and the pervading spirit! What friendliness between his mind and the religious truth of the world! What manliness of dealing with the foes that tempted his heart and the trials that roughened his way! What thorough insight into the subserviency of nature to the soul! What a joyous spring from the shadow of every sorrow into the arms of infinite sympathy and compassion. It is the mission of the church to show us all, that these postures and privileges were not the exceptions of Jesus, miraculous nature, but that such religious glory belongs to every life. The fall of man is the lapse from such a posture in the world, and such a heritage of thought and faith. Christ is the restoration of the type. He wore a peculiar drapery of office and of sorrow, so that his career should not and cannot be copied in servile imitation; but in his feeling of superiority to nature, and his free access to God; in his clear vision of all the glory in this universe as part of the furniture for the home of man ; in his sense of the greatness of the spirit as lying in humility and devout deference to the heavenly will; in his assurance of an ever-enduring life, and in the joy which, beneath all the surface tribulations, suffused his heart; in these essentials of his character, he is the type of the privileges that belong to the soul in the Father's universe, and the blessed suggestion of what all science, all Christian literature, and all preaching, should conspire, under the guidance of his religion, to make the life of

man.

The church, by the sanction of the life of Christ, should preach not only duty but joy. Its power should be, not in the ethics which it lifts solemnly over the will, but in the supernatural joy, the deliverance from all sin and bondage and skepticism, the ecstacy with which it tempts the soul. St. Paul felt this; his spirit mounted into this ecstacy through his Christian conversion, and he has given the best exposition of the sweep of meaning in the second member of the baptismal phrase, where he described the human race as in its minority under the law, but reaching its majority and attaining its freedom in Christ. Now, he says, we are no more servants but sons, and if sons, then heirs of God through Christ. Paul never preached the detailed acts of Jesus as models of

duty; with regard to humanity he taught one lesson from Christ's mission,-that we are not citizens subjects of God's empire, but the family of His I coming into possession in all the divine property of universe, and lifted out of fear by knowing that all wo and times were created for our culture and our home. Millions receive the baptismal waters upon their br but only a few, only here and there a spirit, have fulf in their feeling its vast significance and privilege. C such souls as have been lifted out of servitude, and b able to touch the sun with their thought, and say, mine, and with consecrated imagination have seen stars netted into a domestic canopy, and have felt the as full of the Father's providence as of His light. M of the Christians have lived rather in fear than in joy have crouched before God rather than felt His prese as their inspiration, and have nurtured a piety that arti lated itself in trembling deprecation of judgments sinking miseries, instead of bursting into joy.

"And of the Holy Ghost." The peculiarity and pr tical power of the earliest Christianity were associated w the gift of the Holy Ghost. It was that by which Jo the forerunner, prophetically distinguished the baptism Christ from his own lustration by water, and in the chu which the Apostles guided the gift of the Holy Gh was the attestation of a sincere conversion and a vi faith. Here, too, how sadly we shall miss the richness this final phrase in the great commission, if we interp it as a reference to the inward constitution of the divi nature and the completion of a mysterious Trinity,-if do not see in it the symbol of the third great element power in Christianity-the disclosure of the constant pr ence and pleading of the Spirit of God in human sou The Jews had no notion of a God with whose spirit th could have secret fellowship. He was monarch, dictator laws, claimant of punctilious service, rewarder and jud from the veil of inaccessible light and the distance of terrible throne. Heathenism had no deity whose spir impinging upon the boundaries of human personalit could be felt as quickening any holy emotion, or startin any new undulation of life. Christianity brought the co ception of the intermixture of our souls with the infini

life and love, showing that we grow out of God spiritually, and are visited by Him secretly, as the harvests grow from the soil by the bounties of the air. This is the great mystery of our life, that we are of God and in Him, are nothing without Him, and yet are distinct, potent, guilty or meritorious personalities. Even the bad man lives incomprehensibly in God, and perverts His grace into private infamy, as the Upas tree sucks its deathly fragrance and distils its blistering juices from the same air and earth which yield to the orange its loveliness and nectar. The constant life of the soul in God is one of the seminal ideas of the gospel. St. Paul welcomed it as the most practical ray in its rich grace. The eighth of Romans, and the second chapter of the first Corinthians, record his jubilant appreciation of that principle which came forth to him in his Christian consecration. He never speaks of Christ's words as a revelation; his whole conception of the privilege of Christian faith was foreign from our theories of a literal statute-book of the Holy Spirit. God revealed Himself by the diffusion of His light into every heart, he said. It was the spirit dwelling in believers that gave them counsel, peace and joy. All the sons of God, he said, are led by the spirit of God, and God revealeth the greatest mysteries unto us by His indwelling spirit.

