Ui LtBRAar 
 SF M 
 
 UMVEBSITir OF lUINOiS 
 
 CHKIST, 
 
 AND THE 
 
 UNITY OF THE FACE. 
 
 BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 
 
 V 
 
 DELIVERED AT 
 
 MIDDLEBUKY COLLEGE, 
 
 v 
 
 BY 
 
 OALYIN B. HULBERT, D. D., 
 
 President. 
 
 ■ 
 
 “C NEW YORK: 
 
 COLLINS & BROTHER, STATIONERS, 414 BROADWAY. 
 1879. 
 
CHKIST, 
 
 II 
 
 y OF TEl OOCTEI 
 
 AND THE 
 
 UNITY OF THE RACE. 
 
 BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 
 
 DELIVERED AT 
 
 MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, 
 
 CALVIN B. HULBERT, D. D., 
 
 President. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 COLLINS & BROTHER, STATIONERS, 414 BROADWAY. 
 1879. 
 
2 3 "/. 3 
 
 H ^ 
 
 TO 
 
 Mr. L. M. bates, 
 
 m:w YORK CITY, 
 
 THROUGH WHOSE LIBERALITY THEY ARE GIVEN TO THE PUBLIC, 
 THESE DISCOURSES ARE RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED 
 BY HIS GRATEFUL FRIEND, 
 
 C. B. HULBERT. 
 
 Middlebury College, Vt., 
 
 February 22, 1S79. 
 
CHRIST, 
 
 THE HAHMONY OF THE DOCTHINES. 
 
SERMON 
 
 Delivered June 24 , 1877 , 
 
 “ Who is he that condemneth ? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen 
 again.”—Eom. viii. 34. 
 
 “ Seeing, then, that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech.”—II, Cor. 
 hi. 12. 
 
 Let it be supposed that on a certain Sabbath morning I repair, 
 in company with others, to the sanctuary, and there, in the order of 
 the service, listen to a sermon on the subject of Sin: its Nature, 
 Extent and Guilt. The preacher speaks in a tone of great solemnity, 
 as if borne down with a sense of the intrinsic seriousness of the theme 
 which he has in hand and the magnitude of the issues which are 
 involved. His positions are taken with care, are clearly presented, 
 and abundantly sustained by appeal to Biblical authority. 
 
 Relieving his subject of mere abstractions, he presents it as far 
 as possible in the concrete and in a pungent application of it to his 
 audience. In doing this, let it be supposed that he seems to single 
 me out from all his other hearers, and to have in all he says a very 
 distinct reference to my misdeeds and sins. He awakens in me the 
 conviction that I am a sinner ; by nature and by practice a sinner ; 
 and a sinner of aggravated, criminal guilt. The question now arises, 
 What shall be my attitude of mind toward the doctrine presented? 
 What shall my conscience say in response to the preacher’s appeals? 
 and what shall be my feelings toward the preacher himself? Shall 
 bow in penitential grief and give utterance to my sense of guilt in 
 
8 
 
 the spirit of the Fifty-first Psalm? or shall I manifest displeasure and 
 indignantly repel the doctrine unfolded, and affirm that, so far as I 
 am concerned, it is altogether misapplied? 
 
 Not so. Neither of these last attitudes will I assume. I am not 
 altogether uninstracted by my own convictions. 1 am conscious of 
 an arrangement made in my moral constitution for just this form of 
 truth. I will, therefore, take leave of the sanctuary with this intent, 
 to return and hear further. It is possible that the preacher has 
 another sermon to preach ; and though upon a logically related, yet 
 upon a different theme. I will hold my judgment in suspense till I 
 have heard him in a second discourse. 
 
 Suppose that on the succeeding Sabbath I carry out my purpose 
 and attend public worship in the same sanctuary, and on this occa¬ 
 sion listen to a sermon by the same preacher. His subject is Moral 
 Lidbility. He shows with great clearness and with abundant proof 
 from Scripture that the sinner, in his apostasy, has no power of 
 self-recovery; no reserved and latent forces within him, which, 
 energizing, can enable him to deliver himself from his state of guilt 
 and restore him to his normal integrity and purity. The preacher 
 affirms the existence in nature of a known law whereby living things 
 develop themselves spontaneously according to a principle inlaid in 
 their constitutions, while no law is known to exist whereby one 
 nature can contravene itself and develop its opposite without the 
 intervention of a creative act of God. The analogy holds, he says, 
 in regard to the sinner. He can develop, without help, the law of 
 sin and death within him ; but he cannot go back of that law and 
 insert a new base and evolve a nature therefrom at variance with 
 it. In illustration of the sinner’s state, the preacher points to a tree, 
 dead and in the process of decay, and says, that as that tree has no 
 recuperative power whereby it can restore its life, re-invest itself in a 
 fresh bark and stand forth again crowmed in the glory of its summer 
 foliage, so the sinner, dead in trespasses and sins, has no self-restor¬ 
 ing power. If saved, he must be saved by a power that regenerates 
 in distinction from one that merely expands ; a power that grounds 
 his life in a new spiritual base, rather than develops it from an illegiti- 
 
9 
 
 mate and false one, violently inlaid in liis apostate nature by liis own 
 free act. 
 
 He insists that 
 
 “ The transformation of apostate man 
 From fool to wise, from earthly to divine, 
 
 Is work for Him that made him.” 
 
 Such now is the preacher’s position in his doctrine, and a position 
 which he maintains with an obviously intense conviction of its truth. 
 As on the previous Sabbath when I listened to him, so on this, he 
 advances beyond the mere development of his subject to make a 
 most earnest and solemn application of it to his hearers, among 
 whom I seem again to be singled out and specially addressed. The 
 preacher seems intent upon driving me to the conviction that 1 am 
 not only a sinner, and wholly a sinner, and a guilty sinner, but that, 
 being such, I am disabled, morally incapacitated, incompetent to 
 perform a holy act in my own strength. I had always acted on the 
 maxim, that if I needed help, to help myself; but he tells me that I 
 have reached an emergency where this maxim must be set aside. 
 He assures me that I must have help which is not self-rendered. 
 He rings changes upon that word of mysterious import— lost; and 
 with such solemn earnestness as to give it an appalling significance. 
 As he speaks, I feel that I am included in the number of those who 
 have passed the limits of self-recovery, and that what I need is what 
 may properly be denominated a salvation from a lost condition. 
 
 And now I repeat my previous inquiry and ask. What shall I do 
 in view of this new truth urged upon my attention ? Shall I men¬ 
 tally resist it? Shall I openly express my displeasure? Shall I say 
 that the preacher puts the divine character in peril by supposing God 
 to have created man with such a prerogative of free will as to render 
 possible a lapse in such a lost condition ? Shall I go away from this 
 preacher irate and say that I will hear him no more? Nothing of all 
 this can I do. I am a rational soul, and I cannot afford to repel the 
 words of a man who makes his appeal to my reason, and obviously 
 grounds his positions not only in the Bible, but in the nature of 
 things. It is true that what he has taught is encumbered with 
 
10 
 
 difficulties; but if I should hold no truths but those which are not, x 
 should, in fact, have none at all, and be a man of mere negations. 
 Moreover, while my understanding may have been not a little baffled 
 in what the preacher has taught, still a certain rational intuition 
 holds me to his positions as absolutely impregnable. I will go away, 
 therefore, with this intention—to come and hear him again on the 
 next Sabbath. I have heard him speak on tw’O themes—he may 
 have a third. 
 
 Imagine, no^v, that upon the ensuing Sabbath I take my place in 
 the same worshipping assembly, and listen to another sermon from 
 its pastor. The impressions of the previous Sabbaths are unefifaced 
 by the labors of the week, and prepare me to listen with deeper 
 interest than ever before. But conceive of my surprise as the 
 preacher announces his theme : The Reality and Power, of Satanic 
 Agency in the Earth. The shock given me 'by this announcement, 
 however, is soon abated by the calm and earnest manner of the 
 speaker, who goes on to maintain that what the Bible teaches con¬ 
 cerning those spiritual beings who kept not their first estate is 
 taught in the interests of truth, and not, as some have strangely 
 affirmed, in accommodation to our human w^eakness. He shows that 
 next after One Other Personage, no being is more frequently brought 
 into view in the Scriptures than Satan; and particularly in the Ne\v 
 Testament, where we have the most advanced forms of inspired 
 thought. He contends, with Archbishop Whately, that'a style of 
 exegesis which eliminates the person of such a fallen spirit from the 
 Scriptures, by converting him into an oriental metaphor or into a 
 grammatical idiom, or by making him simply an impersonation of 
 evil, is a style of biblical interpretation which is likely, in its conceit, 
 to advance till it precipitates the whole body of the Scriptures into 
 offensive rubbish. He takes the ground that the Bible teaches by 
 direct assertion and by implication that there exists a kingdom of 
 fallen spirits circumambient to the earth and coming continually into 
 immediate and influential contact with human minds. He suggests 
 whether the hypothesis of the existence of such a superhuman 
 
11 
 
 agency of evil is not required to account for the strange forms of 
 human wickedness that abound in the earth. 
 
 Let it be supposed, as heretofore, that in dealing with this sub¬ 
 ject—a subject from which every mind instinctively revolts—the 
 preacher does it in the style of solemn earnestness which a personal 
 belief enforces, and in a way to awaken in me a sense of alarm at 
 the thought of my own exposure to the wiles of the Arch-Enemy. 
 Ill at ease when I came to church, with the conviction that 1 was a 
 sinner, and a lost sinner, I find no relief now in the added position 
 that I am a sinner assaulted and enthralled by alien spirits. 
 
