golden quiver. Everywhere space warmed, lighted, and governed by incandescent and locomotive suns. Everywhere system framed into system as the parts of a house are framed together to make one serviceable whole. Broad lines of sympathy, resemblance, interdependence run. everywhere through the heavens as run the veins and arteries and nerves through animal bodies.

Just as the general resemblance between animals enables comparative anatomy to foresee what will be found in the human system, so the great resemblances between the different parts of the astronomical realm have enabled us to forecast many discoveries long before they were actually made.

Of course there is but one thing to be said; but one thing is said to philosophic ears by the voices that fall from the sky. With one consent they proclaim unity of authorship. This unity is the simplest and most natural interpretation of the facts. Such sameness of material, of plan, of process, and of apparent ultimate object (the furnishing of homes for living beings) is just what we would expect from a single author; and such a single Author as the God of the Scriptures is fully equal to the task of making all the heavens in all their richness and vastness, though these should be found a thousandfold richer and vaster than we yet know them.

3. God is great.-After we have been convinced of the Divine existence by immemorial tradition, by our sense of need, by the miraculously attested Revelation, by the enormous superiority of theism as an hypothesis to account for Nature, it behooves us to get as vivid a conception as possible of the personal greatness of God. We know that His attributes are great, are infinite; but there is a great difference between a cloud as seen in the twilight and the same cloud as painted and illumined by the rising sun. What we need is to have the cloudy vastness which we call omniscience, omnipotence, and eternity painted and illumined into vividness and realization by full-orbed and effulgent examples of the vast durations, forces, and wisdoms of design and administration which God has established in Nature and by which He has expressed Himself. In no science can we find such magnificent examples of these things as in astronomy. They are to our vague ideas of the natural attributes of God what the light of a great speculum is to the great nebula in Andromeda, only faintly visible to the naked eye.

The problem of three bodies is yet beyond mastery by our most potential science. How much more the problem of three hundred bodies! That of a system composed of millions of worlds is infinitely beyond even the hope of the most audacious astronomer; and yet a glance at the heavens shows us that God has mastered this despair of our science; for we see there very many such millionaire systems in a state of permanent equilibrium, all the secrets of which God as the Inventor and Framer must thoroughly understand.

The conditions of stability in our solar system-a central body much heavier than all its planets and satellites put together; orbits nearly circular, lying in nearly the same plane, and traversed in the same direction-have been ascertained. This achievement is reckoned a splendid triumph of genius and the calculus; but what human genius is equal to finding the conditions of stability in some enormous globular cluster that has no dominant central orb and whose orbits cut one another at all possible angles? This is a fact infinitely beyond even the hope of our science; and yet the Inventor and Framer of such a system that remains unchanged from generation to generation, must thoroughly know the conditions which He Himself has contrived and established.

A single beautiful garden may show a very accomplished gardener, but when we are assured that he has a score or more of similar gardens in different parts of the country, all of which he made and superintends, we conceive a still higher opinion of him as a gardener. A merchant may show much ability in starting and managing a business that covers only a single town and a single branch of trade; but if we find him successfully extending his operations till they cover the whole nation and almost every commodity, we greatly enlarge our impression of his business faculty. A sovereign may command admiration by his administration of a small principality; but if he becomes the head of a great empire and administers a hundred provinces as well as he did his Monaco, we conceive a far greater admiration of his ability as a sovereign than we had before. So, much as we admire and have reason to admire, the vast Mind displayed in the making and furnishing our own world, when we look skyward and find that this world is but an inconsiderable part of the celestial theatre which this Divine Mind inade and administers equally well, we naturally rise to a grander conception of Him who, without apparent strain, extends His earthly sceptre over all the stars.

To establish and administer so vast and varied an empire as this argues a breadth and activity of thought of the most astounding character. Nowhere outside of astronomy do we find signs of anything like such mighty rushes and battles and victories of thought and plan and skill, as appear in the glorious systems that wheel their ordered and enduring pomp through the nightly heavens. Lo, here is One who is at home in the vastest affairs, whose congenial element is stupendous achievement, whose thoughts can go and come from star to star and from zenith to nadir as easily as our wings can go from bush to bush! Lo, an executive faculty equal to any emergency or breadth of application! Lo, endless faculty for detail as well as for broad superintendence! Lo, powers so elastic that they never tire, so far-reaching that nothing lies outside of their orbit, so individualizing that the mote in the sunbeam is no more overlooked than the sun itself! It is a great throne that looks down upon us from the sky; but it is not so great as the King who founded and fills it. The power to produce something out of nothing by a mere act of will

means a power to annihilate as well as create all things conceivable. Such a power is unspeakably grand. It casts all other powers into the shade. It puts all things within the grasp of its possessor. It is itself condensed

omnipotence.

People who believe in God as the Framer of nature, almost or quite without exception, also believe in Him as the Creator of the various elements that compose nature. When does one get his most impressive conception of creative power? Is it not when he includes in his view not merely the single grain of sand that he happens to hold in his hand, but that vast host of atoms which compose the shining astronomical realm Though the power that can produce a single atom out of nothing by mere willing, is clearly quite as great as that which can smite the deserts of space into solar systems, yet there is a great difference between the two in power to rouse and impress the imagination. The one conception gives us only the sublime in cause; the other adds to this the sublime of a vast and glorious effect. We have two sublimities instead of one just as soon as we lift our eyes from the dust at our feet to the stardust over our heads.

