humanity as a whole, or of the safety of society. When, therefore, our Saviour compassionated the multitudes, because they were scattered abroad, he bestowed on them the pity they most needed. Next to absolute hunger, exclusion from social and civil privileges, by a wandering, dispersed, and uncalculated life, is man's greatest misfortune, and the chief source of his moral and spiritual degradation. We may talk of spontaneous genius, of self-correcting powers and attributes in humanity, of necessary, self-evolved improvement as the true hope for the masses; we may reason about the natural and inevitable tendencies of man to civilization and progress: if we leave out of this calculation the providence of God, which has chosen centres of light and life, kindled altars of piety, written tables of law, and erected models and standards of domestic, social, and civil life, which are the primal and chief means for the education and rescue of the race at large, we shall lose the only key to the history of the world, and the only clue to the substantial progress of the race. Probably there is no tendency in savage or barbarous tribes and races to self-elevation, only a capacity for improvement, under the guidance and inspiration of higher branches of the one great family, specially prepared by God for this work. Specially, God has committed to modern civilization, which is the child of Christianity, the salvation of the world. Civilization has, by approximate steps, reached the conviction, that there is no way of civilizing but by intercourse; and that intercourse is worth little or nothing except it be easy, constant, and general. It has perceived that the "scattering abroad"- Christ's own ground of compassion -was still the great obstacle to progress; and, therefore, the grand instinct of modern efforts at improvement has been road-making, - the construction of the highways of civilization, ways on land, ways over water, ways through air, ways under ocean; ways between civilized and civilized, the more to strengthen each other by exchange of wisdom, experience, and products; ways between civilized and uncivilized, to extend knowledge and commerce and industrial arts; ways into Africa and New Holland; ways to the neigh

borhoods of the Northern and the Southern Poles; ways to the Pacific and across the Atlantic; ways for the products of subdued fields, conquered streams, and powers of nature enslaved to man's will; for the products of the loom, the forge, and the plough; ways for the traveller, be he the missionary of commerce, of science, or of religion each equally valuable and all co-operative; ways for thought, the greatest of all products, the most urgent and enterprising of all travellers, the grandest of missionaries. To throw the net of roads, -its woof of iron and stone, its warp of wire and water,that great net, of which every track that civilized man pursues, whether with his foot, his beast, his wheel, his sail, his iron-rail, his electric flash, is a mesh that catches and holds in some estray and outcast interest, some scattered and otherwise lost member of humanity, this is the providential passion and sacred instinct of modern civilization. It is the perpetuity of Christ's compassion that inspires and vivifies this grand movement. That the multitudes may not faint, may not be scattered abroad, Christian civilization must seek them, must hem them in, bind them to its girdle, make swift ways to the scenes of their ignorance and their despair, pierce their rivers and jungles, cross their deserts with the rail, abolish oceans and seas, and declare every part and portion of the earth explored, open, safe, related, in connection with all other parts, and so united to the race, to Christ, and to God.

And now, finally, within the bounds of Christendom - at any rate, within the bounds of that happiest and most blessed portion of it which we occupy-a new and higher sentiment than even that of compassion, through the grace of God and his Son, animates our hearts when we look on the multitudes, -the sentiment of confidence and hope. Fear gave way, in our Saviour's courageous and loving mind, to compassion, when he saw the multitude. Have not the reasons for that compassion-at least within our immediate sphere of life and influence-most sensibly lessened, and almost totally disap. peared, under the influence of the Saviour's own ever-advancing work? He himself, new as compassion then was, did not

