the resources of industry and science lavished on fearful and diabolical engines, to enable men to murder those who never did them any harm, and against whom they have no unfriendly feeling, but who are hurled against each other in masses, both armies perhaps professing the same Christianity—as was the case in the great war between North and South America, or between France and Prussia, or between England, Italy, France, and Russia, in the Crimea-Christian people, belonging maybe to different churches, but still Christian people? And why are thousands of homes made miserable, by loss, and want, and despair, whilst Christmas bells are ringing out "Peace on earth and good will towards men"? Ah! you have sometimes felt inclined to despair of humanity. But despair is not the note of the spiritual life; the victory lies not with the seen and temporal, but with the things unseen and eternal; and you are pessimists in spite of yourselves. You who have ceased to believe in the progress of right and the victory of good, may be recalled to a healthier and nobler view by the indomitable hopefulness and deep trust to be found in the utterances of Longfellow, and, I significantly

add, Tennyson. So the two great characteristic poets of the Old and New Worlds, amid our infidelities, our pessimist views of life, our failures, and our sins, still hold high the torch of redemptive goodstill bear aloft the soiled and tattered banner of our heavenly King-still proclaim that all is well, as those that hear the "deeper voice beyond the storm." And so I am not ashamed to sound the same note at this festival of Christmas, and to keep before a world darkened with malice and stained with bloodshed the immortal refrain of the Christmas Bells.

I heard the bells on Christmas-day
Their old familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along

The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way,

The world revolved from night to-day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime,

Of peace on earth, good will to men !

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The canon thundered, in the South,

And with the sound

The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good will to men !

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearthstones of a continent,
And made forlorn

The households born

Of peace on earth, good will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep :

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep!

The wrong shall fail,

The right prevail,

With peace on earth, good will to men!

This is the Resurgam of hope; I leave it with you to-night. In it Longfellow conducts us to the very threshold of the New Year, with the vigour of inexhaustible life.

Take home to your hearts the warmth of his sweet natural religion; take home the peaceful and quiet contemplation of death and the grave, and the bright glimpses of the shining fields beyond;

take home his manly courage, his earnest endeavour
after all that is noble, and sweet, and upward; take
home his unstained aspirations, his sense and belief
in the triumph of good. He sends you forth into
the New Year, but he bids you tread its threshold
with a firm and light step; before you
lies an
unknown, untravelled world.

Into what land of harvests, what plantations,
Bright with Autumnal foliage and the glow

Of sunsets burning low;

Beneath what midnight skies, whose constellations
Light up the spacious avenues between

This world and the unseen ;—

Amid what friendly greetings and caresses,

What households, though not alien, yet not mine,

What bowers of rest divine;

To what temptations in lone wildernesses,
What famine of the heart, what pain and loss,
The bearing of what cross,-

I do not know; nor will I vainly question
Those pages of the mystic book which hold

The story still untold;

But without rash conjecture or suggestion,

Turn its last leaves, in reverence and good heed,
Until "The End " I read.