rook's rt\ it I if>* '»i«ttt'U«'B»,«,l»,|'t,«*nn.»'ill('«,i,>iiM,»H,.rb<••»• DAYID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. ^ 3 svman PREACHED AT THE REQUEST OF. THE AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION, IN THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA, ON SUNDAY EVENING, JUNE 5, 1S64. REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS. l'U'-i.«,M'W"*»»*11*"L.U'Wll"*. »*»»•»¦ •¦»««*»¦ \>'».l»l<,lij'**«'i.M I <",<"^jM,f»,,»'»»»,»U'M. «¦*«•*. >"(,»<'H.ll'',l*>,«'k. »%,»%«» DAYID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. A SERMON PREACHED AT THE REQUEST OE THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA, ON SUNDAY EVENING, JUNE 5, 1864. REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS. PHILADELPHIA : AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION, No. 1122 Chestnut Street. NEW YORK: 599 BROADWAY. §vM» frapr Ux £&\mm. "And give unto Solomon my son a perfect heart, to keep thy commandments, thy testimonies and thy statutes, and to do all these things, and to build the palace for the which I have made provision." — 1 Chronicles xxix. 19. I am to speak to-night to the friends of the noblest education society of our land. I rejoice to be able to designate it thus at the outset, be cause such a designation applied to the American Sunday-School Union, gives us all the encourage ment of the thought that our noblest education society is a distinctly Christian institution. It assures us that education among us is still a Christian idea. To attempt to tell such a society of its powers and responsibilities is no easy duty. It certainly is a duty which may well lift the speaker into a fitting earnestness, and give him leave to speak 4 DAVIDS PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. very freely and conscientiously the responsible message which the acceptance of his position has devolved upon him. I have taken, as my text, David's praj^er for Solomon. It represents the best desire of every present in behalf of every future that is coming up to take its place. It is the truest prayer of every father for every son ; of every age for the new age that is to follow it. And, since every human effort ought to be towards the fulfilment ofthe highest human prayers, it will follow that this petition of the old Hebrew king contains not merely the desire of every present in behalf of every future, but, likewise, a sketch ofthe method by which the fulfilment of that desire must be sought. It becomes then, you see, the announce ment of a theory of education, and as such 1 wish to speak of it to-night, drawing out of a very simple exposition of its phrases a statement of some of the principles which ought to regulate a great education society. For the work of this institution is twofold, is general and special. Accepting the Christian truth of the infinite value of the personal soul, it makes its first aim, as it always ought, the conversion and salvation of every nature it can DAVIDS PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 0 reach. But then, accepting the other Christian truth of the exaltation of a nation by righteous ness, it relates itself to all the larger welfare of our land. It accepts both tasks. It must save souls, and it must build the future of our coun try. It is only the necessary impulse of the anxi eties of our times that I am impelled to speak mainly this evening of the second of these two aspects of the work. You surely will not think it strange if the colour of the perplexing days through which we are passing, tinges deeply very much of what I say. I should not know how to speak otherwise. First, then, see how the fundamental thought of education, the first relation of the present to the future, is included in the last term of David's prayer. He asks that Solomon may have the pri vilege to " build the palace for the which I have made provision." The father's work was done. The preparations for the temple of Jehovah were all made. The wood was hewn °, the gold, the iron, and the brass were lying waiting for their places ; the precious stones were all ready to be set ; the costly curtains were woven and ready to be hung. David might do all this, but David might not build the palace. He stood among 6 DAVID S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. his preparations. He surveyed the piled mate rials, which in his dreams he had a thousand times built into the architecture of the temple that he longed to see, and, calmly accepting the limits of the work that was allowed him, gave the accumulations of his lifetime to his son, that he might realize their result. Without a hesita tion, he accepts the divine arrangement that his son's life is to be completer than his own, and is satisfied to contribute to that life's maturer needs. And what is David here but just the repre sentative of every present to whom the education of any future is committed ? This is the first truth always. One period collects materials, the next period builds the palace. The long, hard working winter gathers with infinite toil the conditions of growth, stores them about the dead unanswering seed, then dies like David, and the spring-time its successor, bright as Solomon in all his glory, comes and finds the preparation