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their whine I mean the Puritans. While it was for the skeptic Hume first to assert the greatness of their work for the civil liberties of England, it fell to the lot of the deist Carlyle to declare the real grandeur of their character and their strength; and it was reserved for the brilliant Macaulay not only to portray the glory of their achievements but to trace that power to its source. "They derived their character," says he, "from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests"; and in glowing terms he has set forth how each aspect of the divine character was a strand in their cable of strength whereby they “roused the people to resistance, directed their measures through a long series of eventful years, formed out of the most unpromising materials the finest army Europe had ever seen, trampled down king, church, and aristocracy, and in short intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion made the name of England terrible to every nation on the face of the earth," and those who laughed at them for their "uncouth visages" and "whining hymns had little reason to laugh when they encountered them on the field of battle." And whenever Puritanism shall be thoroughly imbued with the same divine influences, when it shall go forth beaming with the very light of God, armed with the "sword of the Spirit," and strong in the power of prayer, its foes will have other occupation than to laugh or sneer. We need to be brought face to face with those momentous realities which so filled the soul of the psalmist and the thought and life of Paul. These themes will

never grow old. They can no more go out of fashion than Yosemite, Niagara, or the Alps. They shall never grow dull so long as a redeemed soul exists and eternity lasts. They form the heavenly food of the noblest lives; and it is the great question for our time how to bring them back once more and place them in men's hearts.

II. See the same principle illustrated in the elevating power of lofty purposes and great enterprises. From high thoughts come high aims, and from these spring noble achievements. The arrow shot at the tree top goes higher and farther than if shot at the trunk. The drippings of a large heart and life are richer than the full cup of a narrow soul. Some men's failures and defeats are grander than other men's successes and victories. The monk Schwartz discovered gunpowder while he searched for the philosopher's stone. When Columbus struck out a new path to the East Indies he found the West Indies and a new world.

So in the higher sphere they that have been bent on doing all they could have commonly wrought far more than they thought. The perfume of one alabaster box has filled the air of Christendom for eighteen hundred years. Nothing in this world is so strong as selfforgetfulness, and nothing so weak in child or man, in State or Church, as selfishness. More soldiers would have given their lives for Florence Nightingale than for all the titled dignitaries of the French and English armies.

The consciousness of a high purpose and the alliance

to a noble work or enterprise seem to create a steady expansion in the capacity and executive power. A missionary physician, whose abilities were a laughing. stock to his brilliant fellow-student, became a skillful surgeon and a diplomatist. Mrs. Sarah Lanman Smith learned to talk of Christ to the Arab women in a few months, and Schwartz to the Hindus, it is said, in three weeks. Howard's errand of mercy seemed to raise him above all hesitancy and made him a clear will and a pure force. With him to judge, to decide, and to do were indissolubly bound together. In like manner the simple greatness of his aim and effort has erected a once obscure evangelist into a national force. These noble master purposes overmaster human infirmities. Such aims and enterprises surmount hindrances, and are the omen of success. When John Knox could pray, "Lord, give me Scotland or I die," God gave him Scotland. When Luther, warm in his great work, could say, "I would go to Leipsic if I had business there, if it rained Duke Georges nine days running,” the Reformation was born; it made no difference whether it rained Duke Georges nine days or Charles V forty years, striving against him all the while. And how many a man in private life has quietly grown into a steady power by the disinterestedness of his heart and life and the magnitude of his purposes! Draw out a rich man in noble benefactions, and you do him more good than even the cause he helps; and how many a man has been led by his very benefactions towards the kingdom of heaven.

Just so the strongest church is the most magnanimous church. Christ struck this chord at the beginning, and it reverberates down the centuries. He did not say to the Twelve, Look well to your own things first; then take care of Jerusalem; afterwards attend to Judæa; then think, perhaps, of Palestine, and pause there. No; he rolled up the great globe, as it were, and laid it right on their hearts. He brought the whole race to pull at their heartstrings: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." And so "they went forth, and preached every where," and with such power as has never been equaled; for every personal interest was lost in the grandeur of the end and aim as they moved on, holding Christ in the heart and God by the hand.

Strong ever in unselfishness! And thus the missionary spirit, in the broad sense, is the test of the power of Christ's Church. If the spirit of prayer is its thermometer, the state of the missionary feeling is its barometer, telling of the density or the levity of the air it breathes. Thus, in imitation of the Master, it has been the policy of the wisest guides and almoners of bounty in his kingdom to encourage no body of believers, however feeble, to concentrate all its energies at home; but they urge that the church that is in part supported itself by charity shall bear its part in the great charities of the age. It is the chief hope of life and power in store. Not seldom has such a starving association, whose workings and plannings and contributions, if not its prayings, were tied up to itself,

struck off into independence when it has struck out for other objects. I have known a poor city church that turned the cold shoulder to all charitable appeals because it was so poor, with difficulty procured its transient pulpit supplies, took its weekly collection for its current expenses, and in its Ladies' Circle with needle and thread mostly sewed up its sympathies at homeI have known such a church spring into strength when it heard Christ say, "Stretch forth thy hand," and it stretched it forth whole; when its members had learned to put God's cause above all private interests and to open their ears to the calls of the great multitude poorer than they, when some of them even mortgaged their own houses to build God's house, and all sprang to the work of beneficence in every available form — then came the era of strength, deliverance, growth. Strong, because there was in it the spirit and power of Him who gave himself for the world. And any body of so-called Christians that becomes chiefly intent on its own comfort and greatness and glory, on its fashion, its architecture, its style, its artistic arrangements and performances, its magnitude of numbers, or whatever else of the kind, that church, though it contained a thousand members, and every member a millionaire, would be poor and weak; for it would have forgotten the first principles of its mission and its power. And when from these semblances of Christian life we look forth and view that type of thought and character which sets itself in deliberate antagonism to the great verities of God's revelation to man, nothing could more

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