furthest limit of to-day. Even what we love best becomes distasteful by sameness; and a monotony of happiness is readily exchanged for a discomfort which promises the charm of variety. And the same impulse has been at work too, towards other and higher ends than those I have named. Without this, in the State, the establishment of juster laws and wiser institutions would be impossible; (for when did the abstract love of what is best in itself mould the course of any nation?) without this, in the Church, we should have lacked those great revivals or reformations of religion, or by whatever name you may call the fresh outpourings of the Holy Spirit on the hearts of Christians; nay, without this (humanly speaking) we should never have been Christians at all, and the standard of Christ would never have triumphed over the banners of the Jew and the heathen.

But side by side with the love of change, following upon it, nay, often blended with it, there is also the desire of rest. There comes a time, to the individual, or the Church, or the nation, when the heart, weary of endless fluctuation, longs for something stable, immoveable, unchanging, in which it may fix its roots for ever: a time when the very end and consummation of all our desires seems to be the harbour after the tempest, the repose after the battle, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Then we long to rest and be

thankful:' then, like those fabled mariners of old, we exclaim

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil; the shore, Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar. Oh, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more!'

Or, like the Christian hymnist

'Change and decay in all around I see :

O Thou who changest not, abide with me.'

Then the reaction, after years perhaps of restlessness, sets in with its strong tide upon our hearts; and we begin to say to ourselves, 'There must be some unchangeable truth, some steadfast pillar to which faith and hope may bind themselves, some home that may fix its foundations deep as the bases of the everlasting hills, some point at which we may say to the restless sea of change, Thus far shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.' This is the feeling which makes men who were Radicals in their youth Conservatives in their old age, and which makes many an aged Christian shake his grey head, when he sees new phases of faith and unaccustomed forms of worship developing around him, as the great ocean of human hearts seethes and bubbles in its unceasing fluctuations.

Brethren, it is the assertion of the Christian Church that there is but one Name given among men, but one Person that ever wore human form,

Who satisfies equally these two opposite longings of the human mind-the love of change, and the desire of rest. It is the Name of Jesus Christ: it is the Person of the Son of God.

I. We say first that Christ satisfies that irresistible love of change which is one of the moving impulses of men's actions. We mean not that in Himself, in His own Nature and Character, He can change in the slightest particular. The very words of my text forbid the thought: He is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. But we mean that in that very sameness there is a variety, in that oneness a multiformity, which fits Him to be the Guide of hearts, the Teacher of minds, the Saviour of souls, to persons, under circumstances, and in times, the most diverse which the mind can imagine as existing within the wide compass of the rational creation of God.

For cast your eye back over the diversified history of the Church of Christ, during the wellnigh nineteen centuries of its existence, and tell me if in that garment of many colours, that 'mighty maze, but not without a plan,' you do not find the proof that Christ has been and is the centre of souls differing from each other widely as the poles in every outward circumstance, and every inward phase of character. Can we compare together two civilized nations which shall differ from each other more widely in every respect, except the fact that

they are civilized, than the Greece of the first century of the Christian era, and the England of the nineteenth? And yet, who shall dare to say that Christ is not to the one all that He was to the other? who shall dare to say that He has not much people in this city' in which we live— that He is not loved as intensely, worshipped as devoutly, served as faithfully, in London to-day as in Corinth or Philippi eighteen hundred years ago? The Church of Christ, we boldly affirm it, is as full of life this day among ourselves as at Pentecost in Jerusalem; and yet in her surroundings, in the landscape that environs her, she sees not now a single feature which would have met her gaze then.

Look where you will down the stream of Church History, and you will find abundant evidence of the adaptability of the Church to every fresh phase with which she has been brought into contact. If Christ has added to human life, by a fresh moral creation, new types of work and character unknown before the martyr and the confessor, the monk and the missionary, the sister of mercy and the preacher of repentance-yet He has not less enlisted in His service those characters old as civilized society itself the monarch and the statesman, the scholar and the philosopher, the merchant and the soldier. If under the shelter of His Church, the despised and the destitute, the beggar and the foundling,

have found refuge, not less have the rich and the great been brought to meet the poor and the humble under its portals, and the purple pride of kings has bowed to wash the feet of outcasts. If gorgeous temples have enshrined Him amid all the splendours which Art can lavish on Religion, yet He has been worshipped too in sordid huts and secret upper-chambers, in dens and caves of the earth, and beneath the open canopy of heaven. If He has accepted the homage of illiterate peasants, and the tongues of little children have learnt to lisp His praises, not less have matured intellect and accumulated knowledge bowed down before the Cross of Calvary, and acknowledged that in Him who hangs there is found all wisdom, as well as righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

Or take another range: look not through time, but through space. Widely as the existing races of mankind differ from each other, by force of climate or circumstance, or the mysterious indelible impress of national character, yet for all Christ is sufficient, in all His Church has learnt, or is surely, if slowly, learning to establish herself. You cross the boundaries which separate nation from nation, or continent from continent: and in all, varied in a hundred particulars of form and ritual, the same Christ is worshipped; ever adapting Himself, if with reverence we may say it, to the shifting conditions