Preached (on behalf of the "Bishop of London's Fund") in St. Paul's Cathedral, on the Fifth Sunday after Easter, May 18, 1873.

Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other Name under heaven yiven among men, whereby we must be saved.

THESE words were uttered by St. Peter, as representing the young Church of Christ, when, for the first time after her foundation, she stood fairly face to face with the hostile power of the world. On the day of Pentecost she had encountered some playful or scornful mockery, which was silenced when Peter came forward and explained the true cause of the occurrences which excited it. But when the cripple was healed on the Mount of the Temple, the Jewish world roused itself in earnest. The miracle was performed in the most public place in Jerusalem; and immediately afterwards St. Peter had addressed a large multitude which gathered round him. He pointed out that Jesus, by the might of His Name, was the real worker of the miracle; that His exaltation and power was in accordance with prophecy; that it was a fact of the utmost moment to every one of his hearers. Hereupon three classes of persons became alarmed. The priests saw in the Apostles of Christ dangerous rivals to their own office and authority. The Sadducees--the unbelieving section of the literary class--were angered at the public discussion of a miracle, which, if true, condemned their own denial of a resurrection, and which they would gladly have buried beneath a contemptuous silence. The Captain of the Temple, as the guardian of public order--a sort of chief commissioner of police--was apprehensive that the excitement might lead to disturbances. These several personages and classes might well have taken the miracle to heart; they might at least have asked the question why it had so impressive a significance for an increasing section of the people. But questions of this kind are not often considered in moments of passion. The prejudices of the past, the fears and resentments of the hour, carried the day; and they cast the Apostles into prison.

This done, it became necessary that the Apostles should be examined in court--the Court of the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin was solemnly convoked; it had, according to the law of Deuteronomy, to decide the point, whether the Apostles were to be regarded as true prophets or as seducers to idolatry. The Court knew that the cripple had been healed by the Apostles--not in the Name of Jehovah, but in the Name of Jesus. And this seemed to establish the charge of idolatry; since nothing could be plainer to the Jewish mind than the distinction between Jesus the Crucified Prophet and the Almighty Jehovah. The first question, therefore, which the Court asked the Apostles was, By what power or by what name have ye done this? The Court, you will observe, does not enter upon the general question of the Apostle's teaching; it asks only Who had been invoked to work the miracle. And St. Peter, standing before men who had his life in their hands, speaks directly to the point: "Ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel, if we this day be examined of the good deed done unto the impotent man, by what means he is made whole, be it known unto you and to all the people of Israel that by the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Whom ye crucified, Whom God raised from the dead, even by Him doth this man stand here before you whole. This is the Stone Which was set of nought by you builders, Which is become the head of the corner." And then he adds, "Neither is there the salvation in any other: for there is none other Name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved."

I.

Now here St. Peter first of all makes a positive assertion. He says that Jesus Christ--His Name, that is, He Himself--brings salvation; he says (if we are to keep quite close to the sense of the original) that Jesus is the cause or ground on which the Salvation rests. It is natural to ask, What kind of salvation?

(a.) St. Peter might have glanced at first of all, although he could not have meant chiefly, salvation from physical pain and discomfort. The circumstance which led to this speech of the Apostle's was the recent healing of the cripple at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. The question was, Who had really healed the cripple? who had saved him from those years of misery and want?

The judges on the bench, like the people in the street, thought that the Apostles had worked the cure of the cripple by some magical trick, or sleight-of-hand, or occult peculiarity of character. St. Peter insists that the Apostles had nothing more to do with it than this:--they had put the real cause of the miracle in motion; they had called on the Name of Jesus. Jesus Who had been crucified; Jesus, now hidden from mortal eyes, but seated on His Throne in heaven, was the real Author of the cure. It was just as much His work as any one of the miracles wrought in the days of His earthly life had been. The Apostles were only instruments in the hand of the true Workman. It was unendurable to them that any man should think that by their own inherent power or holiness they had made the cripple whole.

