love, is no longer one-sided and defective, but complete, comprehending all that belongs to the blessedness of man.

The Christian life springs from the sense of sin and condemnation. From this the sinner is delivered when he sees God's redeeming love in Christ. In that faith the gloom of the law and of condemnation passes away; the life becomes trustful, hopeful, and joyous; the old Greek joyousness reappears, intensified and made spiritual - not now the joy of forgetfulness of God and his law, but joy which springs up, through faith in God's redeeming love, after acquaintance with God and the law has awakened the moral nature and the sense of sin. The moral type now appears, not in the inquisitor or the crusader or the ascetic, but in the Christlike man, with all the earnestness of the inquisitor and the crusader and the ascetic, but also like a little child, living a life of simplicity, trustfulness, and joy, and, like Jesus himself, full of tender compassion and self-sacrificing love to sinners. Inspired by this faith and love, the man in whom the moral element predominates is no longer indifferent to secular interests and weary of life, no longer stern and intolerant in the consciousness only of law; but, like Christ, is sensitive to every human interest, taking children in his arms and blessing them, ministering to the sick, comforting the bereaved, helping the fallen in their efforts to rise, joyous at a wedding, teaching the principles of Christian civilization, alive to every interest of man.

The advancement of Christ's kingdom is not linear only, in the conversion of souls, but also diffusive, advancing in completeness and power. Civilization is said to multiply human wants. This is only another way of saying that it multiplies the powers and capacities of the man. To withhold satisfaction to these wants is to undo the development of the man, and to reduce him to his original infantile and savage state. Christianity must show itself the religion of civilization, competent by its vital force in a savage community to quicken progress to civilization, competent in civilization to stimulate, purify, guide, and ennoble it.

Christianity, then, is not to repress the culture, the refinement, the activity, and manifold development of man, but to vitalize and Christianize it. And thus it reacts, and accelerates its linear advancement. Christian interest in the progress of humanity, in the highest human culture, in all that pertains to human welfare, is itself a powerful recommendation of Christianity and an important influence in quickening men to a new spiritual life.

With this train of thought the true idea of the beautiful accords. Beauty is perfection — an ideal of the mind, expressed in the concrete. Goodness and truth, therefore, when manifested in finite things, are beautiful. When the expression is of that which transcends our power of conception, the emotion of the beautiful passes into the sublime. Hence the close affinity between the admiration of beauty and the awe of the sublime, and adoration. A moral movement which excludes the beautiful is defective and self-destructive; as if a tree in an effort to multiply its fruit should shake off the glory of leaf and blossom and the golden and blushing beauty of the fruit. Beauty is the bloom of truth and goodness; it is their radiance, their glow, their smile.

Therefore, within the scope of Christianity there is room for expending money, time, and talent on any work essential to the culture, development, and well-being of man. Civilization of the most intensely moral type does not exclude aesthetic culture. Its defectiveness in the Hebrew and the Puritan was the result of the incompleteness, rather than the completeness, of the moral life. It was because morality came in the awfulness of law, rather than in the freedom of Christian faith and love, and even as love, in the Puritan, concentrating attention on the conflict with wrongs and oppressions immediately urgent, so as to leave no time for the completeness of human culture.

But Christian love, when completely manifested, must bloom in beauty. When the gospel has free course, it must be glorified. The limping god of work is the one who wins and marries the goddess of beauty. The moral force which

Christianity has made a power in civilization is essentially an energy of reform and progress. As love to man, it is diffusive, and not restrictive, concerned with the interests of man, not conservative of the privileges of a class. There is, necessarily, a certain severity about it in some of its conditions. Sweeping away the tyranny and debauchery of courts and aristocracies, it cannot well avoid sweeping away with them their elegance, refinement, and aesthetic culture. But as its purifying and renovating force works out its legitimate results, it gradually diffuses through the whole people the refinement and culture once limited to a few. And this accords with prophecy: "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle-tree. And I will make the place of my feet glorious."

But, while Christian civilization is to beautify itself with aesthetic culture, no man has a right to live in luxury and self-indulgence, using his powers only for his own enjoyment. Whatever he does, he must do it in Christian service. It is right to break the alabaster box of precious ointment; but it must be broken on the Saviour's feet; and it must be the spontaneous outpouring of Christian love, not a substitute for that love, nor for Christian toil in saving men from sin. Peter, John, and Paul would not have converted the world by breaking alabaster boxes of perfume.

ARTICLE V.

THE THREE FUNDAMENTAL METHODS OF PREACHING.PREACHING EXTEMPORE.

(Continued from Vol. xxix. p. 195).

BY EDWARDS A. PARK.

§ 5. Preaching Extempore.

WHEN a stranger stands before a noted cylinder-machine in the Ardwick Print Works at Manchester, England, he is bewildered by its complicated processes. The yellow or purple cloth is applied to one part of the machine; it is drawn between the main cylinder and the rollers; and, in a few minutes, from another part of the machine it comes forth, not the plain yellow or purple fabric, but variegated with eighteen or twenty different colors, arranged in festoons of leaves and flowers, in crimson arches or scarlet curves. One textile fabric is ornamented so as to gratify the taste of a European princess, another to captivate an Asiatic king; this fabric is modestly adorned for a Fellow at the university, that is highly colored for a half-civilized African. While the stranger walks around this apparatus, he regards it as almost a work of magic. He examines the mordant, the color-boxes filled with brilliant or rich or modest dyes, more fascinating, some of them, than the Tyrian purple, the rollers engraved in intaglio and colored by those various dyes, the wheels and bands drawing the fabric when saturated with the base under those sharply-engraved rollers; then he sees that all this apparent magic is the result of explicable laws.

The process of extemporaneous oratory has been compared to the working of such a complicated machine. A man who was not intending to utter a word is suddenly called to address an assembly. He understands the subject which he is to discuss, and his thoughts rise, one after another, in a

fit arrangement. These thoughts awaken within him the appropriate feelings; and the thoughts and the feelings suggest the proper words in their proper places. They affect the tones of his voice; they prompt the expressive gestures. The sound of his own words and the meaning of his own attitudes react upon him and heighten his excitement. New images crowd upon him; illustrations before unthought of occur to him and startle him. The thoughts which had a plain base when he began his address come out now adorned with blooming metaphors. He fears that he may conceal the main idea under the similes which are flowering out as he speaks; he culls some of the flowers, and rejects others. He sees the danger of covering up the great principle by a multiplicity of details; he selects a few of the details, and dismisses the many. He watches his auditors, as well as his theme; he finds that one argument has not produced its intended effect; he introduces new proof which he had designed to omit. He perceives that his appeals to the sensibilities of his audience are more effective than he anticipated; he abridges an exhortation which a moment before he intended to lengthen. Studying the symmetry of his theme, as well as the ornamentation of it,

the appropriateness of his thoughts, words, and tones to his hearers, as well as to his subject, he does not allow himself to be diverted from the substance of his argument; he turns to his own use the very events which are fitted to confuse him, and causes the distracting scenes of the hour to promote the unity of his efforts. His complicated processes seem to be mysterious; yet there are laws of thought and instincts of expression which make these efforts not only easy to him, but exhilarating. There are many processes of mind which before we engage in them appear simply impossible, and soon after we have entered upon them afford us intense delight. It must be remembered, however, as the subsequent paragraphs will show, that all extemporary speech is not so strictly aus dem Stegereife as the preceding illustration may seem to imply.