made, and, in the sunshine, builds the temple-plant. So it is in a wise family. You have seen fathers, not cultivated or educated men, who just ac cepted it as their task to gather the materials of a cultivated and educated life for their children. Not for them to build the gracious beauty or the DAVIDS PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. / massive strength of scholarly attainment; but they were content to get every thing ready, and then lay the work of construction into their children's hands, in whose fulfilment of their wise ambitions they themselves should live again. And so it is in human history. Age gathers materials for age. One century with slow and painful labour beats out a few crude ideas, which lie like David's logs of wood and blocks of stone and seem merely to cumber the ground. A new century comes, and, inheriting the unfinished plan, it takes these crude ideas, and, lo, they are just what it needs. It finds them hewn to fit each other, and out of them it builds the compact and graceful beauty of its institutions. Thus, everywhere, the true future does not repeat but enlarges the present. And every pre sent which accepts this law accepts with it its appointed work, to gather the stones and the timbers for the temples which the future is to build. It makes this the principle on which it proceeds in training a new generation. It dis ciplines the child with reverence, as destined to a completer life than the parent. It transcends selfishness, and prejudice, and jealousy, and, with a large and loving hope, a complete faith in 8 DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. human progress, it imagines no perfection for itself except this relative one of perfectly filling its place in the gradual perfection of the whole. Now, you will see how this truth, which makes the teacher in this great world-school always recognize that the scholar is to have larger work than his to do, will make all education of neces sity a profound and thorough thing. It insists on teaching principles and truths, and is not satisfied with just imposing forms. One man, who has not learnt this law, says, " Here is my child, who is to take my place some day. Let me build a house for him ; let me make habits for him, social, moral, mental, and they shall be all ready whem he needs them." He builds his house, and some day his son succeeds to it, and is cramped and killed by the formal restraints that he has inherited. Another man says, "No. Let me teach my son the principles of building ; let me provide him material as richly as I can. But I cannot build for him. He must do that himself; for he alone is to live the larger life which must regulate the necessities and possi bilities of the structure." We look back over history, and we see the same sight always. Wherever any age has given its successor nothing david's prayer for Solomon. 9 but forms and institutions ready-made, the new age has not merely made no advance upon the old; it has invariably shrunk and shrivelled till it lived a life too small even to fill the narrow limits which its father claimed. But wherever any age has given its child an education in any vital truths, the child has always taken those truths, developed them into an effectiveness and built them into a beauty that the father never guessed. This is why we may rejoice that the greatest education society of our land is a distinctively Christian society. It ought to be most ready to take this first truth of all education. It is not a society for the preservation of any forms, how ever venerable, or the fostering of any economies, however prudent. It simply represents from year to year the process of all nurture ; bringing the materials of all life, the great truths of the eternal Christianity, laying them at the feet of every new humanity, and then watching to see how each maturer life in each more perfect age works those truths into ever more and more complete results, building each its palace that no time before its own could have built. If all this be true, then we have the general 10 DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. doctrine which includes all smaller truth upon the subject. We are ready, therefore, to proceed and examine in detail David's suggestions of the methods of education in his petitions for his son. He asks that God will give to Solomon " a per fect heart to keep His commandments, and His testimonies, and His statutes." His command ments, and His testimonies, and His statutes. I would have you notice here the succession and the progress of these words ; for they seem to me to include this idea, that the perfect heart which Solomon was to have was to be achieved by a training which should be made up of three elements : Moral, in " Thy commandments ;" Doctrinal, in "Thy testimonies;" and Formal or Structural, in " Thy statutes." Let us ex amine the three elements in turn. It was most natural, then, for a Jew to specify first the moral element in the culture of character, the keeping of the commandments or the law of God. It is not the most fundamental, as we shall see by-and-by, but it is the most obvious. The Jew was so used to the sublime thought of human life held fast in the hands of the Divine authority, shaped into gradual rectitude