statement, and still less as a history, either of the past or of the future. To interpret that Book is to feel it; and he interprets it alone, while he rejoices in it, who finds his imagination swelling to moral inspirations, who finds himself lifted up into an heroic mood, who believes that the things which now seem weak have in them everlasting strength, and that the things which seem now trodden under foot are as seeds that, being trodden under foot, are to spring up with new vitality and strange power. It is a Book which reaches the understanding but little, and the heart much—and that through the strong colors of imagination.

It is out of this Book that we have a multitude of scenes; but none of them, perhaps, is more remarkable than the one which I have selected for our text. For, although the description of that strange scene, which we read in the opening of our service to-night, sung by ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, has some elements which are lacking in this, yet there is in this passage, if less of the pictorial, more scope and more inward suggestion for motive.

"And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb."

Now, Moses is not to be regarded here exactly as a historic personage; certainly it is not the song which he composed that is meant, nor the song that was composed by the Lamb; but here is the theme-Moses and the Lamb. And what was Moses in this heavenly tableau, to the thoughts of those addressed, but the beginning of a great divine dispensation of mercy and of education? He, far back in the wilderness, and in the beginnings and sources of history, organized truth and beauty and right, and set agoing those great services by which the soul was to be enriched and ennobled. In other words, he was the beginner. The song, beginning with Moses, and ending with the Lamb, connected the very first dawn of divine truth, in the earliest periods, with its first flow, and all its mutations, clear down to the time of Jesus Christ, who in Jerusalem was, and who now in the New Jerusalem is, typified as the Lamb. The figure to us is almost dead, but to the Jew, who had been accustomed to

associate with the sacrificial Lamb whatever was sweet, whatever was beautiful, whatever was pure and unworldly in perfection, the figure meant immensely more than it means to us.

The song was of triumph. It was the shout, the jubilatic outcry of the universe, that stood around about the ends of things, looking back to the beginning, and seeing the way of God down through the whole dispensation of time in the world, now fulfilled and brought to a triumphant close in the other life. All that there was in the different heroes; all that there was in the different dispensations; all the judgments; all the sufferings; all the reformations; all the growths; all the developments; all the victories-whatever had gone to make up the moral elements in human history, in the household, and in matters touching priestly offices and prophetic qualities in those who witnessed in the wilderness, in prisons, and in the mountains, the apostolic administrations, and all the after periods, and doubtless all that which has come down from the apostles' day to ours-all these things constitute the theme of that great heavenly outbreaking song.

And what is the result of it? It is simply the chanting of the old bard by which the deeds of his chief are narrated, as we narrate the achievements, enterprises, battles, and victories of a hero.

"Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest."

Here, then, is the divine catastrophe-evil gone under; imperfections swelled out to perfectness; ungrowth and crudeness brought up to ripeness and to beauty; goodness triumphant through the universal realm. All nations shall

come to thee, not one being left out.

This was the vision, not of time, but of the upper sphere; and it was this: the absolute triumph of the divine part in man. They who have gone before, and for generations yet those that shall follow us, must see the flesh stronger than the spirit in the great mass of mankind. The saddest sight,

I think, that a man can contemplate, who believes in the Fatherhood of God and the maintenance of moral government, is the way in which the race have lived hitherto. Time, looked at from any high standpoint, is a most sad and dreary experience, unless we have some outlet; unless we have some compensation somewhere. If there be no consola

tion; if you believe in none; if you take the human race ethnologically, and with the narrow eye of science simply,the eye of sense, I know not anything that is so sad, and that so tends to destroy the trust of man in man, or all hope for man. The might and power of past ages has been physical, passional, sensuous, devilish; and although here and there there have been sprinklings of goodness, although here and there there have been a thousand sweet voices heard, yet, in the main, the chant of time has been hoarse, harsh, cacophonous. In the main, the movement of the human race has been the movement of vast bodies with vast sufferings, and vast wastefulness, and vast uselessness.

To-day I might take the continent of Africa and turn it bottom side up into the gulf of destiny, and take out every living thing in it, and the world would not know that it had lost a thing. To-day I might take more than half the globe, and sweep the hand of destruction across it, and cut off the race of men, and the world would lose no idea, no moral influence, no treasure that it was important to keep, no possibility in this life of anything great.

