So, from generation to generation, the spiritual Church is rising upward toward its perfection; and, though one after another the workmen pass away, the fabric remains and the great Master Builder carries on the undertaking. Be it ours to build our portion in a solid and substantial manner, so that they who come after us may be at once thankful for our thoroughness and inspired by our example.-WM. M. TAYLOR. How long must the Church live before it will learn that strength is won by action, and success by work; and that all this immeasurable feeling, without action and work, is a positive damage to it—that it is the procurer of spiritual obesity, gout and debility?-J. G. HOLLAND. Persecution has not crushed the Church; power has not beaten it back; time has not abated its force; and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.-HORACE BUSH NELL. The true safety of the Church is not a creed, not an enactment for expelling those who violate the creed; the presence of God alone can protect His people against the cunning assaults of their foes.—SPURGEON. The Church may go through her dark ages, but Christ is with her in the midnight; she may pass through her fiery furnace, but Christ is in the midst of the flame with her.-SPURGEON. Doubtless there are times when controversy becomes a necessary evil. But let us remember that it is an evil. -DEAN STANLEY. THE CITY. The Sorrows of the City. Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and serse in city slime? There, among the gloomy alleys, Progress halts on palsied feet; Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousands on the street. There the master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread; There a single, sordid attic holds the living and the dead. There the smoldering fire of fever creeps across the rot ten floor And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor. TENNYSON. The City at Night. That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed-in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad; that hum, I say, like the sterto rous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors and putrefactions and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born, men are praying. On the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing. And around them all is the vast void, Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw; in obscure cellars Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard, hungry villains; while Councilors of State sit plotting and playing their high chess game, whereof the pawns are Men. The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders; the Thief, still more silently, sets-to his pick-locks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts; but, in the condemned cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and blood-shot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow; their gallows must even now be a-building. Upward of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us, in horizontal position, their heads all in night-caps and full of the most foolish dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid, |