 At this advance upon previous disclosures of truth, the old 
 question returns : How shall I stand affected toward this strange 
 doctrine that has come to my ears ? How shall I feel toward the 
 preacher? Shall I assume an attitude of bristling hostility? Shall 
 I charge him with an unpardonable loitering behind the cul¬ 
 ture of the age? or shall 1 assail him for vindicating the hideous 
 dogmas of a pagan theology? or shall I pour upon him the con¬ 
 tempt due to the craven spirit who adheres to error because it is old, 
 since he lacks the courage to accept truth because it is new ? No ; 
 nothing of this. I will retain an equanimity and candor the full 
 match of the speaker’s. I will say that there is nothing intrinsically 
 unreasonable in the existence of other worlds than our own, and of 
 other systems of moral beings ; such beings must be free moral 
 agents, and be endowed with the possibility to sin ; this possibility 
 may have been realized when they kept not their first estate. That 
 God should permit them to influence human minds is a mystery ; but 
 a mystery in kind with the permission He accords to the seducer 
 when he eyes the flower he would spoil. There is also a logical 
 sequence and harmony in what the preacher has taught in his three 
 discourses concerning my sin and my inability, and now in my 
 exposure to the guileful influences of evil spirits. Retaining a docile 
 mind and accounting him as controlled by the cowardly spirit, who 
 shuns to declare or to receive all the counsel of God, I will retire 
 from the sanctuary, as on previous occasions, with the purpose to 
 return again. I have heard, from the same pulpit, three discourses 
 
12 
 
 upon three difterent themes. It may be that on the next Sabbath I 
 shall hear another fresh subject discussed. It is possible that no 
 preacher, in three sermons, can exhaust the system of biblical 
 truth. 
 
 On the following Sabbath morning, let it be supposed, that I 
 fulfil this purpose and join the same congregation. The pastor is 
 in the pulpit. His bearing on this occasion, as heretofore, is digni¬ 
 fied and impressive ; his face is full of solemnity and benignity, and 
 beams with the emotions of a warm heart. His style of utterance is 
 that of a man who believes, and therefore speaks, and who cannot 
 but speak forth the words of truth and soberness which he has 
 heard ; for his words are not so much those which man’s wisdom 
 teacheth as those which the Holy Ghost teacheth. He speaks 
 like a man commissioned from the court of Heaven to deliver 
 divine messages. He is utterly unmoved by that patent cry of 
 atheistic unbelief which assails the ears of modern preachers as it 
 did those of the ancient prophets : “ Prophesy not unto us right 
 things ; speak unto us smooth things ; prophesy deceits ; cause the 
 Holy One of Israel to cease from before us.” 
 
 From previous experiences under this preacher’s ministrations, I 
 need not be surprised to find that his words continue to be “ as 
 goads and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies.” Hence 
 his theme on this occasion strikes me as in logical harmony with pre¬ 
 ceding ones, when he proposes to consider the doctrine‘of Future 
 Punishment, 
 
 “Alas ! ”—this is my soliloquy—“ I am not only a sinner, a sinner 
 by nature and by practice and a criminally guilty sinner; I am not 
 only a disabled sinner, and, apart from divine intervention, a hope¬ 
 lessly lost sinner ; I am not only a beleaguered sinner, called to war 
 both against flesh and blood and against principalities and powers ; 
 but also and beyond all this, I now find that I am—and in natural 
 sequence—an exposed sinner, and, in the destiny of the soul, to a 
 catastrophe whose bounds the imagination cannot compass.” To 
 ■ establish the truth of this, the preacher, in his sermon, advances to 
 affirm it on the authority of inspired and unambiguous assertion, on 
 
13 
 
 the one hand, and the nature of apostate mind on the other. He 
 says that there are arrangements made, not only in the divine moral 
 government of the world, but in the nature and constitution of the 
 human soul, whereby sinners dying unrepentant and the enemies of 
 God, merit and will receive an everlasting overthrow. He reasons 
 that as God’s character remains unimpaired in the presence of the 
 fact, patent before every eye, that sin and misery are conjoined in 
 this life, so his character will need suffer no loss, but remain infi¬ 
 nitely amiable in case sin and misery are conjoined in human 
 experience in the next. He insists that the fact that God is love” 
 is more easily reconciled with the continuance of sin, in impenitent 
 minds, in eternity, than it is with the beginning of sin, in holy 
 minds, in time. Whatever arguments can harmonize the divine 
 benevolence with the origin of evil are equally valid in reconciling 
 the divine benevolence with the continuance of evil in apostate 
 mind. Thus does the preacher argue. Nor does he speak with a 
 hesitating and faltering confidence. His utterances are not yea and 
 nay, but yea and amen. He gives no uncertain sound. He uses 
 great plainness of speech. As God’s ambassador he asserts, on 
 God’s authority, certain primary and essential facts, giving them 
 unqualified and unmistakable prominence. He asserts ; he reasons 
 he announces ; he proclaims ; knowing the terrors of the Lord, he 
 persuades. And in dealing with this theme of appalling interest, let 
 us suppose that he gives it a practical bearing, and in a way to 
 disturb and alarm impenitent hearers ; and, being myself of this 
 number, let it be supposed that I feel myself to be hard pressed, and 
 not a little alarmed and moved by the urgency of his appeals. His 
 “great plainness of speech ” pricks me to the heart. As I listen to 
 his terrific delineations of the day of judgment and the retributions 
 of eternity, I am filled with a “fear that hath torment.” 
 
 Here again, and for the fourth time, I am driven back upon the 
 old question: What shall I do ? Confronted with this doctrine of 
 the destiny of the incorrigible, what shall I say ? As I hear the 
 preacher, shall I brace my feet in the slip in tort and angry opposi¬ 
 tion to his words? Shall I look around in a choleric spirit to find 
 
14 
 
 in other hearers expressions of sympathy with me in my enmity? 
 Shall 1 wrap about me the scaly folds of a sullen unbelief and bid 
 defiance? Shall I charge the preacher with cruel-heartedness, and 
 curl upon him a lip of contempt, and smite him in the face and 
 say that he imputes to the heart of the Infinite Father the intrinsic 
 quality of a fiend ? 
 
 Not I. There is too much of reason and soberness in the preacher; 
 he speaks too much as one that has authority from above ; he hangs 
 his utterances too much upon hooks which protrude from m}’- own 
 soul ; he incorporates too much of that law which is written in 
 my heart, whereby my conscience bears witness in thoughts that 
 accuse or else excuse. I am too wonderfully and fearfully made, 
 having a large discourse of reason that looks before and after ; and 
 I know not enough of the psychology of guilt, the necessities of 
 finite mind—its possibilities in sin—and what the nature of that 
 death is in which sin issues when it is finished—in all these paiticu- 
 lars I am too uninformed and short-sighted to take any stand against 
 the preacher and against his doctrine. It is true that in his dis¬ 
 courses hitherto he has made havoc of the hopes which I had 
 entertained of my good estate and my prospects for the world 
 to come. I confess that he has hedged up ray way and put dark¬ 
 ness in my path. A succession of ponderous truths, logically 
 related, interlinked, and sombre and gloomy, bar my advance and 
 I cannot gainsay them ; nor do I dare oppose the preacher, lest, 
 haply, I be found to fight against God. 
 
 But this have I found—and it is my great relief— this preacher is 
 the preacher of many themes, and it may be that he can preach 
 another sermon, and on another theme ; and of this one thing I am 
 confident, that in all he may say hereafter, he can possibly preach 
 upon no subjects of more terrific interest than those already pre¬ 
 sented. He has told me that I am a sinner, and a guilty sinner, and 
 I know that I am ; he has taught me that I am a sinner disabled and 
 helpless ; and my consciousness has confirmed all he has said ; he has 
 assured me that I am assailed and beleaguered by apostate spirits in 
 malignant pursuit of me, and upon an authority that forbids a ques- 
 
15 
 
 tion ; and he has reasoned with me out of the Scriptures and out of 
 the contents of my own soul, of righteousness, and. temperance, and 
 judgment to come, till I have trembled in view of the possible issues 
 of the law of sin and death ivithin me; and I do not believe that it is 
 in the pow^r of the preacher to drive me to a more fearful extremity 
 than the one I am in, and where I am “shut up,” and where 
 my “mouth is stopped.” I will, therefore, withdraw from the sanc¬ 
 tuary, controlled by the same purpose as heretofore — to come 
 to listen to what he may next have to say. I would that my 
 extremity might be made by him an opportunity of speaking of 
 some shadow of a great rock in a weary land ; of some daysman, 
 some mediator, some deliverer of captives and opener of prison 
 doors to them that are bound ; but I will hold myself in readiness 
 to receiv'e whatever he shall teach, if he retains his spirit of candor 
 and style of tender appeal. 
 
 There is often a crisis in the history of a human soul. It occurs 
 whenever eternal realities are made to dawn upon the convicted and 
 baffled spirit. It is then that a conflict of rival interests puts the 
 probationer in great temptation to heed the “ many devices in a 
 man’s heart'' as opposed to “the counsel of the Lord, which shall 
 stand,” and which speaks with such tones of authority in man’s 
 reason and conscience^ as well as in the Scriptures. A series of such 
 crises we have noticed in the experience which we have been follow¬ 
 ing, and in each of which a happy transition has been made; a docile 
 and inquiring spirit has been wisely retained. 
 
