genius like that of Jesus. His was the genius for transforming into moral and spiritual wealth the refuse of the world. He took other men's leavings, all the hopeless, the rejected, the castaways, and out of these He made citizens of the kingdom of heaven-men and women who would do anything for the world except lie to it. So the world turned away from Plato to Christ, "To feel the heavenly Alchemist Transform its very dust to gold." Again, it was not the Athenian, it was the Galilean, who conquered. This is dealing with history in broad reaches. Admitting that it is not wholly satisfactory, there are advantages sometimes in taking our stand upon an eminence and looking out across a vast sweep of landscape. It is possible to be too detailed, so as as not to be able to see the wood for the trees. Yet Christ's works stand the test of detailed examination. His influence on epochs is not more incomparable than His influence over individual lives. Let me ask your attention to one of the most impressive facts in the study of history. There are, as we all know, barren ages, dark ages, ages of appalling deadness, laxity, hypocrisy. There are times when the name Christian, like the grand old name of gentleman, is "defamed by every charlatan and soiled with all ignoble use." Yet we are forced to recognize how even in these ages, when there is everything to stifle the spiritual life, the fire of Christ will blaze out in some great soul, and kindle some disciple to sacrifice and heroism. It is wonderful. He never loses this power to raise from the dead. In the worst ages He is the Author of all the good there is. All the greatest saints are Christ's men. Whenever you find a man of whom you can honestly say you do not feel worthy to kneel down and unloose his shoe's latchet, he is one of Christ's men. There are no other saints to put in competition with Christ's saints. I grant you that some of them are voted heretics, sneered at, imprisoned, or flayed alive; but Christ is their life and salvation all the same. Down the long dark line of the centuries there are beacon lights, the flashings out of the light of Christ in the souls He has illuminated. It does us good at times to sit and ponder how slowly, but how surely, He has educated conscience and revealed His mind and will to this world; the thought is profoundly impressive. Slavery is condoned and defended by Christian people so long; but when the final impeachment is made, and the last blow struck, it is the Christian who leads. The most powerful fact in time is the ripening of the Christian conscience. We may resent the phrases "Nonconformist conscience," "Puritan conscience," and indeed I do not like to sectarianize the conscience; but we speak fearlessly about the Christian conscience. When any institution is once fairly and decisively condemned by the Christian conscience, I will not give you many years' purchase for it, though it may stand entrenched in centuries of privilege and vested rights. It may spread itself as a green bay tree, but it will soon be cut down when an axe of Christian conviction is laid at its door. That is very suggestive of the power of Christ. And yet this culture of saints! Is it not the greatest evidence of all of Christ's authority, and His authority in every age and every land? I want to see the philosophy, or science, or cult, or religion that can do such marvels and make such men. The fact is, we have seen and known what Christ Jesus can do and does do; and as has been well said, "until we find His fellow," He is deserving of loyalty, and trust, and praise without end. It is an old story now, we are very familiar with it, but I set it on record once again. Some at least of those who read these pages know Charles Darwin's earliest account of the Patagonians. To Darwin they were absolutely hopeless, a race beyond redemption, impossible to civilize. That was his deliberate judgment. Nothing short of a mir acle could save them. And then the miracle happened. There was a boy-waif of the Foundling Hospital "picked up on St. Thomas's Day and called Thomas, picked up between two bridges and called Bridges-Thomas Bridges" -and to Patagonia he went to teach and preach, to live with these people, die for them if need be, and in short love them into life by the power of Christ. And when he went, God moved on the face of the deep; "God said, Let there be light, and there was light." In Christ was life, and the life was the light of man. In due course Mr. Darwin visited them again and saw the miracle, and then sent his subscription to the society whose agent had wrought these wonders, in token of candid recognition that the impossible had happened. I have only one question to ask: Do you honestly think that there is any other civilizing force in the world that could have done this? Is there any other who can do "these miracles that He doeth?" Surely the secret of life and progress is with Him whose right it is to reign. Christianity, I repeat, is a magnificent success. Its influence is widespread, elevating the masses, lifting the general level of existence. But its influence is not only extensive: it is intensive. It exalts the individual life. Christ can make a great success of you, my reader. I don't say He will give you wealth, for He is more likely to make you poor by sacrifice. I don't say He