theology in the shape of sermons, built up in solid masonry, with buttresses and pillars, and breastworks, with monstrous porticoes and huge, dark corridors, piled up too, story upon story, tower upon tower, are noble monuments of the industry and patience of the times. They stand in our libraries to be explored, like old baronial castles, full of the armory of war and the trophies of victory. We sometimes carry away an old battle-axe and re-cast it into a lighter form; but what could we do with those sermons themselves in our modern pulpits? The ministry has been affected as much as it ought in this matter by the spirit of the times, and now it is stoutly maintained that we must take another step-our very themes are obsolete. The material itself we use is too heavy. We must take instead the popular topics of the day. We must attract men to the house of God, and keep them there by means of those practical themes in which they are so deeply interested. Is it so? What is the spirit of the age, and what its demands upon the ministry? Look at it as an age of progress. Such it surely is, in many respects of unparalleled and fearful progress. In all that pertains to the development of the physical-in the waking up of the human intellect-in radicalism, political, moral, theological-such an age of progress has never been seen.

What do the exigencies of this progressive period demand at our hands? Not surely additional stimulants-not surely a heavier pressure of the moving force, but guidance, guidance to a safe result; the pressure of a heavy hand upon the helm. At other times, the work of the ministry has been to arouse the torpid and slumbering, to infuse life and energy, and for such a work the doctrines of the cross have been found mighty through God. They waked up the energies of the Wittenberg reformers, and gave to all Europe an impulse onward and upward, not yet expended, and we believe never to be expended, till the glory of the Lord shall fill the earth; an impulse that enters in no trifling measure into the sum of influences which have produced the very state of things in the midst of which we live. Are those doctrines adequate to the new demands which this state of things has created? That elements of progress, belong to the gospel, history has demonstrated. We need not tarry here to explain in what these elements consist. Our great concern now is, to know whether there is power to regulate and guide that progress to an end worthy of man, and well pleasing to God. It is an easy thing to guide while the momentum is yet but small-but who will put his hand to that loaded train, loosened from its fastenings and leaping down yonder inclined plane?

And I confess, that when I look at the work to be done by the church in these exigencies, I am oppressed with its awfulness, its magnitude, its difficulty. When we think of the mighty mass of mind, now awakened to its intensest action; think of the im

measurable power of the press now stimulating that mind to the utmost; think of the intense, absorbing pressure of secular business, tasking to the utmost the physical and mental energies of the nation, sweeping into its current almost the entire ranks of the young men, the hope of the country and the church, and sweeping away upon its bosom the wreck of early hopes, of Christian principles, and of vows to God;-think too, that the end of all this action, toward which all this current is sweeping-the end for which every shuttle flies, and every furnace burns, and every furrow is turned--the end for which every steamer and sail plow the deep, and the iron horse rushes across the land; the end for which the lightning speaks and the press re-echoes its utterances; the end for which cabinets plan and senates legislate, and the whole machinery of government is managed-the end for which diplomacy is conducted, war is declared, and human blood poured out like water--the end is none other than Mammon, the god of this world. When we think that all our boasted progress is but rushing down the steep toward such an end; nothing higher, nothing nobler, nothing better; and when we think that the work of the church is to grasp the helm, and turn the mighty moving mass heavenward, and Godward,--the question returns upon us with amazing interest, What are the sources of her power for such an undertaking? It is vain, in these circumstances, to appeal to moral precept and the lessons of prudence and economy-vain to point to the beacon lights of past history, vain to trust to national faith and compromises and treaties. All such influences will avail no more than cobwebs across the path of the locomotive. Nothing can avail, till there be a higher end of progress, and this end be so lifted up and magnified in its importance and its authority as to command the eye and interest the heart, and fill the soul of the man and the nation, until everything else is eclipsed by it. What can do this? Not the naked doctrine of immortality; not the thunders of violated law. I turn in despair from these and from every other source of power to the cross of Christ, and bid this maddened world stop and gaze upon that monument of God's wisdom and love--standing alone "amid the lapse of ages and the waste of worlds." From that cross speaks the infinite God to tell what immortality is worth, what is the power of an endless

life.

The amazing fact of the death of the Son of God upon the cross lifts up the great end to which all true progress must aim -infinitely above every thing else conceivable-and magnifies it, as an interest which, in God's esteem infinitely exceeds all other interests besides. If there is power anywhere to guide the intense activity of the age, it must be found here. The ministry can be fitted for its work in this age, only where this great truth shall so possess their souls, so infuse into their very being the spirit and the life of the cross, and give such intensity and en

largement to their apprehension of divine realities, that they shall know nothing among men but Jesus Christ and him crucified. The church can be fitted to conflict with the temptations that so heavily press upon her, and to be the light of the world, only by being buried with Christ in baptism unto death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness of life.

2. Adaptations to the ends of moral reform.

The church as a reforming agent seeks, or should seek, to lay the foundation of an improved state of morals in the man and in the community, deep in sound moral principle; an abiding, permanent change for the better, that will endure temptation, opposition and reproach-to build a house upon the rock that neither wind nor flood can shake. Nothing else in this regard is worth her seeking. To such reform all the tendencies of the gospel conspire. It relies not on external fastenings to a life of decency, but on the renovation of the central power of the soul. It attempts not to dispossess the strong man armed by violence, nor by legislative enactments and judicial authority, but what Chalmers has so expressively termed the expulsive power of a new affection; it makes better states by making better men; and makes better men by making better hearts.

