The word of the Lord
standeth sure! That Word which was "in the beginning," and "was with
God," and "was God!" Glorious truth! that, amid all the inventions which
man has sought out, while every new philosopher has been starting some
new method of happiness, some new theory of human life and its destinies,
God has still been working onward, unchecked, unaltered, "the same
yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." O, sons of men! perplexed by all
the apparent contradictions and cross purposes and opposing powers and
principles of this strange, dark, noisy time, remember to your comfort
that your King, a man like you, yet very God, now sits above, seeing
through all which you cannot see through; unravelling surely all this
tangled web of time, while under His guiding eye all things are moving
silently onward, like the stars in their courses above you, toward their
appointed end, "when He shall have put down all rule and all authority,
and power, for He must reign, till He hath put all enemies under His
feet." And then, at last, this cloudy sky shall be all clear and bright,
for He, the Lamb, shall be the light thereof.

Christ is the witness to us also of the eternity of Love,--Of God's love-
-the love of the Father who wills, of Himself who has purchased, of the
Holy Ghost who works in us our salvation; and of the eternity of all
love; that true love is not of the flesh, but of the spirit, and
therefore hath its root in the spiritual world, above all change and
accidents of time or circumstance. Think, think, my friends. For what
is life that we should make such ado about it, and hug it so closely, and
look to it to fill our hearts? What is all earthly life with all its bad
and good luck, its riches and its poverty, but a vapour that passes
away?--noise and smoke overclouding the enduring light of heaven. A man
may be very happy and blest in this life; yet he may feel that, however
pleasant it is, at root it is no reality, but only a shadow of realities
which are eternal and infinite in the bosom of God, a piecemeal pattern,
of the Light Kingdom--the city not made with hands--eternal in the
heavens. For all this time-world, as a wise man says, is but like an
image, beautifully and fearfully emblematic, but still only an emblem,
like an air image, which plays and flickers in the grand, still mirror of
eternity. Out of nothing, into time and space we all came into noisy
day; and out of