 Let it be supposed that with such a temper of mind, I resort 
 on the fifth Sabbath to the sanctuary to take what is becoming 
 my accustomed place in the congregation. As I approach the sanc¬ 
 tuary a certain sense of dread steals upon me. According to that 
 law of mental action, whereby we produce from objects that which 
 we have embodied in them by association, the church edifice itself, to 
 my vision, is invested with almost a prison gloom. The service 
 conducted in it heretofore, in my experience, has been simply “ a 
 ministration of death." If for four times I have entered it alive, I 
 have yet as many times withdrawn from it slain. I have found in it 
 
16 
 
 nothing but a knowledge of sin and other painfully related truths. 
 The preacher himself, though seemingly a warm-hearted and genial 
 man, has yet lost something of his winning grace and attractiveness 
 by my association of him with the uninviting and gloomy themes 
 which I have heard him discuss. I might almost sa^^at times that ‘‘I 
 hate him, for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil 
 but my mouth is stopped because of certain “invisible things which 
 are clearly seen in things that are made, and because my own 
 thoughts the meanwhile accuse, or else excuse me.” As he advances, 
 however, on this occasion in the service, there is something in his 
 bearing and spirit that rebukes my hostility and wins me to him. I 
 am the more disarmed and subdued as he announces his theme: Let 
 i(S consider the fitness of God's love in Christ to win the hearts of men. 
 His text is this : “ For God commendeth His love toward us in that 
 while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us ”—a passage which the 
 preacher proposes to use as representative of a large number of pas¬ 
 sages affirming the same truth. That there is this fitness in God’s 
 love to win the heart, is made to appear from the nature of love in 
 general, as an amiable affection, but especially from the character of 
 God’s love as holy. He attaches, also, great importance to its exercise 
 in God as a spontaneous affection, not required in order to the per¬ 
 fectness of His character, nor to an exhibition of it to the comprehen¬ 
 sion of His intelligent creatures, nor to the administration of His 
 government, but as being an uncompelled and free expression of His 
 heart. The great emphasis is laid, however, on the intensity of God’s 
 love as involving self-denial, and on the strangeness of it as exercised 
 toward the guilty. As he speaks of the Father’s self-denial in the 
 mystery of His Son’s incarnation, in His agony and bloody sweat, in 
 His cross and passion, in His precious death and burial, and in the 
 unnaturalness of suffering innocence, and especially under the divine 
 inflictions ; as he announces that Christ tasted death for every man 
 and bore the iniquity of us all ; that He is the propitiation, not only 
 for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world, so that the most 
 needless event that ever takes place in the history of the universe, is 
 the loss of a human soul,— as he speaks of these things, and the 
 
n 
 
 strangeness of them as favors shown to the guilty, there are dis¬ 
 closures made to me of God’s love—“its breadth, and length, and 
 depth, and height’’—of which, previously, I had not the faintest ap¬ 
 prehension. Heretofore as I listened to his ministrations, I regarded 
 the preacher as determined not to know anything in the pulpit save 
 me, and me a sinner, and a sinner disabled and enthralled, and 
 exposed to a miserable destiny ; but as I now hear him speak, he 
 seems determined not to know anything in the pulpit save the love 
 of God in “ Christ and Him crucified.” His range of thought is so 
 broad, his vision is so clear, his emotion is so deep ; he has taken 
 such a hold upon the Seven Pillars which Wisdom hath hewn out, 
 he has caught such an inspiration from the Scourged of Pilate’s hall 5 
 he is so insphered in the loving mind of the Infinite Father, that he 
 speaks with more than the tongues of men or of angels. True to his 
 previous style, he shows that he is not controlled by a speculative 
 interest, nor by any of the motives of the secular orator. His 
 eloquence, like the New Jerusalem, comes down from God out of 
 heaven. It is that of a redeemed sinner supernaturally stirred by His 
 sympathies for men who need redemption. Hence the urgency and 
 force of his appeals. He tells his hearers that their necessity is so 
 great, their unworthiness is so deep, and their salvation is so costly, 
 that, on any terms possible with God, they should account salvation a 
 privilege ; much more, then, should they so account it when its 
 terms are those which are prescribed—repentance and faith—and 
 which are reasonable terms, and just, and practicable and necessary. 
 That he may mount to the height of this great argument of salvation 
 found in, and enforced by, the love of God, he directs my attention 
 to the fact, that the Crucified whom he preaches is the Being of 
 Many Names, and that all these names are significant names—cor¬ 
 responding opposites to necessities in the sinner, each to each. 
 He proposes to me. Are you in Sin ? But Christ is the Lamb of God 
 that taketh away your sin. Are you disabled ? When you were 
 without strength, in due time Christ died for you. Are you en¬ 
 thralled by alien spirits ? Christ hath provided a way of deliverance 
 out of the Kingdom of Satan into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son. 
 
 2 
 
18 
 
 Are you in darkness ? Christ is your light. Are you like the troubled 
 sea wlien it cannot rest ? Christ is your peace. Are you a stumbler 
 on the dark mountains, or are you in a conflict of rival opinions, or are 
 you dead in trespasses and sins? Christ is for you the Way, and 
 the Truth, and the Life. In short, are you in peril number one, or two, 
 or three, or four, and so on, endlessly ? Let me assure you that there 
 are for you in Christ corresponding forms of deliverance, and nu¬ 
 merically an exact match for your perils, each to each. 
 
 Thus the preacher insists that there are no emergencies in the 
 sinner’s state that find not corresponding alleviations in the super¬ 
 abundant grace of God in Jesus Christ; that, however the sinner 
 may be beset behind and before ; however high his guilt may rise 
 or his otfence be rank, his loss in hell, though surely impending, as 
 he is, is yet, witli such a ransom found, the most needless of all 
 needless things. 
 
 Here, once more, arises the ever-recurring question, as I listen to 
 the ministrations of this pulpit : What shall I do ? What response 
 shall I make to this strange variation of, as well as advance upon, 
 previous discourses? I am called to prompt and decisive action— 
 what shall that action be ? Good new^s of great joy has come to me. 
 I had heard about myself, my sin and peril ; I am glad to hear of 
 God, and of His love in Christ. Great is the mystery of godliness ; 
 God manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, 
 preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world and received 
 up into glory ; and to me is the word of this salvation sent. Say, 
 then ? This will I say, that in view of this strange manifestation of 
 God’s mind toward me, I am delivered wholly and forever from all 
 temptation to complain of the severity of this preacher, 
 
 I was once disposed to do it ; I accounted him cruel ; I almost 
 hated him, and was on the point once of abandoning his ministra¬ 
 tions, determined that I would hear him no more. But I now find 
 that I was wise, beyond a knowledge of my wisdom, in holding my 
 judgment in suspense as I first listened to his preaching. The light 
 which pours in upon me in this fifth sermon relieves me from all the 
 terrors that had gathered upon me as I heard the first four. Shut 
 
19 
 
 up solely to the contemplation of sin and the disability it creates ; of 
 alien spirits and the destiny that awaits them and all who are one 
 with them in heart, I am driven to despair ; but as I contemplate 
 these same severe and sombre truths in the light cast upon 
 them in the ameliorating and cheering doctrines of the cross, they 
 lose their threatening aspect; if not their essential nature, they yet 
 surrender their sting. The sanctuary in which, for four Sabbaths, 
 “a ministration of deathwas preached, and which to me then was 
 draped in gloom, its very atmosphere pulsating with a funereal 
 sadness, and which was, therefore, the very opposite of the gate to 
 Heaven, has been transmuted, by the preaching of this fifth sermon, 
 into a totally new structure. A “ministration of life” is now 
 proclaimed in it, and it is flooded with a light from Heaven above the 
 brightness of the sun. The preacher, too, who, in my associating 
 him with uninviting and repulsive doctrines, was fast becoming an 
 object of dread, by a readjustment of previous sermons upon a new 
 base and around a new centre, and with a new outlook, is now 
 a completely transfigured man. A minister of consternation once, he 
 is now an ambassador for Christ. His gentleness and benignity, 
 obscured by my misapprehension of his aims in the pulpit, now 
 invest him in their beaming fulness ; and I say again that this 
 preacher is the preacher of many themes, but of many themes as 
 headed toward, and centring in, and clustering upon. One Theme. 
 Thanks be unto G-od, he is not always telling me that I am a sinner; 
 he does not confine my vision to the fact of my helplessness ; he 
 permits me to turn my gaze from the Arch-Enemy and his angels, in 
 leagued pursuit of me ; he does not hold me unalterably to a 
 fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation. “ Glory be 
 unto the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost ; as it was 
 in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end,’ 
 for the glorious Gospel of the blessed God. Do, then ? What shall I 
 do? I will take the cup of salvation which is offered me in these 
 provisions of redemption. No longer ignorant of God’s righteous¬ 
 ness, I will no longer go about to establish a righteousness of my 
 own, but submit to the one which has been established for me. 
 
20 
 
 I do, therefore, now rest confidently in this crimson centre of 
 the Christian system. I do repent and believe the Gospel. And, 
 accepting the truths taught me from this source, I will no longer 
 hold my judgment in suspense in respect to truths enforced in 
 previous discourses. So long as this preacher will give me such 
 hope as this furnished in the Gospel, I will give him the broadest 
 liberty to use great plainness of speech. While he can offset a 
 ministration of death by this ministration of life, he can give 
 me no offence in the use of those scriptural terms and expressions, 
 from which I once recoiled, and which continue to be so repulsive to 
 many hearers. 
 