Now this healing of the cripple, wrought by Jesus through the agency of the Apostles, was on the face of it a physical salvation. Bodily pain and discomfort, con-tinued through many years, unless it be transfigured by patience and resignation into a consummate blessing, may crush out its very heart and hope from a human life. And anyhow, pain is a disorder and anomaly in nature. When it is inevitable, we may be sure that God has some high and merciful purpose in inflicting it. When it is not inevitable, our business is, if we can do so, to cure it. Our Lord worked then by the agency of the Apostles what He works now by the generous hearts, and kind hands, and cultivated understandings of those whom He guides, in hospitals and elsewhere, to the relief and cure of bodily pain. His precepts, His charity, His unseen but energetic Spirit, is the source of the best and noblest inspirations of our modern philanthropy, even where the cause is unrecognised or unsuspected. And as the result is, in its degree, a salvation, so the inspiring force is the grace and charity of the Saviour.

(b.) But the great word "the salvation" does not, we must feel, make itself very easily at home in such an association as this. Bodily pain is bearable; it may even be changed into an instrument of the highest blessing. But there are evils from which men and nations must bo saved at any cost. And when St. Peter talked of " the salvation" in the Court of the Sanhedrin, he would have meant and been understood to mean something much greater in itself, and much wider in its range of applica-tion than any bodily cure; something of which a bodily cure was a mere figure and presentiment. Salvation was already a consecrated word in the language of Israel. It had been so for centuries. It meant very generally the deliverance of Israel from outward and inward enemies; it meant the deliverance of Israel as a whole; it meant especially a national salvation. That was the point of St. Peter's reference to Psalm cxviii., which was composed for the first observance of the Feast of Tabernacles in the newly-rebuilt Temple, after the return from the Babylonish captivity. St. Peter quotes the famous lines in which Israel, lately restored to the land of his ancestors, is spoken of as a "stone which the builders rejected, and which had been made the head of the corner." The new Temple would have naturally suggested the figure. Israel, rejected as a down-trodden race by the proud nations who aspired to build up the future of the Eastern world, had been lifted by God into a place of honour; Israel was to be in some way the corner-stone of that temple of souls which God would build for the future of humanity. The deeper Jewish commentators saw that the words must really apply, not to Israel as a whole, since the nation had morally fallen too low for such high distinction, but to the expected Messiah, its ripe product and its splendid Representative. And accordingly, our Lord Jesus Christ, just after His public entry into Jerusalem, when the people had saluted Him in other words of this Psalm, applied to Himself what was said about the corner-stone. He was Himself the cornerstone; and Israel, in rejecting Him, was repeating the crime of the Gentiles in rejecting Israel. When, then, St. Peter, standing before the Court of the Sanhedrin, said that Jesus was "the Stone set at nought by you builders," he was following His Blessed Master's guidance. It had been Christ's own way of saying as vividly as He could to His countrymen, that although rejected and crucified, He was the true Hope and Deliverer of Israel. And thus the salvation of which St. Peter speaks was the salvation which Messiah was to bring. It was the salvation to which Israel was looking forward. It was the salvation of which the healing of the cripple had been a figure. Israel was the real cripple after all, and his rulers knew it. As a political body Israel was crippled. The Roman conqueror had broken Israel's limbs, and the nation lay on the soil of Palestine, bound, prostrate, powerless. The leading men of Israel were asking the question, Who will save us? And adventurers were starting up, eager to trade upon that painful anxiety, eager to raise the standard of revolt against the Roman power, or to promise some visionary relief in a distant land. Israel was yet more crippled morally, spiritually. The old burning devotion of prophets and psalmists had died away, and in its place there were now crystallised sects; Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians; men whose religion was a thing of phrase and form; men whose religion was a cold negation of all the unseen realities; men whose religion consisted in a mercenary and servile truckling to the heathen state power of the time. The old heart of Israel, which had made it what it had been in ages past, was eaten out. Who could save it?

There were pretenders and advisers in abundance. Israel might be saved, by this or that Rabbi, by this or that line of political action, by such and such influences, by such and such intrigues. So it was said; but the Apostle knew that what Israel wanted was not new leaders, nor yet new political circumstances. The first would be impotent, and it was too late for the second. Still less did the nation need the experiments of doctors who had tried and failed: Israel really wanted a new life. The salvation must begin not from without but from within. The fabric of national thought, national hope, national convictions must be reconstructed. And before this reconstruction could take place, the natural directors of the work must stoop before the eyes of men to a great humiliation. They had just now thrown aside with contumely and scorn, nay, they had done their best to crush into fragments the one Stone which was indispensable to their success. Him Whom they would have buried beneath the dust for ever, God had raised up to majesty and honour; and Israel must learn to make the crucified Prophet of Nazareth the very corner-stone of the temple of its thoughts and hopes, if its doom was to be even delayed. The political implied a spiritual salvation; the outward, an inward one. And the only Saviour Who could deal with the spirits of men--who could begin really from within--was He Who had just now healed the cripple. Israel must be saved by Him--or perish.

