life of the words, "the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." The gospel therefore was preached unto Abraham. Moses felt the potent influence of "the reproach of Christ." David describeth the blessedness of "the man unto whom God imputeth not iniquity." "Of this salvation the prophets enquired and searched diligently." Christ was the one name of the world's constant memory, "to Him gave all the prophets witness," and from the obscurest to the clearest revelation all testified in tones which it was difficult to misunderstand. "Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." The patriarchal dispensation had no elaborate furniture nor gorgeous ritualism. The father was the priest of the household, and as often as the firstling bled upon the altar it typified the faith of them all in a better sacrifice to come. Then came the Jewish dispensation with its array of services and external splendour, with its expressive symbolism and its magnificent temple; and then, rising into a higher altitude, the fulness of time came, and Christianity--the religion not of the sensuous but of the spiritual, not of the imagination awed by scenes of grandeur nor bewildered by ceremonies of terror, but of the intellect yielding to evidence, of the conscience smitten by truth, of the heart taken captive by the omnipotence of love--appeared for the worship of the world. Our Saviour, in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, inaugurated, so to speak, the dispensation of the spiritual, "The hour cometh, and now is,"--there is the moment of instalment, when the great bell of time might have pealed at once a requiem for the past and a welcome to the grander future, "when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth." Requiring spiritual worship, it was natural that God should have "built up a spiritual house," wherein he should dwell in statelier presence than in "houses made with hands." Hence there is now rising upon earth, its masonry unfinished, but advancing day by day, a spiritual temple more magnificent than the temple of Solomon, costlier than the temple of Herod. "Destroy this temple," said the Saviour to his wondering listeners, "and in three days I will raise it up." "Forty and six years was this temple in building, and will thou rear it up in three days?" "But He spake of the temple of His body." "What, know ye not that _your_ bodies are the members of Christ?" Yes! believers everywhere are stones in the spiritual house, broken perhaps into conformity, or chiselled into beauty by successive strokes of trial; and wherever they are, in the hut or in the ancestral hall, in the climates of the snow or of the sun, whether society hoot them or honour them, whether they wrap themselves in delicate apparelling, or, in rugged homespun, toil all day for bread, they are parts of the true temple which God esteems higher