 He has solved the riddle of the honey in the lion’s carcass. He 
 has put a new song into my mouth, and in triumph I inquire. Who 
 is he that condemneth ? Not he who tells that I am a sinner, 
 and a guilty and a lost sinner; not even though he push me 
 to the extreme of acknowledging that I sinned in Adam and am 
 physically depraved, for it is Christ that died, and in Him I am 
 saved ; not because I am not a sinner and the very chief of sinners, 
 but because I am, and in spite of my being. I repeat: Who is he that 
 condemneth? Not he who tells me that I am disabled and utterly 
 ihelpless, not even if he drive me to the extreme of saying that my 
 inability is natural and absolute; for it is Christ that died, and in 
 Him I am safe, though weak—for I am not saved because I am not 
 helpless and dependent, but because I am, and in spite of it. Who, 
 then, is he that condemneth ? Not he who tells me of the devil and 
 .his angels, and of their influence upon human minds ; for it is Christ 
 that died, and, dying, conquered man’s great enemy, and in Him I 
 'have an impregnable fortress, and stand in no fear ; for I am not 
 saved because there is no empire of evil spirits, but because there is, 
 and in spite of the appalling fact. Yet once more I hurl the 
 •challenge: Who is he that condemneth? Not he who assures me of 
 ‘the certainty of future endless conscious punishment, and in a 
 world prepared for the devil and his angels, for it is Christ that 
 -died ; yea, that is risen again, and in Him I am saved from the 
 
21 
 
 destiny of the incorrigible, and am secure, not because there is 
 no punishment of the kind, but because there is, and in spite of it. 
 
 Let it be supposed now, that, standing on this ground of an 
 evangelical experience, I visit an orthodox sanctuary on the Sabbath 
 and hear a sermon on Sin, or on Inability, or on Alien Spirits, or on 
 Future Punishment, or on any related subject. I take no offence; I 
 say to the preacher: “Preach on; preach with clearness all the counsel 
 of God on these themes ; I am no longer sensitive to the severity of 
 Biblical doctrine ; for my door of entrance into heaven is not in a 
 denial, but in an acceptance of the so-called severe doctrines of Reve¬ 
 lation ; not upon their overthrow and ruins, but upon their vindica¬ 
 tion, do I build my hope. There is a more excellent way to heaven 
 than by battering them down; a better foundation laid than their 
 demolition. So long as you tell me that it is Christ that died, and 
 give me such hope as His death and resurrection justify, you may 
 use and continue to use great plainness of speech. In all needful dis¬ 
 cussions of truth in the pulpit you may use the word “ sin” and its* 
 synonyms; you may affirm of man in his apostasy, that he is without 
 soundness, and that his moral character is little else than “bruises 
 and putrefying sores;” on fitting occasion, and in elevated and solemn 
 discourse, you need not recoil from that outspoken style that uses the 
 words “ devil,” and “ Satan,” and the terms “ evil spirits,” “powers of 
 darkness ;” nor need you hesitate and draw back when you come to 
 the vvord “ hell,” or the terms “ fire and brimstone,” “ wailing and 
 gnashing of teeth,” “ eternal damnation,” “ unquenchable fire.” Both 
 the canon of good taste and the canon of Scripture authorize your 
 use of them ; and I urge you to disclose not a spirit of timid evasion 
 of these severe, but Biblical terms; for to me they have lost their ter¬ 
 rors; not because they are found at length to be meaningless, but 
 because they are overpowered by the superabounding meaning of 
 certain other words in the evangelical system which stand over 
 against them in assaulting contrast. So long as Christ wears His 
 significant names ; so long as the words forgiveness, redemption, 
 salvation, eternal life, have their fulness of meaning, I feel no im¬ 
 pulse to withhold from the harsher Biblical terms their natural and 
 
22 
 
 obvious significance. Christ came not to destro}^ but to fulfil the 
 import of these latter terms, by so giving to the world an advance of 
 truth upon them that they can be accepted without fear. 
 
 I think I cannot be misunderstood. This is my meaning ; let any 
 man accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ for what it is worth to him, 
 and that means at God’s valuation of it, and he can find no possible 
 occasion to fear those doctrines of the evangelical system which are 
 commonly so repulsive to the natural heart. The offence of the Cross 
 is an offence taken at those doctrines that render it needful. Let 
 these doctrines be received without offence, and the offence of the 
 cross ceases. An accceptance of Him who felt “ the sting of death, 
 which is sin,” extracts the sting from the severe doctrines. We are 
 told that when Daniel was cast into the den, God sent His angel and 
 shut the lions’ mouths. It is not otherwise that God interposes to 
 save the sinner when he repents and believes. To those doctrines, 
 that awaken a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, 
 and that threaten io devour the ungodly man, God sends His angel 
 on the instant that he believes, and shuts their mouths. Henceforth 
 these doctrines move about him, or lie at his feet, as inoffensive and 
 harmless as the lions did around the prophet in the den; and God’s 
 promise is that they shall not hurt or destroy in all His holy 
 mountain. 
 
 The subject considered suggests, in closing, a few points of great 
 practical moment: 
 
 I. We see that prominence must be given in the ministrations of 
 the pulpit to the so-called severe doctrines of revelation. These are 
 not the distinctive doctrines of the Bible, but they must be earnestly 
 taught, to create a demand for those that are. The worth of the 
 remedy is measured by the strength of the disease. The arms 
 of the Saviour are inviting only to those who are consciously in the 
 folds of the serpent. Sin and its logically related truths must be 
 clearly and earnestly discussed in the pulpit before men will accept, 
 with the retpiired self-surrender and energy, the antidote provided 
 for it. But, 
 
 II. While prominence is to be given to truths fitted to disturb the 
 
23 
 
 guilty, and to lead them to fear the wrath to come, still they are to 
 be presented, not for their own sakes, but as preliminaries to truths 
 of a different type, to be immediately enforced. It is not sufficiently 
 considered that a great proportion of the truths of the Bible have 
 an existence independent of it. If we had no Bible, they would 
 remain dominant forces in human experience. They are the truths 
 of natural religion which Bishop Butler fell back upon and employed 
 with such power in his immortal “Analogy;” truths which the Bible 
 never teaches, because it always assumes that every man is bound to 
 know them as taught by the natural reason. They are affirmed and 
 reaffirmed everywhere in the Bible, but are not taught as its peculiar 
 and distinctive truths. They are the natural substrate and back¬ 
 ground on which the genial and clement truths of the Gospel are 
 exhibited and enforced. The truths to which I listened on the first 
 four Sabbaths, as represented in the early part of this discourse, were 
 distinctively the truths of natural religion, and, as for substance, 
 might as well have been taught by Plato or Confucius, as by 
 the evangelical divine. There are men who are offended at the 
 Bible, and who are seeking to destroy its credibility. Suppose their 
 end accomplished; they are not delivered from the truths taught in 
 these first four sermons, truths which inhere in the nature of things, 
 and which abide unalterably the same, even though the Bible 
 be shown to be otherwise untrustworthy. The facts of sin and moral 
 inability, of alien destructive influence and penal infliction, arc 
 affirmed in the book of nature, republished in the Bible. In getting 
 rid of the Bible, therefore, they retain all its sombre and severe 
 truths, while they surrender all its inviting and cheering ones. They 
 only do away with the fifth sermon. The sanctuary may remain, but, 
 if properly used, it is a ministration of death. Its gloomy walls 
 can echo to the proclamation of the stern and relentless truths 
 of nature, and that is all. “Silver and gold have I none ; but such 
 as I have, give I thee”—a knowledge of sin and its bondage, 
 of destructive influence and impending doom. Its teachings would 
 contain so little of the Gospel proper, that were they the whole 
 of it, we should have absolutely no Gospel at all. At its best 
 
24 
 
 estate, it would be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, a 
 schoolmaster inflicting rigorous discipline. It could never engage in 
 a ministration of life. It could never bring balm from Gilead, or tell 
 of any physician there. It could only urge the bitten Israelite to 
 inspect his inflamed wound, the leper to mark the progress of decay 
 in his infected limb —that is all. Therefore, 
 
 III.* Our subject suggests a matter of critical interest to the 
 pulpit in observing the .importance of preserving symmetry of doc¬ 
 trine in preaching. The preacher is rightly to divide the Word, not 
 only by giving to his hearers a portion of meat in due season, but 
 also by calling their attention to the twofold origin of the Word he 
 preaches, as coming from both natural and supernatural utterances 
 in the Bible. He is to mark the fact that all the truths of natural 
 religion not only reappear in the Bible, but are there so presented 
 and emphasized as to be lifted to a lofty dignity and importance ; 
 meanwhile he is to notice that over against these, and as contradis¬ 
 tinguished from them, tower, yet higher and more conspicuously, the 
 supernatural truths of the Christian system—the Gospel proper, the 
 glad tidings—and that these are to be the staple of his preaching. 
 These he is to proclaim with such an intense appreciation of their 
 worth, and with such consuming zeal, as to be himself known by the 
 title they give him, and be called a preacher—not of sin, or inability, 
 or Satanic agency, or of Hell—but distinctively, a preacher of the Gospel. 
 Not that these severe truths are not to be emphasized, but that they 
 are not to come to the front and usurp dominion among the themes 
 of the pulpit. The first place is to be given to Christ and Kim 
 crucified. When this is done the pulpit will accomplish all within 
 its power to keep impenitent minds from yielding to a tendency so 
 to exaggerate the severe doctrines as to keep out of view the attract¬ 
 ive and saving ones. There are difficulties in the way of sal¬ 
 vation, and they are connected mainly with the harsher aspects 
 of Biblical truth. There is a strange tendency in unbelieving 
 minds to say that the first four sermons to which I listened consti- 
 
 * This division, and some other parts of the discourse, were omitted in the delivery. 
 
