, knowledge, and indefinite existence.

The consciousness of a supreme, enduring, and all-pervading Energy is a faculty of the human mind. It is an ineradicable and indestructible element of man's nature. It is God-given, inherent, and not acquired by practice, reason, or learning. This religious faculty in man generates those elements of moral conceptions upon which the moral government of God is founded, and is the means of communication between the finite and the Infinite, and is that ever-present and far-reaching medium by which the voice of the Creator ever rings in the hearts of the created intelligences.

That man in his native elements is a religionist, not only accords with the history of the race, but is reasonable and consonant with his nature and the highest ends of his being. It is not necessary to be sinful before being religious. Had there been no sin in the universe, or no infraction of the laws that govern it, whether these laws be physical, mental, or spiritual, the religious faculty still would be a real and constituent part of all intelligences. As man is a thinking, free moral agency, he is necessarily a part of the great whole—a part of the great intelligent system. So far as the moral nature of man is concerned, it must be like that which all other moral beings have. The different spheres in the great moral system of the universe have no tendency to change the moral constitution so as to make it different in one class of moral beings from that in another, unless there could exist two moral systems in one, which is an absurdity. As there can be but one God, there can be but one government presiding over the whole. The moral laws are, therefore, the same in principle, and have the same ends in view in every part of the intelligent creation. It is also evident that the different modes of intelligent existence have nothing to do with the inherent qualities of their moral natures. Man would be man without his body or corporeal delineations, and angels would be none the less angels if clothed in mortal parts as we have. There may be lower and higher degrees of moral capability, as there are in intelligent capacity, but the innate and controlling principles are the same. As place and mode of existence cannot change moral law and moral nature in their inherent qualities, neither can the siege of ages nor the extending cycles. In other words, conditions cannot change the moral universe so as to make it something else different from what it is. It is what it is because it is the moral system. The system cannot be changed, any more than right can be made wrong, and wrong can be made right. It may be possible to annihilate the subjects of the moral system, and any physical part that may be connected with it, but not its inherent qualities. These are what they are because they cannot cease to be, nor grow into something else. Thus the moral system must remain forever intact in all the plentitude of its primary elements. If these premises are properly taken, then the government of God is necessarily a unit. It has an eternal oneness in nature and execution in all places and times, and is unaffected by mere conditions. While the moral system itself is distinct and different from its subjects or participants, yet it presupposes their existence, while, if they do exist, they cannot evade its obligations my more than they can evade the realization of their own being. Wherever there is intelligence, there must be consciousness and moral force and sense of obligation and responsibility. These are prominent faculties of the mind, and prove the existence of it, and force the thinking creature to think of his conscious moral obligations. Here, in the virgin soil of his nature, man finds those promptings, desires and proclivities that we might well call the religious faculty—faculty of his being, or attributes of his mental constitution. It is no argument against this position that some few have been found who are destitute of moral ideas and religious proclivities, if, indeed, there ever were such beings in existence. It is not to be denied that it is possible, in some cases, to suppress to a degree that is almost latent the religious faculty, yet in such cases these are no more silent and latent than the other faculties that are as little used. In any state below and on the line of civilization the human intellect will use those faculties that are most productive of the present and greatest good, because they are factors and manufactories of his immediate wants and daily needs. Forced by hunger and thirst, and the desire for the comforts of life, man, like the birds of prey or the beasts of the field, makes every effort to supply and provide himself with the things that seem needed for his happiness and well-being. Thus all his faculties that are useful for this purpose are especially aroused, cultivated, and stimulated to high degrees. By their use they are made more prominent and distinct. So with the religious faculties. They may be active or dormant to a greater or less degree by culture or less culture. So it is with all the attributes of the human mind. The Creator gave the mind complete in all its distinct attributes or characteristics, but its progressive development is left to conditions. How far mankind is responsible for favorable or unfavorable conditions in which to culture the mind need not now be elaborated. But sufficient has been said to disprove that, because the religious faculties are not particularly active in all, they do not naturally exist in any. The fact that all the great peoples of the earth have been religious is clear evidence that man is naturally so, and it also proves that every man is religious, except where the faculties and proclivities have been overshadowed by artificial means, as in the case of the atheist.

So far as we have come, we have dwelt upon the inherent emanations of religion in its origin, and we conclude that man is naturally a religious being, that the religious faculty is organic, God-given, and is an essential element of his being, and is just as enduring and abiding as any other attribute of his nature. He is, therefore, most natural when he is religious, and most unnatural when he is not religious.

False religion, so-called, is only a part of religion corrupted by superstitions, false additions, mutilations and erroneous interpretations. From the beginning it was not so. All the different forms of religious beliefs and faiths must have had the same beginning and the same parent stem. They must be branches of the same vine, or ramifications of the same great original. All their great moral ideas that have come down to us through the ages came through different channels, but came from the same true and pure fountain whose great original is the Creator. He first gave to His human offsprings, by symbolic and oracular demonstrations, as well as by internal emanations, what He would have them do, and as the generations dispersed into different climes they carried with them the germ thoughts of religion. But being corrupted, these germ thoughts of religion did not reproduce their exact originals, and as time rolled on, the originals were more and more corrupted until complete reproduction was impossible. Then human additions were made to take their places. Hence we have the so-called false religions. But let it be remembered, that one and all of these must have had a common origin.

The name of God, in some form, is common in all known languages, and is spelled with four letters in almost all of them, indicating the unity and oneness in the origin of religion. For instance, it is in Latin, Deus; Greek, Theos; Hebrew, Adon; Syriac, Adad; Arabian, Alla; Persian, Sjra; Tatarian, Idga; Egyptian, Aumn, or Zeut; East Indian, Esgi or Zenl; Japanese, Zain; Turkish, Addi; Scandivanian, Odin; Wallachian, Zenc; Croatian, Doga; Dalmatian, Rogt; Tyrrenian, Eher; Etruian, Chur; Margarian, Oese; Swedish, Gud; Irish, Dich; German, Gott; French, Dieu; Spanish, Dios; Peruvian, Lian; English, Deity, God.

As religion has a oneness in its origin, so the oldest form of it must have been monotheistic, and not polytheistic. And when God proclaimed himself to Israel as “one God,” He merely reaffirmed the more ancient truth delivered to the first of his human offsprings. He uncovered what, in many instances, had been hidden for long ages, and the broken lines of the first principles of religion were gathered and rejoined in the brighter light of the ascending centuries. It is true that God represents himself by many names, but never as more than one Being. The Elohistic and Jehovistic views presented in Genesis present to the mind only an individual God. The first conceptions of His character and individual Being by His intelligent creatures was that of oneness. We could not suppose God to be more than one individual Being, and yet proclaiming himself to be more than one. That is, we could not suppose He would teach His natural offsprings what is not true, or false. God can only speak truth.

