to perish. They are young as Hunger and Thirst, which shall be as fresh in the last man as they were in the first. God has never withdrawn from the universe, but He is now present and active in this spot, as ever on Sinai, and still guides and inspires all who will open their hearts to admit Him there. Men are still men; born pure as Adam, and into no less a sphere. All that Abraham, Moses, or Isaiah possessed is open unto you, just as it was to them. If you will, your inspirations may be glorious as theirs, and your life as divine. Yea, far more; for the least in the New Kingdom is greater than the greatest in the Old. Trouble not yourselves, then, with the fringes and tassels of thread-bare tradition, but be a man on your own account.

Poor sinful Brother, said he to fallen man, you have become a fool, a hypocrite, deceiving and deceived. You live as if there were no God; no soul; as if you were but a beast. You have made yourself as a ghost, a shadow, not a man. Rise up and be a man, thou child of God. Cast off these cumbrous things of old. Let Conscience be your Lawgiver; Reason your Oracle; Nature your Temple; Holiness your High-priest; and a Divine Life your Offering. Be your own Prophet; for the Law and the old Prophets were the best things men had before John; but now the Kingdom of Heaven is preached; leave them, for their work is done. Live no longer such a mean life as now. If you would be saved-love God with your whole heart, and man as yourself. Look not back for better days, and say Abraham is our father; but live now, and be not Abrahams, but something better. Look not forward to the time when your fancied deliverer shall come; but use the moment now in your hands. Wait not for the Kingdom of God; but make it within you by a Divine Life. What if the Scribes and Pharisees sit in the seat of authority? Begin your kingdom of the divine life, and fast as you build it, difficulties will disappear: false men will perish, and the true rise up. Set not for your standard the limit of old times,-for here is one greater than Jonah or Solomon, but be perfect as God. Call no man master. Call none father, save the Infinite Spirit. Be one with Him; think His thoughts; feel His feelings; and live His will. Fear not; I have overcome the world, and you shall do yet greater things; I and the Father will

dwell with you for ever. Thus he spoke the word which men had longed to hear spoken, and others had vainly essayed to utter. While the great and gifted asked in derision, Art thou greater than our father Jacob ?-multitudes of the poor in spirit heard him; their hearts throbbed with the mighty pulsations of his heart. They were swayed to and fro by his words, as an elm branch swings in the summer wind. They said, This is one of the old Prophets, Moses, Elias, or even that greater Prophet, the "desire of all nations." They shouted with one voice, He shall be our King; for human nature is always loyal at its heart, and never fails of allegiance, when it really sees a real Hero of the Soul, in whose heroism of Holiness there is nothing sham. As the carnal pay a shallow worship to rich men, and conquering chiefs, and other heroes of the Flesh, so do men of the spirit revere a faithful Hero of the Soul, with whatever in them is deepest, truest, and most divine.

Before this man had seen five-and-thirty summers, he was put to death by such men as thought old things were new enough, and false things sufficiently true, and, like owls and bats, shriek fearfully when morning comes, because their day is the night, and their power, like the spectres of fable, vanishes as the cock-crowing ushers the morning in. Scarce had this divine youth begun to spread forth his brightness; men had seen but the twilight of his reason and inspiration; the full moon must have come at a later period of life, when experience and long contemplation had matured the divine gifts, never before nor since so prodigally bestowed, nor used so faithfully. But his doctrine was ripe, though he was young. The truth he received first-hand from God required no age to render it mature. So he perished. But as the oak the woodman fells in Autumn on the mountain-side scatters ripe acorns over many a rood, some falling perchance into the bosom of a stream, to be cast up on distant fertile shores, so his words sprang up a host of men; living men like himself, only feebler and of smaller stature. They were quickened by his words, electrified by his love, and enchanted by his divine life. He who has never seen the sun can learn nothing of it from all our words; but he who has once looked thereon can never forget its burning brilliance. Thus these men "who had been with Jesus," were lit up by him.

His spirit passed into them, as the sun into the air, with light and heat. They were possessed and over-mastered by the new spirit they had drunken in. They cared only for truth and the welfare of their brother men. Pleasure

and ease, the endearments of quiet life and the dalliance of home, were all but a bubble to them, as they sought the priceless pearls of a divine life. Their heart's best blood

what was it to these men? They poured it joyfully as festal wine was spent at the marriage in Cana of Galilee; for, as their teacher's life had taught them to live, so had his death taught them to die to the body, that the soul might live greater and more. In their hearts burned a living consciousness of God; a living love of man. Thus they became rare men, such as the world but seldom sees. Some of them had all of woman's tenderness, and more than man's will and strength of endurance, which earth and hell cannot force from the right path. Thus they were fitted for all work. So the Damascus steel, we are told, has a temper so exquisite, it can trim a feather and cleave iron bars.

