th which we were
ready to join issue approached our shores at this crisis, what eager
crowds would have attended their advent, and how impatiently would
they have waited the course of events! And had peace been the result
of the conference, how would the tidings, as they passed from mouth
to mouth, and were flashed by the telegraph from town to town, have
filled and moved the land! The pale student would have forgot his
books, the anxious merchant his speculations, the trader his shop, the
tradesman his craft, tired labour her toils, happy children their
toys, and even the bereaved their griefs; and like the whirlpool,
which sucks straws and sea-weed, boats and gallant ships--all things,
big or small--into its mighty vortex, the news would have absorbed all
other subjects. The one topic of conversation at churches and
theatres, at marriages and funerals, in halls and cottages, in crowded
cities and in lonely glens; ministers had carried it in their sermons
to the pulpit, and devout Christians in their thanksgivings to the
Throne of Grace.

In a much greater crisis, where the stakes were deeper, the question
being not one of peace or war between man and man, but between man and
God, an embassy from heaven reached the borders of our world. Unlike
Elijah, rough in dress, of aspect stern and speech severe, whose
appearance struck Ahab with terror, and wrung from the pale lips of
the conscience-stricken king the cry, "Hast thou found me, O mine
enemy?"--unlike Jonah as he walked the wondering streets, and woke
their echoes with his doleful cry, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall
be destroyed,"--the ambassadors were "a multitude of shining angels."
Leaving the gates of heaven, they winged their flight down the starry
sky to descend and hover above the fields of Bethlehem, and in the
form of a song, as became such joyful tidings, to proclaim news of
Peace--their song, "Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace,
good-will toward men." Nothing presents a more remarkable example of
"much in little" than these few but weighty words. In small crystals,
that coat, as with shining frost-work, the sides of a vessel, we have
all the salts which give perpetual freshness to the ocean, their life
to the weeds that clothe its rocks, and to the fish that swim its
depths and shallows. In some drops of oil distilled from rose-leaves
of Indian lands, and valued at many times their weight in gold, we
have enclosed within one small phial the