for the extinction of Christianity, the dislodgment of the Scriptures, and the decadence of evangelical religion have never long been wanting. But God sits. quietly in the heavens, and Nero and Julian, Mary and Alva, Voltaire and Strauss are, in the great tide of his Providence, but bubbles foaming and bursting and vanishing on the bosom of the ocean,

"One moment white, then gone forever."

But meanwhile his kingdom pervades the great powers of the earth. His Word speaks every year in new tongues to the sons of men. His Spirit subdues the men of every race and every class and every condition. So he rides forth conquering and to conquer.

But for human sin there could have been no exhibition of God's marvelous mercy to the undeserving and his grace to the ill-deserving. His uncompromising holiness also is seen in a new and almost startling form in the great sacrifice for sin. These things "the angels desire to look into." They never saw such things in heaven. Do they hover over the earth to see?

Equally remarkable is the additional revelation of God in the character of his children. It is the sin and the ruin which sin has wrought that give occasion for all that is highest and noblest in regenerate humanity. Hence the call and the sphere for meekness and heroic courage, self-denial and self-sacrifice, the incredible patience of hope and the exhaustless labor of love; for all those qualities that make the difference between man and man, and raise some men to resplendent

excellence. In the turmoil of bitter conflicts appear the majestic forms of great statesmen, Cromwells and Washingtons; in the midst of sin and woe are found the great philanthropists, Howards and Nightingales; in the deepest kinds of degradation loom up the benign figures of the lifelong missionaries, Schwartzes, Judsons, and Goodells; and in the fiery furnace kindled by Satan are seen the noble army of martyrs, and with them One like the Son of God. Such characters and careers can find place only in such a world as this.

III. God makes the sin that is in the world to a great extent his minister of justice. He makes the malignant passions not only neutralize their powers in antagonist struggles, but punish each other with mutual stripes. They become a system of imperfect retribution. Viper-like, they strike the bosom that warms them to life. Whatever may be the transient pleasure of gratification, the baleful passions are painful in the exercise and not seldom disastrous in their issue. The fiercer, the more calamitous. The most diabolic villain of our great dramatist vents his hate upon a noble foe simply by making him the victim of jealousy and revenge. The evil passions first wreak their vengeance upon themselves.

More conspicuously does God use these wicked passions to punish other wickedness. The two ends often concur; as the stinging insect is said sometimes to emit together its poison and its life. All selfishness tends to collision. Violence naturally first finds the violent as surely as provocation invites retaliation. All

selfish and malignant passions in different breasts are essentially beasts of prey, and though often found roaming together in the chase they worry and devour each other over the spoil. Thus, much of the wretchedness of bad men, besides what they inflict upon themselves, is inflicted by other bad men; and sin provoked becomes the executioner of sin provoking. They that take the sword perish by the sword; and they that quaff the cup of villany oftenest drink its deepest dregs.

In many cases the public retributions thus inflicted have been peculiarly striking. Thus God calls the Assyrian king "the rod of his anger," and adds, “I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge, to take the spoil, . . . and to tread them down like the mire of the streets." Faithfully did God fulfill his threat against Jerusalem by the blasphemer's hand. "Howbeit," saith God, "he [the Assyrian king] meaneth Wherefore it shall come to pass, that when the Lord hath performed his whole work upon Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, I will punish . . . the stout heart of the king of Assyria . . . and his high looks." And if the invasion of Sennacherib, as is supposed, be the time referred to, you need not be told how,

not so.

"Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath flown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown."

So God summoned the Persian conqueror, as he says, to be "the weapon of his indignation" against the

Babylonian empire. And when in prophetic vision the man of God hears "the noise of a multitude in the mountains, . . . a tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered together" against the doomed city, it is no chance gathering, no human hand directs the heathen bands; "the Lord of hosts mustereth the host of the battle." Well did the fierce Hun who made his inroads on the Roman empire in the days of its degeneracy and corruption choose his own title, and well is he known as Attila, "the scourge of God."

The thoughtful reader of history will be at no loss to find in its bloody annals abundant instances of the signal punishment of atrocious sin by atrocious sinners. The national law of blood-revenge conspicuously works out the judgment of God. Perhaps no more remarkable exhibition can be found than in the famous, or infamous, French Revolution, a scene of sweeping retribution to which the historian cannot close his eyes. The cause of that convulsion was unquestionably corruption, deep and wide; where the outer rapacity and iniquity rested on an inward wreck of moral and religious principle, of which Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were the expositors. Retribution waited till the cup was full, then followed its victims in almost regular order of priority down from rank to rank. Most culpable of all had been the high church functionaries, the aristocracy, and the court. The storm of avenging passion fell first upon the clergy and consigned them to robbery, exile, and death. Next were the nobles. stripped of privilege and property and put to flight;

and then flowed the royal blood. The old landmarks were removed and the nation upheaved from its foundations. Yet vengeance was but begun. There was a retribution for the retributors. The Constitutionalists had been swept away by the forces they had let loose; and the Girondists who had overwhelmed them were in turn overwhelmed and destroyed by the volcanic passion still rolling upward from below. Next perished Danton and his friends, who had infuriated the populace against the Girondists. Then emerged that memorable Committee of Public Safety, whose strokes of vengeance, directed by a Robespierre, cut ever deeper and deeper into the ranks of the bloodhound populace, till his own comrades turned against the man of blood and took his life. For "in the lowest deep a lower still stood opening to devour."

But with the Reign of Terror the retribution of the godless nation was not complete. From the foaming depths of that vast anarchy loomed a monster military despotism in the person of Napoleon. He seems to have come a minister of vengeance on France and on Europe too. For over the long subjection of Prussia, the manifold humiliations of Austria, and the burning of Moscow, the secular historian has remembered the partition of Poland; and in the youthful forms that fell in the last battles of Napoleon men read the tale of exhaustion which its iron-handed emperor had carried into every corner of France. The man came to do God's work of vengeance. And how safely did God keep him like a very jewel in its casket till his work.