monad to the man, the inhabitants of earth, and air, and water, form but one vast series of infinite gradations in an endless chain of inequalities of organic structure and of physical perfections: "There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial; and one star differeth from another star in glory."-1 Cor. xv. 40, 41. So also there never was, and, while human nature remains the same, there never can be, a period in the history of human society, when inequalities of worldly condition will not follow the unequal use of talents and opportunities originally the same-industry and idleness, virtue and vice lead the same talents, with the same means and opportunities, well used or abused, to most unequal results. The idle brother will waste his goods and sell his birth-right to his more industrious brother or more thrifty neighbour; and, quickly squandering the price thereof, will again and again cry out, "Divide, divide." Like the horse-leech which has two daughters, he will never cease to say, "Give, give." But from the days of Job and Solomon to the day of judgment, idleness has, and ever will, clothe a man with rags; and it is the law of Christianity, as it is the law of Nature, that "if any would not work, neither should he eat."-2 Thes. iii. 10. Equality of mind or body, or of worldly condition, is as inconsistent with the order of Nature as with the moral laws of God. To one servant are given five talents, to another two, and to another one. The lower we descend in the scale of natural, or moral, or political existence, the nearer we approach equality. There may be equalities in poverty; equality of riches is impossible. Equality of poverty is the condition of the Negro, the Boshman, and the Esquimaux. Equality of wealth and property never has and never can exist except in the imagination of wild transcendental theorists, so long as human nature shall continue to be that imperfect thing, which God has placed in this world, in a state of moral probation, and not of perfection. But amidst, and by means of endless inequalities of station and wealth and power, our social and individual condition has been exalted, in the last three-and-thirty years of peace, to a degree of substantial comfort and temperate enjoyment (I will not miscall it luxury) unknown before since the creation of the world. The discoveries of science, practically applied to the improvement of every article of food, and raiment, and dwelling-of bodily health, and comfort, and intellectual enjoyment—and the benevolent preparation, by authors of the highest talent, of cheap and plain and useful publications for the middling and lower classes, and their rapid diffusion and indefinite multiplication by the steam-press, are among the many moral and physical improvements of our age. Machines of rapid locomotion give almost ubiquity to our bodies; we are conveyed on roads and wheels of iron, by horses of fire. In an hour we transport our persons over one-sixtieth part of the semi-diameter of the globe. The application of electricity to the transmission of our thoughts, with the speed of lightning, gives almost omnipresence to our minds. Fire and water, earth and air, are made to perform the very drudgeries of our daily service. Nor is it on the land only that powers approaching to ubiquity have been engrafted on the faculties with which we were born. The sea itself, that great highway of nations, partakes of similar facilities of transport. In less than two or three short weeks we transfer our persons, or the produce of our industry, to the transatlantic world, and in almost as few months, to the antipodes. The words we utter here to-day, may, in twelve days, be re-echoed in America. These are conditions of existence which, not twenty years ago, would have been thought chimerical; yet are they now as familiar to us, and as available for multiplying the extent and powers of our mental and bodily existence, as were the slowly-revolving wheels of the vehicles of Ceres * a quarter of a century ago. My brethren, these are changes in the condition of humanity which should make us tremble lest we fall into temptation, and ask ourselves very seriously what is our religious state. And here, too, thank God, there is much ground of hope and consolation, notwithstanding recent untoward divisions in our Church, which distress and distract the minds of many of our weaker brethren. For though many of these divisions relate to subjects of the deepest * Tardaque Eleusinæ matris volventia plaustra.-Geo. I. 164. importance, whilst others are concerning matters of form, and ceremony, and discipline, rather than the essentials of Christian faith, still are they almost all the result of a laudably zealous but extreme reaction, excited by most unjust and unnatural assaults upon our Church not many years ago; assaults which have tried her, like as silver is tried, and brought her forth seven times more purified from the fire. All these things, we humbly trust, are working together for good. The fervour of excessive zeal will gradually subside into sober and discreet earnestness in God's service; and already have that sobriety and earnestness produced their fruits; already has our Church sent forth her augmented bands of faithful shepherds to seek the wandering lost sheep of our house of Israel. In the last quarter of a century the renewed spirit of piety has planted in our island more new churches and schools than have been founded in any one, or in all the centuries since the Reformation of the English Church; and already we are reaping the fruits thereof in sweet and holy experience, that "the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever."-Isaiah xxxii. 17. But our zealous exertions in the cause of gospel truth, extend beyond our own country to the most distant quarters of the globe. Societies for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, have long been prominent among the religious establishments of England; and a year is not yet passed since some of us now present have witnessed, in this most ancient church of the greatest and most influential city in the world,—a church built on the Thorny Island, once occupied by the Pagan altars of Roman Conquerors of Britain,—a site on which was raised one of the first sanctuaries for the preachers of the gospel to our heathen forefathers, a site consecrated to God and Christ by the piety of our Sebert, and our Offa, and our Edgar, our Ethelred, our Alfred, and our Saxon Edward; and nearly six centuries ago, reconstructed in its actual state of unexampled "beauty of holiness,"-by our Henrys and Edwards, in times coeval with the Crusades; and where still repose in holy rest the mouldering remains of regal mortality, and of many of the most noble, most glorious, most great and good that have adorned our land; in this most holy temple, most befitting the solemnity of the occasion, I and some of you have, within the last ten months, enjoyed the privilege of witnessing the unexampled ceremony of the simultaneous consecration of a chosen band of colonial bishops, who have gone forth under the national sanction of the government of this country, to preach the gospel in many of the extreme regions of the world. May the blessing of God go forth with them! Never before did the compass of Christianity circumscribe so vast a circle-never before has so extensive and * Note 3. |