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are brought into communion with him.

Sometimes

the temptations of life will do that, for Jesus was tempted. When the great struggle of sin takes place in us, if we can only catch his spirit, then we are brought into communion with him by temptation. And sometimes sorrow will do it, for Jesus sorrowed. When we weep as he wept over the grave of Lazarus, when we struggle as he struggled in the garden, then we may be brought into communion with him. And so by the simplest things, even as simple as these elements of the broken bread and the shed wine, we may be brought into communion with him. Nothing is little or great only by the spirit which it unfolds; and if the bread stands to us as a memorial of that selfsacrificing love, if the cup presents to us the symbolism of that poured out sacrifice for the world, then it is a great thing; and if we are brought into communion with the spirit of Jesus Christ by it, let us glory and take hold of it.

And here they stand to-day, and whom do I invite? Not the good, for they will come by the gravitation of their own nature and attraction of their own sympathy to Jesus Christ; not the perfect, for there are none perfect. But I invite the tempted to come and who is not tempted? I invite the sorrowing to come-and who has not known sorrow? I invite the guilty to come, conscious of their sin and weakness, and feeling their need of this strength. I invite you all to come to the Lord's table, not mine-not to the table of my sect,

but to the table of living, vital Christianity. I invite you to come here in this young spring season, when the forms of nature begin to yearn for the things by which they live. Oh, heart of man, with fathomless depths, look to Jesus Christ, and see what there is in him by which you live! and in the truth of that sacred consideration I invite you all to come, eating of the bread and drinking of the cup, thus eating and drinking of Jesus Christ himself, and thus living now and forever in him.

THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT.

See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the Mount,-Hebrews viii. 5.

HE writer of this epistle refers here to the typical

THE

or illustrative character of the Jewish religion, as compared with the dispensation of Jesus. Between these two systems existed the relations of symbol and reality, of ideal and representative, of type and antetype, as the law contained the pattern shown to Moses on Mount Sinai, when he was wrapped in the cloud, and in close communion with God, and, as such, a relation existed between the pattern which he saw there, and the tabernacle and implements of the Levitical service, which were fashioned by it. In the present discourse I propose to employ, for a practical purpose, that fact of a relation between type and antetype, between the ideal and the reality. My discourse will have two divisions. I shall consider, in the first place, the fact that all men have ideals-have some kind of spiritual conceptions-and in the second place, I shall urge the results of consistent action upon those concep

tions.

In the first place, then, I say that this relation suggested in the text is one which exists in human life and experience. There is a spiritual region in and above the nature of every man, where belong the primal patterns of things; whence come the strongest inspirations, and which more or less completely casts the mold of our conduct and character. I do not know that we can lay hold of anything that more completely distinguishes man from the animal, than this faculty of fashioning something after the inward pattern or conception; not acting from instinctive routine, but from intelligent, inward, and original suggestion; not primarily molded by circumstances, but working upon circumstances with the inward force of his thought, and proceeding, withal, in the orbit of a boundless development.

Consider, for a moment, and you will see that this is the great characteristic of man-that he is the constructor of things fashioned after an inward ideal or pattern, and thus he transforms the outward world according to his mental or spiritual conceptions. Here, on one part, stands vast, unshapen matter-rock, wood, stream, fluent air; on the other part is the human agent who is to work upon this world of matter. You may say that the beaver or the bee works upon matter. The one proceeds with the utmost accuracy to build its nest, and the other to construct its dam; but there is a point at which each of them stops. They do not go a jot beyond the line of instinct; they

do nothing more wonderful, nothing different from what has been done for six thousand years. But see, out of this same world of matter, man makes houses, weapons, ships, printing presses, steam engines and telegraphs. He makes implements, and produces combinations that did not exist in nature, but that stood first as shadows on the horizon of his own thought-patterns that were shown him in the mount of intellectual and spiritual elevation. Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing press, whose thunder shakes the world.

Before man, the thinker, on the mount of ideal conception, the great agents of civilization have passed in a prefiguring procession-a shadowy line of kings, bearing the symbols of a sovereignty that should, in due time, be transmitted into his hands, to become the mighty instruments of his dominion over land and sea.

But if this power which man has of working from inward conceptions is expressed in the ways in which he pours his thought into matter, it is still more apparent in the ways in which his thought, so to speak, overrides matter-as he appears not merely in inventions, but in creations. The work of art, for instance

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