has been unable to repel that opposition with weapons out of the world's armoury; for it is forbidden to rely upon the strength of armies or upon the forces of external power. Fanatics have entered into unholy combination. Herod and Pilate have truced up a hollow friendship that they might work against it together. Statesmen have elaborated their policy, and empires have concentrated their strength; the banners of battle have made hideous laughter with the wind; the blood of many sainted confessors has been shed like water, and the vultures of the crag have scented the unburied witnesses and have been ready to swoop down upon the slain. And yet the Church is living, thriving, multiplying; while the names of its tyrants are forgotten, and their kingdoms, like snow-flakes on the wave, have left no trace behind. No inborn strength will account for this mystery. No advance of intelligence nor philosophic enlightenment will explain this phenomenon. The acute observer, if faith have cleared his eye or opened an inner one, will go back for the explanation to an old and unforgotten promise, and will exclaim when he sees the Church struggling, but triumphant, like the fire-girdled bush at Horeb, "God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved; God shall help her, and that right early." And not only in the preservation from her enemies but in her unfailing progress among men in every age, has God shown that his purpose is to build up the spiritual house. The rapid spread of the truth in primitive times was a marvel and a mystery to those who saw not the arm which upheld it and the power which bade it multiply and grow. The whole history of gospel extension is indeed a succession of wonders. It began with a Pentecost, local, but prophetic of a universal one, when "its sound shall have gone out into all the earth and its words to the end of the world." In the times of the Apostles, and of their immediate successors, it overleaped the boundaries of nation after nation, acquired lodgment and proselytes in the proudest cities, subjugated the barbaric magnificence of Asia Minor, had its students in the schools of Greece, and its servitors in the imperial household at Rome. In its triumphant course it attacked idolatry in its strongholds, and that idolatry, though fortified by habit and prejudice, and sanctioned by classic learning, and entwined with the beautiful in architecture and song, and venerable for its wondrous age, and imperial in the dominion which it had exercised over a vassal world, fell speedily, utterly, and for ever. And in each succeeding age, obscured sometimes by the clouds of persecution, and sometimes by the mists of error, its progress has been gradual and sure. If it has not dissipated it has relieved the darkness. It has stamped itself upon the institutions of mankind, and they reflect its image. It has insinuated its leavening spirit where its outward expressions are not, and there is