the wisest as well as of the simplest, will be recognized; the salvation of God will be hailed by the children of God, and, as has well been recorded, within forty years after the fiercest persecution of Diocletian, a Christian shall reign over the empire. For let men relate what to them is a chapter of momentous life-experience, let them tell of the power by which they love and labor and suffer, and they will be heard and heeded; and though they may be slain, their truth will live, and get victories proportioned always to the obstinacy and cruelty of the opposition which it at first called forth.

Let us see your Gospel, saith the world. Let us see how it works. Truth is a hundred times truth when it comes out as experience, when it is seen to be a peculiar power accomplishing its own appointed work of redemption, a vital force in the mind and heart and outward life of man. If we could make Christians simply by singing, or praying, or talking Christianity, by rehearsing its inspired Scriptures, they were read in the Jewish synagogues every Sabbath day, or by citing the experiences and examples of believers of former times, the task would be an easy one; the world would be soon converted. But God has wisely ordered, that only the living shall communicate life; that only they who have reproduced Christianity in their own being and conversation, and have authenticated it for their own souls by living and walking in its spirit, shall be able to make it real to the world about them. Those who saw it in Jesus, and heard it from his lips of inspiration, and gave themselves up to that mighty and gracious influence, were persuaded; they in their turn were able to persuade others; and so the divine life of faith and love is transmitted from age to age, and according to the poverty or the abundance of the Church in this spiritual wealth, its work languishes or is speeded.

Christianity grows only so far forth as it lives. Let it become a tradition or a form, and the world will turn away from its preaching and its worship, and all its institutions, to the realities of this life, the strong and beautiful of earth. When men who think upon other subjects fail to think upon the subject of religion, only throw dust in each other's eyes, and repeat the thoughts of men which they have never verified, or even have learned to distrust, they will cease to understand and will fail to meet the intellectual scepticism of the times. If they write books of evidences, they will convert no infi

dels; it is well if they do not make infidels of believers. When the Gospel becomes, to those who profess to believe it, a mere sanctuary and Sunday thing, only a refuge to which in great straits they betake themselves, or one of the respectabilities of life, when it ceases to be the deliverance, the inspiration, the strength, the joy of the soul, the pearl of great price, they will not show it forth in its power and beauty, whether by word or work; they will not speak as the oracles of God, or live as the children of God. Their lips may talk religion, but their actions will plead for worldliness. Others will contrive to live without the Gospel, just as they contrive to live without it.

Our world is called, by those who moralize and exhort for it, and cease not day and night in holy commonplaces, besotted and blind. And so it is; but it is also very discerning, as wise, any day, as many of its teachers, often seeing quite through and far beyond them. The world is very sure to acknowledge a real force. You need not concern yourself greatly about ways and means, where a genuine conviction is struggling to express itself. Cure a sufferer of some terrible disease by a special treatment, and he will not cease to commend this treatment to others. You can hardly persuade him to talk of anything else. Read what our great adopted naturalist said of his favorite pursuits, in his beautifully eloquent, because so earnest, clear, and simple, plea before the committee of the Legislature of Massachusetts, last winter, and you will find yourself, for the hour at least, filled with his spirit, carried away by his enthusiasm. He has his speciality, understands it, loves it, believes in it; and that is a blessing to any man. You perceive at once that he is giving you of his life; you are the richer for listening to him. If the virtue is in us, it will go out from us. If it is not in us, our talk about the Gospel is a weariness, our means and methods poor creaking or clattering machinery. The more we have of them, the worse; and the sooner we are done with them, the better.

Only Christians can make Christians. Christ first, then they who are Christ's at his coming. For this reason the Christian who cannot make Christians should suspect his Christianity. It can hardly be the real thing. For this reason the Christian holds himself accountable for those who are not Christians. If we really believe in the Gospel with the whole force of our being, as men of

the world believe in trade and manufactures, we shall make others believe in it. If men and women felt that Christianity was indispensable to their peace, it would not matter whether they heard it from wise or simple, in elegant churches or in upper rooms, in houses of worship within a stone's throw or at the distance of a few squares. We are dying of traditions and forms. As George Fox once said to Cromwell, we have the Scriptures, but have lost the spirit that wrote them. We are trying to convert others, and are only half converted ourselves. We are forever telling men what Christianity once was, instead of showing them what it is now. And so, whilst the believing or the conforming walk soberly to church, and indulge in the luxury of choir and pulpit, the cities and villages swarm with multitudes to whom Christianity is nothing but an old fable, or at best an entertainment for the better sort. If a true and beautiful life before God and man is just as impossible without Christ in the nineteenth century as the Apostles and early Christians believed it to be in the first, then the Christian's work is before him, and "as much as in him is" he will preach the Gospel, not only from the pulpit and in stated ways, but everywhere and in all ways. If it be indeed so, it cannot be so hard to show it. What our world needs just now, is not so much eloquent preachers as men and women who believe in the Gospel and live the Gospel. Without these, we may build houses of worship, but the people will not go to them; we may set up preachers, but the people will not listen to them; we may scatter Bibles, but the people will neglect or scoff at them; we may print tracts, but the people will throw them aside, as so much dreary shot rubbish, which indeed they largely are. Give them the light of life, the eloquence of deep conviction, the speech of burning hearts, — let the Holy Ghost dwell in you and speak by your lips, and make your life a hymn of praise and masterpiece of beauty, and you shall no more need to commend the Gospel to men, than you shall need to stand by the Falls of Niagara and tell the beholder that it is a marvel of sublimity and beauty. As much as in us is, not one whit more than that, can we preach the Gospel. When its fulness is the heart's abundance, it lives and sings and works, not by the will or wit of man, but by the grace of God.

