I ct v>> — S ST* TO 
 
The “Things which are not:” God’s chosen instruments for advancing 
 
 His Kingdom. 
 
 A SERMON, 
 
 PREACHED AT CLEVELAND, OHIO, OCTOBER 1, 1861, 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 American Board of Commissioners for 
 Foreign Missions, 
 
 AT TUE1R 
 
 FIFTY-SECOND ANNUAL MEETING. 
 
 BY RICHARD S. STORRS, Jr., D.D., 
 
 OF BROOKI.Y-V, NEW-YORK. 
 
 NEW-YORK : 
 
 JOHN A. GRAY, PRINTER, STEREOTYPER, AND BINDER, 
 
 FIRE-PROOF BUILDINGS, 
 
 CORNER OF FRANKFORT AND JACOB STREETS. 
 
 1861. 
 

 
 ■ 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
SERMON. 
 
 
 1 Corinthians, 1 : 28, (last clause.) 
 
 “ Yea, and things which arc not, to bring to nought things that are. ’ 
 
 This clause contains a complete thought, and suggests to us 
 a theme rich enough, large enough, to engage and reward our 
 evening’s meditation. It is proper, therefore, to single it out 
 from the others with which it stands associated, and to make 
 it the subject of our discourse. And yet, in so separating it, 
 we must not sacrifice the peculiar significance and the added 
 impressiveness which it derives from its position, or the light 
 which is cast on it by its companions. It is the last of a series 
 of clauses, of which each that precedes it prepares the way 
 for it, and by natural progress leads the mind toward it. And 
 it is only when we view it at the head of this series, as sum- 
 ming up and surpassing the previous clauses, that we precisely 
 discern and wholly appreciate its scope and meaning. 
 
 “ For ye see your calling, brethren,” says the Apostle ; “ how 
 that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not 
 many noble, are called ; but God hath chosen the foolish things of 
 the world to confound the wise ; and God hath chosen the weak 
 things of the world to confound the things which are mighty ; 
 and base things of the world, and things which are despised, 
 hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to 
 nought things that are.” The foolish and the weak, the base 
 and the despised things — it is only natural that from the last 
 
4 
 
 and lowest of these, the things which are noticed only to be 
 contemned, the Apostle should step to* the things which are 
 not ; that is, which have either no existence, except in germ or 
 mere possibility, or certainly no existence that is recognised 
 by mankind ; which arrest no thought, excite no fear, and are 
 not prominent enough to be scorned. And these things, he 
 says, the Lord hath chosen — these things which seem still 
 weaker than the weakest, and whose very being appears but a 
 dream of the imaginative enthusiast — these things hath he 
 chosen, to bring to nought the things that are ; the great insti- 
 tutions, establishments, forces, which mark or mould the consti- 
 tution of society. lie hath chosen them for this purpose, to 
 the end that his name may be magnified by their agency, and 
 his glory be revealed in their ultimate triumph. He is able 
 to bring them to success and to victory, to human thought 
 non-existent as they are, because his foolishness is wiser than 
 men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. And 
 when it is done, no flesh shall be able to glory in his presence. 
 
 How complete is the climax to which we are brought, as 
 we thus view the passage ! How sharply discriminated from 
 those that attend it, is the thought which is contained in these 
 last words ! And how fruitful and wide is the field which it 
 opens to our survey ! It is a thought, too, peculiar to the Gos- 
 pel ; and which for that reason the better befits an occasion 
 wholly devoted, as this is, to conference concerning its further 
 advancement. 
 
 That the “Things which are,” at any time, in human society, 
 however venerable, however strong, are always liable to be 
 displaced by others, which were not in existence, or were not 
 of recognised importance and power, when the former were 
 established, but which subsequently and often suddenly are 
 brought to developement and mastery ; that thus the aspects of 
 society and history are continually changing, and each suc- 
 cessive form of civilization is likely in its turn to give place 
 
to another, into whose life its own may be absorbed, but under 
 whose differences it is buried : — these are facts familiar as any 
 fact of nature ; which impress immediately the most careless 
 observer; to question which, with so many annals before us, 
 crowded with thick reports of change, were like denying the 
 atmosphere itself. That the movement which thus is con- 
 stantly going on, through the centuries, around the world, is 
 on the whole a movement for the better ; that the “ Things 
 which are not,” so far as men’s earlier knowledge is concerned, 
 which exist but in embryo, and are only to be developed by a 
 keener observation, or a more profound and exhaustive expe- 
 rience, are yet usually superior to the things which precede 
 them, and more replete with a vitalizing energy ; that thus 
 each industrious and thoughtful community is likely to sur- 
 pass in its later years the attainments of its earlier, and the 
 race itself to be gradually enriched, invigorated, and elevated, 
 as the centuries proceed : — these also are facts which modern 
 history clearly illustrates, and which, without any indiscreet 
 optimism, we may gratefully accept. But that these things 
 of which the age that is at any time knows not and dreams 
 not, — these powers which exist in it only in germ, and which 
 make no appeal either to its hopes or its sensitive fears, — that 
 these, while hidden so remotely from man, are all the time 
 present to the mind of the Most High ; that they are indeed 
 his pre-ordained instruments, not only for working the changes 
 which shall come in the aspects or in the life of Society, but 
 for the higher, grander purpose of establishing supremely His 
 Kingdom in the world ; that he has incorporated their unseen 
 elements with the system of things in order that ultimately 
 he may use them in this office, and make them auxiliaries in 
 subjecting the world to his truth and his Son : — these are facts 
 the declaration of which is peculiar to our Keligion ; yet which 
 it not only affirms with authority, but exhibits and demon- 
 strates, in its actual advancement toward the conquest of the 
 
6 
 
 Earth ; and which it offers to every believer — to us who are 
 here assembled this evening — as a basis on which to found the 
 assurance of its ultimate triumph. 
 
 So here, as every where, does Christianity vindicate its ori- 
 gin in God’s mind, by placing us at once upon the highest 
 levels of truth, and opening to our minds the widest range 
 for reflection. And the words of the Apostle, holding in them 
 a principle so specific and profound, present to us a theme 
 appropriate and adequate to our present occasion. 
 
 To this theme, therefore, Fathers and Brethren, I invite your 
 attention : The “ things which are not,” — which are not re- 
 cognised by man, and which subsequent times alone are to de- 
 velope into power and mastery — these are from the first 
 God’s chosen instruments for the advancement of IIis 
 Kingdom in the World. If this he true, the relations of the 
 fact to the character, power, and government of God, and the 
 bearings of the fact on our Missionary enterprise, will indicate 
 themselves to all our minds. 
 
 That we may get the thought fully before us, as it lay at 
 first in the mind of the Apostle, and may receive the perfect 
 impression of those illustrations of its truth which were given 
 in the centuries that succeeded, let us call before us in rapid 
 review the scenes amid which the text was written, and then 
 the events which became its immediate and complete vindica- 
 tion. — It was written, you remember, from that delightful and 
 populous city planted by the Ionian colony on the hills over- 
 looking ‘ the Asian meadows,’ along the Cayster. In this city 
 of Ephesus, important and peculiar, partly Greek but still 
 more Oriental in its manners and spirit, the metropolis of a 
 province, and with a commerce that drew to its wharves the 
 representatives of all nations, in which schools of philosophy 
 seem so much to have abounded that one of them was opened 
 to Paul for his labors, yet in which the Eastern superstitions 
 
1 
 
 and magic darkly and haughtily confronted philosophy, and 
 still had a power which they had not either at Athens or at 
 Rome, — in this city, the remains of whose magnificent theatre 
 yet strew the ground in colossal confusion, and above which 
 then shone in splendid beauty the Temple of Diana, whose 
 graceful colonnades first revealed the full beauty of the Ionic 
 style, and whose columns of jasper still perpetuate among men 
 the vision of its glory, — in this city where the East and the 
 West were commingled, and within whose spacious walls and 
 harbor was assembled so busy and so various a life, — it was 
 natural that the Apostle, coming westward from Antioch, 
 should tarry for a time, that he might there proclaim the Gos- 
 pel. And so he abode there for more than two years, and 
 from thence he wrote the epistle before us. 
 
 It was written to Corinth ; that wealthier, more brilliant, and 
 more luxurious town, planted upon the celebrated Greek Istli- • 
 mus, and by its position attracting the trade not only of 
 Greece, but of all the countries whose shores were washed by 
 either of the seas between whose almost meeting waves it for- 
 tunately stood; above which arose in austere grandeur the 
 precipitous heights of the Acro-Corintlms ; around which was 
 spread the loveliest beauty of the land and the water ; whose 
 architecture was unrivalled, even in Greece, in its sumptuous 
 elegance ; in whose streets all arts that skill could gain, and 
 all the gifts that commerce could bring, were equally at home ; 
 and yet whose manners were so licentious that even in that 
 gross pagan age its very name was a synonyme for vice, and 
 that from it went a constant influence which defiled and de- 
 moralized wheresoever it touched. — To the Christians in this 
 city Paul wrote from Ephesus the letter which contains the 
 declaration of the text. 
 
