truth of the prophet's words and to the eternal benevolence of God.

Even the sufferings of the unfortunate, the shiftless and the needy in our coldest and darkest winter hours are speedily met by some human benevolence, thus perpetuating the eternal law of Beauty for Ashes, wherever the sweeter thoughts of God have found their winning way.

In fact, everywhere-the flowers beneath our feet, the stars and the sunshine above our heads, the lessons of past history, echoes of forgotten ages, the glimmer of eternal dawn and the glow of ceaseless sunsets, the songs of birds, the anthems of human music, the quenchless but kindly protests of unceasing human love, the gifts of charity, the forgiveness of wrongs, the healings of the wars of the nations, the birth of genius and the clusterings of loyalty, of admiration, of adoration around the brow of greatness, and the carved monuments of human gratitude, the instincts of motherhood and fatherhood that outlive all ingratitude; all, all proclaim this underlying love of the universe, and prove to all but the shameless minions of Ingersoll atheism, that the Eternal giveth "Beauty for Ashes" wherever a human heart is willing, or any burnt and hardened spot of the world can possibly respond.

If the skeptic, the pessimist replies: "And He giveth ashes for beauty as well," murders millions in shipwreck, crushes other millions to death in avalanches of volcanic flames, dooms whole cities to destruction by cyclones, devastates vast areas of the world by pestilence and infectious disease, I ask, how little of all this is traceable directly to God's Providence, and how much of it to man's own degraded and ambitious will; and even when the bolt of destruction is direct from heaven, how few of us are smitten compared with the vast millions who deserve to be smitten, and how quickly the recuperating forces of Nature and of mankind, working with an overruling Providence, build the waste places and heal the broken hearts that remain.

The theme is endless and full of beauty. I could quote chapter after chapter in the prophet Isaiah alone-then fly to the gospels, the epistles, the Apocalypse-yea, to all the prophets, poets and master singers of the world, and prove to you that the divine in us, the beautiful ministry above us, are all in touch with the cheerful view of Nature and Providence, so sweetly sung in the three simple words of our text-" Beauty for Ashes"- until all the eternal springs of

love are hopeless and dry; and, surely, like a good host, I have kept the best wine for the last.

What are all the thoughts I have mentioned-all the testimony of all the ages and the worlds touching the working of this divine law in Nature and in ordinary human affairs-compared with the thought, the fact of its supreme and perpetual working in the supernatural realms for the redemption, evolution and glorification of the moral and spiritual soul and life of man?

Whatever we may think of the Eden story, of the fall, of sin in the abstract, or as taught in the dogma and philosophy of Christendom, every intelligent and honest-minded man knows only too well that there is somewhere a sad rift in the lute of time. Whoever Adam was and however he came into being, by Darwinian methods or by pure creation, the story of the first man is simply the story of every man since born into the world-the sweet Edens of childhood, the richer and rarer Edens of pure and exalted conscious manhood, not to speak of the ordinary lives of ordinary mankind-how surely and how constantly are they invaded by the tempter, darkened and shadow-covered, and filled with despair by the yieldings of the tempted, until the experience of every man forces him to hide from the face of God and to seek in a thousand ways to ease his troubled conscience, to find some sort of union with the broken eternal harmony between God and his own human soul.

And whatever men may think of the dogmas of the Church concerning the one and only divine method of healing the broken heart of the world, of restoring its peace, of recreating and inspiring the human will toward unity with the divine, of sanctifying the human soul through the special and supernatural gift of grace by faith in His incarnate Son, as expounded and offered in the Sacraments of the Church, the simple facts of all the nations as recorded through all the ages of history must convince the reason of the intelligent that wave after wave of evil, passion, greed, lust, ambition, injustice, and million-fold wrongs-even judged by such standards as the best men of the race have set up as standards of the true and the good— has swept nation after nation and people after people to utter destruction, so that the only view of the record that bears the semblance of reason is that some overruling Providence has, in sheer justice, let loose the flames of eternal vengeance until from the Nile to the Ganges, from the plains of the Himalayas to the Alps, to the Tiber, to the Rhine, yea, from the Delaware to the Mississippi and

across our new plains to the Golden Gate and the peaceful sea, they have devoured effete and wasted nations of men, leaving only or mainly heaps of ashes and the long, low wailings of countless millions of dead.

Either the nations have been too sinful to be allowed to live, or the soul of the eternal Destroyer of nations is unjust to the core. Scholarly saints like Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll take the latter view of the case, and curse God as long as their cursing pays.

The more intelligent and more truthful of the human race have always felt that the nations got only their deserts, and that the eternal heart of Providence was not only just, but kind.

Again, whatever conclusion men may reach concerning the causes or the justice at the heart of the destructions of the nations, they must admit that human reason has never yet found a preventive or a cure, and the deeper they reason, the more clearly will they be convinced with Plato and other deeper thinkers among the ancients that only an incarnate God, entering our human nature, so inspiring it at the very fountains of our being-inspiring our very flesh, and mind, and heart, and will toward a new ideal of life, could or can possibly avert from future ages and nations the calamities that have befallen the ages and nations of the past.

