Heavenly Father; he turns aside. He suspends his great laws. He bends himself low and listens to us and waits, and puts up with our foolishness, and considers our troubles, and introduces a distinct element of motherliness into the steadfastness and rigor of his fatherhood. And some of the most heart-warming passages of Holy Writ are those that dwell on this very thing.

I do not wish to make a wrong impression in relation to the miraculous in the administration of God, and I therefore pause right here long enough to say that it is not necessary to the idea of a miracle that it should be considered outside of all law; but only that it should be a visible interruption of the laws of nature as known by us, and established. It has often been thought, and, in fact, it has been the prevailing conception, that a miracle is God taking a sudden start and acting on an impulse, a gush of feeling, as you might say; an unreasoned and undeliberated and unprevised play of his own personal freedom. The miraculous has been made to seem more sensational by this view of it. It has been supposed that by that view miracles have been more utterly separated from the orderliness of law, and the dullness of orderliness.

It is one of the benefits of the modern scientific and naturalistic attack on the whole doctrine of the supernatural, that Christian thinkers have been driven to lay a strong stress on the thought— likely to be admitted by all considerate and candid persons so soon as stated that God's miracles are only a part of his general orderliness, and get their eccentricity and their sensational appeal to the notice of men, much as the tremendous charges of electricity, silent and invisible in our thunder-clouds, appall the world by darting through our atmospheres with a rending that makes everything roar. We think of the electricity as all orderly and under law so long as it stays up there in the clouds; but the forth-leaping and the flashing and the thundering are just as orderly, and law-full. In like manner, I say, God's movement in upon our visible realm, in that irruptive event which we call a miracle, is a law-keeping movement -only the law which he keeps just then is the law of a higher realm, even the supernatural. It is the supernatural flashing through the atmosphere of the natural, and irresistibly arresting the attention of mankind. It is incredible that God should ever act in fits and starts; that is, in ways fundamentally incongruous with his general way of acting, which general way as we all know is uniformity, or law.

I pass now to a final thought. I have been speaking of what seemed to me the pathetic aspects of that great event in the firmament the other day, with the effort of the civilized world to note it accurately and make a good study of it. I leave that now to remark on another point.

Our exceptional interest in the transit of Venus was attributable in part to the unprecedented way in which our attention had been called to it for quite a time beforehand. It reminded me of an Easter service which I attended at St. Peter's, in Rome, where the great multitude in the building were worked up into the most intense expectancy by a long waiting, and by the boom of signal guns and other striking foretokens and heraldings scattered along at intervals through the waiting. By the time the Pope entered with his shining ecclesiastical procession through the wide-swung doors of the church, we were in a state of impressibility that needs to be felt to be understood. Likewise the transit; it had been announced; the newspapers of the world had discussed it; specialists had published explanatory articles; the habits of the planet and its previous doings for centuries had been spread out; the dependence of future astronomic calculations on the precision of our observations of this coming phenomenon had been brought to the public attention; and, to farther sharpen our eagerness, a band of foreign men had selected our city as a good spot on which to set up their instruments, and their daily doings as they carefully made ready for the critical day, had been diligently and sympathetically reported. Venus was enormously advertised, and the result was, she had such a worldwide assembly of witnesses and wide-awake friends as she never had before.

And in my discursive thoughts on the whole great, miscellaneous occasion, I could not help remembering what our forth-going into the eternal life will be, and our first opening of our eyes upon the scenes thereof, in view of the fact that during our whole life here we have been having our attention called to it; by innumerable readings of the Bible, by innumerable sermons, by myriads of references to it in books and journals, by many death-scenes, by many bereavements, by many cities of the dead which we have noticed, and by the constant spontaneous play of our primal instincts unable to turn away from the fascination of that vast Obscure, and home-land of all human populations. What will it not be to see the men there of whom we have so often heard. What will it be to see

the once earth-bound and crucified Redeemer of our souls, whose name has been in half our thoughts from the cradle to the grave. What will it be to see at last exactly what that four-square magnificent city is which John describes; what that green land with its milk and honey and wine, what the throne of God and the Lamb, what the praises day and night of the multitude redeemed, what the farstretching hosts of immortals not earth-born, what the throne of Judgment, and the Judgment searchings and dooms and divisions, what the voices in which they speak there and the bodies they wear, and the communications and communions wherein they indulge, what the rememberings and forgettings, and whether there be forgettings at all! How many thousands of times our attention has been called to these things, how often we have prayed about them and imagined, how often in the long night hours, our minds more awake than in the day, we have expatiated in that field, how often in sickness with possible death before us we have followed the same theme; our mother taught us in it, our familiar hymns sung of it-indeed all our earthly experience has been telegraphically woven together with those realities, along countless wires strange thrills have come, and distant-sounding voices, and articulations obscure and unnatural, as though our faculties were not yet adjusted to that somewhat ; and now, at last, to be bolted into those much-heralded things, what must the eagerness of it be !-and the wide amazement and the confused energizings of our powers put upon a sudden effort to make themselves at home in an untried condition. What must it be to the astronomers to throw away their instruments and search the universe with vision purged and triumphant! God has great surprises for us. Great surprises! Great surprises, of course, in the sense that much not expected by us will come, but quite as great on this ground also, that things long expected startle us for the very reason that they have been long expected and dwelt upon. Many times death has been long foreseen, but it is apt to be a surprise to bystanders, nevertheless, when it really arrives. And in the same way and for the same reason, our arrival in the Hereafter will be charged with weteyed wonders and sweet astonishments.

Brethren, I feel that there is less than my usual unity in the remarks which I have made this morning. But I have this to comfort me, that many times, in discourses of the utmost unity, the good gained by different persons listening comes from single sentences and single thoughts that are no essential part of the substance and

general movement of the discourse. I would not make that an argument for a scattering and unorganized treatment of subjects; but only a solace when, for any reason, one happens to fall into scattering.

MODERN INSPIRATION.

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, APRIL 15, 1883.

THE SECOND CHAPTER OF 1st CORINTHIANS.

It seems strange that many Christians make so little as they do of the direct inspiration of God in souls. They seem to admit with all their hearts that there was any amount of that kind of thing in Bible times; that Prophets had it, that the Patriarchs had it, that the twelve Apostles had it, that the hundreds of miracle-workers had it, that Simeon had it, and Mary, the Blessed Virgin, and all preachers of the Bible day, and hosts besides mentioned in Holy Writ; and especially that all the persons who wrote the Bible had it to such an extent, that in the writing they fell into no mistake— at any rate, into no important mistake. So much as that they freely say, but the moment we undertake to bring them down beyond the Bible date and establish inspiration as an all-time gift—all time as truly as any time-they make a stand and set up the distinct, affirmation, that the inspiration of those first men was quite unique and solitary, and must never be looked for again. That inspiration was for a special purpose, which purpose was fulfilled forever, and now we have the Bible for our guidance and need nothing else. That is their doctrine.

And now I ask :-Whence comes this impulse of denial in Christian people, and why is it they will not consent that we shall have in our natures, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Apostles and the Bible writers and five hundred more, of whom the Bible says, that they had God? What great interest is going to suffer by the wide shedding-abroad of the idea of modern inspiration? Well, first,