your transgressions whereby ye have transgressed, and make to you a new heart and a new spirit.' It is in this sense only that the common phrase 'change of heart' can have any meaning or propriety. There is no change of constitution, but only a change in the objects of the affections."

"HE [Judge Story] had studied the evidences of Christianity with professional closeness and care, and had given to them the testimony of his full assent, and he has often been heard to declare, that in his judgment the great facts of the Gospel history were attested by a mass of evidence, which in any court of law would be perfectly satisfactory and conclusive."

INFLUENCE OF THE GOSPEL.

"THE religion of Christendom is not so much better than the religion of heathendom, as the world is better in other respects. But it is better in all those features of it, in which the new most differs from the old. Whatever is worst in it, it has in common with the ancient; whatever is best in it is peculiar to itself. The religion of Christendom, with all its corruptions and perversions of the Christian idea, is, on the whole, less material than the ancient, less ritual, less stated, more personal, more spontaneous, more humane. The religion of the ancients was a bowing down to superior Power, for the most part, conceived as hostile, and a propitiation of that Power with ceremony and sacrifice. Modern religion has that element of adoration also, but it has other elements peculiar to itself. It not only addresses itself to the invisible, with formal worship, but, in its more characteristic manifestations, it addresses itself to the visible, also, with practical beneficence. The religion of the ancients was local, national; the modern is expansive, cosmopolitan. It is more than that; it is missionary. And,

in that word 'missionary,' what sanctities are comprised! what memories! what deeds! It unfolds to our remembrance a heraldry of sainted names; it brings before the mind a sublime sweep of the Spirit, whose orbit extends from Paul, in Ionia, to Eliot, in New England; from Heber, in India, to Oberlin, in the rugged passes of the Steinthal; embracing whatever is loftiest, sweetest, divinest in man. Ancient relig

ion was hierarchal and select; the religion of Christendom, when genuine, is popular, and helpful, and saving. The organization of charity is its distinguishing trait. Hospitals, asylums, homes for the indigent, houses of refuge for distress, of reformation for crime, are peculiar to the Christian ages. Nothing of the kind is to be found among the nations of antiquity. Athens, with its splendid edifices, had no hospital. Rome, with its shining examples of female virtue, had no sisters of mercy. It was reserved for the modern world to witness that spectacle, which the cynic, Voltaire, pronounced to be the noblest ever witnessed by man, the spectacle of delicate woman sacrificing youth, beauty, rank, wealth, to wait on poverty and loathsome disease. No sooner had Christianity established itself in the world than it began to exhibit this peculiar and beautiful fruit of the Spirit; than it began to found institutions for the sick and infirm, and orphan; insomuch that the Emperor Julian, the strenuous opponent of the Christian faith, is said to have attributed its success to these institutions, and to have emulated them with similar works of beneficence. Equally characteristic is the care of education, the mitigation of the penal code, the promotion of peace, and other and like ministries of mercy in which the Christian Church has led the way. After the battle of Monterey, a woman was seen to traverse the field, and to proffer a draught of cold water to the parched lips of the wounded and the dying. This has been the attitude, and this the ministry, of the Christian religion, to human nature, bleeding and sore with the hard conflicts of this world."

THE PEACE OF FAITH.

"No intellectual proposition, however true, can, as such, bring peace to a wounded soul, though it may incidentally and indirectly guide a man to that action of the soul, which alone does bring peace; namely, to an unreserved, unflinching exposure of the heart to the eye of God. This is the desirable consummation, to which all the previous distress was preparatory; and nearly all of that distress might perhaps have been avoided, if the man had been better taught. Yet no one can say how much severe goading one or another may need, before he dares to rush as it were straight into God's presence, consciously unfaithful and uncleansed. To many a man, perhaps, his own act is as one of desperation. He faces that bright and pure sun, which seems to scorch his eyes, and says: Slay me, O God, if Thou wilt; I deserve it; I am miserable; but leave me not sinful thus. shameful. Behold! I hide nothing. my darkness. I will not palliate. I am worse than I know. Show me all that I am. I cannot heal myself. If I must die, I will die in Thy light.'

