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tion of the Son of God, yet this is the annual and all-inclusive day, and is the Sunday of Sundays, which proclaims the res surrection of Christ from the dead with the sounding joy and sympathy of the whole Christian world. Christ is risen! There is life, therefore, after death! His resurrection is the symbol and pledge of universal resurrection!

It was almost nineteen hundred years ago. The world had not then just begun. It had passed four thosand troubled years. Well might holy men deem the old ended and the new begun, when with Simeon, they were prepared to say, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!" Well might the hopeful expect, from the very hour of Christ's resurrection, new scenes, new power, and new life of men and nations. Yet how blindly did they expect! How utterly unlike expectation have been the results. If we could go back to the time of the resurrection of Christ, and learn what was the expectation of the most intelligent and the most instructed of the early Christian men respecting the future, we should doubtless see that every single element of it, so far as it related to the outward progress of Christ's kingdom in this world, was mistaken.

Where is Jerusalem, that to the early Christian was to be glorified under Christ? Where are the Jews to-day, that were to be God's favored people in a more illustrious reign and kingdom? They are dispersed through all the earth, with indigestible nationality, yet immiscible and ungathered. Jerusalem is a stage for antiquarians and devout pilgrims. The temple is gone, the light of true faith is quenched, and a decaying superstition kindles its lurid fire in the place of it. From the day that the hand of the government was stretched out against Christ, it seems to have been paralyzed, and the fabled Wandering Jew is a symbol of the nation itself, vagabond, restless and wretched-a nation without a land; a people without a goverement; a parasitic people, growing upon the boughs of other nations, as the mistletoe upon the oak.

On this morning, of old, the Greek people, broken in political power, were yet the repositories of literature, of philosophy, of art. They were the world's school-masters. The rude Romans first subdued them, and then became their scholars, and sat at the feet of those on whose necks they had put their own feet.

But now the torch that kindled the whole world's literature has itself gone out. The name and the place of Greece remains, but Greece is but a remembrance; and missionaries from distant lands are carrying scanty coals and embers from modern altars to kindle again the fires long quenched upon

those renowned places of antiquity that gave to the world its light.

The Roman at that time stood supreme; but the empire is dead, ages ago. Rome was the centre of power then. It is now the centre of decrepitude. It then commanded the world. Now it subsists by the permission of foreign armies. Its armies were in the East, in Gaul, in Britain. Europe was its realm. Now Rome mutters anathemas with the permission of a usurping French Emperor, and is saved from the indignation of the Italian people by a mercenary army.

So long ago did the Jewish national life cease, and the Grecian and the Roman, that there has been time since for vast intermediate formations. The complex and transitional nations of the middle ages have had time for growth and for decay, and they have passed away, and still another growth, with modern civilization, is developed-and all since the first incoming of this morning of the resurrection, that seemed to promise immediate victory to the world.

And now, a little more than eighteen hundred years after the resurrection, the day illustrious above all others, the day that brought to light and life the longed-for truths of immortality, the day that glows with the light of the natural sun, not only, but through morning portal pours the effulgence of the great spirit world beyond, the light of the land of God-how strangely has it come every year again, shining upon all the earth! It came annually for a hundred years, and not a Christian temple did it see, and only hidden and dispersed Christians. It came for two hundred years more, and yet no fanes had been built. The root of Christianity had spread, and some leaves had crept along the ground like a hidden vine, but no tree of life spread its branches, a covert and a shade, for full three hundred years after the first shining of this day.

It came year by year to see Christianity recognized and corrupted almost at the same time; to see the world convulsed with wars and revolutions; to see the earth groan and travail in pain until now.

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But now, in these later years, the whole Christian world celebrates this day again. Five hours ago our fatherland beits hymns and chants; but even before that the solemn sounding joy had spread through all the Russian land. Across the sea the light brought joy to many a ship; and glancing on the shore, ten thousand spires flash the glad illumination, and tremble to the rolling organ beneath, that sounds forth the Christian's exultation. It is the Lord's day, and the annual day of resurrection.

Oh, day of God! comest thou to declare the soul's life? As thy light increases, do we read the dim intimations of nature more plainly, and, deciphering them, learn the glorious doctrine of immortality? Shall the dead live again? Shall love light again its quenched fire where storms cannot extinguish it? Shall we find in the future that glorious treasurehouse into which has been gathered all that is good and best of earthly life? Is there a kingdom where God is King, and the King is Father? Oh, land without tears! how shall we understand thee-we who cannot look but through tears? Oh, land of truth, and purity, and love! art thou real, and near, for all who will?-Henry Ward Beecher, 1864.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THE first French Revolution was an experiment on popular institutions which, in its objects and the causes from which it sprang, combined all the elements of a great and successful reform; and the cause of its direful miscarriage stands out therefore conspicuous and undoubted for a lesson to all nations. The French people began their reform by renouncing allegiance to God and to the laws. They proceeded throughout upon the principle that Christianity and republicanism could not subsist together. This frightful doctrine they wrought everywhere into the national mind-expecting to hold its terrible volcanic power in check, and control it to their purpose, by such devices as a representative convention, skilful operations of finance, a political establishment on the theory of natural right, and, more absurd than all, a national oath, to be renewed by all Frenchmen every fourth year of the new calendar, "to live free or die." Infatuated men! Illustrious dupes of impiety and folly! What virtue do you expect from your "national oath" after you have thus extirpated every sentiment and every principle that can give it solemnity or sanction? What barrier will you raise against the tides of popular fury, when they have ceased to obey the attraction of the skies?