by the continual pressure of command and prohibition ; DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 11 the decalogue so supremely represented to him the first thought of religion, that his prayer for a new generation's religious life touched of necessity first of all upon the moral side, the keeping of the commandments of the Lord. And here, I take it, the Jew simply conceives the course of all successful culture. The order of the Testaments is not an accidental, but an essential order. Calvary, in its idea, in its divine conception, was "from the foundation," long before Sinai ; but in man's apprehension of them, Sinai antedated Calvary by fifteen hundred years. The conscience must bow itself to the supreme " Thou shalt" and " Thou shalt not " of authority, before grace can enter in to win the heart with the gentle persuasiveness of its "Believe and live." John the Baptist must preach repentance before Christ can proclaim regeneration. It would seem to follow, then, that any man or any institution which attempts a great religious work in behalf of the growing generations of a country, must undertake, as preparatory to it, and as a necessary part of it, a great moral work as well. A faithful ministry, we hold, must not merely declare the Saviour, but must attack and beat down those special sins which stand in 12 david's PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. the very doorways and keep the Saviour out of the hearts of men. A great educational society does not discharge its responsibilities in full, unless it lays for materials, at the feet of the new humanity it cares for, not merely the highest doctrinal truth it knows, but also the best moral results, the most perfect expositions of the right and the wrong, which it has gathered out of its own and all past experience. Is not this the first task of such an institution as this in whose behalf we meet to-night, to in corporate and register the best moral results of every age, and impress them as settled prin ciples, as new starting-points, upon the conscience of a new age which may advance from them to results yet more complete? I give you no apology for taking, in illustration, to show you what I mean, the relations of our own gene ration to that which will succeed it, and of this Sunday-School Union to the future American conscience which it undertakes to educate. God wastes no history. In every age and every land He is working for the elucidation of some moral truth, some riper culture for the character of man. This war of ours, if it mean any thing, must mean that some imperfect moral education DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 13 needs to be made perfect, and that God is trying to teach us some new lesson. What is that imperfection? Is it hard to see? Two great national sins have been allowed to bring us into this great sorrow. Those sins are the sin of disloyalty and the sin of slavery. We are suffer ing to-day, whatever be the secondary causes, for the violation of two of God's great moral laws, the law of the sacredness of government and the law ofthe brotherhood of man. Gradu ally, grandly, from between these fearful wheels that drip with blood, are being ground forth into shapes which men's eyes, quick-sighted with anxiety, must see, these two eternal ordinances of God, that government has a divine right to be honoured, and that man has a divine right to be free. Those two truths, burned into the very fibre of our people as they walk the fire, are to be the great moral acquisition of American cha racter. At such a time one cannot contemplate the work of a society which offers to educate the next generation of Americans in the ways of God, without standing in awe before the responsibility that is laid upon it. That next generation is to build the palace for which you are making provision. On the provision that 14 david's PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. you make,, their palace must depend. There is, as we have seen, a universal law. The new age takes its materials from the old. If the old does not give them, the new must work them out for itself. Is there one of us that can look about him and think without, a shudder of another generation of our people working out this same education that we are going through ? What ! all these fearful years again? Again these battles that the eye cannot count or the heart remember ? Again this waste of precious blood, this bitter hatred, these wild blazings-up of the devilish in man, this land with State on State where the harvests find no room to grow for the crowded graves ? Must it all come again, this dark Egyptian Passover-night of history, wherein God leads the bondmen out, and, in all the stricken land that held them slaves, leaves in their deliverance "not a house where there is not one dead "? We have no right to leave a chance behind us that this work will have to be done again. But it must be, unless we can bring out of it all, clearly and definitely and forever settled, and lay down before the next age of Americans, the truths of national authority and human liberty, to be the materials out of DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 15 which it is to build the future. On this society, in common with all the educational