Nothing has such a tremendous and powerful influence upon racial and human destiny in their final results, as to national phases and political conditions, as the passions and unbridled lusts of men. This is especially true of that class or people that rules over another class or people. No matter how great the social chasm between the upper and the nether people dwelling together in the same country or territory, the upper will seek the lower at that point of contactability and clandestine intercourse where there is mixing, The craving, heaving and impulsive passion of men, goads them on to blacklisted indulgences that even racial prejudices, many of which are stronger than death, cannot restrain. Even when the two peoples live in separate climes, divided by wide seas, high mountains and extended plains, they will seek each other in that way so as to produce another race and a new progeny. It matters not what distinctions, racial or national, there may exist between the peoples dwelling together, those who are regarded as inferiors will be sought after and will be debased by the superior. They proceed upon the theory that those who are already debased and contaminated cannot be more debauched or lowered in the moral scale than they are, and therefore it is a matter of small import to add to the sum of villainy, vileness and crime. Not that it is a crime for the races to intermix according to the laws of the land, as it may be done in almost all the countries on the earth; but the way amalgamation has been brought about in these Southern States is enough to make the bushmen in the wild jungles blush with shame. There is nothing in amalgamation sinful or wrong, providing it is legal, or done according to the laws of the land. So far as we can see, there is nothing in the nature of the different races of mankind to prohibit legal marriages between them. There is no real fundamental or inherent constitutional differences that can be urged as an objection. It is true that many claim that some races of men are constitutionally superior to others; that the white man is naturally, inherently, superior to the African and the Negro; that Indians, Malays and Chinese are really and constitutionally the deficient races, and cannot measure or cope with the Caucassian intellectually, and are therefore inferior in their creation. If they are inferior in their creation, then they are incapable of reaching that high moral intellectual status that seems inherent in the Caucassian. But there are many things connected with this question that contradict this position: 1. It is to be acknowledged that there are degrees of differences among the races of mankind; but these differences are conditional and circumstantial rather than constitutional. No man is born higher, purer, and better than another, so far as his real nature and the faculties of his humanity are concerned. One man may be superior to another in degree of learning, refinement and intellectual acquisitions; but this is in degree and not in kinds. The difference is the same as that which is between quantity and quality in any two given substances. The difference is not in the constituent elements that make up the one or the other, but in the degrees in the best elements that have the largest and most extended part in the substance. There is a great difference between the cultivated and the uncultivated mind, and in some instances there seems to be an almost infinite difference. That is, one seems almost infinitely above the other in degrees of mind culture and mental ability; but this does not show natural or native superiority. It only shows superior training, higher culture, and better conditions. The untrained and the uncultured have as many faculties of the mind as the refined and the intelligent. Both characters have the same mental and metaphysical constitutions. The province of knowledge is not to create, but to discover, or uncover and set in their native light the things that are already in existence. It is above the power of the human mind to create, or bring from naught to being a single atom in the universe. If new things appear to the learned and the cultured, they are not new in their elementary parts, but new only in their relations and discovery. That is, they existed and had their relations to other things before they were seen by the mind, or comprehended by the reasoning faculties. If it was possible for one mind to create—to make substance from nothing—and impossible for another mind to create, then the former would be inherently and really superior to the latter. Upon this hypothesis men would not be created free and equal, but one constitutionally superior to the other.

2. The highest culture, discovery and learning of those whose ancestry have had superior advantages for centuries (not excepting the greatest minds that have acted upon the arena of life), have never been able to make or add a single new faculty to the human mentality; but men have been found in all ages and countries and nations and conditions, to have the same kind of minds and the same number of faculties, physical and moral. Whatever, therefore, is possible for one man, is possible for the generality of men, so far as their mental qualities are concerned. All the superior intelligence and the achievements of culture that are apparent among men are not founded on a higher native ability, but on the degrees of culture and intellectual altitudes that have been attained by education and training. They are the natural result of labor bestowed upon the mental man. Culture not only develops the mind and extends the domain of thought and widens the mental possibilities, but, as a natural consequence, the mental actions and the mental forces have much to do with the physical stature, both directly and indirectly. Directly, because the body is the outward or physical instrument of the mind. It acts as it is acted upon by the spiritual and living reality that dwells within. Ambition, desires and aspirations, like perturbation, melancholia and hypochondria, all have their mighty and changing influences upon the physical and bodily proportions. Equally is it true that joy, hope and anticipations, like angels, bring the light of heaven upon their golden wings to the despondent and unhappy, physically as well as mentally. Indirectly, men are under attending influences of which they are not always cognizant. Many things are done from the force of habit, taste and custom, when there is no real reason for it. Men are partakers of the influences that surround them in spite of any resistance which they may make. Hence, one type of social and civic life may be easily engrafted upon another, until the former loses its identity in the engulfing personnel of the latter; and what was once two distinct phases of civil life becomes one unconsciously. It is by this absorbing and assimilating process that all civilizations are to become one in fact, if not in type and phase. The aims and bottom principles of civilization are always the same, since they must act upon human nature with the same ends in view. Civic, social and religious regeneration can only reach or attain its ends by this absorbing and assimilating process, and this process is accelerated when the introduction of the better elements is made and the evils are eliminated. Hence, men yield to the conditions that surround them, and yield unconsciously.

3. If there were any real constitutional differences in the races of mankind, the process of amalgamation could not proceed at all. The great disparity between the very superior and the very inferior would prevent, on natural and philosophical principles, the possibility of a progeny. There could be no half-breeds, nor cross-bloods, nor mongrel races or peoples, but there would have been but one race; and that one race would have maintained its perfect identity and individualism through all the decades and centuries. Vile Sodomy, for which “the cities of the plains were overthrown,” has never yet produced a single man or woman, nor is it a thing that is possible to be done. “The reign of law and the unity of nature” forbid the monstrosity. This goes to show, not only the superiority of man over the beasts, but it shows also the unity of the human race.

4. It is in the conception of mankind that “all men are created free and equal,” because the moral requirements, at least in civilized countries, are the same for all men. The same law that presides over the intelligent, the educated and the learned, presides over the ignorant, the uneducated and the unlearned alike. Ignorance of the moral and civic features of the law makes no difference whatever on account of race, color, or condition. This is not only true as regards human laws, but the Divine government in its righteous requirements makes no difference in its application of the law on account of a man belonging to this, that or the other race. All are treated as equals before the law, in their punishments and in their rewards. From this it seems clear that if one race of men wore innately superior to another race then more than one law would have to be established and executed for the one in distinction from the other. Or, if the same law, as now, is to be applied to all men, one race being superior to the other, then there must be degrees in the same law to be applied according to the guilt or innocence of the persons concerned. But we see the beauty of human and divine law executed alike upon all classes and races of men with the same ends in view, namely, to preserve the government of God for the happiness of the universe.