There is no evil under the sun that it is not fitted to grapple with and overcome-no work of the devil that Christ cannot subdue. It comes to men, entrenched in evil habits, wrapped up in prejudice and girt for resistance to all manner of force; it comes in the melting accents of the Son of God, and speaks of the great love wherewith he loved our guilty race; it comes like the mid-day sun, melting away prejudice, disarming resistance, unloosening all bands, and pouring its own heavenly spirit into the very heart. Faithfully applied and honestly received, the doctrines of the cross must work the cure of every individual and every social wrong which we deplore. It has no magic force to heal diseases to which it is not applied, to remedy evils which it is not permitted to reach; but let it be faithfully brought in contact with any evil system, in the kindness of a heart full of the sympathies of Christ, and a blessed result, under God, is certain. The process may be slow, too slow for this fiery age. nent changes in society are always slow, and in the very nature of moral causes must be slow. Changes which involve the reformation of all our tastes and appetites, of all our habits of thought and feeling, and which involve, also, the re-construction of society-changes, too, of this kind, which are expected to be permanent can not be the work of a day or a year, nor on a large scale, the work of a generation, unless effected by miracle. The eternal verities of the gospel, which must be the foundation of such changes, must not only be correctly taught and appre hended, but their very fibre must be inwrought into the bone and

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muscle of the man, and the race, and the spirit of them, must possess their whole being. No shorter way is possible, if we would not have all our work undone before we have finished it, and be buried ourselves in its ruins.

I question not the propriety of calling in the aid of the civil arm in respect to evils which run into the sphere of human legislation; but if we rely upon that arm instead of relying on the great truths of the gospel, made effectual by the Holy Ghost, we abandon Jehovah, to trust in Assyria, and the sword on which we lean shall pierce through our own hand. An unchecked under current of moral corruption will sooner or later wear away all the foundations of your legislative enactments, and sweep every vestige of them from the statute book. I know not by what lessons God may teach his Church to trust not in man, neither to put confidence in princes, in respect to any work she has to do; but to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. Yet I can not doubt she is to learn it in some way effectually and speedily. 3. Adaptations to the special mission of the preacher, viz., the conversion and sanctification of men.

It was for this reason alone that Paul made it his undivided business to preach the doctrines of the cross. The theme was a stumbling block to the Jew and to the Greek foolishness-but to those who are saved it was the power of God and the wisdom of God. The wisdom of God is it, not only in its display of a plan of redemption, which none but the infinite intelligence could devise or fully comprehend, but in its adaptations of means to the immediate end for which the gospel is preached? For the accom plishment of the mightiest work that can be wrought in the human soul, it furnishes the mightiest, the sublimest truth made known to human intelligence. Slighter changes may be made by feebler means; changes of opinion, changes of pursuit, changes of social relations, changes of public profession-all that is superficial may be reached by means of the ordinary forms of truth-of every day's observation. But when it is sought to descend to the very bottom of the soul, to upturn the very foundations of character, and reconstruct the whole, so that to all moral intents and purposes there shall be a new man, old things passed away, and all things become new; and this to be done, in accordance with the laws of free intelligence, an instrument must be used that will cleave through one's being, dividing asunder the soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow, and laying bare the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Just such is the doctrine of the cross. The death of the Son of God to atone for sin, and lift up fallen man from his degradation and ruin, demonstrates, as nothing else can demonstrate, the depth of human guilt, the completeness of man's ruin by sin, the worthlessness of all superficial renovations; and at the same time, it throws in upon the soul the inspiring stimulus furnished

by the worth of the soul, and the possibility of its restoration, in the assurance of heaven's interest and love and infinite power, drawn forth and pledged for its help. It tears away, on the one hand, all the foundations of hope which are found in the natural man, presenting in their place the everlasting rock on which he may build and rest secure; breaking up his confidences in every human arm, and reaching forth in sympathy and tenderness the arm of Omnipotence itself. It has been forcibly said, "that which man goes through to be regenerated to God, opens depths in the soul, down which, not only had he never looked before, but which, till then, had been unthought-of regions. The stillness which had brooded there is broken. Far, far down, deep is calling unto deep, and the waters of the dead sea move. O, if man would know something of that truly shoreless ocean, the soul-something of those caves which no line has fathomed-and feel the power of the Spirit which is moving there, let him see and feel himself a sinner before the Almighty God. If thou wouldst know the infinite capacity of thy nature, O man, feel thyself a worm, and less than a worm, before thy God. To hear one prate of the light of reason and the dignity and perfectibility of his nature, who has never felt the searchings of conviction, and the agonizing throes of sin, how gaudy, how poor, how sad it is. What does such a man know of those depths out of which a redeemed one is come, or of the height and grandeur to which he is ascending?" The instrument by which at once the soul's vileness and worth is thus laid open is the doctrine of the cross. And it is worthy of note here, how in the facts of Christian experience, this simple truth that Christ died for man, is honored above all truth besides.

We have our various theories about the atonement, which we sometimes take with us into the pulpit. They may contribute to relieve our own or other minds of difficulties; but, let it be remembered, our theories are not objects of Christian faith. The soul of the believer rests not on them but on the living personal Christ, the Almighty Saviour. The faith that justifies the soul heeds not your questions of a limited or a general atonement, nor your speculations about imputation, and satisfaction, and equivalents, and the like. It asks not how can Christ save, but can he save. What is the testimony of God concerning his Son? Is he the Almighty Saviour, able and ready to save unto the uttermost? It overleaps all minor questions, and brings the soul at once to Christ crucified, for rest. Hence, Paul declared to the trembling jailor, in answer to that most thrilling question that ever sprung from human lips, "What shall I do to be saved." Paul declared, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." Hence, also, from that day to this, wherever Christ crucified has been preached, under whatever forms of theology, from the highest Augustinian to the lowest Arminian, that preach