Here, again, we encounter the opposition of multitudes. How often men have laughed, how loudly they have laughed, at the idea that the story of the crucified Nazarene could inspire a despondent soul to hope, could purify the vicious soul into virtue, could bring any soul nearer to God! Perhaps somewhere they are laughing at it now; possibly even in this city of Boston, the home of culture and refinement, of fine and wide thought--I don't know, I don't live here; but I know that in the country at large there are always those who are disposed to say, "It is perfectly puerile to try to reach human sorrow and human sin with the power of the gospel, lodged in the little book which the child may carry in her hand!" As if the inconspicuous forces in the world's development were not always those deadliest on the one hand, or most benign on the other; as if wafts of air did not kill multitudes more than all the batteries of artillery; as if the unseen forces, hardly manifesting themselves at all, were not those which society seizes by which to advance itself most rapidly and grandly--that little spark, vanishing instantaneously, but revealing the unseen force which drives machineries, draws carriages, illuminates cities, and enables you and me to talk as if face to face with friends and correspondents at the distance of a thousand miles; that fleecy vapor, vanishing silently into the air but representing the gigantic servant of modern civilization, which tunnels mountains, scoops out mines, and links the continents together with iron bands. These unseen powers are the ones that man craves and uses, or that, on the other hand, he dreads and repels; and the power of the gospel, however men may smile at the idea of that power, has vindicated itself too many times to be assailed by argument, certainly too many times to be encountered with ridicule.