In the Southern States the colored man is treated and regarded as an inferior. The public conscience has been educated under distorted views and a vicious sentimentalism by which nearly all of his civil rights have been abridged, if not entirely destroyed; yet the shameful practice of illegal and damnable miscegenation goes on without let or hindrance. While we deplore this state of things, and while we know of no practical remedy, yet we believe that the hand of God will overrule it all in such a way as to promote the national and international harmony, peace and prosperity of universal man.

It is with great pleasure and profound respect that I appear before you on this occasion. I count it an honor as well as a pleasure to meet and to greet those lofty characters and princely heroes who bear the name and do the work of Methodist preachers. They are not only princely and heroic, but they constitute the world's greatest, and the most active moral force that comes within the limits of human agency. In their reformative movements, they are like “the living creatures” of Ezekiel's wheels who run and return at God's command, thread and ramify the zones of civil and uncivil man, filling the world with the light of God, the majesty of His love, and the splendors of His grace. It is by your grace and Christian charity that I shall attempt to speak to you upon a question of vital interest, both to your people and to mine.

In 1882, the General Conference of the M. E. Church, South, authorized the establishment and maintenance of a school for the training of preachers and teachers for “the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America,” and accordingly in the winter of 1883 the school was organized, and the Board of Trustees gave it the name of “The Paine Institute,” in honor of the then venerable Senior Bishop of the M. E. Church, South, who also, with the assistance of Bishop McTyeire organized the Colored branch of the Church, and ordained its two first Bishops. Augusta, Ga., was selected as the place of its location. For several years the school was taught in rented houses, but by the fortunate turn of events we went near the suburbs of the city and purchased the place that we now have, a beautiful site of ten acres of ground on an eminence overlooking the beautiful city of Augusta. This place was the home of a wealthy citizen, and contained his residence and outer buildings, which were his barns and stables. These were fitted up at small cost for dormitories and recitation rooms. Here the school has been taught for more than twelve years, and here it is still being taught.

Dr. Morgan Calloway, who was the Vice-President of Emory College, was its organizer and first principal, having as his assistant the Rev. George Williams Walker, of the South Carolina Conference, who has always been with the school, and is its present faithful and honored President.

The establishment and maintenance of this school is the official work of the M. E. Church, South, and the only official work which that great church is now doing for the Afro-Americans in this country. We have reached that period in its work and history where its facilities for continued service and usefulness must be enlarged or else the prosecution of its work must stop. A building is indispensable and absolutely necessary. Seeing this condition of things, the Board of Education of the M. E. Church, South, at its last session, “being fully persuaded of the imperative need of a new building at Paine Institute, Augusta, Ga., determined to undertake at once the erection of the new building,” and I have been sent out by that board and the Board of Trustees to solicit your aid and co-operation, that the great work of Christianization of the Negro race may be enlarged and continued by the Christian people of this country.

Whatever may be the various phases or aspects of religion that have existed among the different branches of the human race, and which present themselves for the consideration of the thoughtful and philosophic, to be true in itself and of itself, must be of one origin and of one nature. Not only is this true, but all religion must spring from a common center, and must rest upon the basic principles, strike the same chords in human nature, and have the same ends in view, namely, to please God and to benefit and bless intelligent natures in the highest possible degree. Religion was not made for man, nor for angels; but men and angels and all the high intelligences of the intelligent systems were made for religion. Hence, there is a fitness of corresponding adaptedness of the first and second subjects. This view of the subject must be true since the ground principles of religion are increatable and exist because of the nature of God and the principles upon which His government rests. Form and symbolism in religion have no real connection with its principles and its inherent elements, Principles and natures have no forms, although they are important agencies and powerful factors in preserving, developing, and propagating original religious ideas. Every form in religion at one time, and in some state or condition, had a meaning and was a symbolic representation of an impressive idea embodied in religion, whose intent and purpose looked deeper than the mere surface. The digits are not principles themselves any more than the rainbow is peace. The former represents mathematical principles in the science of the universe, while the latter is an emblem, in its seven-fold arch, of pacification, founded upon certain natural attitudes of matter. Both are mere representatives of abstract ideas, while their material outlines are the sensitive vehicles and exterior preservatives. So the symbolisms of religion are the sensible or tangible representatives of deeper truths or basic principles that lay in the realm of the abstract. All things not only come from the center, but all things tend toward the center. All actions, elements, and forces have objects and ends to attain, although their threads of relations and infinite intricacies, with their respective bearings upon the center and the circumference are beyond the limit of human or angelic concepts. In harmonious relations and mutual conditions, they play on all the threads of infinite design to magnify their functions in those depths, expansions, and altitudes where none but the Infinite treads the golden sands or traverses the open seas of limitless spaces, forcing the entities and activities to their centers or designed ends. From this view, the principle and fundamentals of religion lay beyond their symbols and are in the central zone of the abstract. The commands of religion may not always be understood by those who are commanded to obey its precepts; neither does that class always understand the symbols or reasons why, yet they must obey, because it is possible that they have not the full capacity to understand the whole nature and design, should they be explained to them. Perhaps, also, there are things in the establishment and economies of religion that none can understand, and in the notion of the Deity and divine things, that none can comprehend; therefore, obedience upon presumptive faith is the only prerogative of intelligent activities. Accordingly religion is of faith or reliances upon those subtle substances that belong to the fundamentals in the abstract.

Living in the dimness or the days of slavery, few, if any, could prognosticate the future as to the social, political or religious outcome of the system of American slavery that then prevailed in the “Union of States.” However unrighteous or repugnant to a Christian civilization the institution seems to have been, and whatever changes have come over the public mind since its abolition, one thing is clear, and that is, the Negro race has lost nothing by it, but has gained a thousand pounds sterling where it has lost a penny. It was one of those mysterious acts or permissions of the Divine administrations whose complicated connections and results we could not comprehend, but one in which was displayed the wisdom, power, and goodness of Him who doeth all things well. It is a trite saying, “all is well that ends well.” It is a case where it seems that disease upon the body politic was necessary to heal. Both parties—the slave and slave-holder—were at fault. For some sins unknown to us in the Hametic line, perhaps coming down through the centuries of awful sweep, culminating in national dissolution and tribal confusion, the black man of Africa, when his iniquities came to the full had to suffer; and for every transgression the God of nations demanded principal and interest. The debt had to be paid, for “the wages of sin is death.” But in enslaving the Negro, the master enslaved himself, and was himself a slave of slaves. His in the final settlement—God being the arbiter—was more, perhaps, than that of the man of black skin. But the system of slavery was wonderfully mitigated, and a heavy percentage of its asperities struck off by that beautiful and lavish hand of Christian charity and evangelistic labors bestowed upon the slaves by the Southern Methodists. Everywhere the sons and daughters of Ham were preached to, looked after, and sought out by a class of Methodist preachers with a care and pure simple devotion that were angelic, heavenly, and unparalleled in the annals of Christian charity and Christ-like devotion.