fail to add exultation to it in the triumph which humanity, under his guidance, was finally to accomplish over all its degrading conditions. He "saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven," when the Greeks came to inquire into his gospel. How literally pierced with lightning is the enemy of souls, when DISTANCE, that scatters men abroad and makes them faint on the long way, transfixed on the darting thought of the lightning, dies in mid-heaven and falls headlong into the sea! How long is superstition to make it irreligious to recognize the fulfilment of any of our Lord's promises, the answers to any of his prayers? Is the world's progress never to be confessed; and is a mock humility to drape the very mid-day of hope, and cheer with curtains of despondency, lest it outshine the Christian dawn? The stones would cry out if we were silent, when the very key-stone has so evidently been put into the arch of Christ's triumph over the barbarism and want and dispersion of his scattered flock of humanity. Be it said, then, to his eternal honor and to God's everlasting glory, that the day has come when we can look upon the multitude with something better than compassion,even with confidence and joy. And this, if we mistake not, is the great distinction, as it is the glorious conquest of the times and the day, to which the recent triumph of enterprise and art, the Atlantic Cable, so naturally and properly sung, feted and illumined, is but a tongue and voice. That slender thread of fire explodes a mine of emotion, conviction, and experience that had been slowly but long accumulating in the bosom of our age. That delicate cord moors nations together that were drifting to each other in spite of seas and icebergs. That swift messenger, dark and silent as night, but keener and subtler than light, carries words of brotherhood, long waiting for their vehicle; that syphon, so slender and so patient, empties hearts into each other whose blood had for ages yearned to mingle. God in his providence, by making us the last-born of the great nations and powers of the earth, and giving us half the world for our home; by emptying the blood of all nations into our national veins; by diversifying us with all climates, without colonial

separation, and by the vastness of all the circumstances and conditions of our territory, our origin, our growth and history, as well as by the happy fortune of the splendid age of commerce, liberty, and inventive genius in which our lines have fallen has prepared us, as no people is prepared, to demand, to expect, to understand, and to enjoy universal ideas, -feelings that embrace the world, schemes that include the race, hopes that outrun place and time, destinies that are perfect and complete.

We look upon the multitude-blessed be God's providence and Christ's gospel for our power to do so!—no longer with fear, and not even characteristically, in this land, with compassion, but with sympathy and hope, and almost with reverence. For we see them no longer faint, and no longer scattered abroad; and every day we are, by economic science and motive art, eliminating the unknown or suspended elements in the great equation of human progress. That vast problem is no more a bottomless mystery and a baffling speculation. The obstacles which oppose the advance of the race, immense as they are, are measurable; dense as they are, are penetrable. There is nothing hopeless or desperate in human affairs. Progress is possible, is real, is certain, is inevitable. The relative forces of good and evil, of peace and war, of truth and error, of civilization and barbarity, of brotherly love and selfish antagonism, are weighed, and the balance is favorable for once, and therefore for ever, to the kingdom of God in the salvation of our race. The multitude is accordingly to be trusted and respected. We thank God that we are able, and are compelled by the highest convictions of the heart, to trust and respect them. Nay, in this country, we trust and respect them far more than we do those who make them objects of secret suspicion, and who would gladly reproduce the repressive systems of aristocratic governments. The cultivated and refined classes in America understand less of the true spirit of our institutions, and do far less to maintain them, we fear, than the body of the people at large. Sensitive to defects, fastidious in tastes, overborne by memories of the past, they overlook

the enormous advantages, the broad magnificence, the grand general effect of institutions where human nature, for the first time, is trusted with liberty, education, and plenty, and culti vate the poor satisfactions of a superiority based on criticism, doubt, and evil prophecies. A distinguished and most acute English visitor to this country told us, just before the war, that he had scarcely talked with an educated and thoughtful man in America who had not expressed doubts and fears of the success of our institutions. Thank God, the people have no doubts and no fears. Thank God, those who make and uphold our liberty, love it, trust it, and estimate it at its value, believe in its durableness. They have no misgivings of God's clear intention; no backward looks, no cautious apprehensions. And they are right; wiser, because simpler and more childlike, in their patriotism. They are animated by the fresh instincts, the original convictions, the startling realities, of a new era. And thus, while learned science, and thoughtful philosophy, and even grave experience, shake their heads and mutter, "Impossible," the mighty hope of the people, sure of God's willingness and help, attempts the impossible, and changes it into the accomplished. "I thank thee, O Father! that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

The great popular instincts of a new era in the life of man are the vast powers, the mighty discoveries, the wonderworkers, of the age. The multitude is doing for Christ the miracles he did for them. They, too, say "Peace" to the sea in his name; they, too, are in and out, where all doors are shut; they, too, repeat the Pentecostal marvel, and bring all tongues together, and make them alike intelligible to all. Like Joshua, they stop the sun, not to fight their battles, but to paint their pictures and perpetuate their friends. "Canst thou send lightnings that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?" asked the scornful Job; and the multitude now first is able to answer, "We can.". "Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea, or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?" and the multitude now first replies, "We have."—"Who hath laid the measures of the earth, or