(g.) And so we are led on to perceive a third and altogether deeper sense in St. Peter's words. Salvation really means here--it can mean no less--the rescuing from moral ruin and death of the separate souls of men. The political salvation of Israel required, as we have seen, a spiritual salvation. And the spiritual salvation of the nation as a whole implied that of its several members. Israel was not a real thing existing apart from individual Jews. There is not really any such nation as England apart from Englishmen. We must not mistake for substantial realities the abstractions which we employ to express thought conveniently and concisely. A nation consists of a number of human beings, who for reasons of race or reasons of geography act together in public matters. But before God, a nation is only so many millions of souls, each one of which is on his separate probation. Therefore, in order to save a nation, the individuals who compose it, or the majority of them, must be saved; that is to say, they must be delivered from ignorance, delivered from moral bondage, delivered from the ruin which follows wilful sin here and in the world beyond the grave.

You may do a great deal with a multitude of men, short of saving it, although you deal with such a multitude only in the block. You may protect it against outward enemies; you may endow it with new institutions; nay, you may enrich it with new ideas, with new enthusiasms, with new modes of feeling, with new traditions of social and intellectual life. But to save men is quite another matter. If you would take them out of the strong gripe of evil and falsehood, and translate them into the realm of goodness and truth; if you would change their inward dispositions as well as their outward habits; if you would make the guilty past as though it had not been; if you would cut off the entail of its penal consequences; if you aim at making them, in the language of Scripture, "new creatures;" you will have to treat with them one by one, to reckon with each separate soul, as if it were alone in the universe, and there were none other in existence. The soul of man is intrinsically too great and awful, too complex and magnificent a thing to be dealt with as one animal in a drove of cattle, as one pebble in a heap which is being shovelled away. The soul of the weakest woman, of the youngest child, has that in it, or rather is that, in the awful solitude of its indestructible life, which demands all the respect, all the concentration of purpose, all the energy and resource, whether of thought or charity, that can possibly be given to it. Has not the Maker of us all made each one of our souls unlike, in some respects, any other in His universe? Did not the Redeemer of men, Who gave Himself a ransom for all, yet, as St. Paul felt, die for each with the same deliberate concentration of purpose as if He had to die only for one? Does not the Eternal Spirit, by Whom the whole Church is governed and sanctified, yet dwell in the fulness of His majesty in each regenerate and living spirit? And do we not trace the same principle when we would assist each other in the truest way which is permitted us? Does not the mother who would really help her child take it apart from other children, and speak to it, as if all her love and interest was concentrated upon it alone, in order to convince it that she has its case fully in view, and is thinking of none else while she speaks to it? Does not the Christian pastor know that the words which he addresses in the pulpit to multitudes are powerless as compared with the words which he speaks privately to individual men; when, standing as one soul face to face with another soul--contemplating all the meaning, all the blessedness, all the awfulness of a separate, indestructible life--he grapples with the particular wants, fears, dangers, of his fellow-man, of his fellow-sinner, beneath the Eye of their common Lord? When men talk, as you may sometimes hear them talk, using what I cannot but think a shallow and irreverent phrase, about "influencing the masses," they seem to think that the human family is, after all, only a huge lump of plastic matter which may be shaped or moulded at pleasure this way or that by some outward influence. Our Lord dealt with a Peter, a Mary Magdalen, a Thomas, as if there were no other beings in existence, although He by no means prescribed or neglected those less powerful influences which affect collected multitudes of men; and salvation in its deepest, nay, in its one legitimate sense, is the rescuing souls from present sin and from future misery.

