All Saints' Day

“After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.” — REV. vii. 9, 10.

IN the calendar of the Church to-day is set apart to be celebrated as All Saints’ Day. Besides the special commemorations of particular saints, as St. Peter and St. John, one day is given to the commemoration of the great general idea of Sainthood. It seems to gather in all the multitude of the holy, in every age, and bids us think of their characters and follow in their steps. Its Collect prays that “we may so follow God’s blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys which He has prepared for those who unfeignedly love Him.-” This idea of one life follow ing after and strengthening itself by another life which has gone before it seems to be the great idea of All Saints’ Day, and to this I invite your study to-night. It opens wide subjects of religion and of life.

What is there in the world for each of us that would not be here if others had not lived before us, if we were the first generation that ever peopled this populous earth of ours? What are the legacies that the past sends down to us,? Let us see. First, there are certain circumstances, such as government and society, social improvements, cities, and railroads, and houses, all art, all the furniture and tools of life. All these things men have gradually, in the course of ages, invented and worked out, and they are permanent, and have come down to us in their accumulation. All that makes earth something else than a primeval wilderness when we step into it, — all this is the great bequest of circumstances. Then, besides these, there are certain truths; all the knowledge that man has ever won, of physics, of metaphysics, of morals, of religion, of beauty, — all this we have not to win over again for ourselves. The truths come down to us all found, and we have only to take them and use them. Certain circumstances then and certain truths. These are great legacies surely. But, beside these, there is another gift — of certain inspirations which we find waiting for us in the world. Men have left behind them not only the systems and structures that they built, and the truths that they discovered, but their examples, their enthusiasms, and their standards. The impulse and contagion of their work is waiting everywhere to breathe itself into ours. A thousand incentives to use the circumstances and to learn the truths, a thousand impulses to action press on the new-born life out of the past. The men who are gone seem to have left behind them in the world much of their power of vitality; and I suppose hardly a day passes in which we do not do some act, small or great, under this kind of inspiration from our predecessors, something that we should not have done, or should have done differently, if, even with all the machinery of living and all the truths that we know now, we had had no predecessors, had been the first tenants of our earth.

The power of this inspiration comes in various ways. In some degree it is the mere force of hereditation. Some tastes and tendencies we get in our very blood, just as we get the shape of our features or the color of our eyes. This of course confines the influence to a very narrow range. Then there is the distinct power of example. We see that other men have done certain things, and that they turned out well, and we say we will do the same. Our forefathers have set the step for the great journey of life; they have found out where the quagmires and where the solid ground is likeliest to lie, and we cannot do better than follow in their steps. But besides and above all these, they have set up certain ideals of character, not reducible to precise rules of action, with which we enter into sympathy, and to whose likeness our lives almost unconsciously attempt to shape themselves.

This power of influence may belong to all the past in general. Out of all the living that men have done what young man has not seen gather one complete and total image of what the human life should be? From all the multitude of failures and successes rises up the picture of a true, successful manhood, — the perfect man. That ia our leader. Not in any special man, but generally, this ideal of manhood tempts and inspires and entices us to action.

Or yet again we see that power incorporate itself in K>me great man. Dead or alive, past or contemporary, some mighty character stands out and says, “Come, fol low me;” and who can explain the subtle fascination that reaches everywhere, and lays hold of all kinds of men, and turns their lives out of their course to follow his course; to be with him in some sympathy of purpose, and, if possible, to be like him in some similarity of nature? “As I take it,” says Carlyle, “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.” So all absorbing seems in his philosophy the leadership of the leaders.

We may go farther than this, and analyze the power of leadership that great men have. It is of three kinds.

‘It may rest in either of three things: 1st. It may be in mere strength of personality. Mere strong individuality, showing itself in any act of prowess, attracts men and influences them. In this case the leader is what we call a hero, — a Charlemagne or Napoleon or Csesar. Or,

- 2d. It may be in some truths that he teaches. The leader may lead men by the power of ideas, of superior knowledge. Then the leader is a teacher. Such leaders were Plato and Shakespeare and Bacon. Or, 3d, and above all, it may be in a certain thing which we call holiness, which we cannot define otherwise than that it is a larger and more manifest presence of God in the life of one man than other men have, — more sympathetic nearness to Divinity, which makes men feel that he, more than they, embodies the Divine Spirit and utters the Divine will; that he shows God to them. This is the leadership of the saint. These are the three: the hero, the teacher, and the saint. These are the leaders, the inspirers of men. To each of these we attach ourselves, and draw out strength from them; strength for action from the hero, strength for thought from the teacher, strength for piety and goodness from the saint.

