world, and thus was his mercy shown toward his believing servant. The little company contained in the ark were preserved in safety, and Noah lived for years afterward to praise God and thank him for his marvelous deliverance. Now, there are two points which I am anxious to fix on your mind: Noah preached by his words, and so may we. We are not all ministers, but we may each one of us speak a word for our Master, in the hope of leading others to his happy service. You may have no rank in the Church, but I would not have you stand back on that account. A private soldier has no rank in the army; but though it is not his duty to command or lead others, or even to train the recruits, yet may he not fight and bleed for his country? May he not enlist as many soldiers as he can find? And so the gospel calls you to fight the good fight of faith, to recruit the ranks of Christ's army. It calls upon all, even the meanest soldier in the ranks, to engage in this blessed work. But Noah preached by his life. He was "a preacher of righteousness." Take any parish, and imagine ten or twenty holy, earnest, consistent men living in it-men whose conduct is guided by God's word, who heartily set themselves to act in all things according to his will-men who are living for another world. Now, what a vast influence for good such men would have among their neighbors! Their example would tell; their very lives would preach a daily sermon; their holiness would condemn the ungodly; their earnestness would put to shame the careless; their faith would encourage the timid. Ah! this is the preaching we want. Pulpit-preaching must be left to ministers, but the preaching of the daily life is for all. Go, dear reader, and preach thus, and God will make you a blessing to many. The poorest, the feeblest and most unlearned among you may thus show the power and blessedness of real religion. III. ABRAHAM. IN Abraham we have one who, save our first father nor any other man, has left such a broad mark on the world, though he had no home on its surface but a tent, nor property in its soil but a tomb. His name is known where the greatest emperors and conquerors were never so much as heard of. There is no quarter of the globe to which it has not been carried, and it is the only one which is venerated alike by Jews and Christians and Mohammedans; for whatever be their differences and jealousies, all of them, in one sense or another, claim an equal relationship with this distinguished patriarch, saying, “We have Abraham to our father." Other men, of great statesmanship or military powers, have founded nations; but since the days of the creation or of the deluge he is the only man who was the father of a nation the fountain from which a whole people sprang. The oldest of our families are but of yesterday compared with his. And as no house in the world is so ancient, to none has the world owed so much as to his. Through him the Saviour came. To his descendants God committed those great truths which have overthrown the most ancient idolatries, have tamed the wildest savage, have emancipated the slave, have raised prostrate humanity, have dried up its bitterest tears and redressed its greatest wrongs, and are destined to overturn Satan's empire throughout the whole bounds of earth, and establish on its ruins the reign of a holy and universal peace, restoring Eden to a defiled and distracted world, and, as in the days of primeval innocence, to humanity the image of its God. The biographer of any distinguished man considers himself fortunate if he can present, in the frontispiece, his readers with a likeness of his subject. We are fortunate enough to possess one of Abraham, and in it a likeness more to be depended on than those of the Pharaohs the Egyptians have left us carved on their tombs, or the marble busts of the Cæsars that adorn the galleries of Rome. Our likeness of Abraham is a genuine one, he, indeed, being the only Scripture character, or rather, the only character in all ancient history, of whose portrait so much can be affirmed. We have it not in any antique sculpture or painting, but in a form more true and faithful. He lives in the well-known and characteristic features of his descendants. Types of the Church, his race have suffered, and also survived, the changes of four thousand years, the saying that described their early being equally applicable to their later history—this, namely, the more they were afflicted, "the more they multiplied and grew." With a tenacity of life unexampled in the history of any other people, and which proves them to have been God's peculiar care, neither Babylonian, nor Assyrian, nor Grecian, nor Roman, nor long centuries of Christian oppression, has been able to destroy, or even to absorb them. Clinging as tenaciously to each other as to their faith, they have lived, wedded, died, buried among themselves, mingled as little with other nations as oil with the water amid which it floats. The English, for example, are a mixed race-so mixed that the blood of Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, meets and mingles in their veins. Not so the Jews. It is nigh four thousand years since Isaac and Ishmael met to lay their father in his rocky tomb, yet the blood of Abraham flows as pure in the veins of his Hebrew children as when it first sprang from its source. This is plain from the very remarkable similarity they bear to each other-a resemblance so remarkable that whether he is an old-clothes man or a courtier, a distinguished singer or a dirty beggar, one who pants under an Indian sun or wraps his shivering form in Arctic furs, walks on 'Change a prince of merchants or keeps a booth in the foul purlieus of London or the still fouler Ghetto of Rome, there is no mistaking an Israelite. His features, if not his speech, betray him. Not only so, but we recognize these features in the world's old paintings-those which represent the manners of ancient Egypt and the events of that time-not far remote from Abraham's own day-when Pharaoh, to use the words of Scripture, "made the children of Israel to serve with rigor, and made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in bricks." In all ages the Jews have been, and in all countries are still, so like each other, that we may safely infer that their original was like them. It is impossible to account for this identity of features otherwise than that they bear their father's image-that Abraham's features are repeated and multiplied in theirs. Any person, as I know from experience, by observing the remarkable resemblance among all the copies of some famous statue-the Apollo Belvedere, for instance, or Venus de Medici-is able to form, before seeing it, a very correct conception of the original. Even so, since, with a few exceptions, all Abraham's descendants, ancient and modern, in this and every other country, bear quite a remarkable resemblance to one another, we may certainly conclude that in the Jew we have a faithful portrait and a living likeness of his great progenitor. Prejudices exist against their type of features as strong almost as those felt by many against the negro and colored races, of which I could not give a more striking illustration than is to be found in the paintings of the old masters. It is a remarkable fact that, though our blessed Lord was a Jew, they never give him the features of his race, but, as if they sought thereby to in crease our horror of their crimes, reserve these for Iscariot, who betrays him, and for the priests who eye the Man of sorrows with scowling and malignant looks. Yet this is a mere prejudice, and like that felt against the colored races, is due, as it becomes us to recollect, to circumstances more discreditable to Christians than to Jews-to those who feel the prejudices than to those who suffer from them. The case of the Jews, in fact, is in many respects parallel to that of the negro races. Robbed for long centuries of their rights as men, regarded with undisguised aversion, treated with every possible indignity, and everywhere most cruelly oppressed, what is bad in their character has been the inevitable result of circumstances in which others, not their own choice, placed them; and for such as made either them or the negroes what they now are to abuse and despise them for being so is to add insult to injury, and to cruelty the grossest injustice. Like their countryman in the parable, they have fallen among thieves, and such as cherish the prejudices with which they have been long regarded resemble more the priest and Levite that passed by on the other side than the good Samaritan who took compassion on the man bleeding and poured wine and oil into his. cruel wounds. Where the Jews have got a fair chance, they who have kept separate have exhibited another property of oil—they have risen to the top. Brought under Christian influences, they who retained the features of the patriarch's face have exhibited some of the noblest features of his character, by the one as much as by the other proving their honorable lineage, and their right to say, "We have Abraham to our father." It may be noticed as a curious and interesting fact, that, while Abraham is seen to this day in the features which characterize Jewish men, the very remarkable beauty of his wife often presents and repeats itself in Jewish women. Beauty, no doubt, is always a fading charm, and to its envied possessor, in many cases, a fatal one. Yet it is a good gift of God, and whether found in human beings or in the plumes of a bird, the colors of a |