ine eyes have seen thy salvation."

* * * * *

From an "Installation Sermon," January 4th, 1846.

=_169._= THE TRUE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

The saints of olden time perished at the stake; they hung on gibbets;
they agonized upon the rack; they died under the steel of the tormentor.
It was the heroism of our fathers' day that swam the unknown seas; froze
in the woods; starved with want and cold; fought battles with the red
right hand. It is the sainthood and heroism of our day that toils for
the ignorant, the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the wicked. Yes, it is
our saints and heroes who fight fighting; who contend for the slave, and
his master too, for the drunkard, the criminal; yes, for the wicked or
the weak in all their forms.... But the saints and the heroes of this
day, who draw no sword, whose right hand is never bloody, who burn in no
fires of wood or sulphur, nor languish briefly on the hasty cross; the
saints and heroes who, in a worldly world, dare to be men; in an age of
conformity and selfishness, speak for Truth and Man, living for noble
aims, men who will swear to no lies howsoever popular; who will honor
no sins, though never so profitable, respectable, and ancient; men who
count Christ not their master, but teacher, friend, brother, and strive
like him to practice all they pray; to incarnate and make real the Word
of God, these men I honor far more than the saints of old.... Racks and
fagots soon waft the soul to God, stern messengers, but swift. A boy
could bear that passage,--the martyrdom of death. But the temptation of
a long life of neglect, and scorn, and obloquy, and shame, and want, and
desertion by false friends; to live blameless though blamed, cut off
from human sympathy, that is the martyrdom of to-day. I shed no tears
for such martyrs. I shout when I see one; I take courage and thank God
for the real saints, prophets and heroes of to-day.... Yea, though now
men would steal the rusty sword from underneath the bones of a saint or
hero long deceased, to smite off therewith the head of a new prophet,
that ancient hero's son; though they would gladly crush the heart out of
him with the tombstones they piled up for great men, dead and honored
now; yet in some future day, that mob penitent, baptized with a new
spirit, like drunken men returned to sanity once more, shall search
through all this land for marble white enough to build a monument to
that prophet w