We have reached then this distinctive definition of the saint. He is the man whose power comes of his holiness, — of his godlikeness. It is a special kind of power; and it is the strongest kind of power where it can be brought to bear at all. It must be so because religion is the profoundest interest of our nature, and religious association and religious admiration lay mightier hold of us than any other. There is an attitude which man assumes toward God different from that which he can take toward any of his fellow-beings. Now in the hero man feels that there is something of God’s power, but by no means, of necessity, any of God Himself. All power comes from God; but, horribly misused and perverted as it often is”, no man can fall down in adoration before the violent destructiveness of strong personality as it shows itself in a Caesar or an Attila. And in the teacher there is God’s truth, because all truth is God’s, but the teacher is only the glass through which it shines; at best the glass which condenses and applies its rays; and everybody feels that it is the light and not the glass which he must worship. But in the saint, in the embodiment of holiness among men, there is something more than the mere power or the mere truth of God. Here is something of God Himself, a real abiding presence of divinity; and the attitude which the observer takes towards Him has somewhat of the character with which he bows himself even before God. The hero demands astonished admiration; the teacher challenges obedient reverence; but the saint wins a sympathetic, loving awe.

It is not easy to make this plain in definitions, but when you call up your experience, I am sure that you must understand me. A purely good man, a holy man, a man whose life and nature you saw always luminous with the presence of God in every thought and act and word, — have you never been conscious of some power in his presence; or if he were dead, of some power in the image of what he was that grew up in you as you read or heard about him, utterly unlike that which far greater men had over you. He was no hero and no teacher. You felt no wonder at his ability, and found no intellectual delight in what he told you, but he brought God close to you. Why, I know books vivid with such a life into which one steps as into the presence of God. I have seen rooms where such men or such women, weak and ignorant perhaps, were breathing out their long days of suffering, which were very Holies of Holies. They conducted divinity wonderfully. They made God real, and interpreted Him with something of the power of the incarnate deity of Christ.

I am anxious to connect our whole notion of sainthood with this idea of power. Saints, as we often think of them, are feeble, nerveless creatures, silly and effeminate, the mere soft padding of the universe. I would present true sainthood to you as the strong chain of God’s presence in humanity running down through all history, and making of it a unity, giving it a large and massive strength able to bear great things and to do great things too. This unity which the line of sainthood gives to history is the great point that shows .its strength. You go to your saint and find God working and manifest in him. He got near to God by some saint of his that went before him, or that stood beside him, in whom he saw the Divine presence. That saint again lighted hia fire at some flame before him; and so the power of the sainthoods animates and fills the world. So holiness and purity, and truth and patience, daring and tenderness, hope and faith, are kept constant and pervading things in our humanity. Each man has not to begin and work them out from the beginning for himself. So there is a church of God as well as souls of God in the earth. This is the truth of All Saints.

And in this truth we get the great corrective that wo need of the continual tendency to solitariness and individuality in our religion. This church of all the sainta is a great power in the world. Every true servant of God must belong with this mighty service of God; must get his strength through it, and contribute his strength into it. Ever from out the past, from the old saints who lived in other times, from Enoch, David, Paul, and John, Augustine, Jerome, Luther, Leighton, there comes down the power of God to us. Because they were full of it, we, by association with them, grow fuller of it than we could be by ourselves. Our reverence and love for them becomes akin to, and bears like fruit in us with our reverence and love for God. Our faith mounts up with their exultant prayers. Our weak devotion, tired and drooping, rests against the strong pillars of their certain trust. Their quick sight teaches our half-opened eyes the way to look toward the light that shall unseal them wholly. How large a part of our godward life is travelled not by clear landmarks seen far off in the promised land, but as travellers climb a mountain peak, by putting footstep after footstep slowly and patiently into the prints which some one going before us, with keener sight, with stronger nerves, tied to us by the cord of saintly sympathy, has planted deep into the pathless snow of the bleak distance that stretches up between humanity and God. Take away holy example and the inspiration of holy men (and that I would call destroying the church, not the breaking to pieces of any external system, for that is the true apostolical saintly succession, the tactual succession of heart touching heart with fire); take that away and you would depopulate heaven. Only one bold, supreme soul here and there would still be able to scale the height alone, and stand triumphant in the glorious presence of God. And who can say what distortion and lack of symmetry there might be in its eternal character by the solitariness of its struggles. So we asuend by one another. We live by one another’s blessings, as we die by one another’s cursings. No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. We live and die not only to God but to each other.

