to remark that not all great souls work in the full light of publicity and have their path marked by revolution, and equally needful to remember that not all dislocating and disturbing spirits put forth any true claim to greatness. We are far too apt to confound the occasions with the causes of any great change, and to forget that if fire do indeed come out of a noble heart, it can only kindle other hearts that are already prepared to burn. Many souls were hot with Luther's indignation, before he burned the Bull in the market-place of Wittenberg; many spirits had inwardly rebelled against the deadness of the age, before Wesley told the Gospel tale to the colliers of Kingswood. One indeed speaks what the many feel; to him has been given a clearer insight, a diviner ardour, a more articulate speech; but his word is with power because of the dumb aspirations stirring in many breasts, and an universal emotion which has not yet found fit expression. And this is even more the case with regard to moral operations of a quieter and less signal, though hardly less important kind; forces which do not so much suddenly change the world, as keep it (in some poor and imperfect way) sweet and pure, and perhaps, in the course of ages, urge it a little nearer the throne of God. Is the faith of Christendom sustained from generation to generation by the succession of heroes and saints, to whose achievements all men look up with despairing admiration, and in whose acknowledged and recorded excellence they see the full embodiment of their own desire, or by the thousand nameless fidelities to duty, and obscure victories of self-devotion, and hidden glories of purity, that pass away without celebration? If you, my brethren, have any stoutness of heart to resist mean temptation, if you are conscious of any uplifting of desire towards better and more stable things than form the common stuff of life, if any quiet trust in God sustains you amid the world's chance and change, to what do you owe them? In the last resort, doubtless, to God Himself, and to God working through Christ; but immediately, and in a large measure, to hidden forces, unseen influences, which you perhaps can track only in part, but of which others know nothing. A father's integrity—a mother's sweet goodness—the quiet air of a happy home—a domestic courage and patience, at which you have looked very closely, and whose every line and lineament you know—some ancestral saintliness, which is a household tradition and no more, but which has never withered in the fierce light of public estimate,—these things have inspired and nourished your nobler part. They are the refreshing dew and the fertilizing rain, the restful night and the kindling day, of God's moral world. We grow up with them, and hardly know them for His activity; they are among the necessary conditions of our existence; and when we seek for tokens of Him, it is rather in the crises and catastrophes of life—in the sharp wound that pricks a sleeping conscience, in the call of duty which turns the whole current of our energy, in the sorrow which destroys for ever our trust in the world. But He has been with us all the while in the gentler motions of His will.

Sometimes, I am inclined to think, we insist too much on our own estimate of small and great in the moral world, forgetting that any single fact or individual life is but one link in an endless chain of causes and consequences, of which we ought to know the whole before we can rightly estimate a part. And looking back where some light seems to rest upon our own or others' history, it is easy to see how what we should call great and signal, stands next in the line of causation to what seems (but only seems) to be trivial, and is certainly obscure. Let us take the most remarkable instance of all,—the Christ, whom