3. _The Church of Christ is a society which is for ever shifting its locality and altering its forms._--It is the whole Church, "the whole family in heaven and earth." So, then, those who were on earth and now in heaven are members of the same family still. Those who had their home here, now have it there. The Church of Christ is a society ever altering and changing its external forms. "The whole family"--the Church of the patriarchs and of ages before them; and yet the same family. Remember, I pray you, the diversities of form through which, in so many ages and generations, this Church has passed. Consider the difference there was between the patriarchal Church of the time of Abraham and Isaac and its condition under David; or the difference between the Church so existing and its state in the days of the apostles and the marvellous difference between that and the same Church four of five centuries later; or, once again, the difference between that, externally one, and the Church as it exists in the present day, broken into so many fragments. Yet, diversified as these states may be, they are not more so than the various stages of a family. +II. Consider the name by which this Church is named.+--"Our Lord Jesus Christ," the apostle says, of whom "the whole family in heaven and earth is named." 1. _First, the recognition of a common Father._--That is the sacred truth proclaimed by the Epiphany. God revealed in Christ--not the Father of the Jew only, but also of the Gentile. The Father of a whole family. Not the partial Father, loving one alone--the elder--but the younger son besides, the outcast prodigal who had spent his living with harlots and sinners, but the child still, and the child of a Father's love. 2. _The recognition of a common humanity._--He from whom the Church is named took upon Him not the nature merely of the noble, of kings, or of the intellectual philosopher, but of the beggar, the slave, the outcast, the infidel, the sinner, and the nature of every one struggling in various ways. 3. _The Church of Christ proceeds out of and rests upon the belief in a common Sacrifice.--F. W. Robertson._ _The Family in Heaven and Earth._--With the boldness of a true and inspired nature the apostle Paul speaks with incidental ease of one family distributed between heaven and earth. There is, it seems, domesticity that cannot be absorbed by the interval between two spheres of being--a love that cannot be lost amidst the immensity, but finds the surest track across the void--a home affinity that penetrates the skies, and enters as the morning or evening guest. And it is Jesus of Nazareth who has effected this; has entered under the same household name, and formed into the same class, the dwellers above and those beneath. Spirits there, and spirits here, are gathered by Him into one group; and where before was saddest exile, He has made a blest fraternity.