And yet remember what we said about these saints who help us on our way. They were incorporations, not of the power, nor of the truth, but of the spirit or the character of God. Not heroes nor teachers, but distinctly saints. Now in God Himself all three, power and truth and character, must go together; all must be perfect in their perfect union in Him. And so they will, to some extent, in the saint, who is God’s copy; but not entirely. The saint is God’s child; and the child has the father’s character, but not his truth or his power. You are interested and inspired very likely when you see the child of a very great man showing his father’s qualities, interpreting his father to you, bringing you near to him; but you do not look to see the child of Caesar conquering an other empire, or the child of Shakespeare writing another Hamlet. You are surprised if he has not his father’s character. You are surprised if he has his father’s talent or his father’s knowledge.

This is important. The Romanist thinks that his saints must have some power of miracle. It is not enough for him that they were good godlike men and women, manifesting God in daily duty and the patient devotion of holy lives. His Blessed Virgin, and St. Peter and St. James, St. Joseph, St. Catharine, St. Jerome, and the rest, must heal the sick, and raise the dead, and tread on serpents, and wield the power of divinity over the forces of nature, and help men in their business, or they are no saints. Mere holiness is not enough. God’s power in their acts, as well as God Himself in their characters, seems to him necessary. And so we are overwhelmed with the torrent of stories of miracles of the saints, hung on improbably onto their lives, and hiding from us with their great misty halo of uncertainty the really certain holiness and nobleness of the great men and women who adorn the books of sainthood. And so he who believes those stories easily pauses at such near and convenient repositories of power, between himself and God, asks his blessing of his familiar saint, not of his unfamiliar deity, and so is really not helped nearer to God, but kept farther away from God by his saints. This is the practical working.

And not only among Romanists, but among some schools of Protestants, especially, perhaps, in our own church, there is another error of essentially the same character as this, that is always hampering the freedom of Christian life and the progress of Christian truth. We have seen that godliness of character ought not neces sarily to be supposed to imply the possession of divine miraculous power. But surely it is just as true that it does not imply any sort of miraculous di ine knowledge, or wisdom either. That poor saintly woman by whose hovel bedside you go and sit, and rise up edified and strengthened, feeling that you have been very near to God, it matters nothing to you that she is very ignorant, that you would not value her opinion on any knotty point of history, or doctrine, or economy. What have you to do with those things, sitting there by her. The head monopolizes life. It has more than its share of treasuries to draw on, and fountains to drink from, in the world. It is the poor heart, so often half-starved and thirsty, that is getting sweet refreshment as you sit and draw it from the rich godliness of the suffering saint. Now make this wider. Back in the history of the Christian Church runs the long pedigree of saintship which I have tried to paint before you. Age after age the qualities of God have been taken up into the holy lives of men; and honoring this truth of the perpetuated grace and holiness of the continual church, we call those great religious men who stand out in the several ages high above all the rest, the Fathers. There are the fathers of Primitive Christianity, the fathers of the Reformation, the fathers of the English Church, the fathers of our own American Episcopacy. We hear much in these days about the Fathers and their authority. There are some men who would coordinate their teaching with that of the New Testament, with Christ’s and the Apostles’. But if what we have said be true, is it not evident that however deeply we may reverence, however we may be illuminated by the sweet or splendid piety of those old men of God, there is no true presumption of any infallible wisdom, or any inspired knowledge in them, that should make either their views of truth, or their laws of church regulation, the necessary standards for our thought and action. Wise men, wonderful men, many of them most certainly were; and on the other hand many of them always, and almost all of them sometimes, wrote and talked puerilities and blunders, which are not strange when we consider the times in which they lived, but which compel us to believe that their reliableness as teachers must be tested by the ordinary laws by which we try all our teachers, and that they are to be believed only as they convince our reason, or conform to that higher authority of revelation which both they and we allow. From the substance of a doctrine down to the size of a diocese, or the color of a stole, men quote the Fathers of Nice and Alexandria and Rome. Others will tell us that just in this shape the truth of justification must be always held because Luther or Calvin taught it so. The Prayer-book of the English Reformers, and its adaptation by the first bishops of our own church, is clothed, by some people, with almost superstitious sanctity, as if to alter any jot or tittle in it were a sacrilege. This is not well. These men are patterns for our piety, not tyrants of our thought or action. They made mistakes in ritual and government and doc trine. And the old times in which they lived asked of them shapes of outward Christian life and church organization, which the same live religion that made them create them orders us to change. It is their holy temper that consecrates them to us. It is their godliness that makes them great. In that runs the

