it dilates the most, that all rays may be gathered and utilized; and, like the eye, it involuntarily shuts at the approach of danger. In the bigot only is it true that the more light you pour upon it the more it contracts. XVII. The vane on the Royal Exchange, in London, supports a huge brass grasshopper. There lies behind this curious symbol the story of a babe abandoned by the roadside. While a carriage tarried to give children that were riding a chance for play, one of them chased a large grasshopper, and so came near the crying infant. The foundling was taken to the carriage, adopted as a son in the Gresham family, and subsequently, as Sir Thomas Gresham, founded the first Royal Exchange. Hence this grasshopper emblem. XVIII. "The altar that sanctifieth the gift." It is not the amount we give, but the purpose with which, and to which, we devote the gift, which determines its value. The alabaster box of spikenard had inherent preciousness, but when broken on Jesus' feet to anoint him for his burial it became valuable beyond words. The widow's mites were inherently worth but a farthing, but the holy self-denial, the consecrated purpose, which dignified the gift, made them grow into shekels of the sanctuary; the "altar" transformed the copper into gold when the mites were laid upon it. XIX. Gutenberg's dream of the power of the press. He was working in his cell in the St. Aborsgot Monastery, and heard a voice warning him that the power of his invention would enable bad men to propagate their wickedness and sow dragon's teeth; prophesying that men would profane the art of printing, and posterity would curse the inventor. He took a hammer and broke the type in pieces. Another voice bade him desist from his work of destruction, and persist in perfecting his invention, declaring that, though the occasion of evil, God would make it the fountain of infinite good and give the right the ultimate triumph. XX. The Church's mission is to go out and compel outsiders to come in. Luke xiv: 16-24. Charity does not begin at home, nor above all, stay there. Christian love goes out to the most distant, destitute, depraved, despairing; to those who are alerady destroyed by their own vices; for such are emphatically the "lost" The very fact of remoteness from Christian privileges is an argument and an appeal. XXI. The two handmaids of Christianity are Industry and Intelligence, as the two handmaids of crime are ignorance and indolence. Froude says the Romans worshipped the virtues; the Greeks, the graces. We must, then, dare to be Romans before we essay to be Greeks, for the virtues are the only basis for the graces. All Christian work for the masses must begin by teaching the idle industrious habits, and the ignorant and superstitious, the knowledge of the truth. XXII. Permanence and perfection are the two grand qualities of all God's works. Eccles. iii: 14. Man's work at best is only imperfect and unenduring. The effect of a studious and earnest contemplation of God's work is to make men "fear before him." To see that it is essentially unchanging through all the mutations of human affairs, and that it can neither be improved by addition nor subtraction, overwhelms us with awe. This permanence and perfection of God's works suggests and implies similar changeless and faultless moral discriminations and decisions. This made the thought of the Judgment the most overpowering thought that ever filled the colossal mind of Webster. When God judges, nothing escapes His omniscient eye, and the sentence is irreversible. XXIII. History demands remoteness of time, in order to insure a just verdict. The actors in events, especially in great crises, are too much blinded by prejudice or prepossession to see real merit or recognize real malice with clear vision. Blame attaches where it does not belong, and good offices are credited to the wrong account. The best survey of a battle-field is made after the smoke of battle clears away. Erasmus whimsically compared Buffon to the tapestry of Flanders, with great figures, which to produce their true effect must be seen at a distance. The illustration serves equally well as to the need of distance of time for just historic verdicts. XXIV. The joy of the Lord is your strength. Neh. viii: 10. 1. In the weakness and weariness of doing our duty. 2. In the impotence of conflict with sin. 3. In the prostrating and crushing burden of trials. 4. In that divine work of winning souls. 5. In the last hour when heart and flesh fail. XXV. Matthew Arnold's divisions of society: An upper class, materialized; a middle class, vulgarized; a lower class, brutalized. By a misapprehension the remark has been misquoted thus: a middle class "pulverized." It is one of those blunders that come very near to the truth, for between the materialism of an upper, and the brutality of a lower class, as between opposing millstones, the middle class is sometimes ground to powder. VIII.—THE FIRST FROST. BY JOHN D. SHERWOOD, ENGLEWOOD, N. J. I. SOFTLY sifting through the silence, through the listening, starry night, Covering all so pearly white, Spread the soft, congealing light: As if angels there had shaken their new-furnished, happy wings II. But, alas! when roso the sun all the white was turned to black, All things green now bordered black; Leaving all the leaves so wilted, and the flowers like orphans dressed, While the shrubs sulked in their places, and all Nature seemed oppressed By a weight upon her breast. III. Cease, my soul, thy thankless murmurs. Learn the lesson of the frost ! Nor by any fleeting show let thy wiser faith be tossed, Nor thy trust in God be lost: For HE sendeth the hoar frost; With His cunning hands He spreadeth the fire-hiding, gracious mist, When His loving lips have kissed. IV. Then the golden rods majestic in the fields He groups and sets, Which with gold and green He frets, Or, like signet rings, He sets; Then the golden bees and hornets with bared heads come oft to pay V. Then the cheery swallows sail on the glad and billowy air, And the crickets sound their trumpets with an earnest, forceful blare, In the crisp and rhythmic air: And the fleet and gleeful squirrels dart through all the bare-armed trees, And the nuts, by frost fingers opened, gayly reach and boldly seize, 'Mid the swaying, laughing breeze. VI. Then the gorgeous Indian Summer, like the Apocalypse, comes down, Scattering glittering pearls and diamonds o'er the chill and frosted ground, Placing on each tree a crown, With bronzed bands encircled round. While the Autumn fruits Hesperian nod and laugh o'er trellised wall, VII. Thus from that ungracious frost slow evolved God's gracious plan- Showing quickly what he can, Thrusting works into the van; Patiently He wrought and sifted the hoar frost through silent air, Then leave your murmurs: Trust His care! VIII. No convention heralded what His wisdom would provide; Without noise, or boast, or pride, Wide proclaim the blessed lesson that our faith should rest above, SERMONIC SECTION. THE DIGNITY OF CHRIST. BY A. J. F. BEHRENDS, D.D., IN CENTRAL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BROOKLYN. Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: ail things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.-Col. i: 15-20. THERE is not within the covers of the New Testament a more graphic and powerful delineation of the incomparable dignity of Jesus Christ than the one I have just read. It is a very long and apparently an involved and obscure statement, but it may be doubted whether even an inspired apostle could have more clearly and compactly expressed the great thoughts that burned within him for utterance. It is one of two passages in which Paul passes from the fact of the incarnation to its philosophy and its eternal significance; and one hardly knows whether to admire mnost, the steadiness of his tread on these Alpine heights of Christian doctrine, or the modest reserve that he resolutely maintains in the way of silence as to many great, momentous questions that must have clamored for recognition and reply. The Church of our day is still wrestling with these clauses and their implications, and many a student has longed for a single hour of converse with the great Apostle to the Gentiles, in order that certain burning questions suggested by them might receive an authoritative reply. Both the silence and the speech, the courage and the caution, marking this collocation of phrases, are evidence that a divine revelation pulsed in these words. We have here a companion picture to that which is found in the second chapter of Paul's epistle to the Philippians, representing in bold and masterly outline, the peculiar and the unapproachable majesty of Jesus Christ. I shall ask you closely and reverently to study this picture, giving our attention for a moment to the background, inquiring what were the peculiar circumstances that provoked this rapid sketch. It seems that the church at Colosse was troubled with a school of false teachers, who united oriental and heathen speculation with Jewish asceticism. They were extreme rigorists, so far as the precepts of the law were concerne; they insisted upon circumcision; declared that the Jewish Sabbath, as well as the Lord's day, that had taken its place, was obligatory on Christian disciples; prohibited marriage; declared that the ancient separation between meats that are clean and meats that are unclean was still in force; and also maintained that frequent fasting was indispensable to a pure life. And this Jewish rigor was justified by principles that had their root in pagan and antiChristian philosophy. The characteristic of every pagan system of philosophy is its dualism-the opposition ever maintained between matter and mind, between creation and God. Matter was thought of as being the seat of sin, as inherently and ineradicably evil and as constituting the battleground upon which every man who [Many of the full sermons and condensations published in this REVIEW are printed from the authors' manuscripts; others are specially reported for this publication. Great care is taken to make these reports correct. The condensations are carefully made under our editorial supervision.-ED.] desired to be pure was compelled to enter. The idea that matter was the product of an immediate divine creation was regarded with abhorence. Its existence was deemed possible only as being the product of the last one of a long line of emanations from the pure and the perfect One. The last of these emanations from the Divine Being was called, in many of their systems, the Demi-urge, and the world of matter was held to be the immediate product of the Demi-urge himself. Above him were the purer Aeons, ranked in successive hierarchies of angels, and principalities, and dominions, and powers, ascending until they reached the final and the perfect Essence. In this hierarchy Christ was allowed a place, but not the only one, and perhaps not even the highest -one. Hence the curious and puerile discussions among the primitive Christians concerning the genealogy of these angels, with various ranks and classes, mediating between God and man, and the respect and even the worship that ought to be paid to these angelic ministers. This leads us to see at how early a date the leaven entered into the very life and thought of the Church, by which Jesus Christ was shorn of his peculiar and unapproachable glory, by which the believer was separated, in his personal fellowship, from his Savior: an apostacy, this, from the pure gospel, that crystalized itself at last in the hierarchy of saints and angels in the Romish church, with the Virgin Mary at their head, to whom alone our supplications are to be made, and through whom all our mercies are to be received. It was against this incipient and mischievous heresy, whose doctrine Paul describes as the conceit of a fleshly mind, whose religion he defines as will worship, that he marshals these successive phrases of the text, by which, as over against all false speculation, he affirms that matter and mind, creation and redemption, nature and the church, the visible and the invisible universe in all their ranks of being, have but one living centre and king, and that king and head is none other than Jesus Christ, in whom and through whom and for whom are all things." I. Now, when we come to examine this passage a little more closely, we find that, as in the parallel statement in the Epistle to the Philippians, the thought of the apostle deals with Christ before He was born and after His coming to this earth, or, in technical phrase, with the pre-incarnate and the incarnate Christ. The first three verses of my text have reference to Christ in his pre-incarnate state. The dignity and agency of Christ did not begin with his birth. They were independent of time; they ante-dated and they determined, according to the teaching of the apostle, all created existence. And this dignity of the incarnate Christ, again, is represented by two very brief but expressive clauses, one of which describes His relation to the independent and the original Godhead, and the second his relation to created exist ence. 1. As related, then, first of all, to the independent and original Godhead, our Lord is declared to be the image of the invisible God-His living, walking, exhaustive embodiment, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father;" "No man knoweth the father, but the son, and he to whom the son hath revealed him." Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God. There is this distinction between image and likeness. Likeness represents a superficial resemblance, as when two leaves from one and the same tree are said to be like each other; image indicates resemblance by participation in the same life, by reflection of substance, by reproduction of essence. Likeness is that which is superficial and partial; image is that which is essential, necessary, complete and exhaustive. Our Lord is declared to be the image of the invisible God; that is to say, He is that representation of God which God could not but have, that embodiment of the divine glory which is at once fitting and exhaustive. Whatever of glory there dwells in the eternal Father, that is ex |