that which occurred in Boston in the days of Whitefield? It must be admitted that there are some points of inferiority; but are there any of superiority? We are a larger and more heterogeneous community now than we were then. We are fuller of commercial activity; our heads are in newspapers and ledgers, and not, as the heads and hearts of the early New England fathers were, in the Holy Scriptures. Nevertheless, it was a temporarily demoralized community which Whitefield and Edwards addressed. A practical union of Church and State had so secularized religious society that it had sunk further away from scriptural and scientific ideals than the present religious society of New England has done. We all hold now that the ministry ought to be made up of converted men, and that no one should become a member of the Church unless he can give credible evidence of having entered upon a religious life. But in Whitefield's day it was necessary for him to insist upon what is now a commonplace truththat conversion should precede entrance upon the ministry and church-membership. In Edwards' day many circles of the New England population had forgotten the necessity of the new birth, or did not believe that it is an ascertainable change; and so there was a hush in the revival when Whitefield was here-a sense of sin, which ought to exist now, but which probably does not for a great variety of reasons, not all of them to be classed as proofs of the shallowness of the present effort. Would that we had such loyalty to the scientific method as to have an adequate sense of our dissonance with the nature of things! It were good for us and for America if we had in Boston to-day just that far-penetrating gaze which filled the eyes of New England one hundred years ago, as Whitefield and Edwards turned our fathers' countenances toward the Unseen Holy. In one particular, however, this revival certainly surpasses that under Whitefield in this city in 1740-namely, in the extent to which types have been consecrated to the work of sending religious truths abroad through the newspaper press. All the leading and all the respectable newspapers of Boston have favoured the revival. It is easier for the platform than for the press to speak for to-morrow against the dissent of to-day. But the best part of our press not only mirrors, but leads public sentiment and speaks for to-morrow against the rivalry of the poorer part of both platform and press, which speak only for to-day. Encourage all speakers for to-morrow. In the next place, it deserves to be mentioned that religious visitation from house to house, and especially among the perishing and degraded, is now going forward in a hopefully thorough manner in Boston. I am able to assure you that two thousand persons are now devoting a large part of their time in this city to religious visitation among the poor. In no other population has there been a more effective arrangement for visitation than here. God be thanked that every lane is to be seen, and that superfluity and squalor are to look into each other's eyes! Of one hundred and ten evangelical churches in this city, ninety have already signified their intention to co-operate in this work. Each pastor of these ninety has appointed gentlemen to oversee the work undertaken by his particular church. Is there any one shallow enough to sneer at such proceedings? You will sneer, then, at the best executive talent of Boston. There are seventy thousand families within the limits of Boston, and there have been workers appointed to cover sixty-five thousand of these families. In Boston I include Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Brighton. We are to look on this work as performed by picked men and women. There is no quarter of this city so degraded by unreportable vice that it is not being visited by women, lineal descendants, no doubt, of those whom Tacitus says our German forefathers honoured as recipients of special illumination from Heaven. The saloons are being visited, and the report now coming in is that the visitors are kindly received, and you will find every now and then a visitor saying: "There are in my district fifteen cases of interest, or persons seriously inquiring how they can get rid of vice and enter upon a manly or womanly life; and I am to follow these cases up." Remember that this work of visitation is intended not merely for those who are outside of the circle of glad loyalty to religious truth, but for those who are nominally inside of that circle and are yet inefficient. Nothing quickens a man like trying to quicken another. If there is one measure in which our American evangelist has shown his generalship more effectively than anywhere else, it is in setting men to work, and in so setting them to work as to set them on fire. But what are we to say of the prayer-meetings among business men, which have not yet attained their height, and yet are already visible at a distance? It is my privilege and joy to be a flying scout in New England. One morning, I woke up to the sound of the swollen and impetuous Androscoggin, and in the course of the day passed through Portland, and Portsmouth, and Newburyport, and Salem, and Boston, and Worcester, and Springfield, to