in upon his gloomy sepulchre the epitaph of his blasted life" AND THAT MAN PERISHED NOT ALONE IN HIS INIQUITY." Young men, which will you choose? I affectionately press this question. Oh, choose for God! Oh, choose for God! "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all things ”—science, art, poetry, friendship—" shall be added unto you." I do unfeignedly rejoice that so goodly a number of you have already decided. I I have only one fitness to address you-but it is one which many of your Lecturers cannot claim-and that is, a fitness of sympathy. Your hopes are mine-with your joys at their keenest I can sympathize. have not forgotten the glad hours of opening morning, when the zephyr has a balmier breath, and through the richly-painted windows of the fancy the sunlight streams in upon the soul. I come to you as one of yourselves. Take my counsel. "My heart's desire and prayer for you is, that you may be saved." There is hope for the future. The world is moving on. The great and common mind of Humanity has caught the charm of hallowed Labour. Worthy and toil-worn labourers fall ever and anon in the march, and their fellows weep their loss, and then, dashing away the tears which had blinded them, they struggle and labour on. There has been an upward spirit evoked which men will not willingly let die. Young in its love of the beautiful, young in its quenchless thirst after the true, we see that buoyant presence "In hand it bears, 'mid snow and ice, The one note of high music struck from the great harp of the world's heart-strings is graven on that banner. The student breathes it at his midnight lamp-the poet groans it forth in those spasms of his soul, when he cannot fling his heart's beauty upon language. Fair fingers have wrought in secret at that banner. Many a child of poverty has felt its motto in his soul, like the last vestige of lingering Divinity. The Christian longs for it when his faith, piercing the invisible, "desires a better country, that is, an heavenly." Excelsior! Excelsior! Brothers, let us speed onward the youth who holds that banner-Up, up, brave Spirit! "Climb the steep and starry road To the Infinite's abode." Up, up, brave Spirit! Spite of alpine steep and frowning brow-roaring blast and crashing flood-up! Science has many a glowing secret to reveal thee— Faith has many a Tabor-pleasure to inspire. Ha! does the cloud stop thy progress? Pierce through it to the sacred morning. Fear not to approach the Divinity-it is his own longing which impels thee. Thou art speeding to thy coronation-brave Spirit! Up, up, brave Spirit! till, as thou pantest on the crest of thy loftiest achievement, God's glory shall burst upon thy face, and God's voice, blessing thee from his throne in tones of approval and of welcome, shall deliver thy guerdon-"I have made thee a little lower than the angels, and crowned thee with glory and honour!" D II. IT JOHN BUNYAN. were impossible to gaze upon the Pyramids, those vast sepulchres, which rise, colossal, from the Libyan desert, without solemn feeling. but where are their builders ? They exist, Where is the fulfil Enter them. In their ment of their large ambition? silent heart there is a sarcophagus with a handful of dust in it, and that is all that remains to us of a proud race of kings. Histories are, in some sort, the Pyramids of nations. They entomb in olden chronicle, or in dim tradition, peoples which once filled the world with their fame, men who stamped the form and pressure of their character upon the lives of thousands. The historic page has no more to say of them than that they lived and died. "Their acts and all that they did" are compressed into scantiest record. No obsequious retinue of circumstance, nor pomp of illustration, attend them. They are handed down to us, shrivelled and solitary, only in the letters which spelt out their names. It is a serious thought, sobering enough to our aspirations after that kind of immortality, that multitudes of the men of old have their histories in their epitaphs, and that multitudes more, as worthy, slumber in nameless graves. But although the earlier times are wrapt in a cloud of fable; though tradition, itself a myth, gropes into mythic darkness; though Æneas and Agamemnon are creations rather than men-made human by the poet's "vision and faculty divine;" though forgetfulness has overtaken actual heroes, once content in arms to cope, each with his fronting foe;" it is interesting to observe how rapid was the transition from fable to evidence, from the uncertain twilight to the historic day. It was necessary that it should be so. "The fulness of times" demanded it. There was an everacting Divinity caring, through all change, for the sure working of his own purpose. The legendary must be superseded by the real; tradition must give place to history, before the advent of the Blessed One. The cross must be reared on the loftiest platform, in the midst of the ages, and in the most inquisitive condition of the human mind. The deluge is an awful monument of God's displeasure against sin, but it happened before there was history, save in the Bible, and hence there are those who gainsay it. The fall has impressed its desolations upon the universal heart, but there are scoffers who "contradict it against themselves." But the atonement has been worked out with grandest publicity. There hangs over the cross the largest cloud of witnesses. Swarthy Cyrenian and proud son of Rome, lettered Greek and jealous Jew, join hands around the sacrifice of Christ-its body-guard as an historical fact-fencing it about with most solemn authentications, and handing it to after ages, a truth, as well as a life, for all time. In like manner we find that certain periods of the world epochs in its social progress-times of its emerging from chivalric barbarism-times of reconstruction or of revolution-times of great energy or of nascent life, seem, as by Divine arrangement, to stand forth in sharpest outline; long distinguishable after the records of other times have faded. Such, besides the first age of Christianity, was the period of the Crusades, of the Reformation, of the Puritans, and such, to the thinkers of the future, will be the many-coloured and inexplicable age in which we live. The men of those times are the men on whom history seizes, who are the studies of the after-time; men who, though they must yield to the law by which even the greatest are thrown into somewhat shadowy perspective, were yet powers in their day men who, weighed against the world in the balance, caused "a downward tremble" in the beam. Such times were the years of the seventeenth century in this country. Such a man was JOHN BUNYAN. Rare times they were, the times of that stirring and romantic era. How much was crowded into the sixty years of Bunyan's eventful life! There were embraced in it the turbulent reign of the first Charles-the Starchamber, and the High Commission, names of hate and shuddering-Laud with his Papistry, and Strafford with his scheme of Thorough-the long intestine war; Edgehill, and Naseby, and Marston, memories of sorrowful renown a discrowned monarch, a royal trial, and a royal execution. Bunyan saw all that was venerable and all that was novel changing places like the sceneshifting of a drama; bluff cavaliers in seclusion and in exile; douce burghers acting history, and moulded |