climax of souls whereon each below looks up and rises, yet each above bends down and helps;--the discovery which brings such peace and freedom to the heart, has been delayed by the mistaken identification of the entire creed of the first age with the essence of Christianity. Now that God has shown us so much more, has tried the divine seed of the Gospel on so various a soil of history, and enabled us to distinguish its fairest blossoms and its choicest fruits, a much larger meaning than was possible at first must be given to the purpose of his revelation. Even to Paul, Christ was mainly the great representative of a theocratic idea; and was in no other sense an object of _spiritual_ belief, than that he was not on earth and mortal, but in heaven and immortal. That _faith_ in Christ, which then prominently denoted belief in his appointed return, and _allegiance_ to him as God's viceroy in this world, is now transferred into quite a different thing. It is altogether a moral and affectionate sentiment: an acknowledgment of him as the highest impersonation of divine excellence and inspired insight yet given to the world; a trust in him as the only realized type of perfection that can mediate for us between ourselves and God; a faithfulness to him, as making us conscious of what we are and what God and our conscience would have us to be. It is vain to pretend that revelation is a fixed and stereotyped thing. It was born, as the divinest things must be, among human conditions; and into it ever since human conditions have perpetually flowed. The elements of Hebrew thought surrounded the sacred centre at first, and have been erroneously identified with it by all Unitarian churches in every age. The Hellenic intellect afterwards streamed towards the fresh point of life and faith, and gathered around it the metaphysical system of Trinitarian dogma in which orthodox communions of all times have, with parallel error, sought the essence of the Gospel. The true principle of the religion has been _secreted in both, and consisted in neither_: it has lain unnoticed in the midst, in the silent chamber of the heart, around which the clamor of the disputatious intellect whirls without entrance. The agency of Christ's mind as the expression of God's moral nature and providence, and as the realized ideal of beauty and excellence,--this is the power of God and the wisdom of God, which has made vain the counsels of the world, and baffled the foolishness of the Church. This is the Gospel's centre of stability,--"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." Few persons can be insensible to the sublimity of this expression upon the relation between CHRIST, NATURE, PROVIDENCE, AND GOD.