Hartford; and all along I had evidence, by conversation, and by looking at the local papers, that these business men's meetings are visible on the Androscoggin and on the Connecticut. You have in this Temple a very interesting meeting, which was never matched for weight in Edinburgh. There are crowded prayer-meetings at high noon for men engaged in the dry goods business, for men in the furniture trade, for men in the market, for men in the fish trade, for newspaper men, for all classes, indeed, of our throbbing, tumultuous, breathless, business community. This, if you will notice the fact, is Boston. When I stated a few weeks ago that you would see Boston visited as you had seen other cities visited, you did not receive the affirmation with a smile of incredulity, but the public did. That poor prophecy has been fulfilled, and we have a month more for work. If you please, the times are serious, and light sneers will do no good now, and ought not to be noticed by me except in pity. It was my fortune professionally to walk down to a church near the Tabernacle to give an Easter discourse. As I passed up the street, I met a crowd of people emerging from, I did not at first think where, until I remembered that the Tabernacle service had just closed. They covered acres, and came on in thousands, like the crowds of a gala day. I noticed their faces; for the best test of what has been done in a reli gious address, in any assembly, is to study the countenances of the audience as it disperses. If you see a softened, an ennobled, a solar look," to use one of the phrases of Bronson Alcott, one may be sure that religious truth has done good. I saw the solar look yesterday on the street in hundreds and thousands of faces. I saw it sometimes in the gaze of shop-girls, perhaps. Yes; but high culture in Boston does not care much for shop-girls. Well, it is time it should. There is a low-bred, loaferish liberalism uttering itself occasionally in sneers because the poor have the Gospel preached to them. That sneer has been heard ever since the days of Celsus and the games in the old Coliseum, and it has a peculiarly reptilian ring. There are many kinds of liberalism. Christian liberalism I honour; literary and æsthetic liberalism is to be spoken of with respect in most cases; but below what I have called a limp and lavender and unscientific liberalism there is a w-bred and loaferish liberalism. This, in Boston, has impudence, at no scholarship; rattles, but no fangs. In the great multitude the solar look is the best prophecy that can be had for the American future. It is a radiance that is like the rising of the sun to any man who is anxious about what is to come in America. After noticing that look, and thanking God for it, I walked on, and happened to pass a lonely Boston corner, where the Paine Hall and the Parker Memorial Hall stand near each other-"par nobile fratrum." On a bulletin on the Paine Hall, the street in front of which looked deserted, I read : "Children's Progressive Lyceum Entertainment this evening." "The Origin and Amusements of the Orthodox Hell." "Twenty-ninth Anniversary of Modern Spiritualism, April 1st." Passing by the Parker Memorial Hall, where, no doubt, words of good sense have been uttered occasionally, I found in the window this statement: "To-night, a Lecture on the Arctic Regions, with a Stereopticon and Seventy Views." All over the world, the equivalent of the scene I saw on that Easter morn may be looked upon almost everywhere within the whole domain of Christendom. Infidelity in Germany is no stronger than it is in Boston. Out of the thirty universities of that most learned land of the globe, only one is called rationalistic to-day. When the sun stands above Bunker Hill at noon it has just set on the Parthenon, and is rising on the volcanoes of the Sandwich Isles. As Easter day passed about the globe, the contrasted scenes which the sun saw here-a multitude fed with God's Word, and a few erratics striving to solace themselves without God- -were not unlike the scenes which the resplendent orb looked down upon in the whole range of civilization. In two hundred languages of the world the Scriptures were read yesterday; in two hundred languages of the world hymns were lifted to the Triune Name yesterday; in two hundred languages of the world the Gospel was preached to the poor yesterday. What is our impecunious scepticism doing here? Has it ever printed a book that has gone into a second edition? Theodore Parker's works never went into many editions. I do not know of a single infidel book over a hundred years old that has not been put on the upper neglected shelf by scholars. Boston must compare her achievements with those of cities outside of America, and take her chances under the buffetings of time. Where is there in Boston anything in the shape of scepticism that will bear the microscope? For one, I solemnly aver that I do not know where, and I have nothing else to do but search. Theodore Parker is the best sceptic you ever had; but to me he is honey-combed through and through with disloyalty to the very nature of thingshis supreme authority. It was asserted not long ago, in an obscure sceptical newspaper here, that Parker's