powers of our land, rests the responsibility. You are at once false to God and cruel to your country, unless you teach the young who look to you for teaching, not indirectly and by im plication, but distinctly, in so many words, that treason is wicked and that slavery is wicked ; unless you train them to the high religious duties of loving their native land, and asserting and protecting the personal liberty of every innocent fellow-man. These must be stated distinctly as religious duties. The vast machineries and manifold facilities of a society like this must find in the dissemination of such truths a part of their legitimate employment. The time has passed when their announcement was deemed out of place in the Christian pulpit. The time has no less passed when a Sunday-school book need count it unworthy of its pages to help some boy in the city or on the prairies to gather up, with the love of the Lord who is to save him, a love of the land he may be called to die for, and of all the great race to which, if he lives at all worthily, his life is to be given. I rejoice to know that I am not speaking of 16 DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. an unrecognized or an unattempted work. I rejoice to know that I am speaking before an institution whose imprint is already honoured by standing on the title-page of books that, dis tinctly and by name, uphold the authority, and denounce the sin of the nation. It shows a large appreciation of responsibility, an earnest will to meet it. Let it be met more fully. Still bring each new moral result that God shapes out of our experience, and lay it where the younger hands of younger workers shall build it into a nobler temple of national honour than our hearts have dreamed. So shall the first duty of the educator be performed. So shall the command ments of God become the heritage of all our generations ; and as the deeper spiritual results of obedience grow manifest, you shall see your good work justified, when you discern that in very truth, as this same David sang, " The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul." I pass on now to speak of the second element of religious education, included in David's second prayer : " That he may keep Thy testimonies." As the commandments of God include all moral duty, so the testimonies of God include all doc trinal truth. As we said before, we are here on DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 17 deeper ground, dealing with things more funda mental. Truths are the roots of duties. A root less duty, one that has no truth below it out of which it grows, has no life, and will have no growth. David knew this well enough, and so did not think his prayer complete till he had asked that duty might be underlaid by truth ; that, besides God's commandments, God's testi monies might be given to his son. In the sublimity of his faith, the commandments found their coherence in the coming Christ. He craved for Solomon the same power of centralizing and deepening duty by the addition of spiritual motive, which he so much valued for himself. And here we Christians stand on the same ground with David. We, too, believe that God's testimonies underlie His commandments, and find for all duty its highest consistency in Christ. This is the point from which we always ought to start. Men talk about morality as one thing, and religion as another. Sometimes they pit them one against the other, as if there were some sort of natural antagonism between the two. We take a higher ground, insisting that there can be no such thing as morality without religion, and that morality becomes more and 2 18 DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. more genuine just in proportion as religion be comes more and more sound and true. We do not believe in any great reform which finds its whole motive within the region of human re lations. We look for the permanent success of no effort, however noble its appointed aim may be, which does not draw its impulse from some association of humanity with a power and a will above its own. This is why, in order to be sure of their complete development, we long to see the power of religion among us, as incorporated in the Christian Church, take up and labour for the great national interests of which we were just now speaking. Without . settling detailed judgments, which it is not our place to do, we feel sure, in general, that God has bound our whole nature into such a perfect unity that no man can hold wrong opinions without incurring, just so far, danger of injury to his moral life. Once accept this supreme importance of truth, and every part of our nature becomes anxious for the preservation of the testimonies of God. The great doctrines of our faith become the great pillars of our life. And, speaking thus to-day, one cannot but remember how fearful many persons are for the safety of those great doctrines DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 19 which this Society holds dear. The countless assaults of a speculative time, testing every approach, bringing the manifold artillery of modern knowledge to bear, calling both the frivolity and the earnestness of our strange age to its aid, enlisting an internal treason as well as an external enmity— no wonder that