are the pickets of God's great host. They are scattered up and down our land, fighting alone the great battle, unknown of men and sometimes thinking that they must be forgotten of God. And the picket's lonely post is what tries a man's courage and strength. Take your example from Paul's epistle. Greet Phebe, the schoolmistress, and Aquila and Priscilla on their rocky farm on the mountain-side, and greet the burden-bearing Onesiphorus. And give them God's greeting and encouragement, for he sends it to them through you. Show them the heroism which there is in their "humdrum" lives; and cheer them in the efforts, of whose grandeur they are all unconscious. Bid them "be strong and of a very good courage." For in the character of these people there is the granite of the eternal hills, and in their hearts should be the sunshine of God. Do not be ashamed of your congregation. Their dimes or dollars may look pitifully small and few on the collector's plate; only God sees the real immensity of the gift in the self-denial which it has cost. Your people will take sides with the cause of right, while it is still unpopular. They have furnished the moral backbone and unswerving integrity of many of your great business houses in this city to-day. From those families will go forth the men whom the good will trust and the evil fear. The power for good proceeding from your church will be like the floods which Ezekiel saw pouring out from beneath the threshold of the Lord's house.

For these common people, whom "God must have loved because he made so many of them," are the true heirs to the future. And wealth and culture, art

and learning, are to burn like torches to light their march. Finally, my young brothers, do not be bitterly disappointed if you are not "popular preachers.' Do not let too many people go to sleep under your preaching, even if one young man did go to sleep under one of Paul's sermons. But if now and then someone is angry at what you have said, do not worry too much over it. Preach the truth in love. If Elijah and John the Baptist, and Peter and Paul, were to preach to-day I doubt greatly whether they would be popular preachers. I cannot find that they ever were so. They would probably be peripatetic candidates, until someone supported them as independent evangelists. After their death we would rear them great monuments, and then devote ourselves to railing at Timothy because he was not more like what we imagine Paul was.

Even Socrates found that he must bid farewell to what men count honors, if he would follow after truth. You may have the same experience. You will have to champion many an unpopular cause, and your people will not like it. They will say you lack tact. Now Paul was a man of infinite tact. Witness his sermon on Mars' Hill. But if his letters to the church in Corinth were addressed to most modern churches, they would soon set out in search of a pastor of greater adaptability.

If you play the man, and fight the good fight of faith, I do not see how you can always avoid hitting somebody on the other side. And he will pull you down if he can; and will probably succeed in sometimes making your life very uncomfortable. Remember the teaching of scripture and science, that the up

ward path was never intended to be easy. The scriptural passages to this effect you can find all through the gospels and epistles, and I need not quote them to you. I will, however, tell you honestly that many are of the opinion that these passages are now obsolete, being applicable only to the first centuries, or to especially critical times in the history of the church. I cannot share that view, but, lest I seem too oldfashioned, will merely quote the ringing words of our own Dr. Hitchcock, that "no man ever enters heaven save on his shield." And allow me to quote in the same connection the testimony of that prince of scientists, Professor Huxley, in his lecture on "Evolution and Ethics: "

"If we may permit ourselves a larger hope of abatement of the essential evil of the world than was possible to those who, in the infancy of exact knowledge, faced the problem of existence more than a score of centuries ago, I deem it an essential condition of the realization of that hope that we should cast aside the notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life.

"We have long since emerged from the heroic childhood of our race, when good and evil could be met with the same 'frolic welcome;' the attempts to escape from evil, whether Indian or Greek, have ended in flight from the battle-field; it remains to us to throw aside the youthful over-confidence and the no less youthful discouragement of nonage. We are grown men, and must play the man

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,'

cherishing the good that falls in our way and bearing the evil in and around us, with stout heart set on diminishing it. So far we all may strive in one faith toward one hope:

"It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.

"but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note may yet be done.'

We must be strong and of a very good courage. While the avoidance of pain and discomfort, or even happiness, cannot be the proper end of life, it is not a world of misery or an essentially and hopelessly evil world. There is plenty of misery in the world, and we cannot deny it. Neither can we deny that God has put us in the world to relieve misery, and that until we have made every effort and strained every nerve as we have never yet done, we, and not God, are largely responsible for it. But behind misery stand selfishness and sin as its cause. And here we must not parley but fight. And the hosts of evil are organized and mighty. "The sons of this world are for their own generation wiser than the sons of light." And we shall never overcome them by adopting their means. But we can and shall surely overcome. For he that is with us is more than they that be with them. "The skirmishes are frequently disastrous to us, but the great battles all go one way." And we long for the glory of "him that overcometh." But the victor's song can come only after the battle, and be sung only by those who have overcome. And we would not have it otherwise if we

could. The closing words of Dr. Hitchcock's last sermon are the following:

"It is one of the revelations of scripture that we are to judge the angels, sitting above them on the shining heights. It may well be so. Those angels are the imperial guard, doing easy duty at home. We are the tenth legion, marching in from the swamps and forests of the far-off frontier, scarred and battered, but victorious over death and sin."