Upon these hills of holiness the stability of Messiah’s throne, and the perfect administration of His kingdom, let us take our station, and survey the prospects which rise up before the Church of God.

When I look upon the magnificent scene, I can not repress the salutation, “Hail, thou that art highly favored!” She has the prospect of preservation, of increase and of triumph.

The long existence of the Christian Church would be pronounced, upon common principles of reasoning, impossible.  She finds in every man a natural and inveterate enemy.  To encounter and overcome the unanimous hostility of the world, she boasts no political stratagem, no disciplined legions, no outward coercion of any kind.  Yet her expectation is, that she shall live forever.  To mock this hope and blot out her memorial from under heaven, the most furious efforts of fanaticism, the most ingenious arts of statesmen, the concentrated strength of empires, have been frequently and perseveringly applied.  The blood of her sons and her daughters has streamed like water; the smoke of the scaffold and the stake, where they won the crown of martyrdom in the cause of Jesus, has ascended in thick volumes to the skies.  The tribes of persecutors have sported over her woes and erected monuments, as they imagined, of her perpetual ruin.  But where are her tyrants, and where their empires?  The tyrants have long since gone to their own place; their names have descended upon the roll of infamy; their empires have passed, like shadows over the rock—­they have successively disappeared, and left not a trace behind.

But what became of the Church?  She rose from her ashes fresh in beauty and in might.  Celestial glory beamed around her; she dashed down the monumental marble of her foes, and they who hated her fled before her.  She has celebrated the funeral of kings and kingdoms that plotted her destruction; and, with the inscriptions of their pride, has transmitted to posterity the record of their shame.  How shall this phenomenon be explained?  We are, at the present moment, witnesses of the fact; but who can unfold the mystery?  This blest book, the book of truth and life, has made our wonder to cease.  The Lord her God in the midst of her is mighty.  His presence is a fountain of health, and his protection a wall of fire.  He has betrothed her, in eternal covenant, to Himself.  Her living head, in whom she lives, is above, and His quickening Spirit shall never depart from her.  Armed with divine virtue, His gospel, secret, silent, unobserved, enters the hearts of men and sets up an everlasting kingdom.  It eludes all the vigilance, and baffles all the power of the adversary.  Bars and bolts, and dungeons are no obstacle to its approach.  Bonds, and tortures, and death can not extinguish its influence.  Let no man’s heart tremble, then, because of fear.  Let no man despair, in these days of rebuke and blasphemy, of the Christian cause.  The ark is launched, indeed,