and vitality. A Christian church is an institution with Christ as its heart, with his spirit as its inner and controlling life. It can be made larger in its proportions, stronger in its influence, and to evoke more and more. of love and holiness for the good of mankind, by those who are comprehended in its form, if they will but turn and look upon their Master, who is enthroned within their bounds, with a single eye; if they will but adhere, and conform earnestly and perpetually to his doctrines and precepts.

A nation cannot stand and flourish, in opposition to the law of God. The great interior power of the Nations is God. To him the kingdoms of the earth are but as the drop of a bucket, or the small dust of the balance. He taketh up the isles as a very little thing. If he is not acknowledged nor obeyed, if the people of these earthly realms are not loyal to him, neither constitutions nor armed hosts can avert their inevitable doom. Justice does not sleep. It may give time for the nations of the earth to reform; but it does not sleep. But if God is honored by the nations, they will be exalted. Great shall be that people whose God is the Lord. No harm can come to the country whose citizens love and worship God, and respect the rights and honor the claims of man.

DISCOURSE XVI.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE PROGRESSIVE.

I CORINTHIANS XIII. II.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I SPAKE AS A CHILD, I UNDERSTOOD AS A CHILD: I THOUGHT AS A CHILD: BUT WHEN I BECAME A MAN I PUT AWAY CHILDISH THINGS.

Prophets and apostles, the greatest, the wisest, the best of our race, have risen to their high estate, from the condition of childhood. They began life, as we began it. And they passed their first years, as we passed ours, thinking the thoughts, indulging the fancies, and uttering the words of children. The great apostle to the Gentiles, refers to the earliest period of his life, when he spake, and understood, and thought as a child. This reference of this mighty minister in the service of Christ, to his childhood, attracts my attention, and stirs within me the powers of reflection, as a similar expression from common person would not be likely to do. He now stands before me strong, noble and dignified, teaching me, and teaching us all, that our life should be spiritual and progressive, through all the years of time; that we should begin

on earth the great journey of the soul, which shall continue on forever beyond the valley of death.

I have sometimes heard men and women say, that their childhood was the best and happiest part of their life; and that they can begin no new year again with a prospect as fair and delightful as the condition they have left far behind them. Are the confessions of these persons true? If so, may God regard them with compassion, and lead them in a new path, where they may see before them a condition to be attained to which the estate of childhood, is but as the tender blade to the full corn in the ear, the sapling to the tall and branching oak, the speck of light to the rounded, stupen dous sun.

They do wrong who look back upon their childhood only with sighs and regrets, who remember it only with the thought that all the heaven of life was in it. They ought to know that, however good and beautiful it was to them, they might have made their life more and more noble and beautiful, on their way to manhood and womanhood.

"Ah!" said some of my older companions to me, shaking their heads, and dashing cold water upon my enthusiastic heart and brain when I was a boy, "You have no cause for complaint now; you are seeing your best days; you never will be so well to do, so happy again. You are looking forward, thinking how much more you will attain of enjoyment, when you shall be a man, and shall act for yourself. When you shall have reached the years of manhood, you will find yourself overburdened with cares, weary with work, broken

down with grief and sadness; and, turning back to the life of your early days, you will say: 'O, that I might be young again! O, that I had lived forever in the innocence and peace of childhood.'"

Such words were met by study skepticism in my heart, yet they were chilling, discouraging words. But they have no power over me now. I see now that they came from the lips of individuals who had not improved, as they should have done, the talents which God had given them, who had made their own advanced life ignoble and sad by going downward from the simple condition of their childhood, in the path of worldliness and sin, instead of marching upward from that condition in the path of spirituality, of wisdom goodness, purity and peace. And I see too, that their mistake is a caution to all; especially is it a caution to those here who are now but in the morning of life, who are now but taking the first steps in the endless way they are to pursue.

"When I was a child," says the apostle, "I spake as a child; I understood as a child; I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." This does not imply that he retained nothing of his childhood. There was something in his personality which had always been there — something which he could not lose. He had memories, too, no doubt, which he cherished forever. He was not altogether bad, when he was a child-that Saul of Tarsus, who was brought up with so much care in the straightest sect of the Jews, who sat at the feet of the wise Gamaliel, was a bright and promising scholar, and

was loved and honored for his noble behavior and his fine accomplishments, and to the end of his days must have carried within his heart very pleasant recollections of his childhood and youth. Whatever he did in weakness, or through ignorance, he rejected and ignored. How nobly and grandly he atoned for the mistakes of his early manhood, for the wrong he did to the Saviour and his followers, in his latest days. When he became a Christian, when he became a man in the fashion of the great Master, he still retained the nobleness that was native with him, he still retained the beauty of his childhood, the best attainments of his youth; and besides, while he put aside his Pharisee pride and bigotry, while he cast off from his heart his persecuting spirit, he grew wiser, and stronger, and better in Christian life, he became a powerful, an eloquent teacher and leader in the new religion of the Saviour.

It should be the concern of all to keep and cherish everything good, everything pure, which belonged to the condition of infancy and youth. Whenever we visit or contemplate the scenes of our early life, in our taller and stouter forms, in our more dignified, our manlier mein and walk, we should be able to say: You see us changed, but we have changed for the better; we have not only increased in stature, but we have also increased in wisdom, in moral power; we still can show the elements and fashion of our childhood; but besides an enlarged capacity, a manlier bearing towards our kind, a nobler, broader, deeper sympathy towards those who are wandering in the broad way of the transgressor, a