 In effect, therefore, he had before him while writing the 
 whole expanse of the Mediterranean ; that ‘ many-nationed ’ 
 sea, still full of interest to us and our times, but which was to 
 
8 
 
 the old world what all the oceans are to ours ; yea, more than 
 this : which was not only the cradle and school of its maritime 
 enterprise, and the scene of its naval strifes and conquests, but 
 the constant centre of its most powerful civilizations; around 
 which were grouped, as if by a force as necessary as that 
 which forms the crystal around its axis, all the arts and the 
 empires then most prominent in the world, or which now most 
 attract and influence our minds. Upon or near the shores of 
 this sea, the labors of Paul were constantl}’- performed. Born 
 within sight of it, his whole after life clung to it. In all his 
 incessant missionary tours he scarcely left it ; but at Caesarea, 
 Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi, Thessaloaica, Athens, Corinth, 
 Rome, perhaps still further to the gates of the Atlantic, he had 
 it before him, and strove with all the energy of his will, in- 
 spired and sustained by his Christian enthusiasm, to stud its 
 shores with Christian churches, and to make it a centre of the 
 kingdom of God and his Son in the world. 
 
 o 
 
 It is evident then, at once, from this point of view, what 
 were the institutions which Paul describes as “ things that 
 are the great established powers in society, which withstood, 
 or at least did not harmonize with, the extension of Christian- 
 ity. And upon these things, that we may receive the full im- 
 pression of the truth which he uttered, it is needful that we 
 pause ; till we feel in part the vast strength they possessed ; till 
 we see in a measure the 1 hiding of their power.’ Then bet- 
 ter may we estimate, in comparison with them, the obscure, 
 undeveloped, and unrecognised forces, by which in God’s plan, 
 and in the interest of His kingdom, they were all to be de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 Foremost among these “ Tilings that are” — these powerful 
 institutes of the day of the Apostle, opposed to Christianity — 
 we must reckon, of course, that haughty Judaism, dogmatic 
 and secular, imperious in its claims and impatient in its hopes, 
 
9 
 
 into which the religion given by God to the people of his elec* 
 tion had by degrees been transformed, and which now had the 
 seat of its dominion in Palestine, but the outposts of its in- 
 fluence in many cities of the Empire. Into collision and con- 
 troversy with this, Christianity caino at the very beginning : 
 since the more essentially harmonious it was with the an- 
 cient religion truly interpreted, the more positive and vehe- 
 ment was the contest urged against it by that arrogant system 
 which now clothed itself in the robes and occupied the place 
 of Moses and the Prophets ; a system not content to be recog- 
 nised and honored as Divine in its sphere, yet introductory to 
 a higher, but claiming for itself to be final and universal, and 
 challenging for its own. supremacy in the world. Uncon- 
 scious of imperfection, and intolerant of change, this bred a 
 temper domineering and defiant in those who adhered to it 
 toward all other faiths, but most of all toward the faith which 
 adored a crucified Nazarene. And immediately, continually, 
 in every city, and in almost each village, it met the Apostle ; 
 at Ephesus or at Corinth, no less than at Jerusalem ; among 
 his own kindred, as well as among strangers. It lay in wait for 
 him by stealth, and assailed him with violence. More often 
 far than it touched his person, it overshadowed and darkened 
 his thoughts. And always it fronted him as an urgent, an- 
 cient, and inveterate Power, enthroned supreme among his own 
 nation — the most religious of the peoples of the earth — and 
 systematically withstanding, with all its energy, the advance 
 of Christianity. 
 
 It is one of the most significant illustrations of the drift 
 of human nature — this character of Judaism in the day of the 
 Apostle, and the position it assumed toward the doctrines he 
 proclaimed. Ennobled and vitalised as it had been at the 
 beginning, by the supreme truth of the being of God, eternal 
 and holy, almighty and wise, the creator, moral governor, 
 and judge of the Universe ; receiving a yet mightier practical 
 
10 
 
 impressiveness from the discoveries which it made of his 
 presence and providence, and of his perfect law ; becoming 
 pervaded through and through with a divine glory, as it 
 showed to men something of his heavenly empire, rehearsed 
 the history of his dealings with mankind, and even unfolded 
 through prophecy and psalm the scope and splendor of his 
 purposes of love; bringing all these manifold elements of 
 power into contact with men, through a mechanism of wor- 
 ship unequalled in its majesty, and its fitness to its end : — the re- 
 ligion of the Hebrews was intrinsically adapted, not only above 
 all other religions, but to the highest degree then possible, to 
 educate the mind, to stimulate the conscience, to implant and 
 develope the holiest affections, and to make the nation which 
 * had its oracles for their constant possession the purest, noblest, 
 . and most devout on the earth. Ho other result of it could 
 have been anticipated by those who should have assumed as 
 an axiom the moral integrity or the moral indifference of the 
 nature of man. And doubtless such effects, through the grace 
 of the Spirit, were realized in many, whose faces now glow in 
 the vision of Christ. 
 
 Yet from this religion the nation had early and persistently 
 swung away, into grossest idolatries ; reproducing in gold the 
 Egyptian Apis beneath the very pavement of sapphire on 
 which the feet of God were treading above the mount; in their 
 subsequent history, polluting the hills which looked out upon Je- 
 rusalem with the fury and lust of sacrilegious observances. 
 And when they had at length been driven out of these, by the 
 stern words of preachers and the sterner strokes of providen- 
 tial visitation, — when Assyrian oppressions, fulfilling God’s 
 plans, had forced them to a new recognition of Him, and made 
 them loathe at last the idolatries whose cruel craft had so torn 
 and despoiled them, — they only turned their religion to an oc- 
 casion of pride, and nurtured beneath it the very arrogance 
 and ambition which it was especially designed to subdue. Its 
 
11 
 
 mystic, high, and moving truths, the venerable associations it 
 derived from antiquity, the precious and kindling memories of 
 the Fathers by which it was consecrated, the wonderful inter- 
 ventions of God in providence by which so often it had been 
 vindicated or rescued, the unique impressiveness of tho cere- 
 monies and offices by which it had been conveyed through 
 the ages, the resplendent array of miracles which it wore as 
 the breastplate of gems and the golden mitre on the front of 
 its records, the very endurance and faith of the martyrs who 
 had died beneath the hands of rulers or people in allegiance to 
 it — all were together perverted by the Jews to minister more 
 abundantly to their national pride, and to make them less 
 willing to receive the Messiah whom from the beginning their 
 religion had foreshadowed, unless He should come as a con- 
 quering Prince, reigning visibly at Jerusalem, and carrying his 
 ensigns with squadrons and navies to the ends of the earth. 
 
 This influence had now for many generations been working 
 in the nation ; and, as we know, it had reached its climax when 
 Paul was proclaiming Christianity in the world. The very 
 political calamities of the Jews, stinging and irritating their 
 unsubmissive minds, had only intensified their fanatical ex- 
 pectation of victory through their ritual and law ; had only 
 exasperated their scorn of a Messiah who should seek to rule 
 by the truth and by love. The partial successes which they had 
 realized, — in establishing synagogues in many of the cities to 
 which their restless enterprise had impelled them, in gaining 
 numerous proselytes from the heathen, in compelling the ad- 
 miration of some of the higher philosophical minds for the 
 grand simplicity in which their faith contrasted the mytholo- 
 gies, in adapting through the Alexandrian school their doc- 
 trines and rules to the language, and even in some degree to 
 the spirit of the Greeks, — these had still further invigorated 
 the tendency. And so they stood, divided among themselves 
 in many particulars, yet unanimous in a fierce hostility to the 
 
12 
 
 Gospel : — the Sadducees denying angels and the resurrec- 
 tion, and almost it would seem the existence of the soul, as 
 independent of the body, while still holding among them the 
 office of high .priest, and some posts of chief influence in the 
 national Council ; the Pharisees superadding their traditions 
 to the law, and austerely exacting the most rigorous and lit- 
 eral observance of both, in disregard often of the obvious prin- 
 ciples of equity and of charity ; the Essenes delighting in 
 pietistic seclusion and remote meditations; the Herodians 
 affecting foreign manners, and maintaining the supreme au- 
 thority of the civil ruler in matters of religion: — yet all agreed 
 and unitedly zealous in expecting the propagation, by conquest 
 of arms, of their ancient faith, and all contemning the religion 
 of Jesus. It was to them not only a radical heresy and schism 
 in their national church; it involved what seemed to them a 
 national suicide, the final extinction of hopes they had cher- 
 ished until they had come to be part of their life. 
 
 So Judaism confronted Paul; a perverted system, whose an- 
 cient glory now only gave energy to its ambitious plans, and 
 its hatred and defiance of the Gospel he preached. Possessing 
 the strength derived from great truths, it used that strength 
 relentlessly against him. Retaining for its service a magnifi- 
 cent ritual, ordained of God, it sought to make that a sheet of 
 flame to consume the fruits of all his teachings. Error and 
 verity were so intermingled in its practical frame, piety and 
 pride were so combined beneath its influence, the lust of 
 conquest had blended so intimately with religious veneration, 
 that resistance to Christ seemed now to the Jew a matter of 
 conscience, and his fiercest passions had the sanction of his 
 religion. Inevitably, therefore, by the essential contrariety of 
 its tendency and temper, this was the first antagonist of the 
 Gospel ; its first, and also in some respects its most effective and 
 dangerous. It surrounded Paul in the synagogues. It even 
 entered the churches. Peter himself, and many of the Christ- 
 
13 
 
 ians, yielded at intervals to its vast influence ; and, with an ex- 
 traordinary tenacity of life, where it seemed altogether sub- 
 dued and obliterated, it still persistently reappeared. So 
 stubborn in its spirit, so thorough in its discipline, so fanatical 
 in its zeal, and so fortressed with strength on every side, it was 
 onlv the prescience of an inspired apostle, and only the utmost 
 courage of a will insphered as was Paul’s in the will of the 
 Most High, that could have predicted its absolute overthrow. 
 
 And second in the order of these “Things that are,” — these 
 powerful institutes of the day of the Apostle, opposed to 
 Christianity — must be reckoned of course the Heathenism 
 which prevailed outside of the Jews among all nations; which 
 confronted Paul every where, ancient as man, but still vigor- 
 ous in strength, imperial in place, and arrayed in universal 
 opposition to the Gospel. — The extent of this, a glance reveals 
 to ns. But how mighty it was, he knew and saw more clearly 
 than we can. 
 
