ing some eggs.' The whole question is, is the omelet worth the egg breaking? The Doctor further urges : "A condition of public sentiment, in the several States, rendering the amendment of the Federal Constitution possible, would entirely supercede the necessity for the party, so far as these States are concerned, since the end could and would be gained by State action.” The need of a Prohibition party is not so much to secure the enactment of prohibitory laws (a comparatively easy task), but to secure their enforcement. Besides, "these States" would not be protected against importation from a non-prohibition State. If all the States in the Union save one were to adopt State prohibitory laws, in that one State sufficient liquor could be manufactured to supply all of the States, and no State could prevent its shipment across its borders. If prohibition could be secured in all the States by separate State action (certainly a much more difficult task than amending the Federal Constitution), the liquor men by concentrating their power on a single small State would be able easily to compromise Prohibition in all the States. This defect can be met only by Federal action. Finally, it is objected that the Prohibition party has but a single principle. The answer is, this country settles but one great question at a time. This question becomes for the time being the controlling one, other questions taking subordinate places in the platform of the opposing parties, and having little to do with the determination of voters. It is somewhat surprising that this should occur as an objection to so staunch a Republican as the Rev. Dr. Spear, for, over and over again, his own party, in its early history, had to meet it. He will permit me to quote in answer from the celebrated Rochester speech of William H. Seward in 1858: very char The secret of the Republican party's assured success lies in the acteristic which, in the mouth of scoffers, constitutes its great and lasting im becility and reproach. It lies in the fact that it is a party of one idea; but that idea is a noble one, an idea that fills and expands all generous souls." To push to the front a national party which has prohibition as its dominating issue, and to secure a prohibitory amendment to the Federal constitution, we are reminded, will prove a herculean task. We believe the task a wholly practicable one. But what though it proves herculean? The good results of the combined labors of Hercules were as a drop to the ocean compared with what would follow the suppression of the liquor traffic. The Christian heroism of this age and nation is capable of more than a herculean effort. SERMONIC SECTION. THE VALUE OF LIFE. The Spirit of God hath made me, and the -Job. xxxiii: 4. THERE are two conflicting theories, now-a-days, as to the origin of man. One theory brings him upward from the brute, the other, downward from God; one gives him an ascent from the ape, the other a descent from the Almighty. I shall waste no time in refuting the first theory. The most profound living physicist of Europe, Prof. Virchow, of Berlin, has lately asserted that this theory of man's evolution from the brute has no solid scientific foundation. Why need you and I seek to disprove what no man has ever yet proved or will prove? The other theory of man's origin comes down to us in the oldest book in existence, the Book of Job, and tallies exactly with the narrative in the next oldest books, those compiled by Moses: "The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." That is the Bible account of your and my ancestry. ren, fellow sharers of immortality, open this family record. Trace your ancestry back to the most august parentage in the universe: One is our Father, God; One our elder brother, Jesus. We all draw lineage from the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Herein consists the value and the dignity of human life. I go back to the origin of the globe. I find that for five days the creative hand of the Almighty is busy in fitting up an abode of palatial splendor. He adorns it; He hollows the seas for man's highway, rears the mountains for his observatories, stores the mines for his magazines, pours the streams to give him drink, and fertilizes the fields to give him daily bread. The mansion is carpeted with verdure, illuminated with the greater light by day, lesser lights by night. Then God comes up to the grandest work of all. When the earth is to be fashioned and the ocean to be poured into its bed, God simply says, "Let them be," and they are. When man is to be created, the Godhead seems to make a solemn pause, retires into the recesses of His own tranquility, looks for a model, and finds it in Himself. "And God said, let us make man in our image, after our We make a great deal of ancestry. likeness. . . So God created man in his The son of a duke may become a duke; own image, in the image of God created the child of a king has royal blood in he him; male and female created he his veins; and a vast deal of honor is them. . . . So God breathed into man's supposed to descend with an honorable nostrils the breath of life, and he bedescent. Grant this true; it proves a came a living soul." No longer a beaugreat deal; it proves more than some tiful model, no longer a speechless staof us imagine. It proves that there is tue, but vivified. Life, that subtle, myssomething grander than for a man to terious thing, that no physicist can dehave for his sire a king or an emperor, fine, whose lurking place in the body a statesman or a conqueror, a poet or a no medical eye hath yet found outphilosopher. It looks to the grandest life came into the clay structure. He genealogy in the universe, the ancestry began to breathe, to walk, to think, to of a whole race; not a few favored indi- feel in the body the "nephesh": the viduals, but all humanity. My breth- word in the Hebrew, means, in the first [Many of the full sermons and condensations published in this REVIEW are printed from the authors' manuscripts; others are specially reported for this publication. Great care is taken to make these reports correct. vision.