civil and religious, yet to see to it that the Vatican Octopus, with its Bible-burnings, its cruel intolerance, its hatred of our public schools, its declarations in Encyclical and Syllabus "that the Pope and priests ought to have dominion in temporal affairs," that the principle that "the Church has not power to avail itself of force," and the principle that "the Roman religion shall not be held as the only religion of the State to the exclusion of all others are most mischievous and pernicious errors," to see to it, we say, that this hierarchy shall never acquire and hold dominion in this Republic!

Therefore we must insist that the public school shall nestle in every nook; that in it the Word of God with its pure and unique morality shall be read day by day; copies of this holy Word must be multiplied and placed in every hand, and there must be a sparing of no pains, no labor, no expense, for the conversion of the children of the papacy to the light, liberty and purity of the Gospel!

Duties await us also as Presbyterian Christians.

As voiced by Dr. Charles Hodge, the Presbyterian system denies that all Church power vests in the clergy; denies that the apostolic office is perpetual and denies that each individual Church is independent. It affirms that the people have a right to a substantive part in the government of the Church; that presbyters who minister in word and doctrine are the highest permanent officers in the Church, and that the visible Church is, or should be, one in the sense that a smaller part is subject to a larger, and a larger to the whole. The core of this system is the eldership; the whole eldership the organ for the exercise of the power of the Church; a portion specially ordained to discharge the duties of pulpit and pastorate; as rulers all elders on a footing of perfect equality; preachers and pastors all standing upon the same high level of dignity and authority, and the whole Church compacted into unity by a system of courts-lower, higher, highest. Of this system, Henderson, member of the Westminster Assembly, said, "Here is superiority without tyranny, parity without confusion, subjection without slavery." Of this system the Roman Catholic Archbishop Hughes said, "It acts on the principle of a radiating centre, and is without equal or rival among the other denominations of the country."

Our sister evangelical denominations we bid a hearty Godspeed! There is room for all and work for all. But who will chide us for entertaining the conviction that a peculiar duty awaits a Church like ours in a land like ours; a Church between whose form of government and that of the nation analogies so many and so striking exist, both embracing in felicitous counterpoise the right and privilege of free thought

and private judgment on the one hand, with the predom.nance of an ultimate and venerable authority on the other; a Church historically and notoriously not one whit more republican in the form of its government than it is in its spirit and tendencies; a Church that has, therefore, always been an object of peculiar and cordial hatred to despots secular and spiritual; a Church ever the champion of education; a Church embracing in such proportions talent, learning, character, Christian zeal and piety; before such a Church, we say, there lies a peculiar duty, and well will it be for her and for the world if her members prove themselves true children of Issachar, that have understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do.

Before this Church lies the duty of demonstrating a superior efficiency in spreading the Gospel among men, in gathering in the outcasts, in subduing sinners, in maturing all the rich fruit of the spirit, "love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." Amen!

In conclusion: Out of these fervors of fraternal greeting it is with a half timid heart we send our thoughts onward over the expanse of a coming hundred years of cradles, and of graves toward the two hundredth meeting of this General Assembly. Out of the noise and bustle and swirl of sixty million panting lives, with their sweet chorus of manifold charities, the footfall of beautiful feet upon the mountains bringing good tidings and publishing peace, bringing good tidings of good and publishing salvation, and mingling with these the hoarse, harsh cries of atheist and anarchist, the clash of conflict with sin and vice, with the imperious and cruel saloon, the stench of Mormonism, and withal the still-hunt of the Jesuitic Papacy-it is, we say, with shrinking heart and half timid eye that out of the midst of all this we look forward into and through the noise and bustle and swirl of the oncoming century, with its rush of progress, its masterful subjection and varied applications of the forces of nature to the uses of man, that will be to those of the present as the oak to the acorn, as the Ganges emptying its gathered flood into the sea, to the Ganges at its infant spring-head, its stupendous political changes, its currents and cross-currents of thought, feeling and action, its harmonious blendings of coöperating agencies and its fierce collisions of contending forces!

To this one hundredth General Assembly the members have threaded their way through a throng of sixty millions of people, and it startles us to think that to that two hundredth General Assembly the members will have to crush their way through the seething masses of more than four hundred and

fifty millions of people. The two Assemblies blended on this centennial day represent two great Presbyterian bodies. Why need we doubt that the Two Hundredth Assembly will represent the combined Presbyterianism of the Republic? If one Congress can stand and act for sixty million citizens, why may not one General Assembly stand and act for sixty million Presbyterians?

Let us be thankful, brethren, that the character and fate of that stupendous future that now confronts our thoughts lies in other hands than ours. Our responsibilities will have been met and our duties will have been discharged, when into the custody of that Future we shall have passed this Present, not only unbetrayed, undamaged, uncrippled, but nerved up to a higher and holier tension, fervid, with a warmer zeal, purposes more rigorously girded, momentum harder to be resisted, and all baptized with tears of gratitude, enveloped in clouds of prayer and sanctified by a consecration higher and more entire. Amen and Amen!

THE SERMON,

PREACHED BY THE MODERAtor,

Rev. J. T. SMITH, D.D.,

OF BALTIMORE, MD.,

AT THE OPENING OF THE

One Hundredth General Assembly,

ON THURSDAY, MAY 17, 1888,

IN THE

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,

Washington Square,

PHILADELPHIA, PENNA.

THE SERMON.

FATHERS AND BRETHREN :

It is with no ordinary emotions we meet here to mingle our centennial congratulations and thanksgivings. Philadelphia, the name of our place of assemblage, is a name of happy omen. Brother and Love are two new names borrowed from the vocabulary of Heaven, brought down to earth by the divine Master and transfigured into mighty spiritual forces for the regeneration of human society. We hail the name as a prophecy of that "good time coming" when fear and force and interest and authority shall all be lost in brotherly love, binding these scattered fragments of humanity into one glorious brotherhood.

No memorial city on earth, save one, is for us filled with such inspiring monuments and memories. There stands the old State House, gray with years, covered within and without with sublimer inscriptions than were ever graved on pyramid or pillar, in whose inner chamber was cradled the mightiest of nations, and from whose steeple rang out the proclamation at once of national independence and human brotherhood, which has gone sounding through the world ever since: "Proclaim ye liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof."

This is our Presbyterian Jerusalem, "the Vision of Peace,” transfigured for us into the City of Brotherly Love. Here the Ark, long a wanderer on these shores, found a resting place. For here the first Presbytery was formed and the first Synod and the first General Assembly. And here for many years successive Assemblies met. The spirits of the sainted dead are all around us, and we, my brethren, are come to "Mount Zion, to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to the General Assembly and Church of the First Born."

Organized in 1788, and holding its first meeting the year following, the first General Assembly consisted of 34 members, representing some 177 churches, scattered along this Atlantic coast. The Alleghanies were then the frontiers, and beyond them stretched away to the distant Pacific an almost unbroken wilderness. The Mississippi then rolled voiceless through the great valley to the sea, and the vast plains and