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these modest mansions wreathed with hallowed associations. Could the roll call of the past summon forth to the eye the men and women that are present to the mind's eye — jurists and divines, patriots and philanthropists, scholars and inventors, writers and teachers, distinguished civilians and strong men of business, of enterprise, and of skill, with the wives and the mothers, the daughters and the sisters that formed, cheered, and held them to their high endeavor, what an august assembly would spring forth upon the sight! It is good to be here and to mingle in such company. is well for us on this our festal day — our quarter millennial gathered from far and near, from all the walks and callings of life, in such an invisible presence, to take each other by the hand and pledge eternal fealty to the truth and the right, and deathless devotion to the high law of duty to God and to man. So shall the perpetual benediction of an honorable ancestry pass down as an heirloom to the remotest generation of their descendants, and many an absent son and daughter of the ancient home shall say:

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THE DIVINE FORCES OF THE GOSPEL.

A SERMON BEFORE THE AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS, AT NEW HAVEN, CONN., OCTOBER 1, 1872.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. — 1 CORINTHIANS 2: 1-5.

THE

HE sentiment is completed and compacted by the same apostle thus:

For he that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me toward the Gentiles. - GALATIANS 2:8.

Here is the whole theory of the early success of the gospel. In the acknowledged impotence of human teachings comes "the testimony of God." In place of the world's "wisdom" stands the one absorbing knowledge of "Christ crucified." Instead of merely "persuasive words" of brilliant rhetoric or profoundest logic, all the utterances, both "speech and preaching," are freighted with the "demonstration of the Spirit." In the midst of human "weakness, fear, and much trembling" shines forth the power of God, working effectually in Peter among the Jews, and mighty in Paul toward the Gentiles.

All the surface changes of society leave the fundamental relation of Christ's kingdom to the world

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unaltered. It is no small privilege to live in a time when Christianity is popular and powerful; when its great Author is the subject of men's fair speeches, and his outward realm includes the great empires; when wealth and fashion throng its costly temples; when its messengers charter the power-press, and London bankers honor the drafts of its missionary boards. But, for all this, the offense of the cross has not ceased, nor the difficulty of maintaining and spreading a pure gospel diminished. It is in times like these that faith is sorely tempted to surrender unto sight; that science pushes far away the living God; and the power of the Spirit is superseded by the reign of law. At such times the Church and her ministry "breathe in tainted air." The gospel in solution tends to become a gospel in dilution. Fashion and religion give mutual bonds of good behavior, and the line between the Church and the world fades out in a penumbra. Culture chills fervor; or fervid men exalt peace and union above truth and purity. Christian youth, nursed in luxury, lose the very conception of Christian heroism. It is a time when Robertson and Brooke, in England, can find the whole power of prayer to consist in its influence on the praying heart, and the difference between the inspiration of Wordsworth's "Excursion" and of Paul's Epistles to be one of degree and not of kind; when the popular American pulpit sometimes. knows not what to say of the men "who believe neither the Old Testament nor the New," but abound in the charities of life; and when well-meaning Christians

magnify the possibilities of heathen salvation into probabilities. It is the era for "Theodicies" and "Sciences of Religion" and "Comparative Theologies"; an age when men can discover "Ten Great Religions"-perchance eleven.

Surrounded thus by the glory of secularism, we are called at times to take our bearings and look forth for the polestar of our heavens. Permit me, therefore, fathers and brethren, to strike once more the keynote of the whole Christian enterprise at home and abroad, and to recall to your thoughts and mine this primal truth:

THE

DIVINE FORCES WHICH CENTER IN THE GOSPEL
OF CHRIST ARE THE ONLY ULTIMATE RELIANCE
FOR THE WORLD'S CONVERSION.

By divine forces I mean those which come direct from God; which, though they act in nature and through man, are behind nature and above humanity -supernatural and superhuman. When the Church. fails chiefly to invoke these influences her most magnificent appliances are but a mechanism and her own beautiful form is a corpse. These things need not all be specified in technical detail. The text sketches them in bold outline: the expiatory offering of the Son of God, recorded in sacred Scriptures inspired of God, and applied by the Spirit of God to the regeneration of sinful hearts and the holy energizing of human lives, through institutions appointed and preserved by God, and by God made effectual to overcome the universal

repugnance to truth and duty. reliance would seem clear,

That here must be our

First, from the emergency of the case. After all sentimental dreams, when we open our eyes one appall ing fact stands full in view: every member of the race is clearly out of harmony with the God of holiness and plainly in conflict with his searching law. The Bible did not make it so; it finds it so. I have heard the godless man of business preach as stern a doctrine of depravity as the apostle Paul. And so radical is the ruin that when you look upon the newborn child in his cradle you know that, train him as you will, in the bosom of refinement and love, none the less certainly

will he go astray. Gravitation is no surer. You look upon the stranger, of whose existence you never knew before, and you assume that his character is traversed with sin. The man of the world would otherwise scorn your simplicity. So thoroughgoing is the aversion of men to God that when the full remedy is offered them their opposition to being saved from sin long seems, and often proves, unconquerable. Nay, it seems proved by fact that the forces of the gospel are needed to awaken the desire to be saved by the gospel. And though we grant that the presence of the redemptive work in this world creates a possibility that men may be saved in pagan lands; and though we conceive that for Christ's sake God may accept even a potential or germ faith, the readiness to believe, yet in the whole history of heathenism who will recount to us a hundred undoubted cases where that

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