more than to that in which they lived, but in which they were not understood; in which the common-place and every-day part of their lives hindered the brightness and glory and beauty of their character from shining forth.  So it is in the family.  It is possible for men to live in the same house, and partake of the same meal from day to day, and from year to year, and yet remain strangers to each other, mistaking each other’s feelings, not comprehending each other’s character; and it is only when the Atlantic rolls between, and half a hemisphere is interposed, that we learn how dear they are to us, how all our life is bound up in deep anxiety with their existence.  Therefore it is the Christian feels that the family is not broken.  Think you that family can break or end?—­that because the chair is empty, therefore he, your child, is no more?  It may be so with the coarse, the selfish, the unbelieving, the superstitious; but the eye of faith sees there only a transformation.  He is not there, he is risen.  You see the place where he was, but he has passed to heaven.  So at least the parental heart of David felt of old, “by faith and not by sight,” when speaking of his infant child.  “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.”

Once more, the Church of Christ is a society ever altering and changing its external forms.  “The whole family”—­the Church of the Patriarchs, and of ages before them; and yet the same family.  Remember, I pray you, the diversities of form through which, in so many ages and generations, this Church has passed.  Consider the difference there was between the patriarchal Church of the time of Abraham and Isaac, and its condition under David; or the difference between the Church so existing and its state in the days of the apostles; and the marvellous difference between that and the same Church four or five centuries later; or, once again, the difference between that, externally one, and the Church as it exists in the present day, broken into so many fragments.  Yet diversified as these states may be, they are not more so than the various stages of a family.

There is a time when the children are all in one room, around their mother’s knee.  Then comes a time, still further on, when the first separation takes place, and some are leaving their home to prepare for after life.  Afterwards, when all in their different professions, trades, or occupations, are separate.  At last comes the time when some are gone.  And, perchance, the two survivors meet at last—­an old, gray-haired man, and a weak, worn-out woman—­to mourn over the last graves of a household.  Christian brethren, which of these is the right form—­the true, external pattern of a family?  Say we not truly, it remains the same under all outward mutations?  We must think of this, or else we may lose heart in our work.  Conceive for instance, the feelings of a pious Jew, when Christianity entered this world; when all his religious system was broken up—­the