gh the leaves of Olivet. The wild birds, in
their flight, bore upward the beautiful lesson of Providence, and the
significance of the Kingdom of Heaven was contained in a mustard-seed.
By no abstruse reasoning did he make his instructions so vivid to his
disciples, and so fresh to ourselves. But he awoke the conviction of
moral need, and repentance, and Divine Love, by drawing from instances
with which they had been familiar all their lives--the procedures of
government, the transactions of business, the labors of the husbandman,
and the incidents of home. And the result is essentially the same,
whether we start with the religious truth to find some illustration in
the world around us, or from some aspect of human life, or nature,
extract a religious truth. Nor need this always be sharply obvious. It
is only necessary that our point of view be sufficiently elevated to
throw a spiritual light upon things, and to reveal their moral
relations; for, often, our understandings are cleared, and our hearts
made better, by the mere scope and tendency of such observations.

With this conviction, I called your attention, last winter, to some of
the "Aspects of City Life," and with the same view, I wish now to
address you, for a few Sunday evenings, on the Conditions of Humanity in
the City, in which series I shall endeavor not only to present new
topics of interest, but to urge more explicitly some points, which, in
the afore-mentioned discourses, I merely touched upon.

The essential meaning of the personification in the text is in
accordance, I think, with the general tenor of remark which I have just
been making. For I understand it to mean, that everything is
instructive, that even in the common ways of life the most important
truths, and the profoundest moral and religious significance, are
contained. And the words before us, also, specifically indicate the
subject upon which I wish to speak this evening, for they declare that
"Wisdom... uttereth her voice in the streets."

The street through which you walk every day; with whose sights and
sounds you have been familiar, perhaps, all your lives; is it all so
common-place that it yields you no deep lessons,--deep and fresh, it may
be, if you would only look around with discerning eyes? Engaged with
your own special interests, and busy with monotonous details, you may
not heed it; and yet there is something finer than the grandest poetry,
even in the mere spectacle of these mu