his door in an attire of unseemly extravagance, refusing even to see her till she had exchanged it for her plain peasant's frock! Another mistaken mother, the untrue woman of the seven hills, might have found a parable for her vanity through all those shameful years, in that stern simplicity. No, the difference of the two kingdoms is not a difference of wardrobe; nor is it a whit more in scholastic idioms or professional phrases or pronunciations borrowed from a choir, or an English speech disfigured by a pedantic latinity. The more nearly the teachers of the most holy Faith can teach it in the untechnical language that the world's men use, where they speak earnestly to each other, by the way, in the places of the paths, "at the coming in at the doors," the more it will be "Wisdom" that speaks-that wisdom which "finds out knowledge of witty inventions;" and the more, as the grand context says, they will "have strength."

5. Fifthly, the Kingdom of Christ does not reject the ministries of natural beauty or the beauty of a chaste Art, always keeping near to nature in the multiplying of its attractions and deepening of its impressions. Being the Kingdom of Truth it may surely represent the symmetry of Truth-the Kingdom of Goodness, it may show the brightness and grace native to goodnessthe Kingdom of Love, it may be lovely in look and voice. "The hill of Zion is a fair place." Here, too, there is a danger. For Truth's sake, we can never forget that visible and audible beauty, of color, melody, form-external beauty, is separable from moral purity, is made the servant of unruly senses, and, in every range of human imagination, has been a device and and ally of the Tempter. For that very reason, and because we shall presently have occasion to point to confusions which have crept in from that source, we take pains to reassert the legitimate province of æsthetic culture in the things of religion. Having their signs, the realities of the unseen world, which are ineffably beautiful in themselves, require the signs to be beautiful. The mere circumstance that in the secular sphere these artistic provisions, which are apt to be costly, can be lavishly displayed on what is "of the earth earthly," because money is apt to be in the world's hands before it comes into the Church's hands, ought not to do the Church the wrong of robbing her of a fit robe which she deserves.

It needs but a slight acquaintance with the history of the. Fine Arts, whether in the old mythologies or in Christendom, to know that their most natural alliance is with the religious idea. Their highest inspirations have been from the realm of the supernatural. In Egypt, Syria and Greece, a candid philosophy will consider not how far Paganism degraded art, but how far art relieved and refined Paganism. Since the classical school passed away, the great triumphs of creative genius, pre-eminently in painting and architecture, only less in music, and largely in sculpture, have been wrought on the Christian facts as their subjects. Both prayer and sermon, the soul's cry to God and God's interpreted witness to the soul, humanity reaching up to Heaven and the Eternal Spirit bending and promising and giving to man, have been heard in anthem and statue, in picture and building as clearly as in articulate words. Their masters have been unordained but divinely furnished prophets and priests of the faith preached in Asia and Europe by St. Paul and the mysteries celebrated by St. John. In a word, worship is not of necessity secularized by being artistically adorned, any more than preaching is necessarily secularized by eloquence and learning. The worldspirit begins to do its heathen mischief through ecclesiastical decoration, only when the holy truths of the Gospel revelation are obscured, instead of being made more definite to the mind, more searching to the conscience, more stimulating to the will and more affecting to the heart.

6. One other qualification of our main position must be mentioned for the sake of completeness, not because in these times it is likely to be under-rated. Christ's cause does not protect itself from worldliness by drawing away its sympathies from natural joy, or by frowning forbiddingly on the spontaneous gladness which Providence suffers to play through the companies and homes of an unsanctified society. The Church's business is to show the children of this world that their joy is shallow, their laughter empty, their comfort short-lived, their pleasuregarden baunted and brooded over by ominous shapes of unseen evil, unless "the life that they live here in the flesh they live by faith in the Son of God." But then, any attack of the Church will be very futile-in fact, a mortifying failure, which is

directed against the joy itself, or its elements in human nature, when, in spite of so many sources of mortality, it still bubbles up and overflows. Man, as his Maker made him, is a playing as well as a working creature. Sympathy in what is innocent is one of the powers of the Church to draw men away from sin. Because a scholarly and devoted clergyman's tastes have gradually lost all relish for popular entertainments, he is not to conclude that these tastes are an exact measure of saintliness, or of what the Divine Law allows. To most parish ministers the moral problem of public amusements is one of considerable practical difficulty. But the principles for settling it are all to be found in the ethics of the Bible. If we place beside the apologies and homilies of the early Christian fathers the writings of Athenian and Roman comedians and satirists, we shall see that, although the secular games which polluted the youth of the first centuries have had their licentious successors in horrible profusion to this day, yet that an entirely different class of sports and spectacles, not unfriendly to morality, have sprung up. Some of our clergy are quite dumb on the whole subject, others deal out a few sweeping but feeble generalities of reproof. A very few have done worse by fancying it to be a part of their errand to undertake to legitimate theatres from the pulpit without going to the bottom of their complicated abuses. Like other composite rules, the matter has to be met in the sphere of dispositions, in the spirit of character, more than in detail. And probably a preacher or pastor will almost always succeed, who is himself near enough to Christ to be able to deliver a very strict and lofty doctrine of self-denial in this regard, including the Apostle's rule that doubtful things are to be let alone because they may hurt another's conscience, if not our own, and who can do it in a genial, loving and cheerful spirit, without letting self-assertion belittle his courage, really caring for the offender's purity more than for the triumph of his own authority. He will succeed, i. e., as well here as in other parts of a ministry where success is always relative, and failures are always many. He will reconcile fidelity with charity, and be a messenger of Christ.

