On this day the order of our Services would lead me to speak of our Lord's Ascension. On this day the Queen commands us to give thanks for the restoration of Peace. My text will tell you that I need not break the order of my discourses on St. John, if I desire to speak on the Church Festival. I believe there are lessons in the passage which would naturally come under our notice this afternoon, that belong equally to the National Festival. As long as we think of the Peace without any reference to God,--we mean by Peace, the Treaty of Peace; we question whether such and such articles in it are commensurate with the cost and success of the war,--whether boundary lines are fairly and wisely drawn,--whether new concessions might not have been obtained by a longer struggle? Or perhaps we mean by Peace merely the cessation of those hostilities by which all the nations that have taken part in them are more or less exhausted. Or perhaps we identify it with the material prosperity of the classes which have money,--a prosperity that seems to some closely connected with social and intellectual progress, if not the source of it. All these subjects deserve our most serious consideration. I believe that a Thanksgiving-day is to increase the earnestness with which we reflect on them, to take away the looseness and levity of our thoughts respecting them. But it must do this by opening to us another view of Peace,--not as based upon treaties and conventions,--not as being sustained by these; but as deriving its ultimate strength from the mind and will of Him who rules the universe, its subordinate security from our conformity to His mind and will. Such a day teaches us to look upon Peace not merely as the end of a war, but as the normal state of a Christian and human society; a state which is interrupted by the lusts that war in our members,--the interruption being most terrible when it exhibits itself in internal strifes and hatreds. Such a day calls upon us to reflect that what, in the dialect of the money-market, is called prosperity, is not one of those symptoms of Peace which we are to rest in with confidence,--not one which we are ever to contemplate without trembling. For it does not mean the growth and vital energy of the whole body, but an unnatural swelling and bloating of certain portions of the body. It often leads to ignoble aims, frantic speculations, systematic fraud,--to everything that destroys the force of a people, and makes it a silly, gambling, slavish people. It compels wise men frequently to regard war, with all its horrors, as an inevitable punishment; nay, even as a positive blessing. Therefore such a day as this obliges us to seek diligently for the springs of the moral life of societies,--for the secret of their inward peace and coherency.