Salvation in that sense was no monopoly of Israel. What was Israel that it should claim for itself the whole power of the saving Name? The final, the absolute Religion, could not but be also universal. The question of the Gentiles had not yet been raised, as it was a few years after; but there was the broad commission of Christ to "go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." Therefore, this deepest sense of the word salvation has all the value now, for you and for me, that it had for St. Peter and the first Christians. Some of you, through no merit of your own, but only through your Saviour's grace and mercy, made, as you were in your Baptism, members of Christ, children of God, and heirs of the kingdom of heaven--may have never broken away from that state of privilege and blessedness. You may still hold onto the Pierced Hand which then locked itself in yours that it might lead you across the bleak deserts of life, to your Eternal Home. But with the majority it is otherwise. The "old infection of nature," as Christian theology calls it, some perverse will, some strong, overmastering passion, gaining strength with years, will often, as Plato could say, grasp the reins which should be held by the illuminated reason, and drive desperately like Phaethon down the steep of heaven, though it be into the abyss of sensuality or of crime. It is, alas! no rare catastrophe. Sometimes it is proclaimed in visible profligacy and worldly ruin; more often it mantles its shame under the folds of an unforfeited respectability. But at last Phaethon reaches the floor of hell: the soul lies before God paralysed--dead. In that utter misery and degradation, all sight of necessary truth is lost: the eye of the soul is darkened. All pure affection is impossible: real love is killed out by the gross and incessant demands of sense. All strength of will for good is gone. The will is enslaved; it is at the beck and call of each solicitation to evil. No voice is heard in that loneliness and degradation save now and then a wild wail of agony sounding through the caverns of the deserted spirit and echoing despair. And thus a being who might have had companionship with angels, feeds on the husks that the very swine of creation eat; the greatness of man's capacity is the measure of his ruin. Who will raise, who will save him? Ah! you may think it a dream, but it is true: now, as surely, as completely as eighteen centuries ago, Jesus Christ saves men even from depths like these. Now, as then, He washes out all the stains of a guilty past; now, as then, lie turns back upon itself, with an incomparable union of tenderness and strength, the whole current of destiny. He gives new desires, new aims, new hopes, new enthusiasms; He inspires a hatred even for the garment spotted by the flesh; He renews, by His Spirit, little by little all that His enemy had destroyed; He brings forth His own enjewelled robe of Righteousness, and bids the soul, trembling with the joy of penitence, to sit, as the Apostle says, in heavenly places side by side with Himself. There are men and women living who could assure you that this is no sentimental rhapsody; that it is a hard fact, of which they have themselves had experience. They have been at the very gates of eternal death, and have met One Who could and did save them, ay, to the uttermost.

Jesus can save: it is a matter of faith, and, thank God, it is a matter of experience. But, the Apostle adds, "Neither is there the salvation in any other; for there is none other Name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."

Had St. Peter lived among us now, would he, think you, have put the matter in this way? Would he not have avoided any appearance of comparison or rivalry between the Gospel and other religious systems? Would he not have said: "It is enough for me to proclaim that there is salvation in Christ; I do not know, I am not concerned to determine whether other prophets, other doctrines, other agencies can save? I do not wish to claim for Him any monopoly of saving power; I have no inclination to dispute the pretensions of Jewish rites or of Greek philosophies? No doubt there is much to be said for every religion in the world, and the professors of a religion have only to be sure that they are consistent; that they are careful to fashion their lives according to its law and the light of nature? It is enough for me to say that the religion of Christ will save you if you choose: I am not so illiberal as to maintain that you cannot be sure of salvation without it?"

Why did not St. Peter say this? Why did he state the very converse of it--"Neither is there the salvation in any other; for there is none other Name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved"?

It was because he had in his heart and on his lips, not a human speculation or theory, but, as he held, the Truth--the One, Final, Absolute Truth. The proof of that to his mind, the overwhelming proof, was the life and teaching of his Master, crowned, attested by the miracle--the recent, the certain, the unassailable miracle--of the Resurrection. God had spoken; and here was what He said. If St. Peter had felt himself to be only the repre-sentative of one among many human doctrines; if he had been bidding for popular favour towards a faith or a view of life which could be traced to no higher a source than some generous but human heart, or some inventive but fallible brain, then he would not have dared to say, "Neither is there salvation in any other." Error may pay sincere or splendid compliments to that which contradicts it; it has its successive moods of weak concession and of irrational obstinacy. Truth can only say firmly, tenderly, unvaryingly--"It is I Who save, whether the intellect from falsehood, or the will from weakness and corruption. Neither is there salvation in any other."

