of an incorruptible inheritance; the final defeat, an everlasting victory; the endless exile, home, home at last. Once more, by boldly adopting the sackcloth Christ has changed it into a robe of light. "That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil" We cannot escape the evils of life; they are inevitable and inexorable. We may hide from our eyes the signs and sights of mourning; but in royal splendor our hearts will still bleed; wearing wreaths of roses, our heads will still ache. A preacher who complains that Christianity is "the religion of sorrow" goes on to predict that the woes of the world are fast coming to an end, and then the sorrowful religion of Jesus Christ will give place to some purer faith. "Through the chinks we can see the light. The condition of man becomes more comfortable, more easy; the hope of man is more visible; the endeavor of man is more often crowned with success; the attempt to solve the darkest life-problems is not desperate as it was. The reformer meets with fewer rebuffs; the philanthropist does not despair as he did. The light is dawning. The great teachers of knowledge multiply, bear their burdens more and more steadily; the traditions of truth and knowledge are becoming established in the intellectual world. It is so; and those of us who have caught a vision of the better times coming through reason, through knowledge, through manly and womanly endeavor, have caught a sight of a Christendom passing away, of a religion of sorrow declining, of a gospel preached for the poor no longer useful to a world that is mastering its own problems of poverty and lifting itself out of disabling misery into wealth without angelic assistance. This is our consolation; and while we admit, clearly and frankly, the real power of the popular faith, we also see the pillars on which a new faith rests, which shall be a faith, not of sorrow, but of joy." Now, the deepest sorrow of the race is not physical, neither is it bound up with material and social conditions. As the Scotch say, "The king sighs as often as the peasant"; and this proverb anticipates the fact that those who participate in the richest civilization that will ever flower will sigh as men sigh now. When the problem of poverty is mastered, when disease is extirpated, when a period is put to all disorganization of industry and misgovernment, social and political, it will be found by the emancipated and enriched community what is now found by opulent individuals and privileged classes, that the secret of our discontent is internal and mysterious, that it springs from the ungodliness, the egotism, the sensuality, which theology calls sin. But whatever the future may reveal, all the sorrows of life are upon us here and now; we cannot deny them, we have constantly to struggle with them, we are often overwhelmed by irreparable misfortune. Esther "sent raiment to clothe Mordecai, and