ial angle is to bring into connection the Eternal
Word and the transient vehicles and hearers of it.

Did you ever stand in some roofless, ruined cathedral or abbey church,
and try to gather round you the generations that had bowed and
worshipped there? Did you ever step across the threshold of some ancient
sanctuary, where the feet of vanished generations had worn down the
sand-stone steps at the entrance? It is solemn to think of the fleeting
series of men; it is still more striking to bring them into connection
with that everlasting Word which once they heard, and accepted or
rejected.

But let me bring the thought a little closer. There is not a sitting in
our churches that has not been sat in by dead people. As I stand here
and look round I can re-people almost every pew with faces that we shall
see no more. Many of you, the older _habitues_ of this place, can do the
same, and can look and think, 'Ah! _he_ used to sit there; _she_ used to
be in that corner.' And I can remember many mouldering lips that have
stood in this place where I stand, of friends and brethren that are
gone. 'Your fathers, where are they?' 'Graves under us, silent,' is the
only answer. 'And the prophets, do they live for ever?' No memories are
shorter-lived than the memories of the preachers of God's Word.

Take another thought, that all these past hearers and speakers of the
Word had that Word verified in their lives. 'Took it not hold of your
fathers?' Some of them neglected it, and its burdens were upon them,
little as they felt them sometimes. Some of them clave to it, and
accepted it, and its blessed promises were all fulfilled to them. Not
one of those who, for the brief period of their earthly lives, came in
contact with that divine message but realised, more or less consciously,
some blessedly and some in darkened lives and ruined careers, the solemn
truth of its promises and of its threatenings. The Word may have been
received, or it may have been neglected, by the past generations; but
whether the members thereof put out a hand to accept, or withheld their
grasp, whether they took hold of it or it took hold of them--wherever
they are now, their earthly relation to that word is a determining
factor in their condition. The syllables died away into empty air, the
messages were forgotten, but the men that ministered them are eternally
influenced by the faithfulness of their ministrations, and the men that
heard them are eternally affec