may be incapable of using it to the best effect, or of extracting from it all that it is susceptible of producing; but, however weak may be her management of it, the material force is there. She still needs two years to finish up the details; she has still "to finally terminate her matériel and her fortresses, to re-model her garrison artillery, to re-organize her Intendance and her staff corps. But all the really heavy work is done. She is ready now to fight upon her own ground if needful. At home, one-half of her difficulties would disappear. Her fortresses and her entrenched camps would supply her armies with magazines and solid points d'appui. Her railways would furnish ample means of transport from the rear. Of course she will grow stronger with each year; of course with time her army will steadily improve; of course its faults will gradually diminish, — at least it may be hoped so. But it is an army now; and it is useful not only to declare that fact, but to add to it the distinct statement that if Germany were to once more raise the menace of two years ago, France would no longer depend for her existence on the intervention of Europe. She would, most assuredly, accept that intervention gratefully and heartily, in order to avoid war; but she no longer imperiously needs it, as she did in 1875, to save her from destruction. If another "scare'" burst out to-morrow, it would find her, at last, in a situation to efficaciously protect herself. She would no longer talk of withdrawing her useless soldiers behind the Loire, and of leaving the invader to overrun an undefended country. If Germany again proclaimed the wish to crush up France for good, before she is fit to fight, France would, this time, look her calmly in the face, and would say to her, in the consciousness of sufficient' strength, —
It is too late.
IS THE PULPIT LOSING ITS POWER?
"Quam pulchri super montes pedes annuntiantis et prædicantis pacem!"
St. Paul must at least be credited with a far-reaching glance over the future of the kingdom of which he was the foremost minister, when he wrote in the beginning of the gospel, "When in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." And the commission, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature," reveals at any rate a marvellous foresight of the work which the preacher of that gospel was destined to accomplish for mankind. It was by a sermon from bold, firm, but quite unlearned lips, that the movement was inaugurated which has since grown into Christendom, and is now, by more silent though not less potent agencies, visibly overspreading the earth. Men went forth preaching "Jesus and the resurrection," and from their generation we date, not our years only, but a new movement of human society which is filling the world with its pressures and progresses still.
We are assured authoritatively by serene censors that all the force which was once in that movement has quite spent itself, and that this gospel of "Jesus and the resurrection" must be struck out of any reliable estimate of the forces which are working for progress in the deeper springs of society. And yet somehow it refuses to be struck out. Quietly, but mightily, in the midst of the bright Saturnian realm which pure intellect seeks to restore, theology with all that springs from it is holding its place in the front rank, and is mixing itself, with an energy which shows no sign of decay or weariness, with all the practical interests and activities of mankind. It concerns itself, apparently in increasing instead of decreasing measure, with the foremost questions which occupy the attention of the statesman, and it enters, to an extent unparalleled probably since the great Puritan age, into the familiar household intercourse of our times. Those who advise us quietly to ignore it, and to lay it up with the lumber of dead superstitions, little dream how they are strengthening the hands of the party which they chiefly dread, and whose stronghold is the Vatican; perhaps they may be startled some day by the outburst of fanaticism which they are preparing, and which will be formidable precisely in the measure of their success. There is no rest possible for man in nescience, or in any negation. He needs a rock and not the pivot of a balance to sustain him; and the end of a long course of painful balancings has always been a swift rush downwards towards an abyss.
But, whatever may be the destiny of Christianity in the future, no student of history can ignore the power of the preacher in relation to its first establishment and its earliest triumphs. It is the