But, that nothing might be wanting to make this experiment complete and final, or to show that it was made by the whole nation in its corporate capacity, the government, by a solemn public act, renounced its allegiance to Heaven and established impiety by law. It decreed that all religious signs, whether in public or private places, which might serve. to remind the people of their ancient faith, should be annihi

lated. It voted death an eternal sleep. It abolished funerals, and decreed that all deceased persons should be buried like the carcasses of brutes, without ceremony or religious service. It abolished the Sabbath, and gave up all churches and places of worship to plunder. It ordered the Bible to be publicly burnt by the common hangman; and, as if to extirpate the very memory of Scripture history, it instituted a new calendar, in which the divisions of time should be marked by no reference to the Christian era or to Christian institutions.

The world stood aghast at such a bold and shameless desecration of everything pure and venerable and holy. Men's hearts failed them for fear; and they waited for the event in fixed astonishment, as they wait for the avalanche or the earthquake. Those who managed the vessel of State had thrown chart and compass overboard, and madly put out on the sea of revolution. They had hailed the rising sun of liberty with joy; but now that the ocean swelled, and the air darkened, with what terror did they behold his broad bloodred disk climb a sky black with tempests, and sounding with loud thunders from side to side! It has not been left to us to record the horrors and crimes of that eventful period, when Paris, the seat of art and elegance and fashion, became a great slaughter-house, and the throne and the altar floated in blood away from their foundations. When one executioner tired with his horrid work of chopping off human heads, another was called to stand in his place-and another-and another. No love was left. Every man was an assassin; and the murderer of to-day, while his hand was yet upon the axe, was marked the victim for to-morrow. And thus the Republic, drunk with blood, staggered on under her load of misery and crime, towards the gulf of military despotisman abyss dreadful and profound as hell! Anarchy is always impatient for a tyrant; and in a State so fruitful of monsters as France had been, he could not long be waited for. There was a brief and fearful pause; when lo! girt about with darkness and clad in complete steel, a stern and solitary figure, bred out of the seething mass of national corruptionthe offspring and very image of the times-rose on the highest wave of revolution, with the imperial eagle in his hand! The Tribunate hailed him as the supreme head of the nation. The Senate entreated him to accept the purple. The army followed, and laid the glory of a thousand victories at his feet. The people shouted, "Vive L'Empereur Napoleon !" and-the French Republic was no more. Samuel Eells, 1839.

THE PATIENCE OF POLAND.

To my brethren in misfortune, the Polish exiles, I have a word of thanks to speak. It is eighty-one years since Poland first was quartered by a nefarious act of combined royalty, which the Swiss Tacitus, Johannes Müller, well characterized by saying that "God permitted the act to show forth the morality of kings." And it is twenty-four years since downtrodden Poland made the greatest (not the last) manifestation of her imperishable vitality, which the cabinets of Europe were too narrow-minded to understand, or too corrupt to appreciate,-eighty-one years of still unretributed crime, and twenty-four years of misery in exile! It is a long time to suffer and not to despair. And all along this time, you proscribed patriots of Poland, you were suffering and did not despair. You stood up before God and the world, a living statue, with the unquenchable life-flame of patriotism streaming through its petrified limbs. You stood up, a protest of eternal right against the sway of impious might, a Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, written in letters of burning blood on the walls of despotism. Time, misery and sorrow thinned the ranks of your scattered Israel. You have carried your dead to the grave, and those who survived went to suffer and to hope. Wherever oppressed Freedom reared a banner, you rallied around;-the living statue changed to a fighting hero. Many of you fell; but when might triumphed once more over virtue and right, the living resumed the wandering exile's walking-stick and did not despair. Many among you who were young when last they saw the sun rise over Poland's mountains and plains, have their hair whitened and their strength broken with age, with anguish and with misery; but the patriot heart keeps the freshness of its youth. It is young in love of Poland, young in aspirations for her freedom, young in hope, and youthfully fresh in determination to break Poland's chains. What a rich source of noble deeds patriotism must be, to give you strength so much to suffer and never to despair. You have given to all of us, your younger brethren in the family of exiles, a noble example, which will be fruitful in good time.

When the battle of Canna was lost, and Hannibal was measuring by bushels the rings of the fallen Roman squires, the Senate of Rome voted thanks to Consul Terentius Varro, "for not having despaired of the commonwealth." Proscribed patriots of Poland! I thank you, and history will

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