And the Gospel has said this from the first. He, Who is its Author and its Object, with His Eye upon all the doctrines, all the speculations, all the religious systems and religious teachers which in successive ages have claimed the homage of the human heart, did not shrink from saying, "No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." And His Apostles and Evangelists, catching the tremendous import of these words, repeat them in every variety of phrase and inference. "There is one Mediator between God and man," says St. Paul, with reference to certain Gnostic systems of many intermediate agents, "the Man Christ Jesus, Who gave Himself a Ransom for all." "He is the Propitiation for our sins," says St. John, who is thinking of the rites of Judaism; "and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." "Other foundation," says St. Paul, "can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." "This is the record," says St. John, "that God hath given unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." "Though we or an angel from heaven," cries St. Paul, "preach any other doctrine unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." "He that believeth the Son," says St. John, "hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." The Ephesians, before their conversion, says St. Paul, were men "having no hope, and without God in the world." "We know," exclaims St. John, "that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness." "Lord, to whom shall we go?" cries St. Peter to his Master; "Thou hast the words of eternal life." "Neither is there the salvation in any other," proclaims St. Peter to his Master's executioners; "for there is none other Name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."

There are, of course, many ways of saying this; but there is no mistaking the accent of tenderness which may be heard in the sternest language of the Gospel. The Apostles speak, not as dialecticians passionately contending for a logical victory, and riveting the charge of error upon their opponents; nor yet as men with a taste and aptitude for government, who claim the monopoly of truth and grace as a mighty instrument of moving and regulating the hearts of men. They speak as men who have found for themselves the secret of happiness, the secret of hope, the secret of life, the secret and warrant of salvation; and their highest ambition is that others should share the privilege. They would rather appear to be uncharitable than be disloyal to that true and highest charity which "gives light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, and guides the feet of wanderers into the way of peace."

When we affirm that there is salvation in none other than Jesus, we do not deny that other religions, besides Christianity, contain certain elements of truth. Of course they do. They would not last as they last if they did not. It is the element of truth in false religions which enables them to resist dissolution, and they possess this amount of invigorating truth in different degrees. But, then, error enters into their composition much more largely than truth does; and so, though such religions may within limits do a certain amount of good to their votaries in virtue of the truth which they hold, as it were, in solution, they cannot possibly save. No religion but that of Christ Jesus, God and Man, bridges over the chasm which yawns between earth and heaven; no other religion touches the human heart in all the depths of its corruption, or touches the Heart of God in all the boundlessness of His Charity. And therefore, "neither is there salvation in any other."

Again, when we affirm that Christianity alone can save, we do not deny that other agencies besides Christianity may improve mankind. In such improving agencies, promoted by noble-minded and disinterested men, this metropolis abounds. Philanthropic societies, literary societies, social and political organisations of all kinds may bring with them progress, elevation, improvement. Good government, sound education, the diffusion of useful knowledge, the influence of eminent men, the opportunities of social intercourse, the enthusiasm of common aims;--these things and the like do public services which I should be the last to dispute. But their influence is bounded by the horizon of this life. They aim at no effects beyond in the great Hereafter. They do not save us. They are not opponents of the Church of Christ. They are not even her rivals. They move in a totally different sphere of action. They have nothing really to say to the gravest side of human existence, to the deepest problems that can interest a thoughtful man. They leave us at a distance from our one true and dearest Friend; they leave us face to face with our worst enemies. They only embellish our outward life; they leave our real selves untouched. Who, asks St. Chrysostom, would think of spending his fortune in laying out an ornamental garden while his dwelling-house was an uninhabitable ruin? Brethren, believe it, improvement, elevation of tone, progress, are admirable things in their way, but they are not salvation. The one question which will interest every one of us a short century hence, when other human beings have taken our places here, and we have passed away, will be, not whether we have been improved, but whether we have been saved.