25 
 
 tute the staple of evangelical preaching. If, in listening to the fifth 
 sermon, they do not accept it, then they require the ministration of 
 death, set forth in the first four, to take permanent possession of the 
 sanctuary. Thus what ought to be to them, by accepting another 
 ministration, the very gate to Heaven, becomes practically, in their 
 experience, the very gate to Hell. Their every thought of the sanc¬ 
 tuary and of the service in it, and of Christian believers, is a 
 thought of severe and gloomy truths. The result is, that persons of 
 this class adopt one of several courses. Perhaps they abandon the 
 sanctuary. Why should they reappear in it Sabbath after Sabbath 
 to hear truths which they repel as cruel, because they refuse to 
 accept truths that are sweet and winning? Who wants to be kept 
 always in misery? On the other hand, perhaps they continue their 
 attendance, but settle down into a state of sceptical indifference as 
 to the truths presented. There is a comeliness in the service that 
 appeals to their cultured taste, an intellectual elevation that satisfies 
 the mind, a sympathy with good people that reacts favorably upon 
 their own morals, and they continue to attend. Yet another class, 
 possessed of a controversial spirit, will go to church to hear truth 
 proclaimed in order to repel it because of the suspected illogical 
 processes used in its defence. In sympathy with these classes, there 
 may arise a goodly number of persons who, abandoning the sanc¬ 
 tuary, where they say a pagan theology is taught, unite with them 
 and form a society of their own, in whose house of worship the 
 liarsher doctrines are studiously excluded, while they are the only 
 ones that can be logically taught therein. 
 
 Now the workman in the pulpit who needeth not to be ashamed, 
 who rightly divides the Word, and is wdse to win souls, will take 
 note of this tendency of the human heart to misinterpret and pervert 
 the more unwelcome doctrines of the Bible, and so present the same 
 in connection with the warm and genial truths of the Gospel, as to 
 enable the people to see that, having accepted the latter, they have 
 nothing to fear from the former. 
 
 IV. We see the exceeding injustice of the charge, often hinted, 
 and sometimes directly brought against the evangelical pulpit, that it 
 
2Q 
 
 preaches a system of doctrine essentially inhumane, if not replete 
 with the spirit of pagan cruelty. Nothing can be further from the 
 fact. The Christian pulpit teaches this, “He that hath the Son hath 
 life, and he that hath not the Son, hath not life, but the wrath of God 
 abideth on him,” and this is good doctrine. It teaches that it is 
 needless for men to be lost—that they have no right not to be saved 
 —and this is not pagan barbarity. It teaches that God would have 
 all men to be saved; that He is not willing that any should perish; 
 that the exclamation of His heart is, How can I give thee up ? and 
 there is no cruelty in such expressions of God’s love. Is the mother 
 cruel in warning her child from the verge of a cataract ? Neither is 
 God, when, in the proclamation of severe truths in the* pulpit. He 
 would stay His children from dashing themselves in pieces upon the 
 thick bosses of His bucklers. God grant that we may all so receive the 
 whole counsel of God—truths of His Word of either sort—that we 
 shall be able to exclaim with the Psalmist, “Great peace have they 
 that keep Thy law, and nothing shall offend them.” 
 
 Christian friends, the occasion which convenes us to-day takes 
 to itself an interest with which we have been made familiar. The 
 close of another college year; the commencement of a new year; the 
 departure from among us of a body of young men who for four years 
 have been with us; the advance of classes to higher grades, and the 
 incoming of a new class, are events that we recognize with an ever 
 fresh interest. If it is sometimes charged against our college that 
 she is not richly endowed—that she lacks in equipment—it may yet 
 be affirmed in her favor, that she is fortunately intrenched in the 
 bosom of a community who account her interests their own, and 
 who are studious of her welfare. Far hence be the day when any¬ 
 thing shall ever occur to create the slightest alienation and severance 
 between relations that have been so happily allied, and for so many 
 years. 
 
 But the peculiar interest of this occasion appertains to a portion 
 of our number who have been wont to worship with us here and in 
 other sanctuaries of the village, and who are soon to go forth to 
 
27 
 
 be with us no more, save as we shall greet them hereafter as 
 alumni as they return on commencement and other occasions. 
 
 Speaking on behalf of the college, let me extend to you, gentlemen 
 of the graduating class, those forms of congratulation which are due 
 to those who have prosecuted successfully their college course to its 
 close. I need not remind you, gentlemen, of the significance of this 
 event in your lives. A young man is always an object of interest. 
 Large capabilities are lodged within him. Depths of dishonor are to 
 be escaped; heights of glory to be attained. But pre-eminently true 
 is this of a young man who has enjoyed the advantages of a col¬ 
 legiate and Christian education. We impose on him the obligations 
 of a noble career and great usefulness. His training and culture; his 
 accumulated knowledge; his growth towards a maturer and riper 
 manhood, dispose us to lay on him the heavier burdens of responsi¬ 
 bility, and require from him more ample returns. We are happy to 
 express the confidence that this will be the service which you will 
 render. Go forth from us fortified by Christian principles, under the 
 inspirations of a resolute purpose to do good and to inherit whatever 
 reward such a purpose will bring; hate sin and rebuke it; accept the 
 truths of the Christian faith and practice her virtues ; and to each 
 of you I add 
 
 “ Be just and fear not. 
 
 Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s, 
 
 Thy God’s, and truth’s.” 
 
 “ To thine own self be true. 
 
 And it must follow as night the day, 
 
 Thou canst not then be false to any man.” 
 
/ 
 
 CHRIST, 
 
 THE UNITY OE THE RACE. 
 
SERMON 
 
 Delivered June 30 , 1878 . 
 
 “ Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”— 
 
 Matt. xi. 28 . 
 
 I. You have all observed in the study of history a tendeney in 
 human minds to yield to the attraction of certain centres of thought—to 
 congregate and cluster upon certain leading or representative ideas. 
 This teudency is foreshadowed in the endless unities of material 
 nature. Particles of matter cohere by the law of chemical affinity; 
 the heavenly bodies are held to their respective centres by gravita¬ 
 tion ; atoms adjust themselves in the plant or tree by an architect¬ 
 ural instinct in the law of its life ; tlie material that enters into the 
 animal organization obeys the same law of vivific growth. Rising 
 higher, we see insects living in communities and moving in swarms ; 
 fishes in shoals, birds in flocks and cattle in herds. But this 
 law which obtains in all the departments of lower nature, animate 
 and inanimate, enforcing organization and social harmony, reap¬ 
 pears in a higher form and equally imperative in the realm of 
 humanity, requiring men to live in society. Every plan of isolation 
 here is abortive ; confronts a decree of God and a law of nature. 
 Our solar system could as easily - disband, or the coherence of the 
 dew-drop or of the crystal cease, as human souls could abide apart 
 from one another in social independence. But mankind have not 
 only cohered at these centres, they have moved together from place 
 to place, retaining their unity. As honey bees move in swarms and 
 pigeons in flocks, so men have moved in masses. Such was the 
 
32 
 
 migration of the Israelites from the house of bondage, the successive 
 settlements along the Mediterranean and in Southern Europe, after¬ 
 wards in the British Isles, and, in modern times, in our Western 
 Hemisphere. By what potent and mysterious spring of action these 
 migratory movements have been caused, it matters not. The fact of 
 a common impulse in these earth-slides and avalanches of migration, 
 without disturbing the old unities, is all that concerns us here. But 
 this harmonious movement has not been wholly geographical. There 
 have been social and moral elevations and lapses, where whole nations 
 have been raised above themselves or have fallen to a lower level ; 
 but these advances or retrogressions have all taken place in harmony 
 with law enforcing a general order. The world of mankind has beeli 
 moving evermore, sometimes with slow and laggard pace, often with 
 the force of a storm-driven sea, but always, though separated into 
 clans and tribes and nations, in obedience to the law of unity that 
 has kept these peoples together as respects place or grade of civiliza¬ 
 tion. 
 
 But notice, that while the race has been characterized by this 
 restless and feverish mobility, and has fallen into different and 
 separate nationalities, bounded often and shut in by sea and mount¬ 
 ain range, human minds meanwhile have congregated and fastened 
 upon ideas at the great centres of historic thought which have been 
 largely independent of time and place. These centres have been 
 'denominated schools—schools in philosophy, in ethics, in theology; 
 schools in politics, in jurisprudence and administration ; in litera¬ 
 ture, science, art and criticism. By the word schools, we mean 
 “ ways in which ideas pre-eminently manifest themselves as living 
 powers in the practical life of mankind.” They are the great leading 
 forms in which human energy has been developing and expanding its 
 forces along the lines of time. 
 
 But human minds have concentred often at points which can 
 hardly be dignified by the word school, a word which, in its common 
 acceptation, carries in it a certain claim to respectability. And yet 
 a little careful inspection will show in these more remote and subor¬ 
 dinate and less worthy centres of thought, points of union between 
 
33 
 
 themselves and the more authoritative and dominant ones to which 
 reference has been made. As the earth’s surface presents to us vast 
 mountain ranges which, in their lateral expansion, embrace in 
 organic unity with themselves the hills on either side, so humanity, 
 sweeping down the ages and expanding over the earth, presents to 
 us equivalent ranges of thought which assert a vital connection with 
 all subordinate and remoter elevations here and there in the valleys 
 on either hand. 
 