12*

E.

SUNSET ON MOUNT WASHINGTON.

On Friday afternoon not only the bottles of heaven seemed to be poured out, but the hogsheads and reservoirs, and the rain did not come in drops so much as in masses, like sea-breakers over a deck. Saturday morning the sky was murky as ever, and a set of rather sour-looking fellows streamed off homeward from the Crawford House, evidently out of sorts with Nature for having kept up such a dreadful pother over their heads for ten days in succession. A round, fat man got into the wrong stage, usurping the seat of a lean, nervous man. The lean, nervous man muttered and growled, and the round, fat man swore some confirmatory oaths, as the stage rolled off and splashed through water and mire into the Notch. Then Nature, as if having waited to be rid of these fellows, changed her mood, rolled her clouds off out of sight, and Sunday morning Mount Washington and his whole staff peered up in the blue serene, as saying, “ Come up hither."

There was to be a sermon that Sunday morning at the Crawford House. People looked solemn, and thought it our duty to stay and hear it. Albeit a very good preacher was enlisted, I knew there must be better sermons up in the sky regions, where Sunday, before it has come down and touched the common earth, retains its breezy vigor fresh from the peace of God. About noon, we were standing on the top of the Tip-top House, with half of New England unrolled beneath us. O such sermons as came out legible on that open page!

Do not imagine, however, that you have seen Mount Washington, if you have only been there by daylight. Endless piles of mountains with their winding valleys, lying in smoke and haze, dimly seen through voluptuous dream-light! Away to the west sweeps the Green Mountain range: the sun must go down there somewhere, and I will wait and see him set after the other sight-seers have gone. Already they are returning, stringing off down the bridle-path. I sit and watch them till they look like mice creeping down into nonexistence, and the sublime feeling comes over me, "Alone with Nature and the God that fashioned us both." Rather humiliating, too, for if those sight-seeing ladies and gentlemen just dwindled into mice and thence into grasshoppers beneath me, how must I appear

to the angels still higher up, while I sit here waiting to see Mount Washington under his coronal of stars?

Looking westward, the valley of the Ammonoosuc lies right under my feet, threaded by its winding river, and away beyond, pile after pile, the Green Mountain ridges stretch, visible almost from the Catskill height to the Canada line. Lying on the rocks, I wait to see how that region will light up under the evening twilight. I could not have imagined the reality, nor can pen or pencil describe it. There the sun goes down through ridges of cloud piled half-way to the zenith, and seeming like a mass continuous with the mountain piles below. And all are shaded off at sunset with purple and gold and blue. Near at hand, the Ammonoosuc Valley lies black with shade. The range beyond takes on a deep blue tinge. The range beyond that is light cerulean, and shades off into purple. Then there is one of pure gold. Then there is a ridge with sarcenet edgings. Then there is another, and then another, and by this time the eye has got half-way up the sky, and it cannot distinguish the line where sky and mountain join together. The whole west, from the valley right below clear up into the welkin where the stars are coming out, is fused into one grand picture, beginning with dark gray and ending with the flame colors in all their imaginable comminglings. And the lakes, which hardly appear in the noon-day haze, come out in that gorgeous twilight, and reflect its changing hues, and they dot that great western expanse with studs of gleaming silver or blazing fire. It is as if the Great Spirit had gone off through the west with his robe floating back, dropping down fold after fold, the upper ones compacted flame and purple, the lower ones gray and blue, ablaze with gold and silver spangles. It is such an unrolling of the robes of Omnipotence as is worth going round the earth to see, and, once seen, enriches the memory forever and feeds the spirit of meditation, "flashing on the inward eye," and rendering solitude ever after an impossibility. For how can there ever be solitude with such a picture hung up in the galleries of memory, on which the inward eye can ever turn back to gaze?

Artists have a way of looking at natural scenery which idealizes the picture. Lying on the tip-top rocks, I saw near me a painter whose spirit was "drinking the spectacle." "Lay your head upon your hand," said he, " and let your eye sweep the scene horizontally.”