In those days there were intellectual giants and blazing seraphs of oratory whose piety was deep, all-spreading and bright as the morning star. None of them were afraid or ashamed to preach the gospel to Negroes. There was nothing like the simple gospel in those days, and nothing more beautiful and consistent than those faithful and true Negro veteran Christians that were the fruit of those great and noble men's labors for the salvation and Christianization of the Negro race. When the war came the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, had more than two hundred thousand persons of color in her membership, besides there was a large number of Sunday-schools, in which the best blood, both male and female, engaged in catechising and teaching the young Negroes the simple and fundamental principles of the gospel. Thousands of churches were built especially for the colored people, and often a pastor was sent to them as to the whites. Sometimes the Negroes got the best preacher and the most talented man. No matter what Methodist Church has come into the Southern States, it has simply built on the old foundation laid by “the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.” That church justly claims the ground against all comers, all invasions and invaders. It laid the foundation deep, strong, and wide, upon which all subsequent buildings have been reared as religious and intellectual institutions established for the elevation and advancement of the Negro race. Every question has two sides to it, and whatever may be said about slavery and slaveholders does not concern us at present. To recall the past with its sleepy memories of strife and bitterness, recasting its shapeless forms into post-bellum thought, and thus confusing and confounding the present, is not only unwise and suicidal, but detrimental and obstructive to the progress of the colored race in too many ways to be mentioned. The earnest, consecrated and noble Southern men who proclaimed the gospel of salvation to the aspiring sons and daughters of Ham, were doing all they could under prevailing conditions, and the established laws, customs, and institutions of the land. Neither did they whine, nor sulk in the tents of idleness, nor consult the whimsical in human nature; but they consecrated their lives, their ease, and wealth, and, as apostles of the fullest and freest salvation, went forth to the black sons of Ham and founded enduring monuments to their greatness, and built a power-house of strength whose living and propulsive energies still thread and thrill the evangelistic forces and redemptive activities of all denominations. It may be truly said that the simple Christianity impressed upon the Negro race by these men of God in ante-bellum decades was the purest, the sublimest, and the most apostolic since the days of Pentecost, vieing with that of the Waldenses, the Huguenots, and those devoted Piedmontese who dwelt in their rock-bound land of the skies. There were Christians in those days. Black men and white men, black women and white women, lived for God and heaven, and the pure and simple Christ of the New Testament was the only most exalted and consummate ideal of the Christian life, while his death of perfect resignation was the plenary gauge by which they died. While other denominations helped to some small degree in preaching the Gospel to the slaves, yet the Methodists led the way, cleared the ground, and burnt the stubble with the ardent flames of love and sacred, far-reaching devotion that was pure, splendid and heroic. By their preaching and evangelistic labors, thousands, if not millions, of Negroes lived and died in the ecstacies of a living faith, and in “the mysterious translation,” that awful flight to the celestial center, they fled on the burning wing of the plantation melodies to hymn in eternal anthems that Saviour preached to them by the Southern Methodist preachers.

Whatever may betide the peace, the happiness, and the development of man in the onward trend of his civilization; whatever civil forms, social aspects, or religious tendencies may claim the attention of mankind, one of the most powerful and potent agencies that is to influence the destiny of nations is that wonderful and aged organization known as the papacy or the Catholic hierarchy. While we have no hatred or malice toward any man or set of men because of their church, faith, or religious opinions, yet, because of the doctrines, claims and fearful record of the Catholic church, it presents to-day, as of old, a profound study and the deepest concern. It is not denied that there are millions of honest hearts, pure souls and good Christian people in that church. Throughout its long tramp through the ages, amid the birth and death, of years and the mutations of centuries, many of its hehoic devotees and pronounced followers have stood as monuments of honor, piety and virtue. Many of its sainted heroes and majestic apostles shine in the galaxy of blazing suns and golden stars with an enduring and unfading lustre that shall outlast the roll of years and the flight of centuries. Their ancient priests with rosary and cross have traversed sea and land, and stood among the evanescencies and reversions of states and empires, and with tenderness and love have sought to bind up the broken-hearted and dry up the tears of the widow and orphan. They have stood amid contagions, epidemics and the wide sweep of endemics and the wild play of even “the black death.” In the track of blood and revolution, and the debris of broken kingdoms and shattered empires, they have remembered the sons of toll and the daughters of misery.

Whatever else may exist in the human personality, apart from its tangible attributes and component elements, it has in some way the image of the Absolute Intelligence. That intelligence is more than coextensive with matter which must within itself live above and beyond its own material creations. No matter how extensive and calculable the tangible parts of the universe may appear to human conception, there are no faculties possessed by man or any other created intelligences to measure its depths and heights and weigh its imponderable masses. Everywhere we look, conceive, or think, thought quails before the wonders, powers, forces, infinite varieties, and majesties amaze us. In this category of splendors, this endless chain of wonders, there dwells a “soulful life,” a splendid and all-subduing actuality, whose potentialities are infinitely absolute. For the want of a better name, or rather the want of a capacity in man to use a better name, we call it God. In this image man is made. In Genesis it is declared that “God created man in his own image—in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” St. Paul tells us that “he is the image and glory of God.” St. Paul makes the “glory” here referred to an attribute of “the image.” The glory is not the “image” of the Great Original, but is a product of that original. There is a “glory of God” and a glory in God. The former is a product “of God,” the latter is an attribute, or an inherent quality, or part of his being or nature. If there is a seen and tangible universe, there must be an unseen and intangible universe, and the former must be the product of the latter. In other words, the unseen must have produced or brought into being the seen and the thinkable. Thus “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The earth is a part of the seen, also the heavens that shine above us. But the Creator, or the invisible Universe, must be forever hid from man and all his intelligent associates. Now an image is the likeness of a thing either in form or substance, or in both, but not in the sense that the image is a part of or a dissepiment of the original. In that case there could be no image at all. It would simply be a part of the original, or a part of the first part, and not a product or creation of the first part. The possibility of making a perfect likeness of a thing in kind, possessing the same elements and attributes of the original, is an indispensable faculty or power that belongs to, and must inhere in the Creator alone. None but God can create, and the creative fiats and acts can only proceed from this unseen Intelligence that was always the unthinkable, the unknowable, and infinite embodiment of concepts that had no time, place, or condition from which to start into being. This is the universal Original in whose “image” man is made. To be made “in the image of God,” is the only possible way that man and all intelligent creatures can be, or could have been, made or created. Angels and men, all spirits, whether they be in heaven, on earth, or in hell, or in any other part of the habitable spheres of the universe, are made “in the image of God,” and therefore are like man, or man is like them. They are images of one another, just as a thousand photographs drawn from one face at one sitting are images of that face. Each one of the thousand is precisely like every other one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine. If there were but one man in the universe, and these one thousand images were the likeness of his face, and if this man should die and all his pictures be lost or burned in the flames, it would be impossible to reproduce them except from the negative, or the glass plate upon which his face was formerly photographed. This is the original from which all the thousand photographs were taken. Let us particularly note the fact, that every one of these thousand photographs was exactly alike in their fundamental outlines and constituents. In other words, every single one of them would correspond to or have those characteristics that distinguished the face from which it was taken; and every one, to all intents and purposes would be an image of that man. If any of them should become blurred or soiled, that would be a condition, and would have nothing to do with the fundamentals. It is still a photograph, although soiled and changed in the externals, and, in that sense, is bleared or dimmed, but not lost.