We have done with the qualifications. They are ample. They are not concessions to "the world." They are, we believe,

a part of the truth of God, the Maker of the world and the Father of Man.

"Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world." The conflict has gone on, shifting its phases, age by age, with the shifting social and political conditions of mankind, but every substantial element the same, the passions identical, the principles permanent. The Gospel to-day is confronted by no Cæsar: Cæsar owns a pew in Church, pays the tax, either grudgingly or ostentatiously, and expects to have Christian burial when he dies. Rome Imperial, persecuting the faith because it has in hand pretorian eagles and a sword, has altered its accoutrements;-but there is no change of mind if Rome Ecclesiastical wishes it had the the army, fumbles impotently at its side for the sword-hilt, and will rather spare the whiteness from its soul than the purple from its shoulders. Avowed Heathenism, though it shows too large on our missionary maps, makes only a small figure beside Christianity whether as a contestant or a rival among the powers and enterprises of modern life. But we look round in the highways of Christendom, and the question stares every branch of Christ's Church full in the face, whether Heathenism within is less formidable than the service of Plutus and Venus and Bacchus, of Baal and Astarte, without; whether Mammon is not in every rational sense a god, honored and flattered, in every city and village of Christian lands; whether Herod is any better, being of Israel, (Idumean but Judaized) than Pilate of the Gentiles; in short, whether "this world," instead of fighting the Kingdom of Heaven, is not buying it up.

Every three years our Chief Council, every week our churchpress, and every day the thoughtful church-mind anxiously revolve the problem, how to give extension, and progress to our Church. Something is added to the machinery. New methods. are invented and tried. One obstacle after another is pointed out and assailed. Generally, it is taken for granted that the main difficulties are either ecclesiastical or theological. But if they were, the intellectual labor and the ecclesiastical experiments of nearly two thousand years would have found the grand secret out. Have they not well-nigh demonstrated that all our deliverance does not lie on that road? I see no signs at all that in learning,

in dialectic skill, in sheer thinking power, or in liturgic or ceremonial arrangement, we are to expect more of the future than of the past. We have, to be sure, devoted officers in our Church, who appear to suppose that by some constitution-mending or canon-making, some rubrical or textual revision, some repair of the "properties," some patching on of color upon the garment, some new-found quotations by hasty writers, too busy to be very scholarly, from the profound old masters of Christianity, or by the calling of some handsome church edifice, not specially unlike a hundred others in purpose or use, a Cathedral, or perhaps by the omission of a familiar symbol or the mutilation of a venerable office of worship, great furtherance is to be given to the faith, and their immense American energies are to be made to flow together to the top of the mountain of the Lord's House. It is a matter, of course, as we take it, that we all may see in several of these suggestions, whether new or old, and few of them are very new, a certain value. We are to despise no earnest reaching out for life. My claim is that whatever our schemes or our activities in all these respects may be, there is creeping in upon us everywhere, an enormous adverse force, which challenges supreme attention, so silent and subtle that it often escapes the eyes of the watchmen, so powerful in its entrenchments and so crafty in its alliances that it defies our denunciations, so diffused or so determined that, unless we can overmatch it, it destroys the Church's life within as fast as we propagate her forms without. This is secularism. is not, at present, so much a philosophy as a passion. It is not a system, but a sweep of eager, immoral impulse. There are scientific materialists, but they play only a trifling part in the spread of this propensity, which rushes before their processes, which gathers and swallows, is amused and fattened, eats and drinks, and dresses, calculates its chances and counts its gains, flaunts its splendors or hoards its profits, and, when its devotees die, does not die with them, but flourishes as if no such thing as death could be. It is in the blood of the people, in the atmosphere of the climate, in the spirit of the age. The old Hebrew god of flies, brilliant, prolific, evasive, little, bred of grossness, and mostly wings and stomach, is as good a deity for it as any;-Beelzebub. Like all iniquity, it is as disastrous to manhood as to godliness. It eats