And if man be looked at as a creature of time, and as worth only that which he is able to contribute to political economy and to the welfare of the globe, he is the poorest thing on the earth.

It is bad to look too literally at things, and to trace them too literally. It is, therefore, that we find in this the rebound from minute and statistical and philosophical investigation. There must be something which shall help us out of this; which shall lift a man's soul above the traditions of historical verity. We get it through the imagination in this light that streams down from the far future. And that struggle which has been going on, although there have been great improvements in some respects, is still going on.

Nor

is it hard to be skeptical to-day. It is hard not to be. It is not hard for a man that opens his eyes to see. It is easy for a man to be orthodox, if he will take the right books, and shut himself up, and hear nothing except what they contain. It is easy for a man to have faith in Christian thought respecting this world in all the glories of the millennial conceptions, if in seeking facts he will take only those that are convenient, and those that are arranged for that special purpose. But when you take the human mind, and shut out nothing, and look at all the conditions of men, all their birth traits, all their tendencies, all the great channels in which they inevitably flow; at things as they are, as they usually have been, and as they will yet for generations be; when you look out with a true, loving eye, and an unbiased judgment, it is not easy not to be doubting, skeptical. There must be some door open. An honest man, a sympathetic man, a generous man, in other words, a child of the gospel, cries out in anguish of soul at the state of things which he finds upon the globe. There is need of some relief somewhere, or one could not live under the pressure and burden.

If a man can shut himself up in a system, so as that his sympathies are cut off from his kind; if a man can be so trained by any strange transformation of nature within that he shall feel himself bound to sympathize with the elect, and live or rest without concern or care for all else; if a man can coldly look on and be happy when he knows, or thinks he knows, that his friends are to be condemned, I can see how he may be relieved from pressure of doubt and skepticism and unbelief. But I cannot conceive how a man who undertakes, according to the spirit of the master, to say, "The field is the world, and God so loved the world that he gave his son to die for it"-I cannot conceive how a man who holds himself responsible in his reason for taking an account of the condition of the whole human family from the beginning through the bloody ages to the present day, with all their prospects in the future-I cannot understand how such a man shall not be troubled, even if he have nothing but the mere earth-side, or physical sense, to judge from.

It is from this aspect that there comes to me inconceivable

relief and rejoicing when I find that the spiritual, the ineffable, cannot be actually represented, cannot be stated systematically and succinctly, because the higher states of being have no corresponding expressions, no language, by which they can be philosophically set forth.

If an emotion be made known to us it must be made known by some symbol, by some vision, by some poetic representation; and therefore, looking down through the ages and hearing the thunder of groans, and the clash of battles, and seeing rivers of blood still rolling along the gulf-stream of time, seeing the world bestormed, and seeing lurid tornadoes sweeping over the earth, it is an unspeakable gladness to see at the end, and on the horizon, the bright and glowing colors of triumph; and I stop to gaze; and that administration which has seemed so doubtful, so dark, seems lighter and plainer. They who stand disengaged from the ignorance and darkness of time; they who are lifted up, and are at a point of vision where they can see the past, the present and the future-I behold them, not bearing witness to us, but in their own unconciousness breaking out into ecstacies of gladness because God is justified. He who brought into existence this globe, with all its miserable populations, in the last estate shall stand and be glorified in the thought and feeling of those who behold the end as well as the beginning. Yea, he shall be glorified, not as the oriental monarch is, who is praised whatever he does, but upon grounds and

reasons.

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"Thou only art holy." "All nations shall come and worship before thee." Why? For thy judgments are made manifest." There is charity; there is explanation; there is reconciliation; there is harmonization; and in the end it shall appear, when we see from the beginning to the end of this tremendous, and as yet uninterpreted, riddle of life and time, with an unclouded eye, and with a vision just and true and perfect-then it shall appear that God is lovely and beautiful.

This vision of God that we shall then have will present him in such an aspect of loveliness and beauty that we shall no longer, as we do now, see through a glass, darkly; we