-ED.] The condensations are carefully made under our editorial super place, breath, the breath of life, the vital spirit, then, finally, what we understand by that immortal essence called the soul. Now, it is not my intention to enter into any analysis of this expression, "the spirit," but talk to you, my dear people, on life, its reach and its revenue, its preciousness and its power, its rewards and its retributions, life for this world and the far reaching world beyond. Life is God's gift; your and my trust. We are the trustees of the Giver, unto whom at last we shall render account for every thought, word and deed in the body. I. In the first place, life, in its origin, is infinitely important. The birth of a babe is a mighty event. From the frequency of births, as well as the frequency of deaths, we are prone to set a very low estimate on the ushering into existence of an animate child, unless the child be born in a palace or a presidential mansion, or some other lofty station. Unless there be something extraordinary in the circumstances, we do not attach the importance we ought to the event itself. It is only noble birth, distinguished birth, that is chronicled in the journals or announced with salvos of artillery. I admit that the relations of a prince, of a president and statesman, are more important to their fellow men and touch them at more points than those of an obscure pauper; but when the events are weighed in the scales of eternity, the difference is scarcely perceptible. In the darkest hovel in Brooklyn, in the dingiest attic or cellar, or in any place in which a human being sees the first glimpse of light, the eye of the Omniscient beholds an occurrence of prodigious moment. A life is begun, a life that shall never end. A heart begins to throb that shall beat to the keenest delight or the acutest anguish. More than this a soul commences a career that shall outlast the earth on which it lives and the stars beneath which it moves. The soul enters upon an existence that shall be untouched by time, when the sun is extinguished like a taper in the sky, the moon blotted out, and the heavens have been rolled together as a vesture and changed forever. The Scandinavians have a very impressive allegory of human life. They represent it as a tree, the "Igdrasil;" or, the tree of existence, whose roots grow deep down in the soil of mystery; the trunk reaches above the clouds; its branches spread out over the globe. At the foot of it sit the Past, the Present, and the Future, watering the roots. Its boughs, with their unleafing, spread out through all lands and all time; every leaf of the tree is a biography, every fibre a word, a thought or a deed; its boughs are the histories of nations; the rustle of it is the noise of human existence onwards from of old; it grows amid the howling of the hurricane, it is the great tree of humanity. Now in that conception of the half savage Norsemen, we learn how they estimated the grandeur of human life. It is a transcendent, momentous thing, this living, bare living, thinking, feeling, deciding. It comes from God; He is its author; it should rise towards God, its giver, who is alone worthy of being served; that with God it may live forever. II. In the next place, human life is transcendently precious from the services it may render to God in the advancement of His glory. Man was not created as a piece of guess-work, flung into existence as a waif. There is a purpose in the creation of every human being. God did not breath the breath of life into you, my friend, that you might be a sensuous or a splendid animal. That soul was given you for a purpose worthy of yourself, still more of the Creator. What is the purpose of life? Is it advancement? Is it promotion? Is it merely the pursuit of happiness? Man was created to be happy, but to be more to be holy. The wisdom of those Westminster fathers that gathered in the Jerusalem chamber, wrought it into the well-known phrase, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." That is the double aim of life: duty first, then happiness as the consequence; to bring in revenues of honor to God, to build up His kingdom, spread His truth; to bring this whole world of His and lay it subject at the feet of the Son of God. That is the highest end and aim of existence, and every one here that has risen up to that purpose of life lives. He does not merely vegetate, he does not exist as a higher type of animal: he lives a man's life on earth, and when he dies he takes a man's life up to mingle with the loftier life of Paradise. The highest style of manhood and womanhood is to be attained by consecration to the Son of God. That is the only right way, my friends, to employ these powers which you have brought back to your homes from your sanctuary. That is the only idea of life which you are to take tomorrow into the toils and temptations of the week. That is the only idea of life that you are to carry unto God in your confessions and thanksgivings in the closet. That is the only idea of life on which you are to let the transcendent light of eternity fall. The powers, these gifts, the wealth earned, the influence imparted, all are to be laid at the feet of Him who gave His life for you. Life is real, momentous, clothed with an awful and an overwhelming responsibility to its possessor. Nay, I believe that life is the richest of boons, or the most intolerable of curses. Setting before you the power of a well-spent life, I might of course point first to the radiant pathway that extended from Bethlehem's manger to the cross of Calvary. All along that path I read the single purpose of love, all embracing and undying: "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me. .. I have glorified thee on earth, I have finished the work thou gavest me to do." Next to that life we place