There are plenty of churches of Laodicea to-day. May you be delivered from them. But, thank God, there are also churches of Philadelphia and Smyrna. May you be pastors of one of the latter. It will not pay you a very large salary, for Demas has gone to the church of Laodicea, because the minister of the church of Smyrna was not orthodox, or not sufficiently spiritually minded--meaning thereby that he rebuked the sins of actual living men in general, and of Demas in particular--or preached politics, and did not mind his business. And your church may be small. For many of the congregation have gone to the church around the other corner, which is mainly a cluster of associations, having excellent names, and useful for almost every purpose except building up a manly, rugged, heroic, godlike character. The minister there, they will tell you, preaches delightful sermons. They make you "feel so good." He annihilates pantheism, and his denunciations of materialism are eloquent in the extreme. But his incarnations of materialism are Huxley and Darwin, and to the uncharitable he seems to almost carefully avoid any language which might seem to reflect upon the dollar- and place-worship of some of the occupants of his front pews. Now, I am not here to defend Mr. Huxley or Mr. Darwin. Withstand them to the face wherever they are to be blamed. And for some utterances they are undoubtedly to be blamed, honest souls as they were. But I for one cannot help feeling that there is among the "dwellers in Jerusalem" a materialism of the heart which is indefinitely worse than any intellectual heresy. When you hit at the one heresy strike hard at the other also. Many will have left your little church of Smyrna. It had to be so. For the divine sifting process, which is natural selection on its highest plane, has not ceased to work. It must and shall still go on; it cannot be otherwise. Has the great principle ceased to be true in modern history that "though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved?"