The mind of the universe is a mirror. It reflects and absorbs images. If an angel flies through the skies, he is mirrored in the deep track of space, and in the deeper, broader, and perfectly receptive mind of God. An angel or man may blend in the most subtle ether, or in the most attenuated elements of the nebulæ, but he is himself still, and is the same in image, and consequently retains his personal reality to that degree where he is forever himself and eternally no other self.

Every man is photographed in the absorbent universe, both in his mental and physical personal outlines. He is not only the highest (God excepted), but also a distinct rationality, equal in mental quality, if not in degree, to any other intelligence that inhabits the spheres of the universe. Everywhere man is man. Conditions dwarf his mental stature, or enlarge it, blear or clarify it, but do not, because they cannot, change his real self and vital humanity. Paradise, nor hell, nor the corrosions of centuries can have any effect upon the innate possibilities of mind, because that is the image of its Creator, and the only possible image of the Creator that can be made or can exist. God made man in His “own image,” because there was in the nature of things no other way to make him. To be was to be made this way, and not to be made this way was not to be made at all. This brings us to the conclusion that man, like all other intelligent creatures, was finished in the fiat act that gave him the birth of his being. He was finished in his creation, and in those higher and deeper finalities where he became a living soul or an intelligent actuality. His nature is full-orbed in all those essentials upon which all subsequent possibilities must rest. If this is not so, then there must have, been not only one creation, as in the first fiat act of his being, but there must still be subsequent creations and consequently additions to his being, and soon the real self must become another self, and a distinct ego from the original personality. This would not only destroy the nature of man, but it would unbalance the unseen universe, subvert “the unity of nature and the reign of law.” Men and angels, and all the intelligences of the universe, would lose their identity of character and their moral responsibility.

Neither do actual developments nor possibilities imply a change in the fundamentals of being. These simply imply progress, those intellectual expansions where new conditions are attained. On these lines and principles there may be infinite lengths, depths and heights. There are broad areas for the mental force. They are open and clear for the eternal transitions of mind. Indeed, our mental humanity may not only have the power of perpetual development in endless space, but for all that we know there may be sleeping forces and even latent faculties that have not as yet reached those planes in evolution and those arenas in endless progression where they are needed in the mental sphere. All the powers of nature used for the improvement of mankind are not new energies or forces in themselves, but old forces and energies newly discovered, and together with new combinations and new uses they make up the discoveries of science and the inventions of civilization. Steam and electricity are as old as creation, and ether is as old as the heavens in which it floats, and all minerals were here from the foundation of the world. So nothing in creation is new in itself. If, then, man is made “in the image of God,” and that image is the mental constitution, then all the intellectualities of the universe are images or photographs taken from the same negative, or, in other words, made like God. But they are made like God how? Man is not made like God in his physical properties, nor those delineations of his material embodiment that we call the body. As yet there is nothing discovered in science to prove the truth of the doctrine of anthropomophism. “God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” This is not only a declaration of Holy Writ, but is a scientific certainty and an absolute necessity. God cannot be God unless he is spirit or mental individualism, including all the faculties of the universal intelligence. He can be nothing lower and nothing less than spirit or mind, and we are taught that he has neither shape nor form, nor bodily parts. That is, if he has these faculties at all, they are on a plane too high and exalted to be conceived by His intelligent offsprings. In the very nature of the metaphysical universe, we cannot see or handle spirit any more than we can see or handle thought. It exists everywhere as the all-pervading life and activity of the universe, but nowhere, so far as our knowledge goes, has it any perceptible parts or tangible properties. Rising higher and incumbent upon all space and all things therein contained, spirit is the finest, the most subtle and attenuated substance that can possibly be. While it is the highest form of existence possible, yet it exists, not only independent of all other things and beings, but because it cannot cease from existing. In other words, the universal intelligence cannot become annihilated, because it is not an entity in the sense that it ever began. It had no time, place, or conditions upon which to enter. It was here before all entities. It is the entirety of the unbeginning and universal actuality, whose qualities and altitude of faculties are too high to be reached by others.

The moral sense is only a part of the mental. If man loves, hates, obeys, or fears, it is the action of the human mentality, and not anything separate and distinct from it.

All of the mental natures of the universe are alike in the constituent elements of their being. Not only are they alike in this particular, but they are alike because they are made in the image of the Creator. This being the true metaphysical nature of beings in the sphere of life, all are related to each other, not only because they are the common inhabitants of a common universe, but especially because they are made in the same image in their mental constitution, and of the same substance. There exist between them the closest, the nearest, and highest function of affinity and kinship. Angels, devils, men, and all the intelligent inhabitants of the universe, whether they have fallen from any state of purity, or kept their state of obedience and happiness, are all our nearest and dearest brothers. All are of the same Father, possessing in common the same nature, with all that is in implied in the term. Adam was the father of his children, but not the father of their spiritual humanity. Spirit can only come from spirit. Flesh can beget flesh, but it cannot beget spirit or mental humanity. This is God's specific work, and belongs in the realm of the spiritual. The views here presented are substantiated from the facts of history, respecting man's nature in all ages, nations and conditions. In the fundamentals of human nature, Asiatics, Europeans, Africans, Americans, with all the people of Oceania, no matter how distinct in their habits and customs, present to the considerate judgment of all the same proclivities and mental aspects. The climate and the modes of life may change the color of the skin, distort the features, giving the whole physique an appearance of marked differences, but still the mental nature remains the same in all. If it can be shown that there have been several creations of man, or that the family of man had different starting points in their lower physical generation, yet this would not affect the human relation in any of its phases, nor destroy that intimate kinship that of necessity belongs to all intelligent creatures. No individual can evade or destroy the duties and relations which the constitution of his being imposes upon him, any more than he can get out of the universe. There is no way in the nature and fitness of things for any mental character to get off the spheres of being and responsibility any more than he can get out of himself or the eternal ego. As a citizen, he is one, and only one, but all of one, and can never be any less than one, or any less than the present self. The image of God cannot be lost or annihilated. The individuals themselves, whether men, angels, or devils, have no power or capacity to bring on total death to their mental being or destroy their personal identity. Mirrored in the universe, and engraved upon the potentialities of the eternal possibilities of the spiritual activities, each one of us shall ascend the scales and planes of evolution, transition and development, through long ages to come, forever retaining the image of God and the conscious self.