the life begun on the road to Damascus. In him Christ lived again, with wondrous power, present in the utterances and footsteps of the servant. For me to live is Christ:" that is the master passion of Paul. Whether he ate or drank, gained or lost, wrought or suffered, Christ filled the eye and animated every I found myself lately studying with intense interest, the biography of BAXTER. For half a century that man gave himself to the service of Jesus with a perseverance and industry that shames such loiterers as you and I. Just think of a man that twice on every Lord's day proclaimed the Gospel of his Master with most elaborate care and unflinching diligence; on the first two days of the week spent seven hours each day in instructing the children of the parish, not omitting a single one on account of poverty or obscurity; think of him as devoting one whole day of each week to caring for their bodily welfare, devoting three days to study, during which he prepared one hundred and sixty instructive volumes saturated with the spirit of the word, among them that immortal "Saints' Everlasting Rest," that has guided so many a believer up to glory. The influence of one such life as that changed the whole aspect of the town of Kidderminster, When he came to it, it swarmed with ignorance, profligacy, Sabbath-breaking, vice; when he left it, the whole community had become sober and industrious, and a large portion converted and godly. He says: 'On the Lord's Day evening you may hear hundreds of families in their doors singing psalms or reading the Bible as you pass along the streets." Sixteen hundred sat down at one time to his communion table. Nearly every house became a house of prayer. Such was one life, the life of a man much of the time an invalid, crying out often unto God for deliverance from the most excruciating bodily pains. Such was one life on which was a stamped "Holiness to Jesus," and ont of which flowed the continual efflux of Christian power and beneficence. Such a man never dies. Good men live forever. Old Augustine lives to-day in the rich discourses inspired by his teachings. Lord Bacon lives in the ever-widening circles of engines, telegraph and telephones which he taught men how to invent. Elizabeth Fry lives in the prison reformers following her radiant and beneficial footsteps. Bunyan lies in Bunhill Fields, but his bright spirit walks the earth in the Pilgrim's Progress. Calvin sleeps at Geneva, and no man knoweth his sepulcher to this day, but his magnificent Vindication of God's Sovereignty will live forever. We hail him as in one sense an ancestor of our republic. Wesley slumbers beside the City Road Chapel; his dead hand rings ten thousand Methodist church bells round the globe. Isaac Watts is dead, but in the chariot of his hymns tens of thousands of spirits ascend to-day in majestic devotion. Howard still keeps prisons clean. Franklin protects our dwellings from lightnings. Dr. Duncan guards the earnings of the poor in the savings bank. For a hundred years Robert Raikes has gathered his Sunday-schools all over Christendom; and Abraham Lincoln's breath still breathes through the life of the nation to which, under God, he gave a new birth of freedom. The heart of a good man or a good woman never dies. Why, it is infamy to die and not be missed. Live, immortal friend, live as the brother of Jesus, live as a fellow workman with Christ in God's work. Rev. Phillips Brooks once said to his people: "I exhort you to pray for fullness of life-full red blood in the body, full and honest truth in the mind, fullness of consecrated love to the dying Saviour in the heart." III. In the next place, life is infinitely valuable, not only from the dignity of its origin and the results and revenues it may reach, but from the eternal consequences flowing from it. Ah, this world, with its curtaining of light, its embroideries of the heavens, and its carpeting of verdure, is a solemn vestibule to eternity. My hearer, this world on which you exhibit your nature this morning is the porch of heaven or the gateway of hell. Here you may be laying up treasures through Christ and for Christ, to make you a millionaire to all eternity. Here, by simply refusing to hearken, by rejecting the cross, by grieving the Spirit, you may kindle a flame that shall consume and give birth to a worm of remorse that shall prey on your soul forever and ever. In this brief twenty years, thirty, or forty, you must, without mistake, settle a question, the decision of which shall lift you to the indescribable heights of rapture, or plunge you to the depths of darkness and despair. I am a baby at the thought of the word eternity; I have racked this brain of mine, in its poverty and its weakness, and have not the faintest conception of it, any more than I have of the omnipresence of Jehovah; yet one is as real as the other, and you and I will go on in the continuation of an existence that outnumbers the years as the Atlantic drops outnumber the drops of a brook; an existence whose ages are more than the stars that twinkled last night in the firmament-an existence interminable, yet all swinging on the pivot of that life in that pew. It is overpowering. How momentous, then, is life! How grand its possession! what responsibility, in its very breath! what a crime to waste it! what a glory to consecrate it! what a magnificent outcome when it shall shuffle off the coil, and break itself free from its entanglements, and burst into the presence of its Giver, and rise into all the transcendent glories of its life everlasting! In view of that, what a solemn thing it is to preach God's Word, and to stand between the living and the dead! And in view of life, its preciousness and power, its far-reaching rewards and punishments, let me say here, in closing, that there are three or four prac tical considerations that should be pressed home upon us and carried out by us. 1. The first practical thought is, how careful you and I ought to be to hus |