they make the boldest fear sometimes. The rain is descending, the floods are coming, the winds are blowing and beating, and when loose houses are sliding off the slippery sand on every side of them, no wonder that the dwellers in the house upon the rock, with dazzled eyes, think sometimes that they see their own foundation waver. And yet the case does not seem hard to understand. Christianity is one and everlasting. Its work of salvation for man's soul is the same blessed work forever. But its relations to the world's life at large must be forever changing with the changes of that world's needs and seekings. The larger applications of Christianity must of neces sity be from time to time readjusted, and in their readjustments its power may be temporarily obscured or unrecognized as it passes into new forms of exhibition. Is it strange, then, in. a day of readjustments such as ours, when so 20 DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. many forms are going to pieces, so many old relations broken up and changed for new ones, when so many of the accidents of Christianity are being taken down, that men should be ready enough to think that Christianity itself is worn out and obsolete ? At such a time, what can be done ? We feel no doubt of the eternal issue. Our faith in Christ comes not from seeing how men treat Him, but from reading what God says of Him and feeling how He works. We are sure of the end; that all this overturning, overturning, over turning, must bring at last the day of Him whose right it is. This we are sure of; and, meanwhile, what can we do but keep alive by earnest and continual utterance those truths which we be lieve, no matter how utterly men may disown their names, are doing the work of the world all the while ? This is one of the great values of such a time, that it sifts and ordinates truths, and makes us find out which are the few precious ones that we will not let go at any risk. And when we look about and ask, How can 'we best preserve these truths ? I think there can be but one answer. The highest truth has always found its own best guardians. Christ DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 21 Himself pointed to the younger generation that was growing up about Him, and declared its hands to be the place where His gospel would be safest, purest and most fruitful. Other years have their work to do — old age, and middle man hood, and the fresh enterprise of originating youth. But, after all, these are not the surest guardians of truth. Through the life of every people winds an endless procession, which appears to totter with its feebleness, which again and again is lost out of sight among the hurrying crowd that seems to tread it .under foot, and yet whose tiny hands bear safest and most pure forever the sacred treasures of all time. And if you once get a truth into the circle of that end less childhood, it makes its way to unfound hearts, and, through the crazy passions and cold bigotries of life, wins for itself an influence which men feel because they do not fear. Here is, and always must be, the crowning glory of this institution. It is evangelical ; it believes the gospel. Putting all lesser things on which men differ aside, it declares the great doctrines of the Christian faith with perfect clearness. It holds the sinfulness of man, the atonement of the divine and human Christ, the 22 david's PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. necessary personal regeneration of the Holy Spirit. It takes these truths outside the lines of controversy, and finds the childhood of the country, and, when it has once laid them in its hands, has furnished it with the strong material for whatever palace in the future God may grant it the privilege to build. This is the crowning glory of your institution. God only knows the grandeur of the work you try to do. You take these truths of life to every school-house in the land. You lay them about the roots of the country's new prosperity. You deepen and assure every moral advance by pro viding infinite spiritual supply. May God enlarge your work, and make you worthy of this high mission from the present to the future, in the earnestness with which you carry the everlasting truth and put it in the hands of what is to be our country, full of the confident assurance that " The testimonies of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple." I must speak much less at length of the third element of a sound religious education. I have called it the formal or structural element. David alludes to it when he asks that Solomon may grow up, not only in the commandments and DAVIDS PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 23 the testimonies, but also in the statutes, of Jehovah. By that word, statutes, I suppose he means, in addition to moral law and doctrinal truth, the detailed organism of religion, the special method of operation and exhibition which he accepted as being of Divine arrangement, and to which he prayed that his son might prove true. The idea was not unfamiliar to his Hebrew mind. From the very beginning of His people's history, God had made constant exhibition of Himself, not merely as the giver of laws and the revealer of truths, but also as the careful dis poser of the external