true chain of sainthood, linking the ages together and making the eternal unity of the church. Oh, there have been great souls behind us, brethren. The stream of truth may widen as the years roll on, and sweep us into harbors of thought and knowledge of which they never dreamed. We may unlearn things that they thought were certainties, and take for sure truths what they would have turned from as the wildest dreams. On the one rock we may build structures of an other shape from theirs. But does that make us greater than they were? Does it authorize us to be contemptuous and cast them off as useless? Has your mere schoolboy a right to say that he is greater than Plato, because he lives in a house full of luxuries, and can tell you of opinions in which Plato was mistaken, and knows facts that Plato never dreamed of. Pat them in their true place, and the Fathers are mighty. We bow before them as they stand through history and win their blessing. Let them not be made despots over us, and I will praise them with the loudest. A poor extemporized thing the church would be without them. If we learn more than they knew, we still owe it all to them, for we learn it all in the directions which their devout and faithful lives first indicated. We learn of God when we look steadily at them, and ‘thank Him for the blessing of the saints and fathers.

I have been anxious to point this out, this absence of power of miracle, or of authority in truth in the saints of the Christian Church, because we must have some doc trine of the sainthood which shall not for a moment dim or distort the leadership and perfect headship of the Christian, and the church which rests in Christ alone. He must do all our great works for us, and teach us all our great lessons. Better that the whole calendar were swept away and every saint forgotten, than that one of them should take anything from that perfect prerogative of Baviorship which is the Saviour’s own. But this need not be. Christ, as He leads us on to higher things, may still strengthen us with the company of those who have the same road to travel, and are walking it in the same strength. It surely does not lessen Christ to me as the supporter of my sickness, when on my sick-bed I call up the image of some sufferer of old, and see him patient in the power of a divine sympathy, which then I reach out and cry after with all the more certain assurance for my self. Christ is more utterly my sole resource in strong temptation, the only Being I can flee to, when I see strong men of the saintly histories turned into weakness before the power of evil, and fleeing in desperation to that same Christ, to be restrengthened with a higher power than the old. There is a use of the saints that can make Christ’ nearer, clearer, dearer to our souls. They may be like a mere atmosphere between our souls and Him, whose every particle, filled with Him, has passed on his life to the next particle, and so at last sent him down to us pure, as He is, uncolored with its own blueness, the “light that lighteth every man,” lighting us all the more brightly because it has lighted them.

We have been speaking almost altogether of the saints of old times. But our subject is “All Saints.” The question comes then, are there no saints to-day? Has the- race run out, or is there such a thing as a modern saint? Yes, surely, I reply. If sainthood means what we have said, the indwelling, the manifest indwelling of God in man, then there must be many a very saintly saint in these late days of ours. We can well conceive in deed that there may be fewer supreme preeminent saints, fewer outreaching pinnacles of grace in the long ranges of spiritual life. There does seem to be something arbitrary in our modern canonizations, both Protestant and Romish, some absence of reason why this or that one should be chosen for the aureole or the biography, more than a multitude of others who seemed quite as manifestly full of God as he. This is conceivable. As all civilization and human culture advances, great men become less com mon and less marked. As the general level rises the mountain-tops are less prominent. And so as the presence of God in humanity becomes more visible every where (and in spite of all men say, I believe there never has been a time whose large spiritual level was so high as that in which we thank God that we live), as spirituality grows more common the sainthoods stand out less marked from their surroundings. It is conceivable that a time of such general elevation may come, in this world or another, that the promontories shall be all lost in the lofty table land of millennial goodness and nobleness.

Still there are saints enough if we only know how to find them. The result of what I have just spoken of will be that all saintliness now will have less a miraculous and strange appearance, will far more blend in with and manifest itself through the channels of the most familiar life. The old idea of sainthood demanded miracles of those whom it admitted to its calendars. The Church of Rome still makes the same demand. All makes the sainthood an exceptional, irregular, unusual thing. We cannot surely think that this idea has anything like the real nobleness of that other which conceives that the highest holiness will not work miracles, but only do its duty; will busy itself, not with unusual, but with famil ial things, and make itself manifest, not in prodigies, but in the ordinary duties of a common life.

