A sermon upon any important subject is always a piece of unfinished work. I once heard a famous preacher say that he could preach throughout his whole life on the text, "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," and even then have something left to say. The statement illustrates the many-sidedness of truth, and the multitude of its relations to the life of the individual and the world. Any sensible preacher knows that, within the compass of a single sermon, he can only present a single aspect of a great and important truth, yet he is criticized as if it had been expected that the work of a dozen volumes could be crowded into the utterances of half an hour. What is called an "exhaustive" sermon would exhaust an audience long before it would its subject. A sermon is only the dab of a brush upon a great picture, and if it gives a single striking view of a single great truth, it accomplishes its object. It must necessarily be an unfinished piece as regards its exposition of truth; and the same may be said of any essay on any subject. Every writer begins in the middle of things, and leaves off in the middle of things; and every thing he writes relates at some point to every thing that everybody has written. No man cleans up the field over which he walks, and leaves nothing to be said; and the best we do is unfinished work. There are those who, in view of the sin and suffering which appear on every hand, are moved to impugn the goodness and love of Him who created the world by His power, and sustains and orders it by His providence. Millions are whelmed in the darkness of heathenism; other millions are bound by the chains of slavery; the oppressor is clothed in purple and fine linen; the beautiful and innocent are the victims of treacherous lust; children cry for bread beneath the windows of luxury; justice is denied to the poor by men who take bribes of wealth; and deceit circumvents and baffles honor. Such a world as this the critics condemn as a failure, which reflects alike upon the benevolence and power of its Maker; but these men have an eminent place among the fools who criticize half-finished work. If they could have witnessed the creation of the earth, and watched it through all the processes by which it was prepared for the reception of the human race, they would doubtless have been quite as critical as they are now, and quite as unreasonable. Suppose a man should visit his pear-trees in midsummer, and on tasting the fruit upon them, should condemn them and order them to be cut down and removed--how should we characterize his folly? He has criticized half-finished fruit, and made a fatal mistake. It is just as unreasonable to condemn a half-finished world as a half-finished pear. Human society must be brought to perfection by regularly instituted and slowly operating processes. It may take as long to perfect society as it did to create the world that it lives on; and God is not to be found