tion; the word of Heaven had passed that a bone of Him should not be broken, and the whole power of Heaven, could it have been necessary, would have interfered to prevent the violation of the decree. And thus, to our comfort let us remember, it must be with Christ's body, the Church, even now. A limit has been set to its enemies which they cannot pass; the utmost extent of their successful malice has been fore-ordained, fore-registered, in Heaven; nor can they, even in its weakest hour, wreak one insult upon its apparently lifeless frame, beyond those of which God, in His goodness, sees fit to permit the infliction.
The existence of such a limit it is impossible that they should believe, or even understand. Their views of the Church's fortunes and condition are necessarily as imperfect as their notions of the Church itself. Seeing nothing but its tangible frame, conscious of its political existence alone, they naturally deem that the overthrow of these externals is the essential overthrow of the Church; which will, as they suppose, cease to exist at all when they shall have deprived it of all those symptoms of existence, which their faculties can perceive. They know not—the Church's enemies, till taught by fatal experience, never did know—that all which the utmost exertion of their violence can effect, will be but to bruise its heel. Its true, its inherent vitality, as it is beyond their ken, is also beyond their power; and in that vitality it may, if God so please, grow and flourish the most, at the very moment of their fancied triumph in the supposed annihilation of its powers.
Even to the Church's true members, its real glories here on earth are for the most part the objects of Faith. "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation;"—the workings of God's Spirit in the assembly of His chosen,—His constantly repeated triumphs in the overthrow of evil, and in the increase of spiritual life among the faithful, are noiseless and unperceived. Churchmen know not, in their generation, what is passing around them, or even in themselves. In silence and in mystery, God is working out, now and continually, the accomplishment of those prophecies, the realization of those inspired pictures which describe the earthly glories of the Messiah's kingdom. But the full comparison of those prophecies with their fulfilment, of
