for those that heartily receive it, and is a
conception of magnificence beside which even a Nebular Hypothesis with
all its grandeur grows small. And the man of facts may as well
recognize what Napoleon saw on St. Helena,--the one grand fact of the
living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is
mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in
vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has
pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the
stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped
the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social
life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy
battalions; a force that this hour beats in millions of hearts, all
over this globe, with a living warmth beside which the love of science
and art is cold and clammy. Surely it would be not much to ask for the
docility to recognize such patent facts as these. And I must believe
that any mind is fundamentally unhinged that despises the profoundest
convictions of the noblest hearts, or speaks lightly of the mighty
influence that has moulded human events and has upheaved the world. It
has, in its arrogance, cut adrift and swung off from the two grand
foci of all truth, the human and the divine.

"Of the several qualities,--the wakefulness, precision, fullness,
equipoise, and docility--that form, in other words, the motion, edge,
weight, balance, and direction of the forged and tempered
intellect,--I might give many instances. Such men as Thomas Arnold and
Mr. Gladstone instantly rise to the thoughts,--the one by his
truth-seeking and truth-finding spirit moulding a generation of
English scholars, the other carrying by the sheer force of his
clear-cut intellect and magnanimous soul the sympathies of a great
nation and the admiration of Christendom. But let me rather single out
one name from the land of specialties and limitations,--Barthold
George Niebuhr, the statesman and historian. Not perfect, indeed, but
admirable. See him begin in his early youth by saying,--'I do not ask
myself whether I can do a thing; I command myself to do it.' Read the
singular sketch of his intellectual gymnastics at twenty-one, spurring
himself to 'inward deep voluntary thought,' 'guarding against society
and dissipation,' devoting an hour each day to clearing up his
thoughts on given subjects, and two hours to the round of phys