of the nation and the laws of society, if he says to moral laws as applied to him, 'My burden is greater than I can bear,' he does so upon his own responsibility. It may be that he has a full justification in the eyes of God, though not in the eyes of men. If he be wrong, it will go against him in the great day when God makes up the number of His jewels.

154. In conclusion, dear friends, the motive power to do right must come upon you like the mightier one upon the strong man armed. Your hearts must be taken captive, your lusts and evil appetites slain, and the heavenly passions must enter in and subdue the weaker ones that are of the earth, earthy. You see constantly the bad motive expels the good motive, because the bad is the strongest. Try if the good motive may not be made strong enough to expel the bad one. You ask how? and I can but answer, The Spirit of God comes upon the man who prays, comes upon the man who seeks to do his Father's will, and be about his Father's business. It comes, brethren, as the wind comes, and as the light of the morning. It comes as the fire of patriotism, comes to make a man sacrifice even the nearest and the dearest, it comes as love comes, to make us insensible to our own private feelings, and willing to suffer for those whom we love. So are we inspired by God in our daily lives with a motive power which the world has not given and which the world cannot take away-an enthusiasm to do the right for Christ and His brethren, and to sanctify the Lord God in our bodies and in our spirits which are

VIII.

CONCLUSION.

ARGUMENT.

GOD is revealed in the Law of Progress. Progress is described as a procession from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

Progress is traced in the stages of Creation, in man, in human society, in history, in the evolution of the Christian Church. The irresistible nature of Progress is revealed in its steady triumph. Christ is declared to present the one Ideal of Life ever true to the cause of Progress. The Progress of the individual soul in Eternity is affirmed.

Fourteenth Discourse.

ON THE LAW OF PROGRESS.

DELIVERED JUNE 11, 1871.

HERE never has been a time when there was such an intense anxiety to know something certain about God, and about His relations

with man. Formerly these questions were settled by dogmatism, and by the assertions of so-called Revelation. The utterances which we still call revelation, contain indeed the germs of the most precious truths upon which the heart and intellect of man can feed, but insofar as the words of Revelation are dogmatic assertions put forward for you to believe, whether you can understand and appropriate them or not, insofar as they represent merely dogmatic as opposed to living truth, our age seems to have grown somewhat impatient with them, because man, constantly striving to make his religion, such as it is, bear upon his life, when he finds religious truth stated in such a manner as to obscure its connection with life and ordinary experience, then I say