heart, and to embrace the Saviour as he is offered in the gospel!

I have seldom heard this catholic and happy doctrine more pointedly expressed than by a poor woman who dwelt in one of the darkest and most wretched quarters of our city. Away from her native home, and without one earthly friend, she had floated here, a stranger in a strange land, to sink into the most abject poverty; her condition but one degree better than our Saviour's. In common with the fox, she had a hole to lay her head in. Yet, although poor and outwardly wretched, she was a child of God, one of the jewels which, if sought for, we should sometimes find in dust-heaps. With a bashfulness not unnatural, she had shrunk from exposing her poverty to the stare of well-robed congregations, resorting on Sabbath days to the wellappropriate place where a pious man was wont to preach to ragged outcasts, crying in the name of Jesus, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. Supposing, in my ignorance of this, that she was living, like the mass around her, in careless neglect of her soul, I began to warn her. Nor shall I soon forget how she interrupted me, and, drawing herself up with an air of humble dignity, and half offended, said, Sir, I worship at the well; and am sure that if we are true believers in Jesus, and love him, and try to follow him, we shall never be asked at the judgment day, Where did you worship? Well said, and well shot, thou poor one; that arrow hits the mark! And as I hold no other creed, nor admit anything to be of vital importance but genuine heaven-born faith, let me ask, Are you true believers? Blessed are you! Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! Are you unbelievers, impenitent, ungodly? You may by

profession belong to a church which holds the head, and holds truth, and has, in God's providence, been honored to testify and suffer for it; but what of that? There is no safety in that. On the contrary, you appear only the more offensive to a holy God. A spot looks worse on the face of beauty; Satan looked most hateful when he stood among the sons of God; and, as I have observed at funerals in the winter time, skulls never look so grim, nor the churchyard mould so black, as when they have been flung on a bank of snow. Trust not in your church, nor say, "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are we." Judgment shall begin at the house of God.

III. Christ's body, in a sense, embraces all those churches which hold the essential truths of the gospel.

It was the misfortune of Europe that Charles V. did not learn at an early period of his life the lesson which he was afterwards taught in a Spanish cloister. It had saved him much treasure, the world much bloodshed, and his soul much sin. After vainly attempting to quench the light of the Reformation, and make all men think alike, this great monarch, resigning his crown, retired to a monastery. Wearied, perhaps, with the dull round of mechanical devotions, he betook himself, in the mechanical arts, to something more congenial to his active mind. After long and repeated efforts, he found that he could not make two time-pieces go alike, two machines, that had neither mind nor will, move in perfect harmony. Whereupon, it is said, he uttered this memorable reflection, What a fool was I to attempt to make all men think alike! Unfortunately for the peace of the church and for the interests

of Christian charity, Charles the king has had more followers than Charles the philosopher.

There is a broad line of distinction between the essentials and the circumstantials of the faith. Yet what violent, what unnatural attempts at uniformity have men made, as if uniformity were a law of God! It is on no such model that he has constructed our world. God, while he preserves unity, delights in variety. A dull, dreary, uninteresting uniformity, is quite foreign to nature. Look at the trees of the forest! all presenting the same grand features, what variety in their forms! Some, standing erect, wear a proud and lofty air; some, modest-like, grow lowly and seek the shade; some, like grief, hang the head and have weeping branches; some, like aspiring and unscrupulous ambition, climb up by means of others, killing what they climb by; while some, rising straight and tall, with branches all pointing upwards, present in their tapering forms emblems of the piety that spurns the ground and seeks the skies. Or look at the flowers, what variety of gay colors in a meadow! Or look at mankind, what variety of expression in human faces, of tones in human voices! There are no two faces alike, no two flowers alike, no two leaves alike, I believe no two grains of sand alike. In that variety God manifests his exhaustless resources, and Nature possesses one of her most attractive charms. And why insist on all men observing a uniform style of worship, or thinking alike on matters that are not essential to salvation? You might as well insist on all men wearing the same expression of face, or speaking in the same tone of voice; for I believe that there are as great natural and constitutional differences in the minds as in the bodies of men.

How tolerant was Paul of differences! Forgetting how he bore even with errors which would now-a-days call down prompt excommunication on their authors, men, insisting on uniformity in the mere circumstantials of religion, have rent the church and sown the seeds of discord far and wide. Praying all the while for the peace of Jerusalem, they have made the church of Christ present such a melancholy spectacle as Jerusalem itself exhibited when, the Roman without and famine within, different factions raged in the city, and the Jews, fired by ferocious passions, plunged their swords into each other's bosoms.

His church has not followed her Lord's example. They were thieves and murderers whom Christ cleared out of the temple. But, struck with frenzy, aiming at an impossible uniformity, his followers have driven. their brethren out, while Religion has stood by, wringing her hands, like Rachel weeping for her children, because they were not. No man, says the Bible, hateth his own flesh. What sane man consents to part with an arm or limb unless it be dead or incurably diseased? But churches, possessed, if not of a devil, yet of the greatest folly, have cut off their living members for no other offence than some small differences, some petty trifling sore, which the progress of time or the balm. of kindness would have healed. I do not deny that there have been justifiable separations. There must needs be offences; and it does not follow that the woe pronounced on those by whom offences come falls on the party stigmatized as separatists. It is they who, creating wrongs or refusing redress, compel men of tender conscience to leave a church, that are guilty, if there be schism, of its sin.

Divisions are bad things, Do not fancy that I have

any sympathy with those who, confounding charity with indifference, regard matters of religion as not worth disputing about. Such a state of death is still worse than war. Give me the roaring storm rather than the peace of the grave. Division is better than such union as the frost produces, when with its cold and icy fingers it binds up into one dead, congealed, heterogeneous mass, stones and straws, pearls and pebbles, gold and silver, iron and clay, substances that have nothing in common. Yet divisions are bad things. They give birth to bad passions. They cause Ephraim to envy Judah, and Judah to vex Ephraim. Therefore, what we ought to aim at, is to heal them, and where we cannot heal them, to soften their asperities. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." "Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called the children of God." If for conscience's sake Christian men must part, oh, that they would part, saying with Abraham, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, for we are brethren. Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.

"The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree." But it may not be the will of God that his church, in its collective character, should ever present, in this world, the characteristic feature of that beautiful tree. The palm has a peculiar port. It rises tall and graceful in one straight stem without a single branch, up to the leafy plumes that wave above the desert sands and form its graceful crown. The church, throwing out many goodly and fruitful boughs, may ever present apparent variety in actual unity-like that giant oak which, with its roots in the rock and its head in the skies, throws