tered in the centres of its power, and Heathenism pierced at multitudes of points by the progress of the Gospel; with the whole world now open to the march of the truth. And in all the long progress, his method has been that which the text first declared. He has conquered the powers that seemed irresistible, and overturned the establishments that looked solid as the earth, not by great forces at which all the world wondered, by monarchies and their might, by universities and their learning, by military movements and magnificent diplomacies, but just as of old by the things which were not' till He bade them to be; which existed but in germ, unrevealed to the knowledge or the hope of mankind.

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

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

What is the lesson it teaches here? Is it that the Government which so long has been powerful is to be overturned by the startling Rebellion which so recently was not, but

which now has expanded to colossal proportions? that God thus designs to exalt the mean thing to a might unexpected, and to vindicate his supremacy through the triumph which he gives it over that which it seemed inadequate to shake ? Nay! but the line in which he chooses to do this is the line, you observe, in which his ancient plans advance to the reduction of the world to allegiance to his Son. The things which are mighty, and which he overturns, are those which obstruct, not those which assist, this beneficent progress. And the feeble and obscure things to which he gives effectiveness, are those which are adapted by their nature to his work; which are marked from the beginning by a radical righteousness, though at the beginning most faint in development; whose expansion is therefore harmonious with his character, as well as directly auxiliary to his aim. And so this is not the lesson which is taught for our times by the text. A diverse application is that which it has for them.

Our Government in the past, so broad in its basis, so noble in its frame, builded so grandly on primordial truths, and seemingly riveted to them so firmly by the terms of its charter and the traditions of its founders, has still been confronted, and to some extent combined, in unnatural alliance, with another its opposite. Perverted by this, in many of its officers, laws, and operations, it has been rendered in some degree, it has been in peril of being rendered more largely, a bulwark of bondage, and not a grand power for popular liberation; the ally of a force which would shut the book of God to a race, and not of the faith which would open it to all men; the minister of a rule before which the family-institute is nothing, and not of the great idea of the Scriptures that the family inviolate is the solid corner-stone of all civilization, the first and most sacred of governments and of churches. It has seemed sometimes that this abnormal system-this marvellous complication of legalized lies, fronting the heavens in our late century-was so established in all our seats of ancient renown

and national power that nothing could shake it; that every institution, officer, law, must be subservient to its behests. Strong in the wealth produced for it by millions of laborers unrequited; crafty in the policy and effective in the tactics which leisure gave its leaders opportunity to master; domineering in its spirit and tenacious in its will as was the Roman Empire first, and the Papacy afterward; aiming at incessant renewal and expansion, and even with a certain religious fanaticism confusing its conscience and intensifying its passion,— it has looked to those who have studied it in the past too vast to be avoided, too strong to be subdued; almost certainly the master of our national policy for generations to come; whose pride and might would be only cemented with the progress of time, and to shake whose dominion were like breaking the Alleghanies into a prairie.

But God has taken the impalpable powers of thought and prayer, which alone remained to set against this, and has made them mighty as of old on his errand. The weak and despised, and the base things of earth, yea, even the things which 'were not' when he commenced, he has made in part victorious already over this gigantic and inveterate system. He is carrying them forward, let none of us doubt, to their certain consummation. If we are true to ourselves and to Him, it is SLAVERY that is going down, not our benign and venerated GOVERNMENT, in this fierce struggle which agitates the land. It is Slavery which is to disappear in the end from its last stronghold within nominal Christendom. The truths that started in so much feebleness, that gained so tardy and reluctant an acceptance from even the minds which most were attuned to them, that have had to encounter such constant opposition, and whose power to overcome it has seemed so slight they have mastered many mechanisms, and enthroned themselves in pulpits; they have found multitudinous voices in literature; they have organized themselves by degrees into statesmanship; they have had their martyrs here and there, as

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all great truths must have to be vindicated as such; they have reached and grappled the popular conscience, inspired and directed political action, and at last have placed their nearest representatives among public men in the chief seats of power, and have crowded the imperious and exasperated system which has watched their advance, and has frantically resisted the approach of its end, to a point where it snatches up arms in rebellion, and makes civil war to blaze and thunder for the first time in our history-and also for the last !-along the mid line of our peaceful confederacy.

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

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

empire which threatened at the outset to crush them by its weight, wherein the inventions that subdue to man's use the unfatigueable powers of nature have arisen to displace and replace the old instruments in so swift a succession,-as in all our career, so here, most of all, shall the principle of the text be vindicated to us: when the final demolition of Slavery shall have come; and when, as Pericles built the Odeum, for great musical performances, out of the masts of Persian vessels captured at Marathon, so the generations which come after us shall find that that magnificent and durable temple which is here to be erected to Universal Freedom, and within which shall arise, age after age, the Te Deums of millions, has taken its stateliest proportions and pillars from the shattered strength and the vanquished rage of this present Rebellion !

And, finally: how the whole pressure of the theme bears instantly and always on OUR MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE; and what an animating view does it open of the prospects of this work in the ages to come! We cannot close but with this thought. Last year, as was fit, our minds were turned backward along the magnificent march of the work up to that anniversary; and with grateful hearts and praising lips we could but exclaim, at the end of the Half-century, "What hath God wrought"! We will not forget the successes then recited. We will not let slip from the hold of our minds the great memories then awakened. Our thoughts and hearts are anchored still to the colleges, churches, and schools of the prophets, in which this Society had its commencement. Our tender recollections cling still to the homes amid whose piety has been nurtured the faith which has signalized its annals; to the graves where so much devoted life, the dignity of man and the beauty of woman, has gone down in its service from the vision of men; to the scenes which are forever consecrated, by the labors of its teachers, and the sacrifice of its martyrs. Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him who hath raised it