Indeed to ask for miracles, as exhibitors of character, is always the sign of feeble insight and feeble faith. The true father does not ask his son for prodigies of submission to approve his filial loyalty. He sees it in the hourly look and walk of obedience. The headstrong Pharaoh could not see God until He showed Himself in the ten plagues. The loving David saw God in the quiet guidance of his daily life. “By Thee have I been holden up from the womb,” he says. I have been struck by a fine instance of this discernment of God, not in miracles, but in the ordinary course of providence, which occurs in the history of Martin Luther. It was a time when things were going very hard with him, a time when all the human props of the Reformation seemed ready to fall away. It was then that “I saw not long since,” cried Luther, “a sign in the heavens.” Then you begin to listen for some startling prodigy. A falling star, a pillar of fire, a blazing cross held out against the sky. Certainly some miracle is coming. But hear what does come. *’ I was looking out of my window at night, and beheld the stars, and the whole majestic vault of God, held up without my being able to see the pillars on which the Master had caused it to rest. Men fear that the sky may fall. Poor fools! Is not God always there? “That is all. That is his “sign in the heavens.” It is a miracle; but only that old miracle that has been shown nightly since the heavens and the stars were made, that you and I will see when we go out to-night. The eye that sees God there is more clear and more blessed than the eye that has to be scared into seeing Him by lightnings and by firebrands. It is not, if we understand it rightly, a sign of decreasing, but of increasing spirituality, that miracles have ceased. And so it is a truer discrimination that recognizes the presences of God in men, the saints that are in the world, not by the miracles they work but by the miracles they are, by the way in which they bring the grace of God to bear on the simple duties of the household and the street. The sainthoods of the fireside and of the market-place — they wear no glory round their heads; they do their duties in the strength of God; they have their martyrdoms and win their palms, and though they get into no calendars, they leave a benediction and a force behind them on the earth when they go up to heaven.

Every time that we say our Creed, to-night, for instance, we profess that we “believe in the communion of saints.” I hope that all which we have said has made it a little clearer to us what is the meaning of that article of faith. All the souls, everywhere, in whom God dwells, dwell together in virtue of that occupation. They may be separated very far. They may not know each other’s tongue. The Divine presence in them may take the most utterly various forms of expression. Their works in life may be entirely distinct. All these are things external. They live together as they both abide in God. The symbols of that inner life are many; the multitudinous life itself is one. I have preached of the saint as leader. This article of the Creed brings in a higher thought, — the saint as brother and companion. It is a higher aspect of the same thought, rather, for the two are really one. The highest leadership does not stand above its flock to rule them. It comes down among them, and is one of them. And the completest brotherhood is not mere company; it aids and feeds and ministers to its brethren.

It is leadership also. So that the leader is the brother, and the brother is the leader, and saint is both to saint. The communion of saints is a mutual ministry of saints. It is a noble thing to think of. Here, and in the antipodes; here, and in regions of thought and culture utterly estranged from ours; here, and in the lordliest cathedral and the lowliest camp-meeting; here, and in sick-rooms, in prisons, in poor-houses, in palaces, the great communion reaches. The Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints! Wherever men are praying, loving, trusting, seeking and finding God, it is a true body with all its ministries of part to part. Nay, shall we stop at that poor line, the grave, which all our Christianity is always trying to wipe out and make nothing of, and which we always insist on widening into a great gulf? Shall we not stretch our thought beyond, and feel the life-blood of this holy church, this living body of Christ, pulsing out into the saints who are living there, and coming back throbbing with tidings of their glorious and sympathetic life. It is the very power of this truth of ours to-day, that it lays hold on immortality. It leaps the gulf of death. David and Peter, part of the same body with us, already prophesy to us, the more sluggish and tardy members, of the great things that are before us, the final bright outcome of the struggle in which we are still so blindly toiling on; as the eager eyes send messages down to the slow laboring feet, of the green, soft fields before, on which they are already feasting, and on which, after a little more plodding toil, the tired feet shall rest. What we know of Christ becomes in some measure the property of all.

Angels, and living saints, and dead,

But one communion make:
All join in Christ, their vital head,

And of His love partake.

The true church, the only church worth living in or fighting for, is this communion of saints. It is the an swer to the Saviour’s prayer, “I in them and Thou in Me, that they all may be one in us.” Oh, when I think of what the church really is meaning all this time, — the fellowship of faith and goodness everywhere, — it does make me indignant to hear how some men talk of it in little narrow mechanical phrases, and think that they alone do it worthy honor.

