ing, was a daily sight, feasting the eyes of an unrestrained, almost irresponsible tyranny. Names are not things; yet we are prone to this confusion. He is in no wise free whom Christ hath not made free. Pride and passion claim citizenship in the soul's commonwealth as well as reason and conscience. With which is the victory? He who is the slave of profit and lust is the only slave in the eyes of God. He only is free in whom all baseness is dead, and in whose heart the Spirit of our blessed Father reigns supreme. The march towards this realization is progress. And no century, since the first, has been wholly idle. We may decry the present, and sorrow that the former times were better than these; but this we can do only in our ignorance of the past and inappreciation of the present. There are more souls to-day baptized into the image of Christ than ever before. Government and society defer more to subjects than to sovereigns. For centuries there was only a small discipleship outside the Visible Church: to-day the Visible Church is the merest fraction of Christ's invisible following. The Jew and barbarian do him reverence, and pure souls everywhere "crown him Lord of all." We are not in isolation: we are in a noble and holy fellowship. Our brothers of the free faith are in all climes. You greet them as the citizens of all soils. One knows them by the signs of a spiritual freemasonry; for they love virtue, and plan and labor for its enlargement. This is to be the constant, as it has been the recently added, joy of my life, to know that no land is without its witnesses for God, each man in his own way and after his own kind. We, then, are members one of another, and all of Christ. The world belongs to us, and we belong to the world. Its history, its treasures of art, its wealth of literature, its noble men and women, its holy thoughts and working hands, its human sighs and undried tears, its burdens and griefs,-"all things are ours, we are Christ's, and Christ is God's." |