NEW TRIALS OF CHRISTIANITY.
For a time has come when they that stand for Christ must either be a great deal better in their life, or else a great deal worse. All the fiery woes of persecution that, in former ages, burnt in a saintly piety are extinguished. The way to heaven is grown easy and safe under the guarantee of our modern liberties. The world, meanwhile, is in tide of economic progress—the very soil of the world is being scientifically fattened for a more copious production. Wealth is becoming, thus, a hope more nearly universal, and so luxury, show and fashion, are becoming a kind of general ambition. A great and fearful problem is thus raised for the gospel: how to let in riches into piety itself; how to make a solid union between power and humility; how to raise the taste and manners, and keep the simplicity of feeling; how to amplify conditions, without raising puffs and swells in the men; in one word, how to bring in means, and not bring in dissipations, fumings of pride, vapors of conceit, shows of vanity, apings of the great world of ungodliness. Such a fool is man, that, getting power, he loses sobriety; and it is yet to be seen whether even the lowly-minded, self-renouncing religion of Jesus can save a prospering age from this folly. What is specially wanted, therefore, now, is Christian men and churches who maintain the open state with God: living joyfully above the world, when the world's best gifts are theirs; godly, self-renouncing, simple, responsible, using their great means for great beneficence, and finding always, in the riches of Christ, a heaven full of consciously ennobled joy and peace, so as plainly no inferior good can yield. What we want is Christian men and families who can be saints without being persecuted or poor; men who, having mastered all prosperity, can master also themselves; who, having conquered all the good of time, can conquer it again by being superior to it; doing honor to God's abounding fatherhood in all most generous uses of his gifts, and yet, in such a way, all ascetic practices apart, that not his gifts, but he himself, will ever be the joy and rest and fullness of their heart. The low, legal, anxious piety, now commonly prevalent is far too doubtfully blessed in Christ—a kind of starvation, out of which the soul hies herself eagerly to lay hold of almost any sort of good. It is no argument for unworldliness, but the great temptation to it, rather. Nothing answers now but the fullness of Christ, riches above all riches, glory within above all glory without, to be imparadised in faith, and God to faith revealed.—Dr. Bushnell's Farewell Sermon.