Whatever may be the distinctions of one race from another in the qualities and inherent elements that constitute those distinctions, there is one civilization and one common destiny for all the human race. In essential qualities and characteristics, mankind is one and the same. The different phases of social, civic, and individual life that have presented themselves to the consideration of the student of history and philosophy are mere ramifications that radiate from the same centers, or parent stems. The foundation of civilization is found in the nature, conditions, necessities, and aspirations of men. Because of the desire to better his condition and to make the way of human life pleasing and joyous, he seeks to bend the powers of nature to his wants and coerces its forces and agencies along those lines and planes that will produce the greatest amount of those results by which he ascends the altitudes of civilization. The very construction of his native constituency that permeates “the human form divine” involve those agitative and sleepless precipitants that ever stir, stimulate, and woo him on to investigate, to weigh, and measure principles of the universe that draw his chariot from the individual center to the impalpable periphery. Man is nothing if not agitative and exploring. The mental attributes are the restless aggregates of divine sunbeams formed into the sphere of mind whereby man seeks those lofty climes and grasps those splendid qualities which make men become as gods, “knowing good from evil.” To what extent the elements of nature and the mental and physical forces of the universe may be made to serve and develop the earthly side of humanity or to develop mankind as we see it in this state of being, can only be determined by the output of the ages and the wonders of the cycles. Like the universe around us, nowhere does man stand still. He is coming and going, living and dying, rising and falling, ascending and descending, on the ladder of evolution, dissolution and revolution. He springs forth to the depth of his own center, and from it rebounds to the utmost limits of his hemisphere, widening his own sphere of action and mental ebullitions, gaining every step he takes towards the great center of a unified and common civilization. What is wonderful to-day may be lost as insignificant to-morrow, and the raindrops of the morning may be the cloudbursts of the night. In the mental and physical immensity human expansion, in degrees of civilized life, is in its infancy. Its greatest possibility lies in the undiscovered depths of metaphysical science. There are latent forces whose vital cords are still untouched by the occultist or the metaphysician. There are gems of thought and jewels of wisdom in the bays and gulfs and deep seas of the manhood of humanity that shall be set to “the music of the spheres” and the song of the ages, in the day of their coronation amid the jubilees of an all-conquering, centralized, and unified civilization. All things move toward the center. It is the generous, free, and full combination of the elements and agencies that deify humanity and make men princes and kings, and women and little children angels.

Slowly, but surely, the oneness of civilization, like the oneness of humanity, is everywhere asserting itself and gathering its momentum until all its holding points shall center in a common unit of a civic, political, and inter-commercial metropolis, from whose brightness the earth shall be enlightened with “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”

The first great obstacle in the way of the unification of the world's civilizations is the want of the unification of the human race. As long as there are broad and deep racial distinctions, produced by the various conditions under which the different wings of the human kind have existed, there will be those racial antipathies and prejudices that have so long been the bane of society and the curse of the nations. Everywhere the blighting and withering blasts of caste and prejudice have left their deep imprint upon the social, civic, moral and political records of the peoples of the world. Race hatred is the strongest, the most enduring of all hatred. It is a despicable culmination of the hatred of all the individuals of a race or people, collected and crowded into the heart and life of many individuals of another race or people. They despise each other, not because they are the lower class of the same race, but they despise because they are of a different and distinct race. In the instincts of man, as in the instincts of the lower animals, there is, apparently at least, an inherent or natural propensity for class to seek its class. Hogs do not like the company of goats, nor horses the company of cows. The rich and the educated will not seek the association of poor and ignorant because they are of different tastes, feelings and practices in the social sphere. They live on different planes in the same country, and there is a manifest incongruity and a want of harmony in the social state that prevent that close personal contact that exists between social equals. If, then, there is such a difference among individuals of the same race, merely because of their class, then there will be a greater difference between individuals of two or more distinct races; and as long as these real and supposed differences exist between man and man, there will be a conflict of forces and interests, so directed in their exhaustive regime as to delay, if not despoil, the world of the speedy redemption from the evils that have grown up from the pestiferous soil of human prejudices. Be it understood that we do not want to make the impression that, because one man does not associate with another on account of the difference of race or class, he necessarily hates the other. This is not necessary, neither is it always the case. On the contrary, there are thousands of people in all classes and races who love all classes and races, and thousands have given their lives to ameliorate and better the condition of others. On the other hand, race hatred is perverse and criminal, and proceeds from the depraved and “downright cussedness of human nature.”

Why should one man hate another because he is of a different race? Who does it, or who can it help or benefit? It makes no one better, but always makes the man who hates worse and more depraved in his nature and proclivities. Hatred contains the essential elements of murder, and the Scriptures of Holy Writ substantiate this when they declare: “He that hateth his brother is a murderer.” As human nature is one and inseparable as to its real substantial qualities and tendencies, civilization is destined to become so changed and revolutionized in its works and effects that this race prejudice is to become a thing of the past; because it is in the way of those aggregated interests and intellectual propulsions that have given the world its present degree of advancement in the social state. The world moves. It dips its expanding horizon into out-lying seas and oceanic fathoms to disgorge from the deep the hidden treasures and unpolished gems that seem to sleep on the pebbly bottom. These when polished by human culture shall bedeck the crown and bestud the heavens of a triumphant and unified civilization. Nothing but physical disaster and material dissolution can absorb the force, or subtract that driving universal intellectual energy that now collects its agencies and moulds the thought, the life, and the sentiment of ages into one great intellectual, international, and inter-racial man. Then a mighty force is driving the wheels of a new civilization in a new age. Not new is it as to its ground principles and native elements, but new in the facts discovered, the truths revealed, and the exhibition of hidden life, by the touch of whose fingers the rocks are turned to silver, silver into gold, gold into diamonds, and diamonds into those lost jewels that fell from the crown of angels in the conflicting transition from the old to the new. The age itself is full of energy, drawing man upward and upward to himself—his more and perfect self. The selfhood of self is becoming more asserted. Man is rounding into that high and ethereal realization that himself is one, that he is an entity with an ineffacable identity, whose essential and divine personale shall outlast the stars, and glow in its ineffable splendors amid the ages of newer domains and brighter dispensations.