 It is difficult for any man to appreciate the strength of re- 
 ligious attachments which he does not share ; difficult for the 
 Protestant to do complete justice to the mind of the Bomanist, 
 or, on the other hand, for the Bomanist to understand the 
 spiritual power of the faith of the Protestant. The Huguenot 
 and the Papist were thus dissevered in France; and the Ty- 
 rolese peasant is separated to-day from the disciple of him 
 who taught at Geneva, by chasms more deep than the Alpine 
 crevasses. Most of all is it difficult for one educated from 
 childhood beneath the light of the Gospel, accustomed to its 
 discoveries of God, its holy precepts and benign invitations, 
 and its majestic, immortal promises, to understand the power of 
 Heathenism over those who have known no other religion, whose 
 earliest thoughts have been modified by it, and all whose tem- 
 per and habits of life have been formed and matured beneath 
 its impressions. And not even he who has learned this hard 
 
u 
 
 lesson, — not even the most observant missionary •who has 
 passed his life in the midst of Heathenism, as it now exists in 
 India for example, or the islands of the Pacific, who has seen 
 it he thinks in its whole omnipresent and voluminous power, 
 surrounding the minds of a people like an atmosphere, inhaled 
 anew with every breath, and mingling itself incessantly and 
 inseparably with the currents of their life and the frame of 
 their being, — not even he can appreciate the power which the 
 antique forms of Heathenism had, when as yet no purer re- 
 ligion contrasted them on earth, except the incomplete and 
 distasteful religion of the unhonored Jews; when the foremost 
 and most cultivated nations of the earth were as ardent in the 
 maintainance of these forms of religion as the most uncivilized, 
 and were only more stately, elaborate, and ingenious in their 
 details of worship ; when every art and all agencies of com- 
 merce were auxiliary to them, all literature was full of them, 
 and all statesmanship was their servant ; when, in a word, 
 Heathenism in some form was the common law and the com- 
 mon life of the inhabited World. It was at this time that Paul 
 confronted it, at Ephesus and at Corinth, around the whole 
 sweep of the Mediterranean. And though we cannot know 
 as he did how immense and overwhelming a power it was, 
 yet we, I think, may perceive this in part if we consider 
 some obvious facts. 
 
 First of all, then, it is to be recognised by us that this Heathen- 
 ism which so withstood Christianity was not an altogether ar- 
 tificial system in any nation ; that it grew out of real and even 
 deep motions in the general mind, and was not in its substance 
 a matter of chance or a creature of contrivance, least of all an 
 arbitrary and fabricated arrangement either of state-craft or of 
 priest-craft ; nay, that it had a certain real moral life in it, and 
 was related not to depraved desire alone, to the lust and the 
 pride which it never denied and too often deified, but related 
 also, however insufficiently, to needs which the soul always 
 
15 
 
 feels to be inmost and knows to be abiding. Its answer was a 
 vain one, but it sought to give an answer, to questions which 
 never since the exile from Eden have ceased profoundly to 
 agitate the race. Unconscious prophecies of better things 
 lurked in many of its forms, and in some of its traditions. 
 There were thoughts in it that had drifted down, as has been 
 said, as ‘ planks from the wreck of Paradise.’ Its sacrifices 
 were efforts to staunch the flow from bleeding hearts. And 
 while the popular mind acknowledged chiefly the hold of its 
 ceremonies .and shows, the thoughtful found also some solace 
 or stimulus in its sublimated legends. 
 
 Then further it must be noticed that as existing in any nation 
 it took the form most germane to that people, to its genius and 
 spirit, to its circumstances and habits ; and that every where 
 it allied itself with whatever was strongest, whatever most im- 
 pressed and attracted men’s minds. Thus in Greece, from the 
 first, it enshrined itself in Art ; made eloquence its advocate ; 
 was indebted for the memorable form which it assumed to 
 the noble poetry in which its mythologies were melodiously 
 uttered. It was there at the same time a philosophy for the 
 studious, a cloister for the religious, a splendid spectacle and 
 continual entertainment for the excitable populace. In Egypt, 
 on the other hand, it folded around it the solemn gloom of 
 those austere and mystic legends which told of the destruction 
 of Osiris by Typlion, or traced in long unfolding terrors, on the 
 walls of the sealed and unsunned tomb, the path of the spirit 
 from its birth to its judgment. In Rome, the same power allied 
 itself with politics, became a military force, selected and 
 blessed the standards of the army, added sanctions to the laws, 
 and apotheosized the emperor. While eastward in Assyria, it 
 subsided to a sluggish and luxurious developement, as it touched 
 the plains whose wealth fed empires, and whose teeming tilth 
 gave license to indolence. Every where, with spontaneous flex- 
 ibility and precision, the special form of the Heathenism which 
 
16 
 
 prevailed was fitted to the needs and the temper of the people ; 
 adjusting itself to these as exactly as did the fleet and melting 
 sea-wave to the cliffs and crags or the smooth sand-reaches 
 against which in mobile might it played. 
 
 Still further we must remember that in no land was this 
 recent ; in none was it devoid of that dignity and authority 
 which were derived from a high antiquity ; while to all the 
 peoples, in proportion to their advancement, it was associated 
 with whatever was to them most renowned and inspiring in 
 their history. Their early benefactors and eminent chieftains 
 had been deified by it. It bridged the interval between their 
 times and the Golden Age. It was signalized by connection 
 with all their inspiriting national successes. It was under the 
 benediction, as he fondly believed, of his ancestral gods that 
 the Greek had fought at Marathon and Plaffea. From the 
 brazen spoils of the former of these victories the colossal 
 statue of Minerva had been wrought, which, flashing afar from 
 the summit of the Acropolis, seemed to keep perpetual ward 
 over the consecrated city and scene. It was the god Pan 
 who, in the terrible clash of Platfea, overwhelming the Per- 
 sians with sudden fright as his voice of thunder broke on them 
 from the air, had delivered the nation in the crisis of its peril, 
 and made the word 1 panic’ thenceforth an inheritance of the 
 speech of mankind. So with all that was majestic and delight- 
 ful in the past — and we must not forget that the nations of the 
 old world looked back into the past far more fondly than we 
 do, whose eyes, by Christianity, have been turned with a higher 
 expectation toward the future, — with all that was charming 
 and inspiring in their past, their religion was identified. It came 
 to them consecrated by the memories most precious. It was 
 dear to them as the bond which connected their life with 
 heroic ages; which knit them to those great Fathers of the 
 State who had learned from the gods their secrets of power as 
 they walked with them familiarly in the morning of time. 
 
17 
 
 And yet further, we must remember that diverse as were 
 the forms of Heathenism which severally obtained among the 
 nations, no one of them was essentially isolated from or discord- 
 ant with the others around it; that the Greek might find much 
 which to him was familiar in the worships of the East ; that the 
 Roman had no difficulty in opening his Pantheon to any god 
 of all the tribes, in giving as Gibbon says “ the freedom of 
 the city” to all divinities ; that, as matter of fact, the inter- 
 changes of commerce were continually bringing the different 
 idolatries to blend with each other ; and that when Alexander, 
 in his rapid conquests, carried the Hellenic arts and influence 
 over the East, the "Western and Oriental heathenisms com- 
 mingled, with ready affinities, to a singular extent. Thus all 
 became modified, expanded, invigorated ; and each, without 
 losing its local prestige, derived a fresh access of strength from 
 the others. In that very temple of Diana at Ephesus, beneath 
 whose shadow Paul was writing, while the shrine was in all 
 its conception Greek, and in all its execution, of the loveliest of 
 Greek styles, the image within was not the statue which a 
 student of Phidias or Praxiteles would have chiseled, of her 
 who hunted with flying nymphs on Arcadian hills, instinct 
 with a vivid virginal authority ; it was a crude rough image 
 of wood, like those still seeu in Eastern temples — below, a sim- 
 ple pointed block covered with mystic animal figures, above, 
 a mass of many breasts. 
 
 So it was then, in part, that Heathenism had power and supre- 
 macy on earth in the day of St. Paul ; a power incomparable 
 by that which it now has among any people ; a supre- 
 macy almost literally unquestioned. It covered the earth, 
 embosomed in its influence all ranks and vocations, moulded 
 every institution, infiltrated its forces into every thing human. 
 Springing out of the heart and mind of mankind, it had in 
 turn, from its place of power, wrought these to its likeness, 
 and toned them to an absolute sympathy with itself. It touched 
 2 
 
18 
 
 every class, and had its appeal for every person ; from the Sy- 
 barite to the Stoic ; from the profligate Alcibiades, to Socrates 
 who seemed almost a forerunner of the Lord. The philoso- 
 pher might sneer at it, but even he infused into it an esoteric 
 significance which dignified and endeared it to himself and his 
 pupils. The popular mind absorbed it greedily, and was per- 
 vaded in every fibre by its impression. Its infinite complica- 
 tion of fancies and myths was to those who lived under it a 
 spiritual system, as real as life, as vast as the skies, yet as near 
 their souls as friendship or hope. Through it the living forces 
 of nature, personified and familiarized, seemed to leap forth to 
 greet the shepherd or the sailor. Through it the spirits of 
 their dead ancestors seemed to the citizens invisibly but really 
 to brood over and assist their troubled minds and perilled for- 
 tunes. Above all, through it the vast Unknown, the some- 
 thing Infinite and Enduring, of which the heavens gave them 
 witness, which inarticulately encircled their life, shedding on it 
 at once a shadow and a gleam, — the Unspeakable Power, which 
 as Paul saw at Athens, when looking on their pathetic altars, 
 they ‘ ignorantly worshipped,’ and to which the Homans were 
 wont formally to pray when the shuddering undulations of the 
 earthquake surprised them — this seemed to them brought 
 nearer their souls, and almost made palpable to their imagin- 
 ations. 
 
