hour followed hour, His passion unveiling with every act some greater greatness of His nature, full of exhaustless pity and unfailing courage, now shaming His contemptuous judge with His calm dignity, now falling under the burden of His cross, now forgetting Himself as He turned to bless His fellow sufferers, and at last standing triumphant, with His foot upon the conquered tomb, was not merely Jesus of Nazareth, but was at the same time every follower of the Nazarene who anywhere had caught His spirit and repeated the essential words of His life.

But it is not only when we thus make the story of Christ's life the parable of our own life that we discover the confirmation of His testimony in ourselves. When in all the deeper experiences of our souls we find that there is no solution of our problems and no escape from our distress except in what the incarnation meant and means forever, then it is that our poor pathetic histories get their great dignity as confirmation of all He said and did. When overcome by your own sin, nothing but Christ can make you know that you are so thoroughly God's, and God is so completely yours that no sin can separate you from Him or forbid you the privilege of coming on your knees to Him, to repent and confess, and ask Him to forgive and be forgiven; when full of self-distress and selfcontempt, nothing but the incarnate Christ can keep you from despairing of humanity and show you how grand and pure it is in its essential nature, how capable of being filled with God and shining with His glory; when thus, in the strength of the incarnation, you gather up your helplessness and come full of trust and hope up to the door where He who made you stands tirelessly inviting you to enter in and become what He made you to be, then, then it is that the transcendent wonder of God manifest in Christ has translated itself into our human speech, and men may read in you, the poor saved sinner, what your Saviour is. Is there a glory for a human life like that? Can you conceive a humble splendor so complete as the great light which clothes the soul that has thus in pure submission made itself transparent, so that through it Christ has shone? Among the new experiences, the deepest of them

unknown in their fullness save to you and God, which must have come to you, my friends, in these months of our year of separation

may I not hope, may I not rejoice to know, that to some of you has come this crown of all experiences, this glad and complete submission of your converted life to Christ, in which you have become a new confirmation of the testimony of His grace and power. I thank God with you for this, which is indeed the salvation of your soul.

I must not seem to be pouring out on you on this first morning the flood of preaching which has been accumulating through a whole year of silence. But I have wanted to ask you to think with me of how the key of the world's life, and of every Christian's experience, lies deep in that incarnation which it is the privilege of the Christian pulpit to proclaim and preach. If what I have been saying to you is true, then that great manifestation of God must be preaching itself forever. All history, all life, must be struggling to confirm the testimony of Christ. I have known well how faithfully the gospel of the incarnation has been preached to you from this pulpit since I have been away. With ever deeper satisfaction I have known that God was preaching it to each of you in silent sermons, out of all that He has sent or has allowed to come into your lives. You have had troubles and anxieties, sickness, pains; some of you, sorrows which have torn your hearts and homes asunder, and changed your lives forever. Have they not shown you something? Has not God, through them, shown you something of how near He is to you and how He loves you, and how capable your human natures are of containing ever more and more of Him? You have had delights, joys; happiness has burst on some of you with a great gush of sunshine, and opened upon others with that calm and gradual glow which is even richer and more blessed. Have you not learned something in most personal and private consciousness of what the world meant when the tidings ran abroad from Bethlehem : Behold, your King is come. The tabernacle of God is with His children, men"? The children have turned another page in the delightful book of opening life. The active

men and women have seen what seemed the full-blown flower open some deeper heart of richness. The thinker has learned some new lessons of the infiniteness of truth. The old have found age, grown ever more familiar, declare itself in unexpected ways their friend, and seen its hard face brighten with the mysterious promises of things beyond, which it cannot explain, but whose reality and richness it will not let them doubt. We are all growing older. Oh, how dreary and wretched it would be if those words did not mean that through Christ, in Christ, we are always gaining more knowledge of what God is and what we may be!

As I look around upon your faces, I cannot help asking myself in hope whether it must not be that some of you are ready for the gospel now, for whom, in the years heretofore, it has seemed to have no voice. Has not some new need opened your eyes? Has not some new mercy touched your hearts? Has not the very steady flow and pressure of life brought you to some new ground, where you are ready to know that life is not life without the faith of Him who is the revelation of God and of ourselves? I will believe it, and believing it, I will take up again, enthusiastically, the preaching of that Christ who is always preaching Himself in wonderful, and powerful, and tender ways even to hearts that seem to hear Him least.

To those who do hear Him and receive Him there comes a peace and strength, a patience to bear, an energy to work, which is to the soul itself a perpetual surprise and joy, a hope unquenchable, a love for and a belief in fellow man that nothing can disturb, and around all, as the great element of all, a certainty of God's encircling love to us which conquers sin and welcomes sorrow, and laughs at death and already lives in immortality. What shall we say of it that is not in the words of Christ's beloved disciple, who knows it all so well: To as many as receive Him, to them gives He power to become the sons of God."

Let us say then to one another, "Sursum corda! Lift up your hearts!" Let us answer back to one another, We do lift them up

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unto the Lord"; and so let us go forward together into whatever new life He has set before us.

HENRY WOODFIN GRADY

To present the best representative of Southern oratory since the ante-bellum days, when Southern supremacy in legislative halls depended so largely upon the power of public speech, we must call the name

of Henry Woodfin Grady (1850-1889) of Georgia. His was a striking personality whose voice, face, and figure seemed aglow with expression, and whose spirit teemed with optimism, high motives, and love of country. Such a spirit could not dwell among men without exerting its uplifting influence, nor depart from our midst without leaving its abiding stamp upon our character and ideals. His success in advocacy of the claims of his section of our

common country and the establishment of a better understanding between the North and South after the estrangement of bitter civil war must stand as one of the triumphs of modern oratory.

Grady states that he was a speaker by inheritance, but he was also a diligent student of the methods of the world's greatest orators and debaters; and his own bent of mind

turned all acquisition of thought into the channels of public speech. As a student in college it is said that even his classroom recitations were spoken in good speech form. This habit of mind was manifest even in his editorial work. One has but to read his editorials in the Rome (Georgia) Commercial or in the Atlanta Constitution to note the language of expressive speech. The thought of an audience was ever present with him, and even the words that fell from his facile pen suggested to the mind of the reader the image, accents, and cadences of the orator.

At the age of eighteen Grady was graduated from the University of Georgia and he subsequently took a postgraduate course at the University of Virginia. His biographer, Joel Chandler Harris, tells us that he was accounted one of the best debaters in college, was very active in literary-society work and his chief ambition was to represent his college on the commencement occasion as "society orator." His chief object in his postgraduate course was to perfect himself in oratory. His choice of studies, so far as college elective privileges would allow, was for those subjects which contribute most largely to preparation for public service.

And the immediate necessity for such service was at hand. The South with her problems was his thought, and her welfare his passion. As a boy he had witnessed some of the sanguinary scenes of sectional warfare and suffered the sacrifice of a father upon the altar of his country. As a student of social and economic conditions following the Civil War he sought a solution of the many problems of the South, and his optimism grasped the plan of her betterment. By common consent he became her champion, and all of his recorded speeches, whether delivered on his native soil or in the great cities of the North, carry the refrain of Southern motives, problems, and hopes.