And here again we find the church committed by the baptismal formula to the development of a most rich and amazing truth, that God comes nearer to us in our feelings, in the structure of our personality, than He does in the greatest splendor and magnificence of the outward universe; that he is nearer to us in our sense of right than he would be if the light of a new star, just sped from His Omnipotence, should break upon our brain; that His justice is more intensely manifest in the throb of shame and anguish that shoots through our desecrated bosom, than it would be if the very glare of hell should scare our sight, streaking the horizon with its smoke and flame; and that His word is as solemn in the call to duty and the inward pointing of the better way in some crisis of experience, as it is even in the printed paragraphs of the Sermon on the Mount, or the written dealing of Jesus with the young lawyer's soul.

What power would not the church have invited t aid, if, instead of its microscopic and almost malic analysis of the depravity of man to abase our na it had kindled up by the lenses of the New Testamen consciousness of a wrestling God in every unconsecr bosom, and made every Christian believer feel that a walking sanctuary of the Infinite, with oracles breat articulate messages from the spirit in the Delpic aver of the breast. This privilege belongs to us as Christi -that pages of kindred sacredness with those of New Testament, are written every day on the deli tissues of the spirit; that warnings ominous as th of Sinai mutter often through the flaming conscie within, and that voices as really, though not as audi from God, break over the spaces of the soul in season moral victory, as the tones which said of Jesus, "This my beloved Son." If we were taught this, and made respect our nature thus, the rich symbol of baptism i the Holy Ghost would be fulfilled in the instruct given to us, and the steady conciousness that would sustained by it.

Of course we have only hinted the outlines and dir tions by which our thought should be guided in listeni to the last commission of the Saviour. Does it not th us with joy to see the formula of baptism open to a thr fold symbolic sense, instead of coiling itself into an en ma-suggesting by its three arcs the full circle of Chr tian truth, and representing the principles which liber Christianity is striving to commend to the heart, a conscience of the world. By such insight into its phrase we are brought visibly into the Christian fold. For eve man baptized into the belief, by the belief of the paterni of God, of the Sonship of humanity on the earth, a through eternity, and of the indwelling and inspirin presence of God in all His children,-does he not ful the creed with which the church sprinkles her childre and devotes them to Christian training? does he not fu fil it, if not in the usual theological and sectarian sens yet in a sense nobler than that, and consonant with th instruction and spirit of the Apostolic age. Oh, that, b discerning this richer symbolic significance in the grea formula of our faith, we might open from all ground of sectarian battle a retreat to the hills, to re-form as on

army, back at those impregnable lines of defence in the revelation itself, where Christians may stand together and be unconquerable, not by each other, but by all the skepticism, error and sin of the world. "For the Christian - formula itself is no wedge of division, but an inclusive bond of union, and is perverted to a purpose directly contrary to its own genius and design, when it is changed to the keen instrument of a wound. Verily, so wide as it is in its language, avoiding all the sharp and thorny distinctions of man's device by which we are so tangled and severed, and having its birth back of those discussions and criticisms of which it is now too often the perpetuating sign, it should be regarded as Christ's own easy and blessed yoke, meaning all that the reverent imagination can ever find it to mean, under which all may come, Catholic and Protestant, Trinitarin and Unitarian, establishment and dissent, yielding to every one, with its regenerating power, also the double blessing of freedom of thought and largeness of love.

God as the Father, the Sonship of humanity on earth, with its attendant privileges and duty, and the all pervading vitality of the Holy Spirit, is there any need that we be urged to continuous and more fervid zeal for a Christianity that emblazons such a Trinity of principles upon its standards? All that is glowing and glorious in such a scheme of deity, of revelation, and of life, all that is searching in the appeal of such a faith to the conscience, or inspiring in the breath of it upon the heart, calls upon us to be more devoted to its maintainance, more interested for its progress, more liberal in our consecration of time and means to diffuse it by missionaries, by institutions and by the press, and more careful in our efforts to illustrate and commend it through reverent, cheerful and charitable lives. Liberal Christians are consecrated to the publication of such a scheme of the gospel, to such a large symbolical interpretation of the great commission.

The world looks to us to show that the vision of noble truth is consistent with zeal, that a religion of austerity is not the only one in which the power of the spirit dwells, and that the passion for the gospel, as the enduring and ever-deepening need of human nature, is not cooled and and paralysed by the process that gives us a Christianity worthy of our reverence and love.

T. S. K.