 Heathenism to many had thus the sacredness of a Faith. 
 It was felt a real infidelity to deny it ; a kind of atheism, from 
 which sensitive men shrunk then as now, as from a denial of 
 man’s great birthright, a piercing confession of spiritual or- 
 phanage. And the religion which thus grappled and held 
 them by manifold ties, which engaged to itself on every side 
 their affections and passions, and intermingled its subtile influ- 
 ence with all their letters, laws, and thoughts, had become 
 the very life of their life to all the nations; till it was in fact 
 attempting to remould their nature to disturb it. — Preemi- 
 
19 
 
 nently, too, in the century of Paul, when the prevalent forms 
 of civilization were seen to have culminated, and when a sha- 
 dowy but jealous unrest was invading men’s minds and troub- 
 ling their wills, a reaction had commenced toward the old 
 forms of faith. It revealed itself widely, in new ardors of de- 
 votion. It questioned the tendencies of philosophical teaching. 
 It had risen in some to a fanatical zeal, which sent them forth 
 to encourage or enkindle the like in others ; so that heathenism 
 had begun to be preached as well as cherished, and instances 
 of conversion to the worship of the gods were exultingly 
 chronicled. The ‘ Revival of Heathenism,’ it might properly 
 be called ; and all the ancient lire of the system was stirring 
 beneath and bursting through the smouldering embers, and 
 preparing to spread itself with an all new energy. 
 
 This was not either a “ hurtless lire.” The passions of men, 
 which in its divorce of morality from religion, were all fostered 
 by Heathenism : the sensual lusts, which for those who were 
 ensnared by them it hallowed and honored as a service to the 
 gods; the cruelty, falsehood, and tyrannous self-will, of which 
 it exalted the patterns to the heavens, and made its divinities 
 the most signal examples ; — all these, not less than the more 
 gentle sentiments, were the allies of its might, now aroused 
 for its defence. To assail it was to start these multiform, enven- 
 omed, and many-fanged passions to the deadliest resistance ; so 
 that Paul well knew, what history had shown, what history 
 afterward more fearfully illustrated, that when the hour of 
 contest came there was no weapon in all the armory of human 
 craft and human rage that would not be enlisted on the side of 
 these religions ; that the shouting amphitheatre would be stilled 
 before the agonies of those torn by their beasts; that the 
 darkness of night would be lurid with the glare of their pitch- 
 robed and burning victims ! 
 
 And yet, in view of all this it was that the dauntless Apos- 
 tle unflinchingly affirmed that this whole Heathenism, so vast 
 
20 
 
 and various, so philosophic, poetic, and sensual by turns, so 
 ancient, so haughty, so cruel and passionate, and so replete 
 with resources, should be shattered and exiled, and forever 
 obliterated, by the “ Things which were not.” 
 
 There remains then but one other, a third thing, to be re- 
 cognised as standing among the “ Things that are ” — the pow- 
 erful institutes and establishments of society, opposed to Christ- 
 ianity — when Paul was writing from Ephesus to Corinth. But 
 this was also the most powerful of all ; the most dangerous to 
 assail, to human view the most inaccessible to change or de- 
 cay ; supreme over every force that could touch it, and com- 
 paring with them all as the Mediterranean with the restless 
 streams which sought and sank into it. It was, of course, the 
 authority and power of Imperial Rome. Immense in ex- 
 tent, immeasurable in energy, this was also so completely sub- 
 ordinated to Heathenism, so entirely impregnated and ener- 
 gized by its spirit, that the Gospel could no more advance to 
 its dominion without its conversion or without its destruction, 
 than light can break through seven-fold walls, or the brook can 
 leap the mountain-chain. This, therefore, must be reckoned, 
 last and grandest, among the things that met the Apostle as 
 those which in the interest of God’s kingdom, and in the de- 
 velopment of His purposes for it, should be utterly, finally, 
 ‘ brought to nought.’ 
 
 It was hardly as yet at its uttermost height, this Imperial 
 power ; for scores of years still slowly passed before that age of 
 Trajan and the Antonines which marked its consummate might 
 and splendor ; while it was later even than this that Severus car- 
 ried his victorious arms to Ctesiphon and Seleucia, transferred 
 the entire legislative power from the Senate to himself, and 
 scattered the profuse memorials of his reign over Africa and 
 the East. But already had Julius Ccesar, first of generals and 
 foremost of statesmen, by natural force the leading man of all 
 
21 
 
 his world, laid the first courses of that immense structure in 
 which others after him were to perpetuate his name, and with- 
 out his genius to outrun his plans. Already had Augustus, 
 with marvellous tact, dissimulation and ability, overcoming all 
 obstacles and destroying all rivals, raised himself by sure steps 
 to the empire of the world. While retaining artfully some 
 forms of the Republic he had centralized all authority in his 
 will, being recognised successively as General, Emperor, Su- 
 preme Pontiff, and Censor. He had adorned with the spoils 
 of every land, and had almost rebuilt, the imperial city ; had 
 added other regions and peoples to the empire ; had disci- 
 plined the troops, tranquilized the provinces, and given to the 
 world an unaccustomed peace ; and he had fostered the bril- 
 liant literature which is the superb and imperishable crown of 
 that whole age which bears his name. lie had been enthroned 
 for forty-five years on the Palatine hill ; had been worshipped 
 during life in some cities of the empire ; and, after his death, 
 had been raised by the solemn decree of the Senate to the 
 rank of a God. 
 
 The ‘dark and unrelenting’ Tiberius who followed him, 
 Caligula, Claudius, and now at last Hero, in front of whose 
 stupendous tyranny, just ripening to its fulness, the Apostle 
 was writing, had successively inherited and abused his prero- 
 gatives ; and their absolute power had been only confirmed by 
 time and use. Hay, even their unspeakable cruelty and lust, 
 by continually exciting the fears of the people, and as con- 
 tinually debasing their character, had but cemented into more 
 solid strength the fabric of that unparalleled domination whose 
 foundations had been laid by a genius so rare, a sagacity so 
 sure, and a courage so complete. 
 
 And so was this empire now exhibited to Paul, encircling 
 the sea which was the centre of his thoughts, from Carthage 
 to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Ephesus, and on to the 
 very pillars of Hercules ; with no sign of weakness and with 
 
22 
 
 no shade of fear on all its frame ; full, on the other hand, of 
 the most intense and commanding vitality ; the vigor of youth 
 blending in its life with the disciplined craft which was the 
 slow growth of ages ; its organization the most perfect of Time ; 
 its wealth the most ample ; its military system the most exact 
 and effective ; its renown the most various ; its ambition as 
 unbounded as if conquest were a novelty, and the stream of the 
 Rubicon still was its limit. Its name was a terror to the wild- 
 est barbarians, while scholars rejoiced in the letters which it 
 cherished. The armies, to which it had given a name that 
 signified of itself their constant practice and incessant activity, 
 were arrayed over the earth at each point of command, from 
 the Indus to the Tweed, from the shores of Scandinavia to 
 the Libyan sands. Their helmets flashed in the streets of each 
 city. Their iron-beaked galleys, from Misenum or Ravenna, 
 were ready at a word to dart to the onset against every foe. 
 The British woods and the Assyrian plains were equally 
 familiar with their triumphing standards. 
 
 The hundred millions of inhabitants of the Empire, from 
 whom these armies were evermore reinforced, though not 
 indeed pervaded by any strong principle of inward unity, 
 were yet by no means merely encircled by a brazen ring of 
 military force. Their obedience was in large part voluntary 
 and stable. They were actually and strongly bound to the 
 metropolis; by admiration of its splendor, as well as awe of 
 its power ; by the tolerance in each province of the local reli- 
 gion, and to some extent of the local law ; by the Roman 
 colonies, which were pushed in all directions after the arms 
 which had opened the way for them ; by the admission to 
 citizenship of those provincials who most desired and most 
 had deserved it ; by the comparative immunity which cer- 
 tainly was given them from the yet more capricious and un- 
 endurable tyranny of the smaller despots whom Rome dis- 
 placed. Thus, in the structure of this wonderful and vast 
 
23 
 
 establishment of government, while at home as I have said 
 the lingering forms of the antique Republic still vailed the 
 might of a perfect autocracy, in the provinces was combined 
 some shadow at least of the federative principle with the 
 power of a complete and irresponsible despotism. The great 
 roads that radiated in every direction from the golden milestone 
 within the forum — crossing or even piercing the hills, and 
 bridging the ravines, with an imperial disregard of all natural 
 obstacles — were arteries along which flowed constant circula- 
 tions from the heart to the extremities. The characteristic 
 productions of each region became gradually dispersed and 
 domesticated in others. And Commerce, Religion, Letters, 
 Law, wove each its strand into that immense and magnificent 
 girdle with which the earth was well-nigh encircled. 
 
 In comparison of this Empire, therefore, all others had been 
 feeble. The Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian monarchies, at their 
 largest extent, had been beside it but fragmentary domains, 
 as one by one they all became its tributary provinces. Before 
 its unwaning and unshaken majesty, the brief empire of 
 Alexander shone in History only as the meteor contrasting the 
 sun. There have been prodigious empires since ; of Charle- 
 magne or Napoleon ; of Timur or the Turks ; but they never 
 at any time have approximated this. No term descriptive of 
 extension represents it, if it indicate less than a universality 
 commensurate with the then existing civilizations. To speak 
 of it as colossal, is to fall far below the just height of its de- 
 mands ; for the will of its Emperor was an earthly omnipo- 
 tence. To resist it, was like crowding a continent from its 
 place. To escape it, was almost like jumping from the planet. 
 When more than once the slaves rose against it, multitudinous 
 as they were, of blood as eager as their masters’, letting slip 
 at them its legions it crushed them as the avalanche crushes 
 the cottage. When the Northern tribes dashed tumultuously 
 against it, those hardy tribes whose chieftains boasted that for 
 
24 
 
 fourteen years they had slept beneath no roof lower than the 
 sky, under Marcus Antoninus it pressed them hack to their 
 fastnesses and forests with a force as irresistible as of mount- 
 ains upheaving. The emulous and cliivalric Grecian spirit 
 had quailed before it in a hopeless despondency, and now from 
 Mount Haem us to the Laconian gulf was its suppliant vassal. 
 The sombre and haughty Egyptian genius, which had once built 
 Thebes, and Memphis, and On, and had shadowed the Nile 
 with the statues of Rameses, was bruised to the dust beneath 
 its more stately and imperious tread. Even Jewish stubborn- 
 ness and fanatical pride, proverbial through the world, had 
 been crushed and quelled in the grasp of its legions; and the 
 castle of Antonia, commanding the Temple, was but one of the 
 eyries from which looked down on a subjugated world its 
 dominating eagles. 
 