Put me to shame : I am Thou art Light. Expose

"O, wonderful simplicity of Faith! He has trusted himself to the Judge of all the earth; he has believed in His good-will, and in His eternal purpose to destroy sin; he has himself become a real hater of sin: and, though he knows not why, he is therefore already in perfect peace. He has followed conscience through cloud and storm into the fiery presence of the Eternal, till fear has dropped off in His nearness. The harmony of heaven and earth is begun within the man's soul, because his will is subdued to God's will; and thus self-despair, joined to faith, has led to peace with God. He is guileless now as a child quiet therefore and easy, though in fullest consciousness that God is reading his heart to the bottom. Before, he thought of God as a severe Judge; now, he feels that he is a compassionate Father. Guilelessness is the whole secret of divine peace; and happy are any who attain it without a convulsion of soul preceding it."

.KING SOLOMON.

"Look at the glory of Solomon, and what do we behold there but the trappings of a short-lived authority, a pride, that was soon to droop and to pass away? We see a grandeur, which, while it lasted, he owned to be vanity, and which departed so soon, that it proved itself to be no better than vanity. It glit tered upon a frail form, that was bent with shame and repentance before it was bent with age, and has now been smaller than dust and lighter than breath for these three thousand years. Beneath one of the most famous churches in Italy is still shown the tomb of St. Charles Borromeo, which no one can have seen and forgotten. In that tomb-if we must call it a tomb, which is as light as the absence of the sun and the solemnity of a sepulchre will permit it to be, and with walls as rich as golden embroidery and Tyrian purple can make them - lies the embalmed body, from which the life departed more than two hundred years ago. Those poor remains are surrounded with a splendor that only makes them appear more poor. They are enshrined in silver and the clearest crystal. The kings and queens of the earth have contributed of their choicest to the jewelry that gleams by the shrunken side, and around the bony forehead, and upon the blackened fingers of that remnant of mortality; dead things paying tribute to the dead; the precious stone that never felt, to what feels no longer. We may be allowed to compare such a sight with the recollection of Solomon and his glory, his outside glory of sceptre and crown; for he could have worn nothing more sumptuous, when he sat upon his ivory throne and between his molten lions, than lies buried with that Christian saint. And what a relief it was, to come up from that magnificent charnelhouse, and gaze again upon nature's lovely and eternal face! The same grass grows and the same flowers bloom which the son of David saw. The fields of Judea are none the less fair, because the throne has fallen and the bones of his people have crumbled beneath them. There is a living perpetuity in the

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works of the Almighty. It is true, that they wither and droop, but not like the materials that mortal workmanship puts together. They will be renewed, the falling leaf that is blown away with the wind, the sickening flower that is nipped with the frost. But who shall restore to the regalia their lost honors, when empire has failed, and when they who held it have gone to the land where artificial distinctions are unknown, where are no crowns but those of immortality for them that shall see God.

"Another consideration remains. What judgment does religion pronounce on the question before us? It tells us, that the most brilliant decorations have tricked out the weakest, the unhappiest, and the worst of human beings; and that the most ordinary and the most servile minds admire them the most. It tells us, that they owe their principal effect only to our own fancy. The diamonds of a prince are not in reality any brighter than the moist leaves that tremble in the sunbeams. The fur on the animal's back is just as beautiful when it protects the animal as when it lines the king's cloak. And it adds, if the ideas of human dominion can lend such a charm to the clothing of monarchy, how royally should the simplest plant appear to send up its stem and hang out its flowers, when it claims a union with the presiding Spirit, and displays the condescending majesty of the King of kings? It tells us far more. 'If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe us?' He who has taught the tender plant how to guard itself from injury, will he be no protector to us? He who has taught the dependent vine how to cling by its tendrils, will he be no guide to train us upward? He who has taught the frail leaf how to draw sustenance from the moisture of the earth and the lustre of the sky, will he not reveal to us the light of his countenance and the refreshing of his grace, and show to us the path of another life out of the hollow ground? We are of more value than the blades of a green field, or the cups of a flower-garden. Will he not clothe us with the raiment that his