and hang up in our bed-chambers, so that we can contemplate it every evening and morning as our full estimation of Christ’s dying love;—­such that after counting our herds and flocks, examining our barns and granaries, surveying our merchandise, and reckoning up our dues, we can enter our closets and pray for the conversion of the world without blushing before God.  Does any one shrink from this criterion of his piety?  I fear he will shrink away from the presence of his final Judge, and bury himself in the darkness of hell; his works and conscience alike testifying his unfitness for the world of light.

14.  That the true mission of the church in the present age is beneficence.  Though the gospel has been preached nearly 2000 years, yet a deep night of spiritual darkness is still brooding over the greatest portion of the world.  Millions on millions have no knowledge of the Saviour, and other millions have no right appreciation of his truth and grace; while, blinded by sin and fascinated by its treacherous charms, they are treading their way, rank after rank, to woes everlasting.  God’s providence seems now to be moving upon the spiritual chaos, preparing it for the reception of light.  Obstacles to the introduction of the gospel into benighted regions are fast giving way.  The kingdoms spread beneath the sun, from north to south, from China to the farthest verge of the west, are seemingly in the posture of waiting for evangelical instruction.  The Macedonian cry is coming up from the four winds.  It is made to the church, the sacramental host of God’s elect; and they must answer it.

God appoints, in some respects, special duties to different ages and nations.  It was the peculiar mission of European Christians in the sixteenth century to break the yoke of papal supremacy; of England in the time of Cromwell to waken those notes of ecclesiastical and civil freedom which are still reverberating among the mountains of Europe, and shakings dynasties; of our fathers to achieve the political independence of the United States,—­to plant the genial tree of liberty, and water it with their blood.  Now what does the providence of God indicate as the special ministry of the church in the present age?  It is written all over the face of the world.  We learn it in the awakened condition of heathen, barbarous, and half-civilized countries; in the stir of intellectual energy which is sweeping over the kingdoms, jostling thrones and alarming monarchs; in the tottering pillars of corrupt religions, and of long-established institutions of iniquity; in the progress of governmental science in connection with political liberty, and the extension of the arts of civilization; in augmented facilities for traveling, together with increased efforts for education, and the consequent quickening of mind; in the degradation of those “who know not God,” the wants of seamen, of the oppressed, of the spiritually destitute both in our own and other lands, and in the charitable