 Considering its history, considering its growth, it seemed 
 hardly so much a construction of man, this Empire of Rome, 
 as one of the pre-ordained elements of nature; reaching in its 
 exhaustive roots to the centres of history, and draining the 
 earth to give it nutriment ; increasing with a steadiness, and an 
 immeasurable might, which no mere art or generalship could 
 have given ; in its production therefore resistible by no agen- 
 cies, and in the result as indestructible by assault as Lebanon 
 or the Apennines. Nay, it seemed hardly so much a power 
 terrestrial, in its amazing and terrific augmentation — to the 
 imaginative student contemplating its wonders, it still some- • 
 times presents itself in History, hardly so much a power ter- 
 restrial — as a drear and vast Fate ; impersonal, immense ; long- 
 slumbering and inert, but expanding itself rapidly from por- 
 tentous beginnings as Christianity came near ; spreading over 
 the heavens, infolding the earth, locking liberty in paralysis, 
 while giving an almost demoniac power to its auxiliary minds ; 
 combining all conquering passions and powers in one ultimate 
 aggregate, and descending beyond help on the overwhelmed 
 nations ! 
 
25 
 
 So it stood before Paul, as at Ephesus he saw it, as every 
 where he met it, as he knew and felt it environing the earth. 
 And so long as it remained undestroyed, unchanged, with its 
 muscles unrelaxed and its heart unsubdued, the supremacy of 
 the Gospel could not be realized. It was absolutely arrested 
 and forbidden. For in essential and immovable antagonism 
 this fronted the Gospel. Its kingdom, and law, and life were 
 different. Its spirit was one of the most malign selfishness ; 
 its ambitions were fierce, its passions implacable, and its whole 
 aim earthly. As soon, therefore, as the doctrine which Paul 
 was proclaiming should emerge from the shelter of its early 
 insignificance, and begin to declare itself a world-mastering 
 principle, this mightiest empire of Time was its enemy ; its 
 ‘ enemy,’ did I say ? was its most terrific and consuming assail- 
 ant. All the powers that pertained to it, so prodigious and 
 omnipresent, as swayed by one will, inspired by one aim, and 
 pushed to their purpose with relentless ferocity, were to con- 
 verge at once on the work of arresting and then of eradicating 
 the hated Christianity. The sharpness of swords and the dark- 
 ness of prisons would be its swift and certain answer to every 
 appeal which invoked for the Gospel the tolerance that it 
 showed toward all other religions. — And so Paul knew that 
 this as well, this mightiest establishment of government on 
 the earth, this impregnable despotism which was touched by 
 no fear, against which human power seemed vain, and to strike 
 which was like trying to startle the stars — that this should 
 also, in God’s own time, be broken aud wrecked, and “ brought 
 to nought.” 
 
 But How should it be doxe ? By what agencies should each 
 of these prophesied victories, over Judaism, Heathenism, and 
 the terrible iron-limbed Empire of Pome, be brought to pass ? 
 Not, he affirms, by the forces which already are at work in 
 the world, in a manifest development, and with recognised 
 
23 
 
 efficiency, and which may be still further augmented and mul- 
 tiplied, and made to bear on this new issue ; not by armies 
 revolting, or statesmen conspiring, or philosophers projecting 
 new answers to Heathenism ; not by nations reclaiming their 
 ravaged rights, or the still existing Senate combining with the 
 people to bury the haughty imperial prerogative in a cata- 
 clysm of revolution. The forces which God shall employ for 
 this work, and to which lie shall give a might irresistible, are 
 simply thus far the “Things which aee not;” which exist but 
 in embryo, and are not so far developed or recognised that men 
 even despise them ; the things which He alone can bring out 
 of the secrets of thought and life, and make triumphant on 
 their mission. — It is here that w T e encounter the whole meaning 
 of the Apostle, and rise to the level of the theme he presents 
 to us. And even with the cursory view we have taken of 
 these so solid and gigantic establishments which confronted 
 the Gospel, how apparent to us is the truthful energy of his 
 expression. How immense the disparity between the great 
 powers and institutes that were, and the agencies so recent and 
 so imperceptible which were to overcome them ! 
 
 For what were these agencies ? To apprehend them at all 
 in their primitive insignificance, we must go back, remember, 
 of all that Christianity has done and has been, of all that it 
 is in the world around us, and think of it as it was, in its wholly 
 unembodied and impalpable life ; back of churches, schools, 
 and homes ; before one temple had sprung toward heaven, in 
 the novel uplift and delight of its architecture ; before one 
 treatise had wrought its principles into scientific statement, or 
 clothed them in the grace and the majesty of letters; before 
 any government had sought to incorporate its rules into stat- 
 utes ; before any one of all the great names now associated with 
 it had become its bulwark in the popular confidence. In the 
 simply spiritual elements it involved, it was set against this 
 array which opposed it ; and of all the auxiliaries which it 
 
27 
 
 afterward gained, not one had as yet appeared on the earth. 
 How utterly insignificant seemed then its force ! How incredi- 
 bly inadequate to the end to be accomplished, its tenuous, 
 delicate, and precarious instruments ! 
 
 The truths which had been taught the Apostles, and after- 
 ward recalled to them and unfolded more fully by the witness 
 of the Spirit, and which were to be enshrined in evangelical 
 narratives, not one of which had yet been written, which were 
 to be expounded in a series of letters by the apostles to the 
 churches, of which only those by Paul himself to Thessalo- 
 nica had thus far been prepared, — these were the primary 
 instruments to be used, with the oral proclamation of their 
 principles and laws, for the spread of God’s Kingdom, and the 
 overthrow of whatever withstood its advance. And these! — 
 it seemed like binding the lightning in the meshes and knots 
 of metaphysical argument to set them to the work which 
 thus lay before them. Epistles, and talks in the synagogue, 
 against armies ! The might that lay on letters and lips, against 
 the might that ruled from thrones ! The publication of doc- 
 trines, against establishments of power as rooted as the hills. 
 The sneer of Pilate, “ What is truth ” ? — ‘ one scream of the 
 trumpet, one rush of the legionaries, and teaching and 
 teacher both are ended ’ ! — the contemptuous carelessness of 
 Gallio afterward, toward what seemed even to his practised 
 mind a dispute about words and an antique law : these only 
 represent the more than disdain, the sarcastic indifference 
 tending only toward disgust, with which the ministers of the 
 powers that were regarded such invisible weapons of thought. 
 
 The living energy of Christianity in the world, through the 
 souls into which its truths should be transferred, throughout 
 whose affections its charity should be shed, whose hopes should 
 be kindled and their courage inspired by its high promises — 
 this personal force of Christianity in the world, realizing the 
 principles which epistles were to teach, and incarnating the 
 spirit with which gospels were to glow : this was the second 
 
28 
 
 of the agencies to be used for the triumph of God’s King- 
 dom over all which withstood it. And this was just begin- 
 ning to be realized, under the resolute ministry of the apos- 
 tles, at a few of the points central to commerce and chief in 
 population. The woman and the jailer converted at Philippi, 
 who lead the long march of European Christendom toward 
 the cross and its service, toward the crown and its splendors, 
 had now some others associated with them. The woman 
 named Damaris, and Dionysius the Areopagite, were doubtless 
 still illustrating at Athens a more divine temper than Grecian 
 homes had hitherto known, or Grecian philosophy ever had 
 taught. And at Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Berea, Anti- 
 och, Jerusalem, and a few other points, individuals could be 
 found who were beginning to illustrate, though as yet how 
 imperfectly, the kindling contact of the Divine heart with 
 theirs, the renovating force of the spirit of the Lord. 
 
 But this, thus far, if a power at all, was plainly a power 
 only in embryo. And it might well be questioned, in the light 
 of previous human experience, whether it were a power at all ; 
 whether, as matched against what was opposed to it, the cha- 
 racteristic spirit of the Christian was not an element of posi- 
 tive weakness and dangerous inefficiency. For it was meek- 
 ness, arrayed against might ; penitence and piety, against a 
 jealousy and wrath which swept sea and land with military 
 force. It was a charity which forgave all offences, against the 
 infuriated passions of millions who were eager to commit 
 
 them. It was a tender and scrupulous patience, that hardly 
 asserted the common right of self-defence, against the impetu- 
 ous and sanguinary onset of bands inured to rapine and blood ; 
 whom confession of helplessness could not conciliate, any 
 more than an armed resistance could daunt them ; who were 
 only more savage in their tyranny over those who lay most 
 entirely and plainly at their mercy. What possible chance, 
 
 then, on mere rational grounds, for such a spirit, represented 
 
29 
 
 ia such feeble and imperfect communities, scattered so widely 
 from each other, to withstand for an instant the real resistance, 
 much more to overcome the marshalled onset, of all the pow- 
 ers arrayed against it! "Words cannot surpass, they can 
 hardly set forth, the apparent utterness of the impossibility. 
 That the tuneful strains of Orpheus’ lyre should have tamed 
 wild beasts, and stirred the trees and rocks to motion, could 
 not have seemed to the sceptical philosopher in the least more 
 improbable. It was as if a child of days would rival Jove ; 
 and flinging back smiles in answer to thunder-bolts, would 
 seek to hurl him from his throne. 
 