Then think of the great natural forces revealed in our outlook on the structure and processes of the astronomical earth and heavens. The thunders and lightnings in their might, the winds and waves at their best, the uplift that sets mountains and continents on their high places, the fires that lap up forests and cities in an hour and turn the toughest metals into fluids and vapors, the forces implied in the annual output of vegetable life as well as in tornadoes, volcanoes, and earthquakes-these are very impressive, but not so impressive as the forces implied in the rush of comets and planets, in the fierce disturbances seen in the photosphere of the sun, in the sweep of a system of millions of huge worlds at the rate of a million miles an hour, above all in the sum of the dynamics included in the universe system sweeping at about the same inconceivable rate around its centre of gravity. What a POWER must He be who could originate, harness, and keep well in hand such terrible forces! "The thunder of His power who can understand!"-how natural such a thought to a reasonable astronomer as he looks forth from his Uraniberg on the prodigious stellar movements.

The idea of the eternity of God is not an easy one to master; indeed, what being short of God Himself has ever compassed it? But some get a larger and more vivid conception of it than others. Other things being equal, none are likely to get so large and just a conception as those who have striven with the mighty astronomical periods, whose thoughts have climbed as by a ladder from the year of the earth to the year of Neptune, from the year of Neptune to that of our sun, from that of our sun to the hundreds of millions of years that circumscribe the ebb and flow of some stellar perturbations. Wider and wider grows our horizon as we ascend, until at last from the highest rung of all we see-never so far, never so

nations, of dispensations compared The great thought crowds outward The successive flights of conception understand what the Everlasting is Its spell is upon us. The roar of

far. What are the lives of men, of with such a mighty round of æons? the elastic walls of the imagination. strengthen our wings. We begin to like. Its representative is before us. its boundless ocean is in our ears, and its surf is spraying in our faces. We uncover, we bend low; for are we not at last in the presence of the eternity of God?

III. THE SECRETS OF THE

EFFECTIVE TREATMENT OF

THEMES.

BY ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D.D., PHILADELPHIA, PA.

We propose to treat the subject of spiritual homiletics. There are some things at the outset that may be taken for granted. A sermon is plainly a product, not of the mind of man only, but of the mind of man in contact with the Spirit of God and the truth of God. In 1 Corinthians ii., we have some most valuable and important hints on the subject of preaching. We are there taught that the natural man-even the princeliest intellect and philosophical wisdom-is still incapable of receiving the things of the Spirit of God, because they are spiritually discerned; and Paul says that we have received the Spirit which is of God that we may know the things that are freely given to us of God, which things also we speak not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual," which latter phrase may be interpreted to mean, expressing spiritual conceptions in spiritual terms, or interpreting spiritual truths to spiritual faculties.

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Although this was undoubtedly written with regard to the production of inspired writings, the principle we regard as fundamental to the production of a proper sermon, and upon this subject we now design to expatiate. The most spiritual preachers, and the most effective, have observed seven great secrets of effectiveness :

I. Simplicity of treatment.

II. Close adherence to the text.

III. The full presentation of the truth.

The sword of the truth is two edged. It has an edge of law and an edge of grace, and they combine to make it powerful.

IV. The enforcement of supernatural truth by the analogies of natural

law.

V. The use of illustrations apt and telling.

VI. The constant progress toward a climax.

VII. The tone of deep spirituality, which again involves two or three things First, a thorough conviction on the part of the speaker, and there

fore a certain positiveness born of conviction; not Yea and Nay, but Yea; not defensive preaching, but offensive; not destructive of error only, but constructive of the truth; consisting not of negations, but of positions.

In our own conception of spiritual preaching we are constrained to go beyond all of these, and will endeavor to give a lucid expression to the thought which we desire to present. The Holy Scriptures are an inspired book, and the Holy Spirit is the indwelling Spirit in the believer. All true insight into the Book hangs on the unveiling of the eyes to behold wondrous things in the Word. If these premises be true, then it follows that the greatest help in the preparation of sermons is a prayerful, humble, devout meditation on the Holy Scriptures, by which the spiritual eye shall be unveiled and enabled to behold the wondrous things. Moreover, every text of Scripture is a Divine gem, and it is a gem which is cut into facets upon the wheel of the Spirit. As we need therefore to turn a piece of spar around in order to get the angle at which it reveals its beautiful colors, and as a diamond with many facets must be seen at every angle to appreciate its brilliance, so a text of Scripture must be turned about in the process of meditation and looked at from every point of view before its wonderful radiance is fully perceived. The most effective preachers may be challenged, therefore, to say whether they have not found that immersion in the Scriptures, with dependence upon the Spirit alike for instruction and unction, has been the secret of their highest pulpit power. John M'Neil, of London, says, "The true preacher prays and meditates on the Scriptures until he has a vision, and he never preaches until he gets the vision."

As

For ourselves, we feel constrained to bear our witness that no amount of study of commentaries or of any other form of human product has been of such help as the spiritual, devotional study of the Scriptures in the original tongues, carefully noting every word and phrase, case of a noun, mood and tense, number and person of a verb, and the relations of clauses and phrases and words to each other. Prayer for insight into the Scriptures, and a supreme regard for the mind of the Spirit will lead to a comparative indifference as to mere literary or so-called "homiletic" completeness, and will tend to raise one above the atmosphere of criticism.

The highest kind of homiletic analysis is not an invention, but a discovery; not the product of ingenuity, but the result of illumination. It would be well, therefore, if preachers would covet earnestly the best gifts. As Professor Drummond has said: "There is an intellectual covetousness abroad, a haste to be wise, which, like the haste to be rich, leads men to speculate upon indifferent securities; and theology must not be bound up with such speculations."

We feel tempted to give a few examples of the effect of personal and prayerful meditation upon the Holy Scriptures, though it is quite possible that we may not select the best illustrations which further thought might bring to our minds. For example, in Genesis xlii. 21, we read : "We are