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ORATIONS

STUBBS

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HARLES WILLIAM STUBBS, an eminent English author and preacher, was born in Liverpool, September 3, 1845, and received his education at the Royal Institution School in that town and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he graduated with high honors. In 1868 he became senior curate of St. Mary's, Sheffield, and from there he was transferred to Granboro', Buckinghamshire, where he was vicar for thirteen years. From 1884 till 1888 he was vicar of Stokenham, South Devon, and from 1888 to 1894 rector of Wavertree, Liverpool. In the latter year he was made Dean of Ely. From 1881 till 1895 he was select preacher at Cambridge, and in 1883 he filled a similar post at Oxford. He served for two years as president of the Liverpool Royal Institution. Among his publications are Village Politics," addresses and sermons on the labor question (1878); "Christ and Democracy (1883); "The Conscience, and Other Poems (1884); "God's Englishmen," sermons on the prophets and kings of England (1887); "The Land and the Laborers " (1890); "Christ and Economics" (1893); "Christus Imperator" (1894); “A Creed for Christian Socialists (1896); "Pro Patria" (1901). In 1900 he visited the United States, preaching at Harvard University and elsewhere.

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INTERNATIONAL PEACE

"A YOUNG MAN'S VISION"

[A sermon preached at the Hague in connection with the Peace Congress, Whit-Sunday, 1899.]

"And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions."-Joel ii, 28.

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HESE words of the prophet Joel had their fullest accomplishment, as you all know, in that new revelation of God to the world symbolized in the rushing wind and the fiery tongues of Pentecost, which we to-day are commemorating on this Whit-Sunday, on this great Church

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festival of the Holy Ghost. But the prophetic words have also had a special fulfilment-have been fulfilled from epoch to epoch in the history of the Church of God.

In the ancient Church they found an immediate realization. For almost within the generation in which Joel lived we see the simultaneous rise of prophets of all degrees of cultivation and from every station in life. Amos, the sheep-master of Tekoa, the gatherer of figs, the prophet of simple style and rustic imagery; Zechariah, the cultured priest and gentle, courtly seer; Micah, the wild village anchorite, pouring out his terrible warnings on the drunkenness, the folly, the oppression of his country, and yet telling also of a reign of universal peace when men shall "beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks"; and, greatest of all, Isaiah, the statesman-prophet of Israel, of great and faithful vision, very bold," as St. Paul says of him, in extending and enlarging the boundaries of the Church, looking beyond the dark and stormy present to the onward destiny of the human race, when God "shall be found of them that seek him not, and made manifest unto them that ask not of him."

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These are but a few. There are many prophets of that period whose very names are lost. Some, no doubt, were wild enthusiasts only, whose ravings did perhaps as much harm as good. Some were hypocrites, who "affected the black prophetic dress without any portion of the prophetic spirit." But all were characteristic of one of those great revivals of religion, one of those spiritual flood-tides in the history of humanity, which have, alas! their baser as well as their nobler aspect.

But Joel did more than utter a special prediction for his own time. He declared one of those great principles which,

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