in method and varieties of spirit will be lost in the blazing splendor of Perfect Love. The intense, incisive question rings in our ears, "What mean ye by these stones?" Shall not the whole body of our parishioners reply: "We will pledge our lives, our strength and our resources to perpetuate in the life of ages this Parish of St. Mark; we will carry on this church in loyalty to the faith once delivered to the saints; we will show gratitude for the liberties won by the advancing kingdom of God, from the cramping influence of prejudice and from the malevolence of bigotry; we will maintain a Church descended from the apostles and now planting herself on the rock of faith in Christ and utilizing all modern progress to evangelize the world of today." II "TRANSFORMED OR CONFORMED” (Preached in St. Luke's Church, Brooklyn.) "Be not fashioned according to this world; be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”—Romans XII: 2. With the opening of the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul passes from the theology of Creed to the divinity of Morals, or from the statement of man's relations to God to the discussion of man's obligations to the breth ren. Such practical matters as are now brought forward spring largely out of the mixed nature of the Christian community in Rome, partly gentile, partly Jewish. In sentimental moments we may imagine that the apostolic and primitive Church enjoyed a unanimity denied to later ages, but careful reading of the "Book of the Acts," of almost every one of St. Paul's Epistles, and especially of this letter to the Church in Rome, must satisfy us that, wherever the earliest societies of believers in Jesus were gathered, there grave controversies immediately sprang up between progressive and traditional Hebrews, between Hebrews and Greeks, between the nations and tribes of the vast gentile world. In the first words of the chapter, we have a glance backward to the strictly theological chapters where the Apostle quieted all doctrinal contentions and all racial jealousies in the love of Jesus Christ. Jew and Gentile have alike disobeyed God, and God has now had mercy on them all. Against the background of the most venerable and the most popular forms of worship St. Paul is lifting into view the better forms of Christian service. Some to whom he wrote had been Jews trained to those Mosaic rites which were even yet celebrated-with all their old-time, elaborate splendor-on Mount Zion. Some had been accustomed to the pompous, gorgeous ceremonies which a classic paganism exhibited in those majestic temples of Rome. But these things for Christians had passed away. They were no longer Pharisaic sticklers, no longer heathen devotees, but brethren of Christ. Sacrifices would still be in order, but not of the old kind. There is but one sacrifice which a reasoning worshipper can now offer to the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. "I beseech you brethren, through the mercies of God, to |