There is a time when the children are all in one room, around their mother's knee. Then comes a time, still further on, when the first separation takes place, and some are leaving their home to prepare for after life. Afterwards, when all in their different professions, trades, or occupations, are separate. At last comes the time when some are gone. And, perchance, the two survivors meet at last--an old, gray-haired man, and a weak, worn-out woman--to mourn over the last graves of a household. Christian brethren, which of these is the right form--the true, external pattern of a family? Say we not truly, it remains the same under all outward mutations? We must think of this, or else we may lose heart in our work. Conceive for instance, the feelings of a pious Jew, when Christianity entered this world; when all his religious system was broken up--the Temple service brought to a violent end; when that polity which he thought was to redeem and ennoble the world was cast aside as a broken and useless thing. Must they not have been as gloomy and as dreary as those of the disciples, when He was dead who they "trusted should have redeemed Israel?" In both cases the body was gone or was altered--the spirit had arisen. And precisely so it is with our fears and unbelieving apprehensions now. Institutions pass--churches alter--old forms change--and high-minded and good men cling to these as if _they_ were the only things by which God could regenerate the world. Christianity appears to some men to be effete and worn out. Men who can look back upon the times of Venn, and Newton, and Scott--comparing the degeneracy of their descendants with the men of those days--lose heart, as if all things were going wrong. "Things are not," they say, "as they were in our younger days." No my Christian brethren, things are not as they then were; but the Christian cause lives on--not in the successors of such men as those; the outward form is altered, but the spirit is elsewhere, is risen--risen just as truly as the spirit of the highest Judaism rose again in Christianity. And to mourn over old superstitions and effete creeds, is just as unwise as is the grief of the mother mourning over the form which was once her child. She cannot separate her affection from that form--those hands, those limbs, those features--are they not her child? The true answer is, her child is not there. It is only the form of her child. And it is as unwise to mourn over the decay of those institutions--the change of human forms--as it was unwise in Jonah to mourn with that passionate sorrow over the decay of the gourd which had sheltered him from the heat of the noontide sun. A worm had eaten the root of the gourd, and it was gone. But he who made the gourd the shelter to the weary--the shadow of those who are oppressed by the noontide heat of life--lived on: Jonah's God. And so brethren, all things change--all things outward