 This figure suggests another resemblance. As these mountain 
 ranges had not a simultaneous origin, but came successively into 
 being at different points in time as subterranean and Titanic forces 
 decreed, and thus stand as “ monumental piles which wizard Time 
 hath raised to count his ages by ; ” so the towering ranges and 
 schools of human thought, that have been working and forecasting 
 the destiny of the race, have had a prolonged and laborious genesis, 
 springing into dominant authority in successive eras, according as 
 human minds have been stimulated and energized by fresh discove¬ 
 ries of truth, by bolder theories and more powerful motives. 
 
 But consider that these centres of thought, whether sovereign in 
 their authority or of a less influential type, whether they had their 
 origin in the flickering dawn of a gray antiquity, or are a recent out¬ 
 burst, all establish and illustrate the fact that human minds are so 
 constituted that they must live in intelligent and sympathetic union 
 one with another. Call these points of union by what term you 
 please—centres of thought, or schools ; conceive of human minds as 
 convoked and crystallizing upon an idea, upon a principle—I care 
 not. All I insist upon is the fact, taught by all history, that man¬ 
 kind are put under the necessity of living in sympathetic and social 
 communion. The entire expanse of human history is dotted all over 
 with these centres of clustered souls. 
 
 II. With this phenomenon of history before us, I will ask you to 
 consider in the second place, that human minds, according as they con¬ 
 verge toward and are held to these centres, have never been able to rise 
 above the intellectual and moral level of the ideas or principles that 
 created them. As in crystallizable material there is a pervasive 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 
 formative force determining every particle in the solution inevitably 
 to some centre and holding it there by a bond which it cannot 
 break, so there is a necessity laid upon the minds of men which 
 determines them to centres, where they are held by a power as 
 authoritative as the necessity that brought them together was 
 absolute. Once at that centre by voluntary social affinit}^, and 
 voluntarily abiding in it, there is no possibility of the individual 
 mind’s breaking away from or rising above its general intellectual 
 and moral tone. Union here is dominion. This is not saying that 
 minds are under the necessity of being at given centres, but that 
 being at these centres, they are of necessity so affiliated with their 
 formative spirit as to be under their control and plastic authority. 
 The apostle would apply his rule here : To what centre ye yield 
 yourselves servants to obey, its servants ye are to whom ye obey. 
 
 I would not, however, be understood to mean that all minds attached 
 to schools have been absorbed in them and held in an invincible 
 bondage ; but that in proportion to their absorption in and the 
 strength of their adherence to them they have been so held and 
 bound. It must be agreed that the world has been favored all along 
 the ages with men whose minds, independent and original, affluent 
 of thought, and bold in speculation, have accepted no existing 
 schools without essential modifications. They have broken away 
 from the old moorings, adventured into new fields of discovery, and 
 created new centres'. “ To sentence a man of true genius,” says an 
 acute thinker, “to the drudgery of a school, is to put a race horse 
 in a mill.” 
 
 But the fact of the existence of such men, so far from militating 
 against my position, only confirms it, since these men have so re¬ 
 organized old ideas and advanced new ones, and compounded them, 
 old and new, into new products, that they have created centres in 
 which multitudes have been involved and put under dominion accord¬ 
 ing to the general law ^hich I have affirmed. That these centres of 
 thought, or schools, or intellectual and moral nuclei—call them by 
 what term you please—have asserted this authority, is easily illus¬ 
 trated by an appeal to history. 
 
35 
 
 In the civil life of the world there has been a ceaseless fermenta¬ 
 tion, and nations have gradually settled into the compactness of 
 political schools. Sometimes they have accepted the doctrine of a 
 pure monarchy ; sometimes they have centred upon the divine right 
 of kings; sometimes the democratic idea has been the organizing and 
 constructive principle; sometimes, in the union of church and state, 
 a religious creed has been the cohering force and bond of empire; 
 sometimes the person of a military conqueror or chieftain has been 
 the national core; but notice that whatever that rallying nucleus has 
 been, this or that, the nation that has accepted it, and according to 
 the measure of that acceptance, has never been able to rise above the 
 level of its political and moral life. The nation has found its anchor¬ 
 age in its constructive idea and organizing centre. 
 
 The same law appears with equal prominence in the world of 
 philosophical inquiry and speculation. The mere mention of certain 
 names, such as Plato, Spinoza, Bacon, Kant, Locke, Coleridge, and 
 Edwards, suggests philosophical schools to which dominion has been 
 accorded. But consider that minds that have accepted the pure ideas 
 of Plato, the pantheistic speculations of Spinoza, the inductive philos¬ 
 ophy of Bacon, the sensuous philosophy of Locke or the spiritual 
 philosophy of Coleridge, or that have yielded to the authority of these 
 kingly spirits in their individual speculative systems, are minds that 
 have been held by these masters in philosophy as by bands of steel, 
 and, according to the strength of this mastery, they have never been 
 able to vary from or rise above the level of the intellectual and moral 
 life of the schools which these philosophers founded. These centres 
 of thought have exerted influences over human souls powerful as 
 gravitation among the planets. They have warped through them; 
 and embraced them and ordained their careers, as by the force of 
 destiny. 
 
 But as religion has been conceived to be of higher moment than 
 politics or philosophy, so it is in the province of theological inquiry 
 and speculation that we behold the most marked and characteristic 
 exhibition of the power of this principle. Human minds have never 
 elsewhere congregated in such numbers or with such spontaneity or 
 
36 
 
 celerity, nor have they elsewhere crystallized with such compactness, 
 as at the great centres of theological thought. Minds that have found 
 their religious union in the teachings of Confucius, or in the doctrines 
 of the Vedas, or in the instructions of the Koran, or in the Christian 
 Scriptures, have been held at these points by motives derived from 
 conscience and the world to come, and hence their unparalleled 
 strength. But confining our eye to the activity of the human mind 
 within the bounds of Christendom, we find a large number of power¬ 
 ful theological schools which have passed into history, carrying, like 
 the philosophical ones, at their germinant centres, the names of their 
 illustrious founders. And observe that minds in the Christian world 
 which have united upon Augustinianism, upon Arminianism, upon 
 Calvinism, or upon Edwardeanism, in short, upon this or that 
 ecclesiastical polity, or theological creed, whether it be the dogma of 
 Infallibility in the creed of the Catholic church, or the tenets of the 
 Latter Day Saints—I repeat, minds that have congregated and crys¬ 
 tallized at the great theological and ecclesiastical centres of the 
 Christian world, have been bound into these centres like a gnarl in 
 an oak, and held there by bonds as invincible as their loyalty and 
 attachment have been unreserved and spontaneous. The Calvinist, 
 so far as he is distinctively a Calvinist, has never been able to rise 
 above his Calvinism, the Arminian above his Arminianism, the Mo¬ 
 hammedan above his Mohammedanism, the Roman Catholic above 
 his Catholicism, the Mormon above his Mormonism, the Spiritist 
 above his Spiritism, and so on through all the schools and sects 
 and parties into which Christendom has been divided. 
 
 With these illustrations before us, I am prepared to reaffirm the 
 position that human minds, according as they have converged to¬ 
 ward and have been held to these great centres, whether in the 
 political, in the philosophical, or in the theological world, or in any 
 other world of thought that can be named, have never been able to 
 rise above the level of the ideas and principles which are there enter¬ 
 tained. God has so created the souls of men, finite and dependent 
 as to put them under the necessity of having centres, and each soul 
 its supreme centre. The necessity here is the necessity of honey 
 
37 
 
 bees when they swarm to have a point distinct from themselves, 
 where they gather in a clustered mass of sonorous life. 
 
 III. We take an important step in advance, as we pass, to con¬ 
 sider, thirdly, that human minds, clustered at these great or these minor 
 centres, have been satisfied and at rest only according as these centres 
 have been replete with truth, and they have been unsatisfied and tumid- 
 tuous in proportion as they have not been. It needs to be remembered 
 that the human spirit is so created in the image of God’s intellectual 
 and moral being, that whatever is false and spurious is utterly alien 
 from, and inimical to its nature. Hence, whenever minds have con¬ 
 gregated in unions wanting in truth, they have been unsatisfied, and 
 restive and tumultuous ; as they have found the place of their 
 supposed rest to be an admixture of truth and error, error predomi¬ 
 nating, the bond of union has given way and disintegration has set 
 in ; as they have found it wholly false and deceptive, minds have 
 revolted in prompt and angry disdain. Instead of gradual severance 
 and separation, there has been, in the issue, explosion. As minds in 
 their associations, in the varied forms we have considered, have been 
 acting in harmony with that universal law in material nature known 
 as attraction; so when they have committed themselves to centres 
 that have been inadequate and spurious, they have acted in harmony 
 with that other law of repulsion equally powerful in nature. Hence, 
 human history is mainly taken up with giving accounts of the disso¬ 
 lutions of old centres and the formation of new ones in the political 
 philosophical and religious world. As systems of government, and 
 of philosophy, and of theology have been put to the test, tried by 
 the standard of truth, and have been found wanting, they have been 
 required to dissolve and give place to systems more in harmony with 
 eternal verity. 
 