 And yet these were the very agencies — these “ Tilings which 
 were not” in every sense — which were not regarded, and 
 which hitherto existed only in germ, these Gospels and Epis- 
 tles which were still to be written, these teachings and preach- 
 ings which had scarcely commenced, these Christian forces in 
 life and character which hardly thus far had appeared on the 
 earth, which were not self-conscious enough to be formed as 
 yet into separate communities, which could not be spoken of 
 as one of the Fathers afterward spoke of them as ‘ verdant 
 islets amid raging oceans,’ but which now were only as scat- 
 tered flowers casually dispersed on the surface of a sea that 
 at any moment might swell with tempests , — these were the 
 forces which God had chosen to bring to nought the “ Things 
 that were” : the ancient, immense, and impregnable institu- 
 tions, that stood in all their august might and tremendous 
 effectiveness fronting the Gospel. Xot with energy only, but 
 with an exact precision of speech, had Paul then described 
 them. The philosopher thought of them, if he thought of 
 them at all, with a contempt only greater that that which he 
 gave to the most absurd or childish of fables. The soldier 
 regarded them less than the mists which had hovered last year 
 around the crests of the hills. To the Jew, in comparison of 
 his august forms and world-challenging miracles, they seemed 
 as frail and shadowy as dreams. The whole wisdom of the 
 
30 
 
 world anticipated as little an impression from them as we that 
 the tiny animalculse in the ocean, streaking its waves with 
 phosphorescent glow, will arrest the revolution of shaft and 
 wheel, and stay the steamship on its march. 
 
 Those secondary forces, too, which were in time to be 
 evolved by God’s plans, and confederated in effective alliance 
 with these — although of course existing in embryo, they were 
 if possible still more unrecognised, and even unrealized, when 
 Paul was writing. How far they all were present yet, even to 
 his inspired expectation, we cannot say ; though some of them, 
 no doubt, he plainly foresaw. The awakening spiritual long- 
 ings under Judaism, at which his ministry to so large an 
 extent was sympathetically aimed ; the awakening moral 
 instincts within Heathenism, whose premonitions he must have 
 felt, of which Plutarch soon afterward became so illustrious 
 and engaging an example ; the gradual progress of moral 
 decline in all the systems that were rooted in error and main- 
 tained by force, a decline which was vastly increased and ac- 
 celerated when the heavenlier power came in controversy with 
 them ; the reaction which took place in even the hard-nerved 
 Poman mind, when all the arts and all the terrors of a perse- 
 cuting world were found unable to shake the hearts or silence 
 the lips of humble men and holy women who still confessed 
 Christ amid dungeons and flames, and under the reddening 
 jaws of lions — a reaction which at last arrested persecution, 
 when the final edict of Dioclesian had been issued from that 
 palace at Nicomedia beside whose ruins stands to-day a 
 Christian church, and which came ten years later to its sud- 
 den consummation when Constantine took the cross for the 
 ensign of the empire, and blazoned upon it the monogram of 
 Christ ; — all these were things which one by one came into 
 developement, each in its time, as the truths and the spirit of 
 the Gospel went forward, and which had been parts, from the 
 very beginning, of the enginery of God for the work to bo 
 accomplished, but which were as latent, when Paul looked 
 
3L 
 
 forth from Ephesus on the sea, as were the germs of modern 
 oaks. 
 
 And those still additional procedures and events, also aux- 
 iliary to these more silent forces, which came as the comets 
 come, with exactest precision when their time was accom- 
 plished, — already they were purposed in the mind of the Most 
 High ; already lie saw their seeds unfolding ; hut how 
 vaguely, if at all, were they thus for foreshown even to Paul ; 
 how entirely unsuspected were they yet by the world ! 
 
 The destruction of Jerusalem by the arms of Titus, who when 
 Paul was writing was a lad of fifteen, just recovering from 
 the poison with which accident or design had nearly blighted 
 his life, and who seems to have felt himself but the instrument 
 of a Power which he could not comprehend and could not 
 contravene, in his overthrow of the city ; the consequent 
 extinction of the Jewish nationality, the final obliteration ot 
 all distinctions between the tribes, and the scattering of their 
 impoverished remnant to the ends of the earth : — this was a fact 
 lying still as hidden among God’s plans as the lightning which 
 summer clouds secrete in their calm folds, but which came at 
 the instant for which it was prepared, as the shattering bolt 
 drops out of those clouds upon fortress or tree. And then, at 
 last, the tremendous descent on the centres of the Empire of 
 those northern barbarians who, when the Apostle dwelt at 
 Ephesus, and for many years after, were divided among them- 
 selves, without arts or arms, without iron or money, strong 
 only in undisciplined valor, and hardly more regarded by the 
 Romans than the Indians or the Esquimaux now are by us, 
 but who already were mysteriously pressed forward by some 
 power from behind toward the seats of the tyranny which 
 despised and forgot them, and who, when at length they broke 
 upon the Empire, though destroying its structure, revitalized 
 its blood, broke it up to recast it for the basis of modern 
 European civilizations, and gave to Christianity such a sweep- 
 
32 
 
 ing distribution as ages without this could not hare accom- 
 plished : — this was another of those latent forces, then existing 
 but in germ, not discovered or hinted to the minds of mankind, 
 but which lay already in the reach of God’s view, and was 
 prepared at the crisis for the grasp of His will, for the over- 
 throw of whatever opposed his evangel ! 
 
 These were the instruments which He had selected, so 
 utterly vague and formless hitherto, possibilities only and not 
 actual powers, to accomplish his majestic and beneficent will. 
 And through them, by His might, it did come to pass in the due 
 time, as Paul had known and declared that it should, that the 
 Gospel which seemed so slight a force when lie was proclaim- 
 ing it in the school of Tyrannus, and the agencies for which 
 looked so frail and so few, did triumph illustriously and domi- 
 nate for all time over the colossal institutions and influences 
 which resisted its march. "Where none had welcomed, there 
 all at last accepted and honored it. Where every thing had 
 opposed it, there every thing sped to do it service. The truths 
 it uttered, — spreading electrically from mind to mind, with 
 resistless velocity and atmospheric ubiquity they came to 
 pervade and irradiate the nations. The spiritual life in the 
 souls of believers, — rushing with fleet though silent contagion 
 from heart to heart, and from people to people, it remoulded 
 literature, it subsidized commerce, it changed the aspects and 
 the tendencies of society, and it blossomed into churches as 
 the hidden vegetative force of the spring bursts forth into 
 flowers or shoots upward in trees. Judaism was surpassed, 
 absorbed, and terminated, in a higher Religion, more adequate 
 to man’s wants, more illustrative of God’s glory. Heathenism 
 was not only broken down and exterminated on the scenes in 
 which so long it had reigned, but it was made, thenceforth and 
 forever, the veriest outcast of civilization. The Roman Em- 
 pire was as finally extinguished as if the crust of the globe 
 had been opened to swallow it up. And all was wrought — 
 
33 
 
 this change at which the world still wonders, and which no 
 other change recorded in history ever has paralleled — all was 
 wrought, within a few centuries, by what at the outset had 
 appeared so unreal or so ineffectual. God’s might had 
 crowned with an absolute victory what mankind had de- 
 spised; and weakness, as used by Omnipotence, was supreme. 
 The vanishing shadow, as it looked to men’s eyes, had shaken 
 and dissolved the earth-centred mountain. Doctrine and suf- 
 fering had discomfited despotism. The market-places vocal, 
 and the catacombs crowded, had been mightier than armies 
 The Mamertine Prison had conquered the Capitol ! 
 
 “The city of God is built,” it has been said, “at the conflu- 
 ence of three great civilizations.” It is built as well, let it 
 never be forgotten, on the ruins of three prodigious, ambitious, 
 and defiant establishments ; a perverted Judaism, deriving vast 
 strength from the truths it denied ; an ancient, haughty, and 
 universal Ileatlienism; a military Empire that encompassed 
 the earth. And the forces which brought all these to nought, 
 they were not descending squadrons of angels ; they were not 
 astute combinations of statesmen, the eloquence of scholars 
 or the strategy of soldiers ; they were forces which Paul could 
 only describe, even in his day, a score of years after Christ 
 had ascended, as “ Things which are not” ! 
 
 Fathers and Brethren : I have tarried too long, I fear, for 
 your patience, though not long enough for the demands of 
 the theme, on this illustration of the words of the text ; on 
 this majestic demonstration in history of their profound and 
 literal truth. And now, as we turn from Ephesus and Corinth, 
 and leave the whole sphere of ancient life which they repre- 
 sent, let us take with us the thoughts with which the theme is 
 instinct, and which fit themselves to our assembly. 
 
 Let us meditate anew on the majesty of God, which is 
 shown us here in full brightness of discovery, and which never 
 should cease to inspire our hearts. — It is shown us in nature ; 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 not so much amid phenomena the most dazzling or vast, as 
 where he makes the force which looks smallest the lord of the 
 greater, and where he sets the ^unseen energies to construct 
 and control the combinations of matter ; where he leaves the 
 great laws which regulate the worlds mere invisible concep- 
 tions and melodious ideas of his archetypal and tranquil 
 mind; where he poises the Universe, in the final analysis, on 
 a globule of ether, beneath which stands only his ‘ word of 
 power.’ It is shown us in miracles ; where the prophet’s rod 
 opens paths through the waves before whose recoil the chari- 
 ots are as chaff ; where the dust and the spittle are omnipotent 
 through his will for removing the blindness that no surgery 
 touches ; where the tones of the voice are indued with a po- 
 tency that masters the storm and raises the dead. It is shown 
 us, as brightly as any where else, in this progress of the Gos- 
 pel ; where the humblest of energies become clothed with 
 supremacy, when auxiliary to his aim ; where is suddenly 
 brought to light what had lain deeply hidden, that it may work 
 his wondrous will ; and where what appeared to have no 
 existence is invested in his plans with irresistible efficiency. 
 