And now do you ask me how can one enter into this society? “I would not stand outside of all this organism of holiness and truth. I would be in, as well as believe in, the ‘communion of saints.’” I have spoken poorly, indeed, unless you see the answer. The saint is he in whom God dwells. But God comes to dwell in men, by His Holy Spirit, in the great work of the personal regeneration. Do you ask then, “How shall I enter in to the company of saints?” You must yield yourself to that power of God which from your birth up until now has been waiting at your heart-doors, to enter in and fill your nature with itself. You have kept your heart full of selfishness. You must turn it all out, and take God in, and straightway, living by Him and for Him, you are one with the living saints and dead. Oh, wondrous moment of conversion! Out to the farthest limits of the perfect body there runs the tidings of a new member added to the unity. Is it strange that “there is joy in heaven?” This doctrine of the communion of the saints alone lots us realize that text. The saints of old know that the body of their Lord, the universal church, is nearer its completion. The saints who stand around feel their own spiritual life move quicker at the access of this new vitality. The whole body knows of it and rejoices with intenser life. The man himself, knowing Christ for his, knows all Christ’s brethren and followers his fellows in the holy unity of faith. Oh, wondrous moment of regeneration! Our church rites, our baptisms and confirmations, what we call “joining the church,” feebly tries to typify the great event. If the rites seem to you cold and hollow, and do not attract you, is there nothing in this great spiritual event to stir your heart, and make you say, “I, too, will be a Christian.”

And now ought there not to be a power to hold men back from sin in this great truth of all saints? The world seems very wrong and wicked. Vice has the upper hand. All is apparently drifting on from worse to worse. Sin has it all its own way. So it seems some times, and the young man says, •’ What is the use of fighting against the current? I never can do better. What is the use of trying? I must yield at last.” And just then, what if the clouds can open round him for one moment and let him see how in the old times, and to-day, there always has been, and still is, through all the wickedness, a compact and steady struggle of goodness in the world. Let him see the church as representing thus the sum of the presence of God in human action, struggling and living always, riding the storms, keeping alive the name of Christ, and the possibility of holiness among men. Let him hear this sainthood of the ages calling to him, “Come, come to us, come with us to God.” And is there not something in him to which, that call will appeal to spur him to one more attempt to make his escape, to burst his chains, to be a good man, and be saved. And having once heard that cry, can he go on and sin, with out feeling, always, that he is doubly obstinate; that he is setting himself not merely against God, but against his fellows too; that they are looking on with sorrow and with pity, as he goes to his self-chosen ruin? This is no illegitimate appeal. It does not dishonor the influence of God, the heavenly Father, when you plead also with a wicked boy, by all the love and high example of his holy earthly father or mother, to turn to nobler things. All is God’s influence, however it is brought to bear. And this you must know, — I tell it to you solemnly, — you cannot sin as if you were the first and only man that God ever made and put into the world. If you will sin, you sin against every high precedent of goodness; you tread on those examples of holiness that have made the world lustrous and sacred; you sweep away the inspiration of sainthood that comes down out of the past, and gathers up around you from the present, like the very breath of heaven; you turn away and go out, obstinately arid deliberately, not merely from the kingdom of God, but from the communion of saints. May God help you, and bring you back.

And now my work to-night is done if I can bid any of you away with this great presence of the saints of God surrounding you. Sin is disintegrating. It breaks up and scatters fellowships. It makes souls live and die in solitude. I appeal to you by all the holy society of Christianity. There is holiness all around you to help you and inspire you. You will have to suffer in doing right. Here are all the martyrs to be your company. You must find Christ and be forgiven by Him. Here is the multitude who have found Him, each with some story of mercy of his own to tell you, till your hopelessness of success shall turn into hope as you listen to them in spite of yourself. You will need patience. Behold all the waiters for God, each at his watching place in all the ages. You have bad habits to conquer. Here is the old battle-field, and the shouts with which other men who have fought down themselves by God’s help are hailing their victory in Him, shall be the prophecy of your tri umph as you go into the fight. You must not stand alone. All this strength is for you. Come in among these best souls that believe in and are finding God. I lift the words above all low formality that clings to them, and say, Come, join the Church. Not in mere outward act, but in true inward fellowship. Stand boldly -with those who are trying to work for God, and willing to suffer for God here; and then in the perfect communion of saints, you shall stand at last among that great multitude which no man can number, who out of all nations and kindreds and people and tongues shall stand before the throne and before the Lamb, clad with white robes, and with palms in their hands, crying with a loud voice, “Salvation to our God, who sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb.” May God grant it for us all.