 Appeal to history might here be made, as before, in illustration of 
 this position. The powers of the earth, in every department of 
 human thought and inquiry, have been shaken from the first, as 
 though there were a Governor among the nations, overturning and 
 overturning, in the interests of Him whose right it is to reign. 
 According as there has been enough of truth at the centres of the 
 
38 
 
 great scliools in government, in philosophy, and in religion, to 
 continue them in being and advance them in excellence, they have 
 withstood the shocks of time and still exist. Yet, as matter of fact, 
 they have not remained undisturbed and tranquil. There have been 
 subterranean rumblings and fermentation ; here and there, now and 
 then, heavy revolts, and removals to other centres. The monarchical 
 idea, in church or state, has never been a cohesive force of sufficient 
 strength to hold its votaries steadily to it. They have trembled like 
 iron filings on an exhausted magnet. 
 
 The multitudes have been kept in place often, not by power 
 within, attracting, but by the constraints and compressure of 
 outward appliances—the driving of hoops. When, under the yoke 
 of tyrannical misrule, they have broken away from bondage thus 
 created and maintained, and attached themselves to centres in 
 which the democratic idea has been the organizing force, whether in 
 church or state, there has been, to a great extent still, fermentation 
 and restlessness. At other centres, less respectable than these, 
 organization has been followed by gradual disintegration ; in some 
 cases by instant disruption. As an instance of the former, take the 
 wild adventure of all Europe in the crusades. Here, for the first 
 time, we see Europe united in a single enterprise, and, for more than 
 two centuries, intent upon one object. But what became, at length, 
 of this unity? It dissolved into thin air, and is known only by the 
 student of history as one of the exhibitions of human folly. As 
 instances of the dissolution of centres by explosion, take any form 
 of government in the history of the world up to date, that has so 
 carried its severity beyond the point of bearing as to issue in revo¬ 
 lution, like the French government under Louis XVI., or the English 
 government under Charles I. ; or, take some of the spurious 
 systems of reform, like the Socialistic adventure at New Harmony, 
 Ind., under Kobert Owen, which crumbled into offensive decay as 
 rapidly as it came into being ; or the Mormon abomination in Utah, 
 wdiere explosive material has been accumulating for a day of 
 vengeance that hastens apace ; or take any of the great financial 
 monopolies, from the lofty “Credit Mobilier” down to the ring 
 
39 
 
 swindles of Tammany fame. At all these tyrannical centres there 
 have been revolutionary explosions ; and they have been the more 
 appalling and eviscerating, according as truth has been wanting and 
 tyranny cruel. 
 
 Recall the steps we have taken : 
 
 Human minds must have their centres ; 
 
 They can never rise above the level of these centres ; 
 
 They have never been content and at rest at centres except as 
 the same have been true and sufficient; 
 
 And since, in the main, they have not contained truth unmixed 
 with error, and have often been positively false, therefore human 
 minds in general have been restive and billowy, volcanic and explo¬ 
 sive. 
 
 It is not difficult to show thus in general that the organic sequences 
 of history have been those of decay and death. Deterioration has 
 been the prevailing fact in language, in literature, in art, science, 
 religion and civilization, except as supernatural influences have inter¬ 
 posed to arrest the decline. No student of history will charge Professor 
 Shedd with exaggeration when he says : “The slow and sure decay 
 of national vigor and return to barbarism, the unvarying decline from 
 public virtue to public voluptuousness ; in short, the entire history 
 of man, so far as he is outside of supernatural influences, and 
 unaffected by the intervention of his ^laker, though it be a self-deter¬ 
 mined and responsible process, is yet in every part and particle a 
 strict evolution of man’s evil nature impelling him on to the bitter 
 and disastrous issue.” 
 
 The original progenitors of the race were created in maturity. 
 God himself was their immediate friend and guide. “ But their 
 descendants are born infantile—helpless as the dust, slow to learn, 
 impatient of thought and study, refusing to profit by lessons of 
 experience, and forever chasing phantoms of the imagination, and 
 breaking over the restraints of government and law. If reason might 
 to a greater extent guide the people, or self-love temper and moderate 
 them in their pursuits, yet passion neutralizes the power of these re¬ 
 straints, and the people are driven headlong. Ambition, prejudice, lust, 
 
40 
 
 false systems of education, corrupting associates, the venom of party- 
 spirit, and the heat of vain and hasty engagements,” every where come 
 in for their share of service in the general decline and wreck. These 
 have been attended by sceptical unbelief, scientific assault, bewilder¬ 
 ing sophistr}^ and the incongruities of history and philosophy. Mean¬ 
 while, the wearisomeness of business, the routine of official service, 
 the uncertainty of events, the malice of enemies, the treachery of 
 friends, the fret of disappointment, the painfulness of disease and the 
 shortness of life, have increased the elements which have caused these 
 endless tossings and surgings of earth’s stormy sea of human life, as 
 it has been sweeping across the longitudes and surging down the 
 ages. New centres have been formed and dissolved. Revolution has 
 succeeded revolution, states and empires have flourished, reached 
 their limits and passed away. Magnificent cities are transformed 
 into frightful heaps, and owls hoot and satyrs dance in the palaces of 
 kings. These facts are the occasions of discouragement to many, to 
 some of despair ; while the multitudes have surrendered to the winds 
 of fortune, and been alternately faint or frantic, despondent or mad, 
 ambitious or idle, according as times and moods have decreed. 
 
 Thus has come to pass the saying that is written, “The wicked 
 are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up 
 mire and dirt.” Humanity has been kept in a state of perpetual 
 fermentation, making the wildest traverses and the most reckless 
 plunges. In this state of things what the world needed was a divine 
 intervention. 
 
 “ Man, with all his posterity, must die; 
 
 Die he, or justice must, unless for him 
 Some other, able and as willing, pay 
 The rigid satisfaction, death for death,” 
 
 By its wisdom the world knew not God and never could know 
 him. Self-deliverance was out of the question. Restoration must 
 come, if at all, from an agency that is above nature, and that can 
 arrest the course of nature—that can do more than expand ; that 
 can regenerate and place upon a new foundation. 
 
 IV. This prepares me to direct 3mur attention to The Centre 
 
41 
 
 which God in Chrislianily has furnished for mankind. Amidst king¬ 
 doms faltering and going to decay, there was need of one that 
 could not be moved ; amidst centres inadequate and exhaustible, 
 there was required one that could meet the nature and the exigency 
 of human souls. 
 
 There must needs appear in the midst of an old and dying world 
 a new and quickening power—a centre of life, around which all the 
 energies that may chance to have survived the general wreck, and 
 which itself may awaken, shall gather and unite—not a philosophy, 
 but a revelation ; not a creed, but a Person. “ 1 looked,” and the 
 object of survey was the world lying in wickedness, eating of the 
 fruit of its own ways and filled with its own devices—a troubled sea. 
 “I looked, and there was none to help, and I wondered that there 
 was none to uphold ; therefore, mine own arm brought salvation.” In 
 only one instance is God represented in the Scriptures as driven to 
 an emergency. For once he is engaged in a search. His knowledge, 
 love and power were put under contribution. At length we hear the 
 divine eureka, “I have found a ransom.” In fulness of time an infant 
 hung upon the bosom of a Jewish maid. Conceived by the Holy 
 Ghost, He was born of the Virgin Mary, and suffered*under Pontius 
 Pilate. Entering upon His work. He came into conflict with man’s 
 arch-enemy and conquered him. He first bound the strong man of 
 the house, and then entered upon the work of spoiling his goods. He 
 remanded demons to their prison home, healed diseases and raised 
 the dead. The forces of nature obeyed His mandates. He declared 
 Himself to be the incarnation and manifestation of the Godhead ; and, 
 in the divine authority of His teachings, in the supernaturalness of His 
 works, and in His fulfilment of the prophecies. He established the 
 claim. Through types, shadows, symbols, God through the ages 
 gave intimation of an approaching redemptive work. In Christ, their 
 antitype and fulfilment, these shadows found their significance and 
 glory. By the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, this 
 Being of a double nature, whose name was Wonderful, of miracu¬ 
 lous power, of tenderest sympathies, of largest beneficence, was 
 taken and by wicked hands slain, voluntarily submitting to indig- 
 
42 
 
 iiity and suffering — the just for the unjust — a ransom for sin. 
 Crucified, dead and buried, He could not be holden of the cords of 
 death, but was declared to be the Son of God with power by His 
 resurrection from the dead. When God thus set to His seal that 
 Christ was, as He declared Himself to be, the Son of God, all nature 
 united to signalize the event ; the heavens were darkened, the earth 
 was convulsed, the veil of the temple was rent in twain, graves were 
 opened and the dead arose and appeared unto many—a series of 
 wonders which carry in them a solemn, miraculous and authoritative 
 declaration of Almighty God that He who died on the cross was the 
 world’s Redeemer. 
 
