light of the Bible. O, what joy it gave them, when it came forth; now no longer speaking in an unknown tongue, but in every man's own language, wherein he was born. Germans and Brittons; Hol landers and French; Italians and Spaniards; Hunga rians and Bavarians; Normans, Danes, Swedes, and all.

Then, too, it should not be forgotten that this was just at the time when the newly discovered art of printing had prepared the way to give wings to the word of God, like the angel of the Apocalypse flying, mid-heaven for its mission, to the nations of the world, as never could have been done before.

The Great Awakening, two hundred years later, now one hundred years ago, was just in time to arrest the lapsing church in its downward course, and give it a great impulse upward and onward in preparation for what has come since, and what is now coming, and what is yet to come in the future. To the great central doctrine of justification by faith revived before in the Reformation, the fact of the new birth, as an experience for all, was now added to the faith of the church in the great awakening. And this just at the moment when the churches of America were in the plastic state, ready to take the Whitefieldian and Wesleyan and Edwardean type, as older churches in older lands were slow to do. And at the moment, too, when India fell under British rule, to be opened to Christianity in due time.

GATHERING EVENTS.

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And now in the intervening hundred years, O how great events have thickened. The old slow march seems to have hastened into double quick time, and the single file to have formed up into the order of platoons. The Missionary Era, commencing fifty years ago, just when simultaneously Bibles began to multiply through the multiplying power of Bible societies, and missionaries began to rise up, to go out into all the world, and the church began to combine to send them, and the nations began to throw open their doors to receive them, and commerce began to spread its wings anew to take them, and steam power began to develop the superiority of Christian nations in all the arts of life, and stimulate commerce to carry Christian fabrics into all heathen nations. Just then a new life began in the church, under the unfolding power of the great commission, which for ages had been allowed to sleep, but now was proclaimed from every pulpit and by every Christian press of Christendom.

As years roll on the natural sciences unfold and lead even skeptical minds to abandon atheism and pantheism and come upon the platform of revelation. All machinery is improved. Railroads are invented. Ships are enlarged, and steam is harnessed in to be our servant of all works on sea and land. Electricity is drilled also into service, and a network of veins and arteries is created, producing a grand system of thought circulation, fast binding the nations together

into one, or at least bringing them face to face within speaking distance of each other. The printing press is increased by a thousand fold in its productive power, and the gold fields of California, Australia, and the north open up their treasures, and pour a golden current into the commercial arteries of the world. And just now, in the midst of all this, God comes down in the power of His spirit and arouses the young men and the business men, the laymen and the laywomen, as well as office bearers in the church, to meet and pray and work for the Master, and such a revival begins as the world has never witnessed before. Hope rises up and begins to stretch forward to the great battle and final triumph. And what now is needed? What now would be the timely work? and what now the timely truth? There is now more than ever needed two things. First, the millenial type of Christian character and life.

Second, the spiritual strength and endurance to carry the church onward and upward unswervingly to and through the conflict and triumph before us. And these two are one, and this one is the experience of full salvation through full trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER III.

THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE.

THE present is ever the stepping-stone of the future. Each stage of progress is the bud of the next. Conviction prepares the way for conversion ; conversion leads to sanctification; sanctification culminates in glory; and glory begun is the entrance upon an endless career of progress in wisdom and knowledge, beneficence and bliss.

In the history of the kingdom, the dread of wrath and death induced by the flood, prepared the way for the law; the law was the school-master to drill the world into readiness for the gospel; the coming of Christ and his death laid the foundations for the temple to be reared by the Holy Spirit, and he is now erecting the temple, stone by stone, course upon course, story above story, in preparation for the millennium and the kingdom of glory.

The present be a round in near to the top.

the now present, would seem to the heavenward-stretching ladder One step more, or two at most,

so it seems at least to us poor short-sighted mortals, and the summit will be gained.

What, then, are the now unfolding germs preparing the way for the incoming period?

Three things may be confidently predicted of the church of the future- its UNITY, ACTIVITY and SPIRITUALITY.

In the prayer of Jesus with his disciples on the night of his betrayal, the unity of his followers was coupled with the spread of the knowledge that Jesus is the Messiah of God as its cause, "That they all may be one," prayed the Saviour," that the world may know that thou hast sent me."

One! Yes; the disciples of Christ are yet in the future, sometime, sooner or later, to become.completely united, and then the world will know that he is the Messiah of God.

This prayer of Jesus is to have its happy fulfil. ment — When? When, if not in the period next approaching, and now at the doors?

What is the watchword of the present? Union. Fifty years ago now, it may be more or less, God began the visible preparations for the fulfilment of this prayer. First in England. The missionary spirit was poured into the heart of an obscure cobler upon his bench, and as he cut the leather into shape, and pounded it upon his lapstone into solidity, and drew the waxed ends stitching together shoes for his customers, he was cutting out, com