methods in which law and truth were to be symbolized and preserved. The same Divine voice that spoke the decalogue had ordered the cubits of the ark, and the carving of the candlestick, and the loops of the curtains, and the bells and pomegranates on the high- priest's robe. The same Divine hand that sepa rated right from wrong and truth from error by an eternal difference, had parted the year into its holy seasons, had fixed the Passover, the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles. The same wise care for man which had established a Religion had.. organized a Church, among whose venerable rites 24 david's PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. and solemn liturgies the piety of David had grown strong and ripe. All this the good king recognizes : the permanence of the inward and invisible by means of the outward and visible ; the incorporation of the commandment in the statute ; the value of the symbol to the law, of the utterance to the truth ; the necessity of the church to the religion. And this must all be recognized, we hold, by any system of religious education that claims to be complete. The mix ture of the holy oil is obsolete. The ordered jewels of the breastplate have faded from their high importance. But the everlasting principle remains, that no moral authority or doctrinal correctness or spiritual impulse can last from generation to generation unimpaired, unless it incorporates itself in some recognized manifesta tion, and yields to the crystallization which its essential life demands. If this be so, then no great national religious institution could be worthy of its work, which did not acknowledge this necessity. None could command the help or confidence of the Christian churches, which sought merely a,n unorganized and unexpressed religion and left out utterly the church idea. If this be so, then the Society DAVIDS PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 25 in whose behalf we meet does well in recognizing the structural element in its educational work. It makes its converts for the church. It aims at the growth of the church. It binds the new spirituality, which the Holy Spirit has given through its labours, into the unity and perma nence of some church organization. It does not claim to supplant or supersede, but just to minister to the higher ministry that the church must always hold. But will you stop me here, and ask what I mean by "the church"? Do you want closer definitions? Let me give, because I do not know where to go for a better, the definition of my own church in her 19 th Article of religion : " The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same." That is the church ; the word and the sacraments, the testimonies and the statutes. This Society, as I understand it, acknowledges them both; the statutes as well as the testi monies. She does not tell her converts just how baptism must be administered, just with what 26 david's PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. quantity of water, just at what period of life. She writes out no communion service. She lays no law down as to posture, bidding the children think the bread and wine are not Christ's sacra ment unless they take them thus or thus. But in the larger spirit with which she draws her disciples to the sacramental churches, and in some one or other of them seeks to incorporate and perpetuate their faith, in her constant efforts to build up the organized forms of Christianity, she wins the confidence of all who believe that religious education ought to be not only moral and doctrinal, but structural as well. It is a noble work — to take the church of Christ, so grand in its idea, so meagre now in its realities ; to take the sacraments, with all the unused power they contain ; to lay them in the hands of younger generations, and say, "Unfold them ; prove what they are ; make of them more than we have made. We give you the materials, build you the temple of the future church ; and, as these holy symbols minister an ever richer strength and hope and comfort, prove more and more forever that ' The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.' " DAVIDS PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 27 "Thy commandments, Thy testimonies, and Thy statutes. Give unto Solomon my son a perfect heart to keep all these." Truly, it was no slight petition. The same God that was to answer it must have taught it first. With all we know of man's capacities and needs, can we conceive a heart more perfect than that which should issue in a life rounded in this complete circle of moral integrity, doctrinal truth and structural order ? Well might the old king die content, when he had prayed such a prayer to the God whom he had learned to trust. Well may a generation close its eyes and die in peace, laying the world's work into its children's hands, when it has won for them from God this perfect heart. Let no society that leaves either of these blessings unattempted claim to be the true teacher of the coming age. Let none that fails to teach God's perfect law in all its strictness and completeness; that leaves out any of Christ's truth, by all of which comes man's salvation ; that counts as nothing that promise which the Saviour held so dear, of an eternal and