Forth to the world are sent these willing seedsmen of God; bearing in their bosom the Christianity of Christ, desiring to scatter this precious seed in every land of the wide world. The Priest, the Philosopher, the Poet, and the King,-all who had love for the past, or an interest in present delusions,-join forces to cast down and tread into dust these Jewish fishermen and tent-makers. They fetter the limbs; they murder the body; but the word of God is not bound, and the soul goes free. The seed, sown broadcast with faith and prayers, springs up and grows night and day, while men wake and while they sleep. Well it might, beneath the hot sun of persecution, and moistened by the dew that martyrs shed. The mailed Roman, hard as iron from his hundred battles, saw the heroism of Christian flesh, and beginning to worship that, saw with changed heart the heroism of the Christian soul; the spear dropped from his hand, and the man, newborn, prayed greater and stronger than before. Hard-hearted Roman men, and barbarians from the fabulous Hydaspis, stood round in the Forum, while some Christian was burned with many tortures for his faith. They saw his gentle meekness, far stronger than the insatiate steel or flame, that never says enough. They whispered to one another-those

hard-hearted men-in the rude speech of common life, more persuasive than eloquence. That young man has a dependent and feeble father, a wife, and a little babe, newly born, but a day old. He leaves them all to uncertain trouble, worse perhaps than his own; yet neither the love of young and blissful life, nor the care of parent, and wife, and child, can make him swerve an inch from the truth. Is there not God in this? And so when the winds scattered wide the eloquent ashes of the uncomplaining victim to regal or priestly pride, the symbolical dust, which Moses cast towards Heaven, was less prolific and less powerful than his.

So the world went for two ages. But in less than three centuries the faith of that lowly youth, and so untimely slain, proclaimed by the fearless voice of those trusting apostles, written in the blood of their hearts, and illuminated by the divine life they lived-this faith goes from its low beginning on the Galilean lake, through Jerusalem, Ephesus, Antioch, Corinth, and Alexandria; ascends the throne of the Cæsars, and great men, and temples, and towers, and rich cities, and broad kingdoms, lie at its feet. What wrought this wondrous change so suddenly; in the midst of such deadly peril; against such fearful odds? We are sometimes told it was because that divine youth had an unusual entrance into life; because he cured a few sick men, or fed many hungry men, by unwonted means. Believe it you who may, it matters not. Was it not rather because his doctrine was felt to be true, real, divine, satisfying to the soul; proclaimed by real men, true men, who felt what they said, and lived what they felt? Man was told there was a God still alive, and that God a father; that man had lost none of that high nature which shone in Moses, Solomon, or Isaiah, or Theseus, or Solon, but was still capable of Virtue, Thought, Religion, to a degree those sages not only never realized, but never dreamed of. He was told there were Laws for his nature, laws to be kept: Duties for his nature,-duties to be done: Rights for his nature,-rights to be enjoyed: Hopes for his nature, hopes to be realized, and more than realized, as man goes forward to his destiny, with perpetual increase of stature. It needs no miracle, but a man, to spread such doctrines. You shall as soon stay Niagara

with a straw, or hold in the swelling surges of an Atlantic storm with the "spider's most attenuated thread," as prevent the progress of God's truth, with all the Kings, Poets, Priests, and Philosophers the world has ever seen; and for this plain reason, that Truth and God are on the same side. Well said the ancient, "Above all things Truth beareth away the victory."

Such was the nature, such the origin of the CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST; the true ideal of a divine life; such its history for three hundred years. It is true that, soon as it was organized into a Church, there were divisions therein, and fierce controversies, Paul withstanding fickle Peter to the face. It is true, hirelings came from time to time to live upon the flock; indolent men wished to place their arm-chair in the Church and sleep undisturbed; ambitious men sought whom they might devour. But in spite of all this, there was still a real religious life. Christianity was something men felt, and felt at home, and in the marketplace, by fire-side and field-side, no less than in the temple. It was something they would make sacrifice for, leaving father and mother and child and wife, if needful; something they would die for, thanking God they were accounted worthy of so great an end. Still more,

something they lived for every day; their religion and their life were the same.

Such was Christianity as it was made real in the lives of the early Christians. But now, the CHRISTIANITY OF THE CHURCH, by which is meant that somewhat which is taught in our religious books, and preached in our pulpits, is a thing quite different, nay, almost opposite. It often fetters and enslaves men. It tells them they must assent to all the doctrines and stories of the Old Testament, and to all the doctrines and stories of the New Testament; that they must ascribe a particular and well-defined character to God; must believe as they are bid respecting Christ and the Bible, or they cannot be saved. If they disbelieve, then is the anathema uttered against them; true, the anathema is but mouthfuls of spoken wind; yet still it is uttered as though it could crush and kill. The Church insists less on the divine life, than on the doctrines a man believes. It measures a man's religion by his creed, and calls him a Heathen or a Christian, as that creed is short or long.