5.  It holds sway over the fortunes of the home.  Where, outside of the Church, will you find the ideal conception of marriage, and the really united and happy home?  The Church makes for domestic happiness, because it goes straight to the roots of life and plants happiness where happiness alone can grow.  More and more the Church is lifting the standards of a noble, proud, pure, and rejoicing married life.  Its ideal of human love is sacred, because founded on the deeper love of the soul in God.  The Church is drawing hosts of young people under the shelter of its teaching, and is placing before men and women ideals which cannot fail to make their mark upon the social standards of the times.  It stands for purity, for patience, for tenderness, for the love of little children, for united education and endeavor, for mutual hopes and dreams, for large public service.

6.  It is the militant force of time.  We speak of the Church militant, and of the Church triumphant.  For us, to-day, the Church militant.  To-morrow, triumph comes.  Armies have been, and armies shall be, but the hosts of this world fight against material foes, and largely for material ends.  It is the glory of the Church militant that its conquests are spiritual and its victories are eternal.  Its fight is chiefly against the inner, not the outer foe—­against sin and wrong-doing, impatience, strife, anger, clamor, meanness, evil-speaking, wrath.  It is the foe of tyranny and its heel is upon the head of the oppressor and the avenger.  Its banner flies over every country and has been carried through tribulation, through sorrow, through danger, and through death to the remotest parts of the yet-known world.  Its troops are legion, marching from the far distances of the past, and extending out to the far confines of the eternal years.

7.  It is the ascendant force of the future.  Rightly conducted, it will surely absorb the vigor of the world.  To stand apart from it is to be out of step with the march of nations.  The processional of progress to-day is the processional of the historic influence of the Church.  What force has there been in time gone by, which has lived and so greatly grown for nineteen hundred years?  Nations have risen, and nations have decayed.  States, once prominent, have passed into the oblivion of the years.  Plato and Pericles, Socrates and Sophocles, Philip and Alexander, the Caesars, the Georges, and the Louis have passed away.  Their politics have passed from our following; their empires are no more.  But through these centuries of change, the Church of God has risen stronger, more powerful year by year; stretching its arm out to the uttermost parts of the earth; levying tribute on the islands of the sea; enlisting all ages and conditions, and looking out over coming generations—­not as a waning, but as a growing and ever-increasing power.  Think you that such a Church can die?  Think you that any spiritual power aloof from this Church can be as efficient as if it were allied with it?