ticism, the error, or the perverseness of a few or of one.

And, on this topic, let me cite the simple words of one whom I cannot pass unremembered to-day. "If" he says, "if the historian tells us the good deeds of the good, we are excited to imitate them; if the bad deeds of the bad, we are taught at once to avoid them, and to turn to such deeds as are really good and worthy of the God whom we serve." These are the simple words of the great father of English Church History, the venerable Bede, whose honoured tomb lies near us, and to whom it were a criminal want of reverence for piety and learning, not to allude in speaking of such a subject here.

The saint, the scholar, from a circle freed,

Of toil stupendous in a hallowed seat

Of learning, where thou heard'st the billow beat
On a wild coast, rough monitors to feed
Perpetual industry! Sublime recluse!

The recreant soul that dares to shun the debt,
Imposed on human kind, must first forget
Thy diligence, thy unrelaxing use

Of a long life; and in the hour of death,

The last dear service of thy passing breath!

First then, let us look at the necessity and the advantage of Church History in a practical

view, as bearing on our hearts and lives. We live in the midst of blessings till we are utterly insensible of their greatness, and of the source from which they flow. We speak of our civilization, our arts, our freedom, our laws, and forget entirely how large a share of all is due to Christianity. Blot Christianity out of the page of man's history, and what would his laws have been, what his civilization? Nay! I will not ask, what would they be, but what were they? For all that genius, and thought, and philosophy, without the spark from heaven, could do, that was done in Athens and in Rome. Let us never be thankless for the benefits we owe to them, nor neglect to drink whatever is pure and healthful from their plenteous fountains; but would we exchange the humblest condition in Christendom with the proudest in the land of the Gentiles? No! Christianity is mixed up with our very being and our daily life; there is not a familiar object round us which does not wear its mark, not a being or a thing which does not wear a different aspect, because the light of Christian hope is on it, not a law which does not owe its truth and its gentleness to Christianity, not a custom which cannot be traced in all its holy and healthful parts, to the Gospel. It is in the page

of Church history, and there alone, that you will see how these blessed influences grew up by painful degrees, that you will trace the gradual abandonment of evil and barbarous usages, the gradual colouring which Christianity has already given to human laws, and customs, and conditions of life, an earnest, let us hope and believe, of those fuller and more abiding fruits which, as the age of the world advances, are to deepen till the consummation of all things.

But pass we onward. In the page of Church History we read also the confirmation of our faith and hope in another point of view. When we look around us at a given moment, and see the frightful mass of evil which, even under Christianity, yet exists, and the vast tracts of regions where its name is still almost unheard, we are oppressed and borne down with the contemplation, and are tempted, in the evil spirit mentioned in the Scripture, to ask, "Where is the promise of his appearing?" But history supplies the comfort and the comment on the promise. The promise is that the gates of hell shall not prevail against Christ's Church! Have they ever prevailed? The promise was, that the least of all the seeds should grow till at length it became a mighty tree of rest and re

fuge for the nations? Is it not growing? The promise was that the little leaven should leaven the three measures, and is it not working its way through them by sure, though it may be by silent, it may be by slow degrees? But where is the promise that these degrees should be other than slow, in the word of that God with whom a thousaud years are as one day? Let us, in the page of Church History, trace the marvellous progress of the Gospel, at first, over that civilized portion of the world, which, alike by its advanced knowledge, by its sense of deficiency of some higher principle, and alas! by its deeper guilt, showed that the fulness of time was come. Let us, with yet deeper interest, trace its slower, but not less marvellous, progress among the barbarous hordes, the deep forests, the bloody frays, and the savage ignorance of our own forefathers, making a sunshine in every shady place which it visited. Let us see with wonder and thankfulness, that in that New World, which the restless spirit of human adventure has discovered, the Gospel has been spread through all its parts, not indeed in its purity,—but yet, that, howsoever, Christ is still preached, that even now India knows the name of Christ, and the distant isles of the trackless ocean own his

power. And thus, seeing, in the full and clear light of history, that he of his part hath most surely kept and performed his promise up to this very hour, we shall remember the stern rebuke of Luther to Melancthon, "Philip, leave God to govern his own world," and cease to doubt and despair, that in his own good time he will accomplish his own purposes, and extend his kingdom to the ends of the world.

But let us pass onwards again. If we have doubted how far Christianity has been effectual, let us turn to history, and in another way be shamed out of our doubts. We shall find there from age to age the records of what many, frail and feeble as the race of man is, have done for the sake of the Gospel, what they have braved, what they have endured. How little indeed, till we have closely examined the records of our faith, do we know what it has cost to procure us the blessings which we enjoy as a sort of right, or as the element in which we breathe,-how many from the hour when the Church began her troubled existence, have toiled, and bled, and died, in order that we may meet, not in such magnificent shrines as tower over our heads, but in the lowliest and humblest shrine that human hands ever reared, there to pour forth the thanks