will give you fame, for He is more likely to make you "of no reputation." I don't say he will give you a crown of honor; He is more likely to offer you a cross of shame. But He will give you success. Through Him you will find yourself. He will lead you through self-sacrifice to self-realization. He will give you influence, power, authority, such as they only have who are His. He will make you loved, and He will make you happy; He will teach you to do good, and not evil, all the days of your life. To whom else should you go while He has the words of eternal life? To be of His making is to be a great suc cess. Milton By Ernest Myers He left the upland lawns and serene air Where from his soul her noble nurture drew, Grew grim with sulphurous dust and sanguine dew; He, with a scornful sigh of his clear soul, By Matthew Arnold The most eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against "the Anglo-Saxon contagion.' The tendencies and aims, the view of life and the social economy of the ever-multiplying and spreading Anglo-Saxon race, would be found congenial, this prophet feared, by all the prose, all the vulgarity amongst mankind, and would invade and overpower all nations. The true ideal would be lost, a general sterility of mind and heart would set in. The prophet had in view, no doubt, in the warning thus given, us and our colonies, but the United States still more. There the Anglo-Saxon race is already most numerous, there it increases fastest: there material interests are most absorbing and pursued with most energy; there the ideal, the saving ideal, of a high and rare excellence, seems perhaps to suffer most danger of being ob *An address delivered in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, on the 13th of February, 1888, at the unveiling of a Memorial Win dow presented by Mr. George W. Childs of Philadelphia. scured and lost. Whatever one may think of the general danger to the world from the Anglo-Saxon contagion, it appears to me difficult to deny that the growing greatness and influence of the United States does bring with it some danger to the ideal of a high and rare excellence. The average man is too much a religion there; his performance is unduly magnified, his shortcomings are not duly seen and admitted. A lady in the State of Ohio sent to me only the other day a volume on American authors; the praise given throughout was of such high pitch that in thanking her I could not forbear saying that for only one or two of the authors named was such a strain of praise admissible, and that we lost all real standard of excellence by praising so unifor.aly and immoderately. She answered me with charming good temper, that very likely I was quite right, but it was pleasant to her to think that excellence was common and abundant. But excellence is not common and abundant: on the contrary, as the Greek poet long ago said, excellence dwells among rocks hardly accessible, and a man must almost wear his heart out before he can reach her. Whoever talks of excellence as common and abundant, is on the way to lose all right standard of excellence. And when the right standard of excellence is lost, it is not likely that much which is excellent will be produced. To habituate ourselves, therefore, to approve, as the Bible says, things that are really excellent, is of the highest importance. And some apprehension may justly be caused by a tendency in Americans to take, or, at any rate, attempt to take, profess to take, the average man and his performances too seriously, to overrate and over-praise what is not really superior. But we have met here today to witness the unveiling of a gift in Milton's honor, and a gift bestowed by an American, Mr. Childs of Philadelphia; whose cordial hospitality so many Englishmen, I myself among the number, have experienced in America. It was only last autumn that Stratford-upon-Avon celebrated the reception of a gift from the same generous donor in honor of Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Milton-he who wishes to keep the standard of excellence high, cannot choose two better objects of regard and honor. And it is an American who has chosen them, and whose eautiful gift in honor of one of them, Milton, with Mr. Whittier's simple and true lines inscribed upon it, is unveiled today. Perhaps this gift in honor of Milton, of which I am asked to speak, is, even more than the gift in honor of Shakespeare, one to suggest edifying reflections to us. Like Mr. Whittier, I treat the gift of Mr. Childs as a gift in honor of Milton, although the window given is in memory of his second wife, Catherine Woodcock, the "late espoused saint" of the famous sonnet, who died in child-bed at the end of the first year of her marriage with Milton, and who lies buried here with her infant. Mliton is buried in Cripplegate, but he lived for a good while in this parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster, and here he composed part of Paradise Lost and the whole of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. When death deprived him of the Catherine whom the new window commerorates, Milton had still some eighteen years to live, and Cromwell, his "chief of men," was yet ruling England. But the Restoration, with its "Sons of Belial," was not far off; and in the meantime Milton's heavy affliction had laid |