of God. Is the
faith of Christendom sustained from generation to generation by the
succession of heroes and saints, to whose achievements all men look up
with despairing admiration, and in whose acknowledged and recorded
excellence they see the full embodiment of their own desire, or by the
thousand nameless fidelities to duty, and obscure victories of
self-devotion, and hidden glories of purity, that pass away without
celebration? If you, my brethren, have any stoutness of heart to resist
mean temptation, if you are conscious of any uplifting of desire towards
better and more stable things than form the common stuff of life, if any
quiet trust in God sustains you amid the world's chance and change, to
what do you owe them? In the last resort, doubtless, to God Himself, and
to God working through Christ; but immediately, and in a large measure,
to hidden forces, unseen influences, which you perhaps can track only in
part, but of which others know nothing. A father's integrity--a
mother's sweet goodness--the quiet air of a happy home--a domestic
courage and patience, at which you have looked very closely, and whose
every line and lineament you know--some ancestral saintliness, which is
a household tradition and no more, but which has never withered in the
fierce light of public estimate,--these things have inspired and
nourished your nobler part. They are the refreshing dew and the
fertilizing rain, the restful night and the kindling day, of God's moral
world. We grow up with them, and hardly know them for His activity; they
are among the necessary conditions of our existence; and when we seek
for tokens of Him, it is rather in the crises and catastrophes of
life--in the sharp wound that pricks a sleeping conscience, in the call
of duty which turns the whole current of our energy, in the sorrow
which destroys for ever our trust in the world. But He has been with us
all the while in the gentler motions of His will.

Sometimes, I am inclined to think, we insist too much on our own
estimate of small and great in the moral world, forgetting that any
single fact or individual life is but one link in an endless chain of
causes and consequences, of which we ought to know the whole before we
can rightly estimate a part. And looking back where some light seems to
rest upon our own or others' history, it is easy to see how what we
should call great and signal, stands next in the line of causation to
what seems (but only seems) to