 What a resource for our hearts ; what an unfailing stimulus 
 to our too often fainting faith ; what a ground of awe, and 
 love, and wonder, more vivid and vast than the theophany upon 
 Sinai, is the discovery thus made of Him ! How plainly does 
 prophecy become possible to him, who knows from the begin- 
 ning all these occult forces which he is to marshall and make 
 
 O 
 
 to determine the history of the world ! And what a privilege is 
 Prayer shown to be, when we place it in its relation to His 
 supreme mind, to His all-controlling and absolute will ! 
 
 And further, let us notice the interpreting tower of this 
 same Divine element in more recent history ; the light which 
 it casts on the subsequent changes that have marked the 
 advance of Christianity in the world. Every where we shall 
 find it, if wo search for it aright, gleaming as a thread of 
 
35 
 
 heavenly gold throughout the tangled and bloody annals that 
 cover the interval between Paul’s day and ours. 
 
 After he had long ascended to his rest, and the Christian 
 temple long had stood on the very site of Nero’s circus, there 
 came that time beneath whose darkness history yet shivers, 
 when all the fearful agencies of ill, which had apparently 
 finally been scattered, seemed to rally again and re-combine, 
 in different forms but with the same spirit, once more to with- 
 stand and overpower the Gospel ; when Romanism was supreme, 
 — the old Heathenism over, though baptized with new titles 
 and adorned with new splendor, — over Western Europe; when 
 Western Europe, and Romanism through it, was as mightily 
 predominant as the Empire had been in human civilization ; 
 when Mohammedanism confronted it, with flaming sword and 
 fanatical zeal, in the very seats where Judaism had been ; and 
 when Heathenism, bulwarked behind this false faith, remained 
 undisturbed and even unquestioned over the remaining area 
 of Asia. Again the whole power of the world seemed com- 
 pacted, to crowd back the truth from the minds of mankind ; 
 and again there appeared, looming darkly above this, an 
 almost unworldly malignity and energy, working tireless and 
 triumphant for the same drear result. And again it seemed, 
 as it had done of old, like looking to see the Alps melt 
 away, or the continents and seas exchange their conditions, to 
 expect such powers of ill to be vanquished, such prodigious 
 establishments to be remoulded. 
 
 But again the possibilities which men had not considered, 
 the germs of things which they had not discerned, were God’s 
 chosen and adequate instruments for his end ; and he brought 
 them out from their silent retreats, and made them victorious 
 over all that opposed him. Kindling the primitive fires 
 again in the souls of his faithful, by the word of his Gospel 
 and the touch of his Spirit, he made their lips aud lives to be 
 vocal, as had been those of the primitive martyrs. He shot 
 an inspiration over the nations, from the prisons of Lollards and 
 
36 
 
 the stake of John Huss. He stirred new longings in Rome 
 itself, after a higher Christian life. He made the progress of 
 scientific thought contribute to the movement which thus 
 constantly broadened. He awakened and invigorated, and 
 brought to powerful development and action, the elements 
 which worked toward national liberation and popular free- 
 dom, and made these auxiliary to his august plan. And then 
 he gathered around these forces, nascent only as yet though 
 full of promise, such an armory of instruments, suddenly 
 revealed, as no other age had ever possessed. He unfolded 
 the mystic might of the type, which makes human thought 
 palpable. He brought to view other worlds by the telescope, 
 and disclosed the true' stellar and planetary system, to shake 
 men’s faith in the ‘ infallible’ Church which had passionately 
 denied this. He picked up this continent out of the seas, by 
 the touch of that needle which is as his own finger of light, 
 guiding the mariner through the darkness. He put the Bible, 
 in the speech of the people, into the hands of all who could 
 read, and made powerless beside it the priestly establishments 
 which were based upon ignorance and bulwarked by force. 
 He wrenched at last the whole of Northern Europe from the 
 grasp of the Papacy, put a commerce into its hands wider 
 than the ancients ever had dreamed of, and inspired it by de- 
 grees with a devotion to the truth unknown till then since 
 the era of the Apostles. He peopled this continent with a 
 Christian colonization, insignificant in its beginning, ap- 
 parently almost accidental in its direction, but providential in 
 its movement, and amazing in its growth. He drew out the 
 energy from that Southern Europe which still remained 
 Romanist., and equally from that fierce and aggressive Mo- 
 hammedanism which so long had arrested the advance of the 
 Gospel. And so he brought the world to this stage in which 
 it meets us : with Protestantism prevalent aud Romanism 
 weak, both in Europe and here ; with Mohammedanism shat- 
 
37 
 
 tcred in the centres of its power, and Heathenism pierced at 
 multitudes of points by the progress of the Gospel ; with the 
 whole world now open to the march of the truth. And in all 
 the long progress, his method has been that which the text 
 first declared. He has conquered the powers that seemed ir- 
 resistible, and overturned the establishments that looked solid 
 as the earth, not by great forces at which all the world won- 
 dered, by monarchies and their might, by universities and their 
 learning, by military movements and magnificent diploma- 
 cies, but just as of old by the things which ‘were not’ till 
 He bade them to be ; which existed but in germ, unrevealed 
 to the knowledge or the hope of mankind. 
 
 It is the key which unlocks for us nistory. It is the method 
 which shows God supreme, and still active in the world, and 
 which associates distant ages in the long triumphal procession 
 of his plans. He uses most these minor means, that we may 
 hear his sounding steps reverberating on earth. He brings in 
 ever the ultimate triumph of his truth and his Son, through 
 the humbleness of the manger and the sorrows of the mount. 
 He leaves the earthquake to shake the lands, and go vibrating 
 on to the caverns where it hides. He leaves the wind to 
 whirl over the surface, and mingle again in the quietness of 
 the azure. He leaves the fire to blaze ineffectual into the 
 heavens, and expire amid a smoke which the star-beams soon 
 pierce. But he utters Himself in the ‘still small voice.’ 
 
 We cannot, I think, be content without noticing the rela- 
 tion which the truth thus declared to us by Paul sustains to our 
 owx Land and Time ; the light which it casts on those purposes 
 of God which already we feel to be wheeling through the 
 mists, and articulating themselves amid the uproar and 
 tumult, with which we are environed. 
 
 What is the lesson it teaches here ? Is it that the Govern- 
 ment which so long has been powerful is to be overturned 
 by the startling Rebellion which so recently was not, but 
 
88 
 
 which now has expanded to colossal proportions ? that God 
 thus designs to exalt the mean thing to a might unexpected, 
 and to vindicate his supremacy through the triumph which 
 he gives it over that which it seemed inadequate to shake ? 
 Nay ! but the line in which he chooses to do this is the line, 
 you observe, in which his ancient plans advance to the reduc- 
 tion of the world to allegiance to his Son. The things which 
 are mighty, and which he overturns, are those which obstruct, 
 not those which assist, this beneficent progress. And the 
 feeble and obscure things to which he;’gives effectiveness, are 
 those which are adapted by their nature to his work ; which 
 are marked from the beginning by a radical righteousness, 
 though at the beginning most faint in development ; whose 
 expansion is therefore harmonious with his character, as well 
 as directly auxiliary to his aim. And so this is not the lesson 
 which is taught for our times by the text. A diverse applica- 
 tion is that which it has for them. 
 
 Our Government in the past, so broad in its basis, so noble 
 in its frame, budded so grandly on primordial truths, and 
 seemingly riveted to them so firmly by the terms of its charter 
 and the traditions of its founders, has still been confronted, 
 and to some extent combined, in unnatural alliance, with an- 
 other its opposite. Perverted by this, in many of its officers, 
 laws, and operations, it has been rendered in some degree, it 
 has been in peril of being rendered more largely, a bulwark 
 of bondage, and not a grand power for popular liberation ; the 
 ally of a force which would shut the book of God to a race, 
 and not of the faith which would open it to all men ; the min- 
 ister of a rule before which the family-institute is nothing, and 
 not of the great idea of the Scriptures that the family in- 
 violate is the solid corner-stone of all civilization, the first 
 and most sacred of governments and of churches. It has 
 seemed sometimes that this abnormal system — this marvellous 
 complication of legalized lies, fronting the heavens in our late 
 century — was so established in all our seats of ancient renown 
 
39 
 
 and national power that nothing could shake it ; that every 
 institution, officer, law, must be subservient to its behests. 
 Strong in the wealth produced for it by millions of laborers un- 
 requited ; crafty in the policy and effective in the tactics 
 which leisure gave its leaders opportunity to master ; domi- 
 neering in its spirit and tenacious in its will as was the Roman 
 Empire first, and the Papacy afterward ; aiming at incessant 
 renewal and expansion, and even with a certain religious fa- 
 naticism confusing its conscience and intensifying its passion, — 
 it has looked to those who have studied it in the past too vast 
 to be avoided, too strong to be subdued ; almost certainly the 
 master of our national policy for generations to come ; whose 
 pride and might would be only cemented with the progress of 
 time, and to shake whose dominion were like breaking the 
 Alleghanies into a prairie. 
 
 But God has taken the impalpable powers of thought and 
 prayer, which alone remained to set against this, and has 
 made them mighty as of old on his errand. The weak and 
 despised, and the base things of earth, yea, even the things 
 which ‘were not’ when he commenced, he has made in part 
 victorious already over this gigantic and inveterate system. 
 He is carrying them forward, let none of us doubt, to their 
 certain consummation. If we are true to ourselves and to 
 Him, it is Slavery that is going down, not our benign and 
 venerated Government, in this fierce struggle which agitates 
 the land. It is Slavery which is to disappear in the end from 
 its last stronghold within nominal Christendom. The truths 
 that started in so much feebleness, that gained so tardy and 
 reluctant an acceptance from even the minds which most were 
 attuned to them, that have had to encounter such constant 
 opposition, and whose power to overcome it has seemed so 
 slight — they have mastered many mechanisms, and enthroned 
 themselves in pulpits ; they have found multitudinous voices 
 in literature ; they have organized themselves by degrees into 
 statesmanship ; they have had their martyrs here and there, as 
 
40 
 
 all great truths must have to be vindicated as such ; they 
 have reached and grappled the popular conscience, inspired 
 and directed political action, and at last have placed their 
 nearest representatives among public men in the chief seats of 
 power, and have crowded the imperious and exasperated sys- 
 tem which has Avatched their advance, and has frantically re- 
 sisted the approach of its end, to a point where it snatches up 
 arms in rebellion, and makes civil war to blaze and thunder 
 for the first time in our history — and also for the last ! — along 
 the mid line of our peaceful confederacy. 
 
