perish;" with so little faith that he unsheathed the sword to smite down the enemies of Christ, as if Christ had not come to be a victim; with so little Christian heroism, that a maid frightened him at the door of the judgment-hall, and made him deny, with an oath, that he knew his blessed Master; in whose breast faith and sense, belief and scepticism, seem to have struggled in mortal conflict for the mastery. Watch Peter, however, after the day of Pentecost. What heroism in telling those that had his life in their hands, “Ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain him!" What faithfulness in preaching salvation for them all, whether Jews or Gentiles, announcing that "there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved," than the name of Christ! His past failures seem to have never departed from his memory. One cannot read his epistles without seeing his sorrow for the past running through every sentence in an audible and continuous undertone, intimating, as it were, that the recollection of his great offence was never distant from his mind, nor sorrow for it quenched in his heart. And, when condemned to be crucified for his Master's name, he is said to have begged that he might be crucified with his head downwards, lest he should seem to take any glory from his blessed Master. In all this we see a trust that faltered not in the worst, and that wearied not in the best of circumstances; and so by faith Peter obtained what we cheerfully accord him, and accord him no more, a good report."

By faith, the Waldenses, those noble witnesses for Christ, obtained a good report. When all Europe was involved in the darkest midnight, and they were persecuted by the inquisitors, and those who were under their directions, they fled to the valleys of Piedmont and to the rocks of the Cottian Alps, and there, amid hunger, and nakedness, and famine, and persecution, they preserved their faith—not their faith,

but our faith- re as the Alpine snows, amid which they lived, unstained during a thousand years, as at its first falling. And that faith they have handed down to us that faith in which we rejoice, while they themselves were the true and resplendent links of that glorious succession — that true and only succession, which connects the Christians of the nineteenth century with the saints and martyrs of the first. These men had no trumpet to sound their names, no newspaper-column to proclaim their praises, no general council to back their sentiments, and no royal shield to protect them. They had only strong confidence in truth, enthusiastic love and affection for the Lord; and by faith they have obtained that "good report," which certain half-papists, and more consistent whole papists, are trying to cover with reproach; but good men and true men, like him of whom the great minstrel wrote, are attempting to scrape off the moss and the dust that have accumulated on their tombstones, that men may read the story of their noble deeds, and thank God while reading that, by faith, they obtained an imperishable report.

By faith, Wickliffe, not the least illustrious of all the ancient reformers, emerged from the obscurity of Europe, and shone alone but prominent in the sky, as he has been justly called, "the morning star of the reformation." Wickliffe exposed the tyranny of the Pope, despised the threatenings of his bishops, and, by faith, first translated the Scriptures into our mother tongue, exhuming God's truth from the grave in which the sextons of Rome had long and successfully entombed it; and, by faith, when he was cited to appear before the Pope, and answer for the awful crime of making God's word free, instead of keeping it chained and bound, he gave the noble answer, by which he "obtained a good report," "Whether it be right to obey the Pope, or to obey God, judge ye." And long after he was gathered to his fathers, and buried in the church-yard at Lutterworth

which I never pass on the railway without earnestly recalling the event, his enemies dug up his bones, and cast them into the Avon, in order to express their detestation of the glorious Gospel. A poet has well said that, in so doing, they gave notice of their own downfall :

"The Avon to the Severn runs,

The Severn to the sea;

And Wickliffe's dust shall spread abroad,

Wide as the waters be."

He died after he had given his testimony; but the very efforts taken to extinguish that testimony were the grand means of spreading it abroad with greater speed from shore to shore. Wickliffe sought no honor from man, and got no favor from the Pope. He lived by faith, and died in faith, and so "obtained a good report." Let his enemies conspire to blacken his illustrious name; they only degrade their own, while his emerges brighter and more cherished than before.

By faith, another great elder of ancient days, the greatest of all since St. Paul, Martin Luther, "obtained a good report;" a report that grows in brightness, that shall never fade, whilst there is truth to be maintained and error to be put down, or gratitude to man or glory to God. By faith, he took his propositions, which condemned the dogmas of the Papacy, and pasted them on the doors of Wittenburg church. By faith, when he visited Rome, and saw what they said were the heads of Paul and of Peter there preserved just as they had been cut off, he pronounced in the midst of that city, and in the hearing of its assembled priests, that they were only wooden blocks made by a bungling and rude carpenter. By faith, he gazed on the catacombs in Rome, where the saints had sighed and prayed, "How long, O Lord most holy?" and recognized in those catacombs a glory and an architectural magnificence which St. Peter's in its richest

array makes no approach to. By faith he took the papal bull which was fulminated at him, and did, what we should do with the last papal bull, burn it in the public street before them who feared it, revealing in its blaze the darkness from which it emanated, and the faithfulness of that servant whom God had raised up to oppose it. And by faith, too, when he was told that he must go to Worms, and appear there before the council, and have an opportunity to plead for himself and his cause, but was also told that Duke George and the priests would waylay and murder him, he answered, "If the skies should rain down Duke Georges for days together, I will go to Worms." He did the duty of his day, and by faith he "obtained a good report." By faith, that lonely monk stood in the presence of illustrious kings, in the midst of irritated and revengeful pontiffs, and enunciated, in all its native simplicity, with unrivalled sharpness and clearness of outline, and in words of thunder, the reverberations of which still agitate the air, the great doctrine of justification by faith; and that doctrine, thus let forth like lightning in the summer skies, shot from land to land, until great continents shone with its splendor, and men's hearts glowed with undying fervor, before which Rome shuddered and trembled till the nations heard her chains. The voice of that noble man still sounds in great congregations, and breaks in sweet music on cottage thresholds. By faith, Luther thus lived; by faith, Luther thus "obtained a good report."

By faith, an illustrious martyr of the land in which we live, Bishop Latimer, not the least illustrious or the least faithful of them all," obtained a good report." When he was seized and made a prisoner for his faithfulness by those who hated the truths that he preached, and fastened to the stake, in company with Ridley, a co-presbyter or co-bishop, — which, it matters not, because of his utterance of the same faithful testimony; and this is not a piece of romance, but what Rome

did when she had the power, and what Rome has never repented of, and is now so far from being ashamed of that, in a little book called the History of England, drawn up specially for the use of children in the Roman Catholic Church, it is said that the burning of Latimer and Ridley was what they deserved, and that the church did well thus to put them to death; when Latimer was tied to the stake, and his brother Ridley to another stake beside him, as the flames rose up, he turned round to Ridley, and said (and said it by faith), "Be of good cheer, dear brother! This day we shall light such a flame as, by God's grace, shall never be quenched in England." These words were a prophecy. A short time ago, when what is called Puseyism was gaining ground every day, when one hundred Protestant ministers had gone over to the Church of Rome, when some bishops were fostering it instead of rebuking it, and others were making apologies for the men that professed it, instead of turning them out of the livings the responsibilities of which they had abused, when the Pope of Rome by an allocution had declared that every man baptized is subject and responsible to him, and ought to be canonically punished if disobedient to him, and according to very clear appearances Latimer's prophecy was about to be reversed, it was really about to be fulfilled. Aggression quickened long dormant feelings the heart of our fatherland was proved to be sound even to the very core. When some thought that the holy flame was utterly extinguished, they found it had been only smouldering, and feeding its strength in the sequestered places of the land, and in the secret recesses of the heart. It burst forth, at the approach of the papal power, from a thousand orifices; and prime ministers came down from their cabinets, and lord chancellors from their woolsacks, and fanned it. It now seems likely to blaze and spread with deepening and augmented speed, till all the chaff shall be utterly consumed, and the truth, dormant, not dead, shall mingle with the rays of

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