So forcible and widespread, so deep and earnest are the movements of the spiritual and intellectual energy to reach and conquer the powers of nature, in behalf of her thinking exponents, that wide seas lose their terrors, high mountains are bored through, commerce harnesses the waves, and the lightning flashes the accents of truth around the globe.

The advancements and discoveries of science have brought all nations near together, and so far as intercourse—commercial, political, and religious—is concerned, they speak to each other daily—almost face to face. The market's of London, New York, Paris, Berlin, and Canton are so intermit, so near each other, and each so full of all the rest, that whatever affects one affects all the commercial centers of the great family of man. There are now no more strangers and foreigners, but all are of the household of the same civilization to an astonishing degree; and this tendency must increase as the interests of the world demand. Nothing will be allowed to stand in its way.

Here racial prejudice must fall and bow to the better and higher interests of man.

Nothing seems more apparent than the tendency of all the nations to become one in blood as well as in interest. Shem, Ham, and Japhet are all nearly ill the same house and eating at the same table, saying the same prayers, singing the same songs, and worshipping the same God. These are the children of a common mother and a common sireship with a common destiny.

In the onward trend and rounding out of this great civilization, white and black, red and swarthy, with all the seven colors of the rainbow, shall be ground to dust and calcined by the stately tramp of a golden civilization, culminating in the eternal fixedness of the golden standard and crowned with the age of diamonds.

That we are in the midst of some great, all-pervading and extraordinary influence, is a most touching and signal fact. We have reached that period in the step of centuries and the cycles, and that degree of spiritual and mental development, where we seem to touch the hem of the Great Master's garment. We seem to sit at his feet, feel his throbbing heart, hear his thrilling voice, while the halo of his countenance fills the whole human hemisphere in the twilighted splendors of a majesty that comes from beyond the stars of God. The Great Galilean is visiting the islands, treading the waters and walking through the continents of human consciousness as never before in the long history of nations and ages. The very air that we breathe, and the sunbeams that gild the horizon with golden light, bear him gently, though strongly, to human consciousness, and the intelligence of universal humanity. The winds are His chariot, the clouds His throne, and the mists of the foaming deep His pavilion.

Indeed, there is a universal presence of an increasing and centralizing force that is stronger than nature, more pungent and deep-throbbing than electricity or the subtle activities of ethereal currents. Beneath the active force and energies of human progress, there is an arm of power, a thrilling somewhat that is silently at work sending its awakening influence to all parts of the mental and conscious humanity. We are in the presence of the great Christ—not the Christ of modern or ancient days, but the universal and eternal Christ of God, crowned from eternity and sceptered before the sun blazed, stars twinkled, or angels played on their harps. He is the God-sent, the divine Legate, who is to propagate and diffuse His inspiring spirituality until the august and adorable Son of Man shall stand in the presence of all men, and pour Himself into the entire drama of human life. Evidently, Christianity is crystalizing its forces, concentrating its energies, so as to give the greatest momentum to the evolutions of thought and actions. We see, as we never saw before, the moral concept and the spiritual comprehensions stricken off in clearer lines and more radiant with distinctiveness of character than in former ages. Faith is becoming more and more a tangible matter of fact, and with its spanning arches is seen to rest upon the fundamentals of the spiritual universe. Christ was a great philosopher as well as a great prophet. His teachings, along with the demonstrations of power displayed in the healing art, were based upon the laws or governing principles of nature. He took hold of nature in its deepest mental and physical phases, tied its broken cords and cables, belted their disobedient elements about His arm of power, coerced their rebellious fragments into line, commanded the molecular universe, and its activities obeyed the voice of the Son of God.

All through the long ages of human darkness He has been their rising Sun and the living Power from whose central throne the peeping and glinting rays of resplendent hope that have inspired their upliftings and aspirations have sprung. His voice is the music that wooed and thrilled the human spheres, vibrated the human mechanism and taught respondent souls the ways of divine providence, and cheered the millions with the truth of God and the realization of the eternal future. He is drawing nearer and nearer to all human hearts and human consciousness. Onwards the overshadowing presence climbs the ecliptic of the busy world, dislodging from its high places the subtle children of hell and the black squadrons. of sin and darkness. The great presence—what is it? What is that mysterious force that seems to play on the universal harp of universal humanity? What is this wondrous power, this magic wand that sweeps the zones of human devices and plays with almighty momentum on the social and civil planes of organized society? What is this that is changing the sentiment of men, expanding the mental vision and enlarging the moral periphery in the sphere of thought, philosophy and philanthropic activity? Is it mere science, progress and discovery, or the mere product of human genius? Or is the force of age upon age filing its victories upon victories, and achievements upon achievements? Nay, these are the fruits of the great presence—of the active Christ in personal transition, the living embodiment of truth and the active Jehovic Dispenser of the reforming and transforming kingdom of heaven. “The whole earth is crammed with heaven, and every common bush is afire with God,” in the great personality of His Son. Mark the steps of modern civilization, read the signs of the times, and measure the strength and weigh the momentum of the trembling forces of evil. A mighty Prince with signal power and the dynamic forces of the spiritual arcana is standing at the end of the dying century, and, like the rising sun on a calm sea, the soft rays of His bright and resplendent light adumbrate His coming and depict His majestic presence. The Song of Solomon says, “The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.” Already we are immersed in the fullness of His joy and the plenitude of His presence. But as He advances upon the sphere of human thought and activity, both good and evil are intensified. The wicked grow more wicked, and the righteous more righteous. As the conflict approaches active engagement, and as the two dissimilar powers line up in battle array, the lines of demarcation are more fully drawn. The devil will be more devilish, and the Christ more Christly. Reserved powers, latent activities, and long pent-up magazines of force will explode, and, the onslaught will be more dreadful and fearful as the Great Presence permeates the moral mass, and vibrates the centers of the human arena.