works ought to be forced into notoriety by his friends; it was admitted that there was not much demand for the book; but it was thought that if now there was an effort made strategically, one might be put upon the market. You have no better books than these, and there has been no marked demand in Boston for these, and the attentive portion of the world knows the facts. Why am I proclaiming this? Because outside of Boston it is often carelessly supposed that, the facts are the reverse, and that this city is represented only by a few people who, deficient in religious activity, and forgetting the law of the survival of the fittest, are distinguished far more by audacity than by scholarship, and are members of a long line in history, of which Gallio stood at the head. Let me mention, as a fourth prominent trait in this revival, the great effort made for temperance. We have done more in that particular than was done in Boston in Whitefield's day; for in his time men were not awake on that theme. It is a good sign to see the Church and secular effort join hands. It is a good sign when our American evangelist himself can say, "I have been a professing Christian twenty-two years, and I have been in Boston and other cities for most of that time, and I never saw such a day as this is. I stand in wonder and amazement at what is being done. It seems as if God were taking this work out of our hands. Prayer-meetings are springing up in all parts of the city. If you were asked two months ago if these things were possible, you would have said: Yes, if God will open the windows of Heaven and do them."" Macau Let us admit that we could all wish for greater blessings. lay said concerning literary excellence that we were to measure success not by absolute, but by relative standards. Matching his own history against the seventh book of Thucydides, he was always humble; but matching his history against current productions, Macaulay felt encouraged. Matching this day in Boston against some things in Whitefield's day; matching it against the dateless noon of Pentecost; matching it against our opportunities, we are humble; we have no reason for elation; ours is a day of small things. But compare what has been done here by God's Word and religious effort with all that has been done since Boston was founded by the opponents of God's Word, and we are encouraged. Our opportunity in the second New England is greater than that of our fathers was in the first New England. Let us act as the memory of our fathers dictates. New England, the Mississippi Valley, the Pacific coast, Scotland, England, always knows whether or not Boston does her duty. A power not of man is in this hushed air. Who will lock hands with him whom we dare not name, and go forward to triumph in the cause that cares equally for the rich and the poor, and for to-day and to-morrow ? THE LECTURE. When the Christian martyr Pionius was asked by his judges, "What God dost thou worship?" he replied: "I worship him who made the heavens and who beautified them with stars, and who has enriched the earth with flowers and trees." "Dost thou mean," asked the magistrates, "Him who was crucified (illum dicis qui crucifixus est)? "Certainly," replied Pionius, "Him whom the Father sent for the salvation of the world."* As Pionius died, so died Blandina and the whole host of those who, in the first three centuries, without knowing anything of the Nicene Creed, held it implicitly, if not explicitly, and proclaimed it in flames and in dungeons, in famine and in nakedness, under the rack and under the sword. On the Egean Sea, under the shadow of the Acropolis, there were undoubtedly sung yesterday, in the Greek cathedrals, words which were written in the second century: 66 ‘Hail, gladdening Light of his pure glory poured, Holiest of Holies, Jesus Christ our Lord! Now we are come to the sun's hour of rest. The lights of evening around us shine; We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit divine. With undefiled tongue, Son of our God, giver of life alone, Therefore, in all the world, thy glories, Lord, we own."+ This poem is yet a vesper hymn in the Greek Church, and St. Basil quotes it in the third century. It and the "Gloria in Excelsis" and the "Ter Sanctus," which yesterday rolled around the world, were written in the second century, to pay absolutely divine honours to our Lord. When I open the best book which unevangelical Christianity ever printed in Boston-James Freeman Clarke's "Truths and Errors about Orthodoxy"? No! "Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy "--but the first would have been a better title-I read: "Down to the time of the Synod of Nice, Anno Domini 325, no doctrine of Trinity existed in the Church."* Will that statement bear the microscope of historical science? If it will, I wish to believe it and to reject everything inconsistent with it. But I hold in my hands this Greek vesper hymn and this "Ter Sanctus" and this" Gloria in Excelsis," written in the second century. What do they mean? Here, too, are the dying words of martyrs for three centuries, and all in harmony with the present faith of the Christian world. Ruinart, "Acta," p. 125. See Liddon's "Bampton Lectures," p. 409. |