power, his earnestness, his love of truth, his reverence for nature, and above all, his love of God, without feeling that he has a great mission to fulfil in the world. I bow myself in homage before this man, and acknowledge his credentials. He speaks with authority, and not as the common run of scribes, at all. Fearlessly he tears the mask away from conventionalism and pretension, sparing neither age nor nation, and scattering critics right and left

“Like chaff from the threshing-floor.”

It seems to me that the sight of this single, unsupported man, plunging boldly into a fight with a whole world full of liars and lies, thrusting right and left, anxious only for the triumph of truth, and everywhere devoutly recognizing God and his glory, and Christ and his honor, as the ultimate end of true art, is one of the most striking and beautiful the world has ever seen. Was there not need of him? Had not art become superstitious and infidel and missionless? Had it not faded to little more than the repetition of old inanities, traditional mannerisms, stereotyped lies? Ruskin came to tell his age that art was doing nothing toward making the world better that, instead of lifting the heart toward God, and enlarging the field of human sympathy, it was only ministering to the vanity of men— that nature was dishonored that men might win the

applause of vulgar crowds by falsehood and trickery. Nobly has he done and nobly is he still doing his work; and the world is reading him. It matters not that critics carp, and scold, and whine-the world is reading, and will regard him. The eternal truth of God and nature is on his side; and we are to see, as I firmly believe, resulting from his noble labors, a beautiful resurrection of art from the grave in which its friends have laid it. It shall come forth, though now bound hand and foot, and be restored to the sisterhood whose happiness it is to serve and sit at the feet of Jesus Christ.

But time and space would fail to give illustrations of the truth that God has always a man ready for an emergency. It is not necessary to speak of Washington. It would not be wise, perhaps, to speak of the first Napoleon, because men differ so widely in their estimate of his work. But of the last Napoleon, it may be said that he furnishes one of the most notable instances the world has ever seen of a man prepared for his age. I suppose that no one believes that there is another man in existence who could have done for France, and would have done for Europe, under the circumstances, what Louis Napoleon has done. Never did the central figure of an elaborate piece of mosaic fit more nicely into its place, than did Louis Napoleon into the complicated affairs of his age. They were made for him, and he for them.

Shall the world of matter never fail-shall the world of thought be exhaustless-shall men be found for all the emergencies of their race, and, yet, shall divine truth be contained in a nut-shell? Must the human soul lack food-fresh food-because a generation long gone has decided that only certain food is fit for the human soul? I believe that the Bible is a revelation of divine truth to men, and, believing this, I believe that its most precious deposits have hardly been touched. I believe that in it, there is special food prepared for all the wide variety of human souls, and that, as generation after generation passes away, new deposits will be struck, so rich in illuminating power that their discoverers will wonder they had never been seen before. I know that just before me, or somewhere before me, there is a generation of men who will think less of being saved, and more of being worth saving, less of dogma, and more of duty, less of law, and more of love; whose worship will be less formal, and more truthful and spiritual, and whose God will be a more tender and considerate father, and less a lawgiver and a judge. For such a generation, there exists a deposit of divine truth almost unknown by Christendom. Only here and there have men gathered it, floating upon the surface. The great deposit waits the touch of another age.

NFINITY lies below us as well as above us. There

I is as much essentin gre tels in littleness as in

greatness

largeness. Mont Blanc-massive, ice-crowned, imperial-is a great work of nature; yet it is only an aggregation of materials with which we are thoroughly familiar. It is only a larger mountain than that which lies within sight of my window. A dozen Monadnocks or Ascutneys or Holyokes, more or less, make a Mont Blanc, with glaciers and avalanches and brooding eter

nity of frost. Such greatness, though it impresses me much, is not beyond my comprehension. It can be reckoned by cubic miles. So with the sea: it is only an expanse of water larger than the river that winds through the meadows. It is great, but it is only an aggregate of numerable quantities that my eyes can measure, and my mind comprehend. These are great objects, and they are great particularly because they are large. They are above me, and they lead me upward toward creative infinity.

If I turn my eyes in the other direction, however, I lose myself in infinity quite as readily. If I pick up a pebble at the foot of Mont Blanc, and undertake the examination of its structure,-the elements which com. pose it, the relations of those elements to each other, the mode of their combination-I am lost as readily as I should be in following the footsteps of the stars. If I undertake to look through a drop of water, I may be arrested at first, indeed, by the sports and struggles of animalcular life; but at length I find myself gazing beyond it into infinitude-using it as a lens through which the Godhead becomes visible to me. I can dissect from one another the muscles and arteries and veins and nerves and vital viscera of the human body, but the little insect that taps a vein upon my hand does it with an instrument and by the operation of machinery which are beyond my scrutiny. They belong to a