It is evident that there is a spirit and that there is a body. The oldest, the most real and most extensive is spirit. The difference between the two is the difference of life and death, or that that is self-active, and that that is not self-active. Spirit acts without matter or body, or acts when there is nothing to act upon, by, or through. Where there is action there must be spirit, since nothing can act without its presence, either mediately or immediately. If matter moves, takes form, or assumes condition, change, or progression, its activity is dependent upon a deeper, broader and more sensitive force, which embraces the elements or properties of a perfect entirety, or an eternal reality. As the human body is the mere instrument of the soul or spirit, so God, the Spirit of spirits, is the hidden or indwelling Life of all life, and the active forces of nature are but the instruments, as well as the manifestations, of the divine presence and power, and are the only means by which the intelligent universe can behold the power and presence of the Infinite. There are first and second causes, or rather there is a first and central cause, and all else are but second causes, results or emanations of the only cause. All second causes in the physical spheres and immensities are nothing but the moving changes or precipitations of the molecules of the whole or parts of the universal system; and as precipitant elements move as they are moved upon by the causative, they constitute molecular force. This molecular force is the tangible activities of the world and the universe which we call nature. In this sense nature, in its multiform and complex mechanism, is as much the instrument of God as the human hand or foot or tongue is the instrument of the human mind. Strictly speaking, spirit is the only perfect reality in the universe, because it is the only thing that has attributes of perception and is utterly incapable of annihilation. It is incapable of annihilation because it is not an entity in the sense of limitation. That is, it has all the faculties and properties of perfect self and perfect realization without beginning, growth or accretions of parts or combination of elements. Hence, spirit has neither body, nor parts, nor tangibility. Or, in other words, if spirit has form, or any kind of molecular constituency, its peculiar nature is so high, ethereal, and attenuated in itself, that we, in common with all intelligent creatures of the universal spheres, have no faculties by which we can comprehend its nature. This rests upon perfect and true philosophical grounds, since nothing call be greater than the greatest, and before the intelligent personalities of the universe call comprehend the Spirit of spirits, these personalities must have existed prior to, and independent of, the Eternal. The opposite conclusion is splendidly absurd and presents a solecism that distresses thought and tortures the imaginary faculties.

In their real nature there is no difference between those atoms or molecules that compose the human body and those that compose the bodies of the inferior animals, or even those that enter or compose the vegetable or mineral kingdoms, and the bodies of men are as much of earth and air as the hills, mines or other material forms and elements that compose the universe.

Hence form has nothing to do with the inherent properties of matter any more than it has to do with the nature of spirit or mental individuality. Change of state, condition or relation, cannot affect the nature, or the inherent qualities of spirit. Punishment may bring repentance and obedience to the laws of God and the requirements of righteousness in this or in some other state of conscious existence, or disobedience may bring on sin and inject the virus of wickedness into the spiritual or mental reality; but none of them can produce deterioration, or change, the real mental conscious individual. If it were otherwise, there could be no such thing as eternal or indefinite punishment. Even human laws presuppose the continuous personal conscious identity of the mental character, since men are often punished upon the supposition that they will remain the same person, or the same mental character to the end of natural life that they were when first adjudged guilty and assigned to life commitment.

There must be something in the character or nature by which every spirit or mental individual will be known of distinguished from every other such character in the universe. The very nature of government, whether it be of God or man, presupposes that every single individual is separate and distinct from every other one in the great whole, and it is a special and particular attribute of justice in the administration of government to avoid the infliction of punishment upon the innocent, and withhold rewards from the unworthy. The greatest scrutiny and care are exercised in the distribution of rewards and punishment lest the wrong person should be dealt with. In their fundamentals, there is no difference in the government of God and the government of men. Both are based upon righteousness, equity and justice. Mercy is not an attribute of government any more than it is an attribute of God. There may be a government without mercy, but there can be no government in the strict sense of the term without justice, equity and righteousness. This is government and all else is anarchy. No transgressor can claim mercy as of right or justice. It does not belong to him as a part of his inherited right, but justice belongs to him because he is a citizen of the universe and under the protection of its government and laws. Again, every intelligent being has an inherent claim on justice, because he is a conscious intelligence, and because he is in no way responsible for his being or his creation, or those eternal mental endowments or faculties of which he is possessed and which he cannot destroy or reduce to nonentity. No attribute of intelligent natures can disappear or be annihilated by any power less than itself, and therefore it is incapable of decay or inaction. Presuming that the above is predicated upon sound metaphysical reasoning, we reach the sequence that man, in common with all other intelligent existences, is an eternal conscious fixture in the universal circle of being. He is an eternal citizen with an indestructible identity, forever dwelling on a plane where annihilation can never come. This plane is in his being, or his being is in or on this plane. Here dwell in ethereal marvels and empyrean splendors all the expansive personal majesties and towering intellects in their universal home, forever aspiring in the highest, broadest and profoundest spheres of the countless and infinite activities. But as matter is incapable of punishment and rewards, and as it has no principles or faculties as a basis for responsibility, it is agreeable to truth and philosophy when we say that nothing is and nothing can be punished, or can receive rewards, but the mental or spirit man, and those capable spiritualities that belong to the intellectual sphere. Every spiritual reality must be a capacity, that is, it must have capability to that degree of volition that involves personal responsibility, and consequently this responsibility is upon the moral plane. This not only makes them subjects of rewards and punishment, but involves that high degree of individualism by which one mental character is distinguished from every other. Since this is the case, there must be some outline or characteristic inherent in all intelligent beings by, which they are to be known. It may not consist in vital or constitutional properties, but it may consist in some exterior delineations through which the piercing art of intuition may comprehend those differentia that must exist among the individuals of the populous universe. We could not perceive the identification of things or persons if every one were exactly alike; neither could we distinguish one place from another if all places were precisely alike in all that make up each of all the places. Intuition itself presupposes a differentiation among a multitude of individuals—those necessary distinguishing features by which one person may be known from every other person or mental individual. Indeed, personal identity seems to be an essential part or element of intellectual natures, as without it one person cannot be known from other conscious intellectualities. When an individual is disrobed of his earthly habiliments and wrapt in the habit of the spiritual, there can be no essential change in character because of the transition. He is still himself in all the plenitude and fundamentals of his being. He does not become an impersonal reality or a mere thing because of the change. In this world, expressions that consist in many things form those features or idiosyncracies of character and person by which one person is known from all the rest, and who knows but that spirits, men, angels and devils, and all the intellectualities of the universe, are clothed in ethereal integuments, though imperceptible to human vision and contact, yet suited to their nature, plane and occupation? Yea, “He maketh his angels winds and his ministers flames of fire.” Then we reach the conclusion, upon philosophical deductions, that we carry with us into the mysterious realities beyond not only all the personal consciousness of tangible and intangible being, but we carry with us the shape, form and expressions that were given us in the creation, and which we had from the beginning of our being. The human form is divine, not in its inherent or native qualities, but in its chartered shape, expression, features and outlines. The contour of the personality is divinely appointed and stereotyped as an essential part or element of being. It cannot be thrown off, covered or disguised, and wherever the individual moves, speaks or acts in the sphere of being, he will be known as that special and specific personality. As every living actuality is a self-acting entity under law and responsibility, his history is registered in space and all the personal data are reflected and wafted in and through the radiating spheres and immensities. The acts and facts of his being cannot be obliterated, lost or forgotten, neither can they be extracted from the enfolding records of the progressive spheres. Man is a book, a history within himself. On and in the mental inlays of growth and development he engraves himself upon himself, and unconsciously he writes his own history, records his own acts and thoughts, and his life keeps its own register. As he is self-acting, he is self-registering, and the universe, with its faithful records, is a duplicating mirror in which every man and mental activity can find himself faithfully portrayed in the eternal archives of the eternal spheres.