 And here, as of old, other instruments that were not till God 
 bade them to be, are now made auxiliary to the spiritual 
 forces of the truth and of righteousness. The wondrous up- 
 rising of an intense patriotism, which flashed with actual 
 lightning-speed from New-York to the Pacific, from the shades 
 of Katahdin to Californian valleys, when the outcry went 
 forth that by bullets and bombs the old imperial starry flag, 
 riddled and rent, but undisgraced, had been hurled from the 
 bastion ; the amazing military development that has followed ; 
 the unexampled enthusiasm of the whole Northern mind for 
 the maintenance of the government, and the extent to which 
 already it is impregnated with a principled and determined 
 detestation of Slavery ; the immense expansion of the culture 
 of cotton beneath the vast stimulus which now is applied to it, 
 preparing it every where to spring up more profusely, till it 
 binds in the filaments of its delicate fibres that system which 
 thought to command the world by a monopoly of its staple — 
 all these are things which were not at first, which -were not a 
 year since, which not the most prescient could have anticipated, 
 but through which and by which God will vindicate his su- 
 premacy, and overwhelm that which would hinder his Gospel 
 from largest publication. 
 
 As in all our career — wherein a faith that seemed so ob- 
 scuro surmounted at first the obstacles that were mighty, 
 wherein the scattered and fragmentary colonies humbled the 
 
41 
 
 empire which threatened at the outset to crush them by its 
 weight, wherein the inventions that subdue to man’s use the 
 unfatigueable powers of nature have arisen to displace and re- 
 place the old instruments in so swift a succession, — as in all 
 our career, so here, most of all, shall the principle of the text 
 be vindicated to us: when the final demolition of Slavery shall 
 have come ; and when, as Pericles built the Odeum, for great mu- 
 sical performances, out of the masts of Persian vessels captured 
 at Marathon, so the generations which come after us shall 
 find that that magnificent and durable temple which is here to 
 be erected to Universal Freedom, and within which shall 
 arise, age after age, the Te Deums of millions, has taken its 
 stateliest proportions and pillars from the shattered strength 
 and the vanquished rage of this present Rebellion ! 
 
 And, finally : how the whole pressure of the theme bears 
 instantly and always on our Missionary Enterprise ; and what 
 an animating view does it open of the prospects of this work 
 in the ages to come ! We cannot close but with this thought. 
 
 Last year, as was fit, our minds were turned backward 
 along the magnificent march of the work up to that anni- 
 versary ; and with grateful hearts and praising lips we could 
 but exclaim, at the end of the Half-century, “ What hath God 
 wrought ” ! We will not forget the successes then recited. W e 
 will not let slip from the hold of our minds the great memories 
 then awakened. Our thoughts and hearts are anchored still 
 to the colleges, churches, and schools of the prophets, in which 
 this Society had its commencement. Our tender recollections 
 cling still to the homes amid whose piety has been nurtured 
 the faith which has signalized its annals ; to the graves where 
 so much devoted life, the dignity of man and the beauty of 
 woman, has gone down in its service from the vision of men ; 
 to the scenes which are forever consecrated, by the labors of 
 its teachers, and the sacrifice of its martyrs. Blessing and 
 honor and glory and *power be unto Him who hath raised it 
 
42 
 
 up, and girded and hallowed it, and given it His help ! Its 
 past is secure ; and in the clear effulgence of that our souls 
 grow bright. 
 
 But standing to-night at the end of the first year of its 
 second Half-century, and assembled as we are in this beautiful 
 city which was not in existence when its labors commenced — 
 looking out on these regions, then almost untrodden, whose 
 lakes and prairies and river-vallies, stretching on to the Paci- 
 fic, are teeming now with so copious a life, which is organizing 
 so fast into Christian communities, — it is not possible but that 
 we look forward, and anticipate what the present period, in 
 its swift circuit, shall also bring. And so looking on, what in- 
 vigorating influences rain upon us from the text ! What vistas 
 of glorious and immeasurable advancement for the Kingdom 
 of Christ open in bright perspective before us ! 
 
 It is inspiring to think of those far-scattered preachers, some 
 of whose associates are with us to-night, who are carrying the 
 great truths which apostles first bore, to distant lands ; again 
 establishing missionary churches; again reducing the languages 
 that are Pagan, and that have been from the start, to the mas- 
 tery of Christ. Prom city and jungle, from coral islands and 
 the echoing marge of ancient continents, we know their 
 thoughts and hearts turn hither; and to them all our souls 
 send back their glad All-IIail ! But it is, if possible, more in- 
 spiring still, not to our affection, but to our courage, to think 
 of those impersonal forces, unknown as yet even by us, 
 which God has marshalled for his work ; which cannot die, 
 and shall not fail, and which he will use, each in its time, for 
 his fit end. It is wonderful that he should have set in Hin- 
 dostan, two hundred and fifty years ago, in such uttermost 
 weakness, and with such absolute unconsciousness on the part 
 of his instruments, the seminal principle of that English do- 
 minion which, beginning when Elizabeth irradiated England 
 with the brilliance of her reign, hath waited for its fulfilment 
 
43 
 
 to the (lay of her latest and loveliest successor. It is wonder- 
 ful that Australia, first seen by the Portuguese, and whose 
 neighboring islands, with the glittering name of Islands of 
 Gold, were first linked to Europe by the commerce of the 
 Spaniard, should still have remained for two centuries and a 
 half unoccupied by settlements, till there as well English 
 colonies were planted, and English influence made supreme. 
 But who does not see that the Protestant energy which per- 
 vades those vast regions is to be henceforth the dominant 
 power in Asia and the Pacific ; and that the beginnings, so 
 feeble and so distant, held in them the germs of Christ’s ulti- 
 mate victory ? It was not known, when the missionary spirit 
 first awoke in this country, that the era of steam-navigation 
 was at hand, to give to commerce world-wide enlargement 
 and lock all lands in alliances of trade. It was not known, 
 when all Christian missions began to need a rapid expansion, 
 that the picking up of a flake or two of gold in the dry beds 
 of streams with which Indians and Mexicans had long been 
 familiar, was to augment the wealth of this country and of 
 Europe by incredible additions, and to furnish the resources 
 for which millions had been praying. But so has God made 
 the things unexpected, and the things that looked trivial, the 
 things which he alone foresaw, to fit into and further his on- 
 working plans. And so shall he do throughout the future. 
 
 The obstacles before us seem great sometimes, but how small 
 they all are beside those which already have been overcome ; 
 and how certain it is that even already the forces are at work, 
 not yet to be recognized probably by us, before which they 
 all shall come to nought ; before which worships, castes, and 
 despotisms, shall melt as melts the morning mist ; before 
 which new men shall spring to action, new routes of travel and 
 trade be opened, new nations be inspired with evangelical 
 fervor, our country be made more than ever heretofore a mis- 
 sionary land, and the fierceness of the world be subdued unto 
 Christ. 
 
u 
 
 Onr grand prerogative is it to know this : that all things 
 coming are our helpers ; that as fast as the possible becomes real- 
 ized and actual, it assists our advance ! That which statesmen 
 always fear, is these possibilities which they can not yet measure. 
 What makes the hearts of monarchs quake, amid palaces and 
 armies, is the chance that already, among the secret seeds of 
 things, is germinating that which shall threaten their thrones* 
 But all these boundless possibilities are ours. These germi- 
 nating influences, every one of them is for us. God’s mind 
 controls and chooses all. They are indeed his selected 
 auxiliaries, for the furtherance of his plans. And we have 
 but to advance in the line which He marks out, to find them 
 all our unwearied fellow- workers ; to find the Half-century 
 of missionary history which we have commenced, full even to 
 the end of still culminating successes ! Over every discourage- 
 ment, and to every fresh victory, He shall lift us by means 
 which we least had anticipated. The most solid of the barriers 
 that still stand in our path, already the unseen and impalpable 
 agencies are conspiring for its downfall. And the great revo- 
 lutions which, when they come, shall startle and amaze us, lie 
 really infolded already, did we know it, in forces and causes 
 which we have not discerned. 
 
 Let us know, then, beforehand, what the issue is to be, and 
 take hold on it with our faith. Let us look upon Nature, 
 Commerce, the Arts, on the movements of states, the changes 
 of dynasties, and feel that in all of them lie hid our helpers. 
 Let us never be discouraged, and never be timid, till the end 
 is attained, or till our life closes. And let us know that when 
 the end has fully come ; when the kingdoms of this world are 
 all the Lord’s, in loyal faith ; when every shackle at last is 
 loosed, and every home is free and secure; when from each hill 
 to every other there rings abroad the shout of joy, and over 
 every outstretched plain there streams the Gospel’s radiant 
 morn ; when all the world securely rests in perfect love, and 
 that various beauty which no autumn can typify lias robed its 
 
45 
 
 coasts in hues and lights which arc the reflection of that great 
 Bow bended of God around His throne — it shall be seen em- 
 blazoned in light on the long progress, it shall be heard re- 
 sounding in music from every part of the vast triumph : 
 “The Things that were” — so ancient, proud, and full of 
 might — by “ the Things that were not,” they are all brought 
 to nought ! 
 
 God make the truth our teacher here ; and make its fruits 
 our glory there ; and unto Him be all the praise! Amen. 
 

fit. 
 
 *