well- ordered church, stand up to do the vast work that is waiting the right hands to do it. Let this Society, since it acknowledges and attempts 28 david's PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. the total education in all its three great depart ments, have our prayers, our sympathy and our help, as it goes on to an ever worthier accom plishment of its task. I am not sure whether one other point may need a single word. The question comes, what is there special and distinctive about this Sunday- School Union which fits it for a work so vast as this you have described? Of course, its dis tinctive power must belong to its distinctive character. It is a Union. It seeks, for certain purposes and in certain labours, to bind into the effectiveness of unity all the powers of all the churches that are at work for Christ. It is not a new church ; it is merely a new instrument in the hands of all the churches. Now, all this matter of church union has been talked over so often, that I will prolong this sermon by only one remark. The principle of union involves two sorts of advantage : one negative, by the removal of hindrances ; and the other positive, by the acquiring of strength. As to the negative part, all union between such complicated individualities as men involves surrender, the temporary stripping off of non essentials that the essential may go on and do DAVIDS PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 29 its work unhindered. Afterward, in the later stages of its labour, each portion ofthe union may resume its non-essentials, which are not there fore non-importants. An army that has to take a city puts its impedimenta by, and, with its sword and cannon, simply an army reduced to its lowest terms, hews its way in at the con quered gates. Once in, it may send back for its supplies, and complete its conquest with the elaborate treatment of a resident garrison. I look round on the work to do, and I do not believe that either Episcopalianism or Methodism or Presbyterianism or Baptism is going to assert the victory of Christianity over sin, the opening of the barred citadel of wickedness in this our land. The Church of Christ, simple, unimpeded, armed powerfully because armed lightly, the essential Church of Christ must make the first entrance. Then let us have up our methods of denominational government, and each, in the way that he thinks most divine, strive for the perfected dominion of our one great Lord. And then, as to the positive strength of union, what can we say but this ? — that just as in God's great sea there is a tide-power and a wave-power, and both are the outputtings of the one same 30 DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. force ; just as neither denies the other, each lends the other impulse ; and the quick waves, which fall like lashes, and the slow, heaving, la bouring tide, have both their work to do in the eternal battle of the sea upon the land : so it is not inconceivable that in the Christian world there may be a church-force and a denomination- force, which yet are both the expression of one same purpose and design of Deity. Neither denies the other. Each draws out some of the other's strength. The waves that crest them selves with angry foam, and beat and beat and beat from sunrise round . to sunrise endlessly upon the stubborn beach, are the most visible agents of the work that is done. But who will find any thing but thankfulness, if once in every world-day the great hand of the Maker and the Watcher is put down under the great mass of the sea itself, and the deep tide of Christian law and Christian truth, with all the waves running their eager races on its bosom, is driven, mightily, silently, farther up than any wave had reached upon the conquered shore ? Who will complain if Christian union, for certain purposes, in certain efforts, develops a new sort of power that the DAVID'S PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. 31 narrower individuality of denominational life has not attained ? But I have done. We stand to-night and pray the prayer that every David prays for every Solomon, that every earnest present prays for every future. 0 God ! give to. this new age that is to follow us a perfect heart to keep Thy commandments, Thy testimonies and Thy sta tutes, and to build the palace for which we have made provision. We labour with God toward the fulfilment of our prayer. We bring our best materials and lay them where young hands are waiting for their work. We bring the great authority, the perfect truth, the simple order which we have treasured not merely for our own days, but for the days in which they shall attain a higher glory than we have seen them reach. And, as we look, lo ! with the eye of faith and hope we see that glory won. And the new temple that the children are to build springs up toward heaven, with walls straight as the straitest judgments of eternity, filled with a light that does not merely show, but is, the ever lasting truth, and ever vocal with a worship 32 david's PRAYER FOR SOLOMON. which man takes down from the lips of God to find it full of endless strength and consolation. May the Lord bless every patient effort that makes ready anywhere the humblest stone for the building of that temple ! THE END.