 This now is the Centre which God, in His infinite compassion, fur¬ 
 nished for mankind. It is not an intangible, cold abstraction of the 
 schools ; not a system of philosophy ; it is more than a theological 
 creed. God’s Centre is a Person, and that Person is both His Son 
 and the Son of Man. In his twofold nature He represents the God¬ 
 head on the one hand, and the human race, in its normal integrity, 
 on the other. He embodied the wisdom of God and the power of 
 God. He expressed the Divine love, compassion and sympathy. In 
 Him was life knd the life was the light of men. No man had seen 
 God at any time; the only begotten Son, who dwelleth in the bosom 
 of the Father, He declared Him. As the apple tree among the trees 
 of the wood, so is our Beloved among the sons of men. So wise in 
 speech was He, so tender in compassion, so amiable in character, so 
 large in beneficence, so replete with every virtue that charms us into 
 admiration and rapture, that we look upon Him as the very incarna¬ 
 tion of universal loveliness. In Him no virtue jostled another out of 
 place, none rose into extravagance, none pined in feeble restriction. 
 In Him the Desire of all nations came. He met the longings ex¬ 
 pressed in the unconscious prophecies of heathenism. To Him her 
 pagan altars, inscribed to the unknown God, pointed with singular 
 directness. As altogether lovely. He was the delight of the sons of 
 men. It was required of the Centre which God should furnish that 
 it should be their attraction. “And I, if I be lifted up”—signifying 
 what death he should die—“ will draw all men unto Me.” Hence 
 
43 
 
 the force of representing Him under the figure of the stone of infinite 
 magnetic attraction, cut out of the mountains without hands; a tried 
 stone, elect, precious, chief-corner; a stone which is destined, in its 
 unspeakably attractive power, so to draw men to it and upon it, as 
 to fill, in due time, in its enlargement, the whole world. It is the old 
 rock of the wilderness that followed Israel, and which quenched their 
 thirst, which rock was Christ. It is the rock in which Israel tri¬ 
 umphed. “ Their rock is not as our rock, our enemies themselves 
 being judges,” but which Israel afterwards repudiated and made a 
 stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. 
 
 Observe that this stone cut from the mountains is a limng stone. 
 The attractive Centre which God has established, is His Eternal Son, 
 the Prince of Life; who, having life in Himself, diffuses and sustains 
 life throughout the universe; who, as Redeemer and Mediator laid 
 down His life; and having power to lay it down, took it again, rising 
 from the dead death’s conqueror, to die no more; and thus becoming 
 the resurrection and the life to all who accept Him. 
 
 Mark the assimilative power of this Centre. “ To whom, coming as 
 unto a living stone, ye also as livwg stones are built up a spiritual 
 house.” From the first laying of this stone in Zion, out of the very 
 stones of the desert, God has been raising up children unto Abra¬ 
 ham; for they that are of faith are Abraham’s seed and heirs accord¬ 
 ing to the promise. Imbedded in nature’s quarry, sunk in the hole 
 of the pit or scattered on the heath, these stones are drawn together 
 upon the Divine Magnet by influences sweeter than the Pleiades, and 
 bands mightier than Orion’s. As stones living, instinct with the 
 very life of the all-embracing Centre, and polished after the simili¬ 
 tude of a palace, and gleaming with inward and reflected light, they 
 congregate upon the foundation. Obeying the architectural instinct 
 of the life that pulsates therefrom, they take their appropriate places 
 in the structure, and are builded together, a living temple wherein 
 God dwells, and which forever resounds His praise. Their relation to 
 the Chief Corner is such that they are changed as by the Spirit of 
 the Lord into the same image from glory to glory, until the house of 
 God, thus created, which is the ecclesia of the living God, throughout 
 
44 
 
 its entire extent, and to its utmost turret and pinnacle, glows and 
 irradiates with the beauty of the Lord, the King of Glory. 
 
 And consider that this Stone laid in Zion is not only provided as 
 the Centre of the Church; the Centre of the Church is the Centre for 
 humanity, and the only Centre. Tliis is as it should be, for there is 
 nothing exclusive in the provisions of redemption. Christ died for all; 
 the Holy Ghost is able to convert all; the conditions of salvation are 
 practicable to all; the decrees of God are the same to all who will 
 accept of salvation, and no man has a right not to be saved. Hence 
 the force of the Divine invitation in the text: “Come unto me;’’ “I 
 have been lifted up;” “ Come all ye that labor and are heavy laden,” 
 ye who have sought in vain for relief and satisfaction at other centres 
 —empty cisterns that can hold no water—“ Come unto me and I will 
 give you”—what elsewhere ye cannot find—“I will give you res/.” 
 “ Come,” ye poor and needy; “Come,” ye desolate ones; “ Come,” ye 
 hardy clans that shiver and freeze amidst the ices of the poles, and ye 
 swarthy hordes that repose in the orange groves or pant on the 
 shrubless sands of the tropics; “Come,” ye rich men and nobles; 
 “Come,” ye wise men; ye masters in philosophy and science; 
 “ Come,” ye arrogant rejectors of the facts of redeniption—facts 
 as good as any facts, supernaturally authenticated, and having an 
 evidence incapable of refutation ; “ Come, ye,” then, all men and all 
 women ; young men and maidens and youth, and—little children, for¬ 
 bid them not to come — and I will gioe you rest. Dig no longer above 
 the mine and leave the vein untried. Ten thousand broken shafts 
 tell where ye have vainly dug; ten thousand broken cisterns tell how 
 your thirst has been vainly mocked.” 
 
 It remains now that we put this Centre to the tests by which we 
 have tried other centres and found them wanting. We have seen 
 that human minds never rise above the intellectual and moral level 
 of the centres upon which they congregate; and that they have been 
 in bondage whenever this level has been so low as to leave them un¬ 
 satisfied. But in this Centre which God has provided for mankind 
 there is no lack of elevation. It is a high Centre ; and all who are 
 attracted to it feel the inspiration of the high calling of God in Christ 
 Jesus. When, in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the 
 
45 
 
 Son of God, we shall all come unto a perfect man, we shall not have 
 surpassed the measure of the stature of the fulness of Clirist. All 
 who come to this Centre will be satisfied with its intellectual and 
 spiritual elevation. 
 
 Therefore, it is the Centre which can never be superseded in the 
 progress of the race. It contains all that man needs or ever can 
 need. Its radius sweeps a realm of infinite extent, and gathers in all 
 possible good. “ I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy like¬ 
 ness.” Therefore, there is no peril of disintegration or of explosion at 
 this Centre. “Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried 
 stone, a precious corner, a sure foundation; he that believeih shall not 
 make haste.^’ 
 
 Gentlemen of the graduating class, the theme which has now en¬ 
 gaged our attention, though not invested with the charms of novelty, 
 is yet accounted by you, as it is by us all, one of the highest import¬ 
 ance and of inexhaustible interest. You bear me witness that the 
 method of treating the subject in hand has not been out of harmony 
 with the spirit and style of your entire course of discipline in the col¬ 
 lege. You have never been encouraged to rest in the forms of knowl¬ 
 edge, but incited to pass beyond the letter that kills to the spirit of 
 truth that imparts life. We have sought to lead you into such clear 
 apprehension of fundamental principles, as to put you in possession of 
 the clue to all knowledge. We have encouraged in you the spirit of 
 inquiry; to take nothing as true that did not commend itself to you 
 as intrinsically reasonable. As you have advanced from one depart¬ 
 ment of study to another, we have asked you to mark the interde¬ 
 pendence and organic unity of all knowledge. You can account no 
 truth as yours, in its fulness of life and power, save as you see its 
 harmony with neighboring truths. I am not confident that we are 
 justified in denominating one department of truth natural and 
 another moral. It is difficult to conceive how a scholar, possessed of 
 a genuinely scientific spirit, can be sceptical concerning truths that 
 are as fundamentally lodged, and as consciously evolved in the intui¬ 
 tions of the soul as any truths brought to our knowledge through the 
 organs of sense. What Nathaniel Hawthorne says of the Christian 
 faith may be affirmed of truth itself: “ It is a grand cathedral, with 
 
46 
 
 divinely pictured windows. Standing without you see no glory, nor 
 can you possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light 
 reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.’^ The exceeding privi¬ 
 lege is accorded to the scholar to stand witliin this temple of truth 
 and to have this vision. To you, gentlemen, standing on this van¬ 
 tage ground, and marking the divine harmony of all truth, I can com¬ 
 mend with confidence Him whom we have considered in this dis¬ 
 course as the organizing and constructive Centre of humanity. The 
 harmony you discover in all truth ought to prepare you to accept 
 Him who is the unity of all men. “To know God, the Maker,” says 
 Carlyle; “to know the divine laws and inner harmonies of the uni¬ 
 verse, must alwa 3 ^s be the highest glory of a man.” May this glory 
 be yours in your knowledge of Him who is at once the wonder ol the 
 world and the solution of its mysteries. 
 
 Gentlemen, you have reached an interesting point in your lives. 
 You have been advancing towards it together for the past foar years 
 in the sweet intimacies of college life. The ground you have trav¬ 
 ersed together, the scenes through which you have passed in all the 
 relations and struggles of these years, will furnish for you a retro¬ 
 spect of never ending delight, notwithstanding you ma^* discover 
 particulars wherein you might have done better than you have. To 
 one event alone, in the history of your class, can you point as having 
 cast a signal gloom upon you. And that deepens as you approach 
 the hour of your separation. You recall to-day, as we ali do, with 
 sorrowing hearts the absence of Leavenworth from your ranks. He 
 is not with you to-day. We recall his manly form; his calm but 
 vigorous thought; his modest but determined purpose; his Christian 
 and noble character, and the high promise he gave of eminent useful¬ 
 ness in the world. But he is not, for God took him. Happy the 
 tempests that cast their wrecks on the shores of Paradise. God 
 sanctify to us our remembrances of him, and the heavy grief that 
 weighs upon the hearts of a stricken home. But you cannot pause 
 long to weep for your dead. The necessity is upon you to move for¬ 
 ward to your work. Go forth in the strength of an honest purpose, 
 armed with faith, and impelled by zeal tempered with wisdom; and 
 may the God of peace go with you.