The "parson's bell," as it was called, was now ringing, so the Vicar, having promised that his wishes should be fully carried out, was compelled to hasten into the church. He first laid his hand on the noble brow of the good old man, and pronounced the blessing of Heaven upon him, and then bade him farewell, adding, "I hope, my dear friend, we may be permitted to meet again in this earthly house of God; but if not, my heart-deep hope and prayer is, that we may meet in His house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens[207]." The little window that looked into the church from the sexton's chamber was opened, and none listened more earnestly to the festive service, and to the Vicar's sermon, on that Ascension Day than did old Matthew Hutchinson. Although it was a common practice with the Vicar on festivals not to preach from any particular passage of Holy Scripture, but simply to make the festival itself the subject of his discourse, yet on this occasion he selected these words as his text: "The patterns of things in the heavens[208]." He showed how that all this world of ours, in which so much that is beautiful and lovely has survived the fall, is full of patterns, or symbols, or types of things in that Heaven to which Christ has ascended; how that the whole Bible abounds with the most vivid symbolism and the most graphic imagery representative of the glories of that Heavenly kingdom; and then, looking round the beautiful church, now so richly adorned with its festive decorations, he explained how the earthly building, in its several parts, possessed a thousand patterns of those heavenly things which make up the spiritual fabric of the Church of Christ. "When we regard the material fabric of the Christian Church," he said, "as a type of the spiritual house, ever rising higher and higher in honour of its Divine Founder, of which the saints on earth and the saints in Heaven are the living stones, we are arraying the noblest work of man with its grandest and most exalted dignity. 'Ye are built upon the _foundations_ of the Apostles and Prophets,' writes St. Paul to the Church of Ephesus, 'Jesus Christ Himself being the chief _corner stone_; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy _temple_ in the Lord: in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit[209].' Here, in the symbol of the _foundation stones_ of the material structure, we have represented to us, as it were, at one view, all those heavenly graces and blessings which from the day of Pentecost down to this time have flowed to God's people through the visible ministry and appointed ordinances of the Christian Church. Then, under the figure of the _corner stone_--the key stone of the edifice--we have gathered up all those old prophecies and types which pointed on forward, through the sufferings and death of the Saviour, up to the time when, having established His Church in the