aws, habits, and language that have come down from the middle ages to
our own day. The evil spirit of the Papacy has intruded into every
place; into the councils of kings, into the laws of nations, into the
births, marriages, and deaths of the people. Between ruler and subject,
between husband and wife, between parent and child, comes the priest,
gliding in like water through seamy walls, sapping their foundations.
Into the inmost heart of maid, wife, mother, creeps the confessional,
tainting, souring, defiling society in its springs,--a leaven of malice
and wickedness, a leaven at once of Pharisee and Sadducee, a
superstition that believes everything in alliance with a scepticism that
believes nothing, and all combined to conceal the salvation of God and
enslave the spirits of men. Beware of the leaven of the Papacy.

Other things of grosser and more material mould follow the law of leaven
in their progress from small to great, until they obtain the mastery of
a community or a man. Such, for example, are the use of ardent spirits
in Scotland and the use of opium in China. A hundred years ago how small
was either bit! but being a bit of leaven, when it is once introduced
it creeps stealthily forward, the appetite growing by what it feeds on,
until it dominates, and in some cases utterly destroys. These creeping
leavens stain the beauty and waste the strength of nations. Some tribes
of Indians in North America have been annihilated mainly by this
process; and at this day the Canadian Parliament, through a benevolent
law, sanctioned by the Sovereign, entirely prohibit the sale of spirits
to the Indians, and thus save from extinction the remnants of the tribes
that live under our protection. Those subtile and powerful material
agents which create abnormal appetites and influence the moral habits of
a whole people, afford ample room for gravest thought both to Christians
and patriots.

The fact acknowledged in Scripture, and manifest in all experience, that
evil has transfused itself through humanity like leaven, serves to bring
out in deeper relief the comforting converse truth which Christ has
embodied in this parable. The universal diffusion of corruption in the
world becomes a dark ground whereon the Lord may more vividly portray
the progress and final triumph of holiness. Good introduced among the
good is not much noticed; but when good assails, overcomes, and
transforms evil, its power and beauty are conspicuously dis