Now it is this highest and last conceivable ideal beauty of eternity that I am to preach in this sermon-the Rose of Sharon-the Star of Bethlehem-the Bright and Morning star-the Sun of Righteousness-the idealized, the actual, highest possible human incarnation of God's eternal love-as God is Love.

You all know of Jesus of Nazareth-the Christ, the Son of the living God-God with us. I will not press the dogma that there is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved. I do not forget that, to say "you must " to a human being, is to make him feel, if not to say, "I won't." I will not trespass on the realm of dogma, I am simply pointing a moral to this and to that acknowledged incident of history. I can prove have proven in No. 8 of this REVIEW-that Jesus of Nazareth met and still meets all conceivable ideals and demands of human reason concerning a possible incarnation of God; and if this was what we needed-if all highest as well as lowest methods of mere human ministry failed the nations of old, and are sure to fail us as well-surely it is worth the while of every intelligent human soul to study well the person of Jesus, and if he is, as tens of thousands of pure, and holy, and gifted,

and wise, and exalted human souls have seen, professed and believed -the Christ, the unrivaled and anointed of heaven-incarnate expressly and especially for our redemption-the healer of all ancient hurts, the ideal dream of manhood for the future, the Saviour, lover, leader, inspirer of all that is conceivably great, and tender, and loving, and lovable in all the future ages of the world, surely we have in him, the last and greatest fulfillment of the old and beautiful poem of the prophet-that God giveth Beauty for Ashes in all the realms of his universal and eternal reign.

For as man in his ordinary intellectual life is master of and superior to all natural objects and things, so man in his moral lifeyea, supremely in his spiritual life-guided by eternal love, is superior to every other form or conception of human life, and as Jesus stood and stands as the ideal, incarnate, eternal love in human form, He is so inconceivably the most beautiful object in the universe that it were a dream of barbarous and blackened darkness of the human soul to do less than love Him with all the heart, and mind, and will.

But this is only looking at Jesus as an ideal personal being, in contrast with all the wrecks, as with all the heroes of past human history. They are gone to ashes. He remaineth the eternal Son of God's eternal love, ever with us-the same yesterday, to-day and forever. But it is not alone in His person and life, it is supremely in His ministry to and for the human race that Jesus becomes the ideal realization of the poet-prophet's words.

Nineteen hundred years ago His last agonized cry went up to God apparently unanswered: "My God, my God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?" That is the bitterest cry that ever rent the ears of the world, and those who understand it best-those who, having striven for His own ideal of love, have felt the same or a similar agony, are the last to wonder why the heavens closed in darkness round the world that hour, a darkness such as had never been known before.

The richest pearl of all the universe had been flung away. The rarest flower that ever grew in the shape of a chaste and stainless human soul had been plucked, and spit upon, and spurned. The holiest life of eternal loyalty to the dreams of divine love had been scorned as an upstart, pestilent fellow-a disturber of the blasphemous and egotistic piety of His own day.

For an hour-for a day-the new Edens of human hopes that centred around Him grew darker than the primal Eden of old-dust

to dust, ashes to ashes-even the bleeding heart of God's love now all gone to dust and ashes, to agony and despair.

Surely there will be no sunrise on the morrow. Surely no new morning of hope will ever bless the world. "His blood be upon us and upon our children," was the blasphemous cry of the saints of His day. So little did they understand the deathless form of all philosophy-that " God is Love, and whoso dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him." In truth, do we understand it in these late days? Dear friends, the morning cometh, and no blackest or widest cloud can ever wholly envelop the world.

I suppose it was comparatively easy for the Almighty to make a natural man, whatever processes He employed. Plainly, it was a far more difficult work to make a God-man, and even that was trivial compared with the work of making the human race into the likeness of this God-man. Yet, this is the process of Beauty for Ashesgoing on in all our hearts and in all nations to-day.

Nineteen hundred years ago it was rocked in the cradle of Bethlehem, nailed to the cross on Calvary, revived on the day of Pentecost, persecuted to death in the catacombs, then heralded by kings, built into no end of creeds, churches, temples, souls of martyrs, saints; and to-day the altars of Christ's eternal love are flower crowned, crowded with loving hearts, and the shrines of His beauty of soul are the rainbows, dawns, sun splendors, adorations, anthems of a loving world, and measureless are the heavens of fadeless beauty of love and life that are springing from the ashes of Christ's love and despair.

All the hillsides of the world are dotted with temples devoted to His worship. All the crowded cities of modern civilization are safe-guarded and blessed and beautified alike by the aspiring pinnacles of His churches and the blessed altars and sanctuaries wherein His presence dwells.

Tens of millions of human hearts wherein dwelt, by nature, the ashes of lust, of doubt, and despair, have found through Him the rest, the hope, the beauty of faith and eternal love springing up within them and growing stronger and more beautiful through all their human lives.

The nations that sat in darkness have seen a great light; eyes that were blinded by sin and shame have seen the heavens opened, and a new world-a new universe of enchanting beauty, ruled by the deeper enchantment of perfect wisdom and perfect love.