There can be no doubt that this conviction was in the first age, and has been since, a great motive power in urging men to promote the spread of Christianity. It was a motive only second in its urgency to the impulsive power of the love of Christ. A Christian who believes his faith knows that it is not merely an advantage to men to believe in Christ, but that it is a strict necessity. Under the stress of this knowledge he exerts himself to the utmost to propagate the Faith both at home and abroad. And it is this conviction which leads me to-night to urge you to do what you can to support the great enterprise of faith and charity, which, for practical purposes, but, perhaps, at some disadvantage in other ways, goes by the name of the Bishop of London's Fund. That title really describes an earnest effort to christianise London. Walk along the roads, and alleys, and lanes which stretch between this Cathedral and Stepney or Limehouse; go through the splendid streets and squares which rise on every side of you between Chelsea and Hampstead or Tyburn, and ask yourselves how many of those whom you pass, or who live right and left of you, know anything really of the One Saving Name. Well, there are many, thank God, who do know it. There are churches, and schools, and clergymen to witness to it; and, better still, there are thousands of Christian lives which show that it is still a power--a mighty power--among men. But what of the majority--for such I fear it is--of the men and women whom you meet as you walk along the streets? Either they are so altogether ignorant of our Lord, or He is to them so distant and intangible a shadow, that, for the practical purposes of salvation, they might almost as well live in India or in Africa. And if this be so, whose is the responsibility? Is it theirs who only know His Name in the echo of a profane oath, or in the advertisement of an infidel lecture, or ours--ours--to whom, through no merit of our own, He has been made " wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption"? [The Bishop of London was present.]

Ten years ago this charitable "Fund" was set on foot. Although it may not have realised all that was hoped by the late Bishop of London, it has done much. Some 437,000 have been raised and spent for the relief of the spiritual wants of the metropolis; and this sum has been met by other contributions amounting to little less than half a million. The result is that 84 churches have been built, and in most cases endowed, chiefly for the use of those classes of the people who cannot help themselves; some 30 parsonages in addition have been erected; while accommodation has been provided in Church schools for about 30,000 children. But the great effort of the fund is to have maintained, and to maintain at this moment, a large staff of clergymen and lay agents, whose work is to reach the many thousands that are in contact with no religious influences whatever. Workers of this kind are placed in mission stations in the most destitute parts of London. This is, in the highest sense, missionary work. I am not concerned to argue that all the work done has been as perfect, or all the success as decided, as we might wish; or that, here and there, as is inevitable in human things, there may not have been mistakes of administration or otherwise. But I say that, in presence of the gigantic needs of this great centre of population--of this metropolis, which, as an aggregate of human beings, exceeds any other, whether of the ancient or modern world--of this diocese, which, after deducting the thousands and tens of thousands that belong to the dioceses of Winchester and Rochester, still yields a population of more than two millions and a half;--in presence of this tragic mass of human interest, of ignorance and sin, of temptation and crime, of infidelity, sometimes frivolous, sometimes serious, often despairing in its misery; of the many thousands of souls that are lost and that might be saved, if only they could be placed in the way of salvation;--in presence of these forces, which must, if left alone, affect, in ways I need not sketch, and affect so powerfully, the best interests of England in the coming time;--in prospect of that eternity towards which, moment by moment, this vast torrent of life is hurrying forwards as to an irrevocable goal--it is unworthy of those who have themselves tasted aught of the Charity and Generosity of Christ our Lord to refuse to see, in this undertaking, a great attempt to carry forward His work--an attempt nobly and generously conceived, and, as I firmly believe, upon the whole generously and nobly executed. . . .

My Brethren, we have reached this year one of those crises which are inevitable in every undertaking of the kind. The first great impulse of charity has spent itself; and, after creating a number of claims and responsibilities, it threatens to die away, with a smile of self-approval, into feebleness or nonentity. Now the question is, whether these new responsibilities are to be disowned; whether we are to hold our hands and say that, looking to the immense work that would still have to be done, if London had already reached the limits of its future extension, an annual increase of 35,000 a year in the population of the diocese makes it hopeless to attempt to keep pace with the larger and more exacting demands that continually crowd upon us. Your Lordship and the Committee of the Fund have resolved to answer that question consistently with the courage and perseverance which have throughout marked the previous history of this great enterprise. The responsible directors of the Fund will go forward with what they have begun in the Name of Jesus Christ. And I dare to affirm that it is the duty of every Christian here to assist them to the utmost of his power, and .to make the nature and needs of their work as widely known as possible. A generous effort will do the man who makes it, at some cost to himself, even more good than it will do to the cause for which I plead; and if you know what it is to have been saved yourselves at the cost of the Blood of the Son of God, you will not fail to exert yourselves in this, as in other ways, for the salvation of your brethren.

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