In the hard, cold winter of our northern lands, how do we feel a longing for the presence of life!  Then we love to look on a pine or fir tree, which seems the only living thing in the woods, surrounded by dead oaks, birches, maples, looking like the gravestones of buried vegetation:  that seems warm and living then; and at Christmas, men bring it into meetinghouses and parlors, and set it up, full of life, and laden with kindly gifts for the little folk.  Then even the unattractive crow seems half sacred, through the winter bearing messages of promise from the perished autumn to the advancing spring—­this dark forerunner of the tuneful tribes which are to come.  We feel a longing for fresh, green nature, and so in the shelter of our houses keep some little Aaron’s rod, budding alike with promise and memory; or in some hyacinth or Dutchman’s tulip we keep a prophecy of flowers, and start off some little John to run before, and with his half-gospel tell of some great Emmanuel, and signify to men that the kingdom of heavenly beauty is near at hand.  Now that forerunner disappears, for the desire of all nations has truly come; the green grass is creeping everywhere, and it is spangled with many flowers that came unasked....

What if there was a spring time of blossoming but once in a hundred years!  How would men look forward to it, and old men, who had beheld its wonders, tell the story to their children, how once all the homely trees became beautiful, and earth was covered with freshness and new growth!  How would young men hope to become old, that they might see so glad a sight!  And when beheld, the aged man would say, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

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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