Temple service brought to a violent end; when that polity which he thought was to redeem and ennoble the world was cast aside as a broken and useless thing.  Must they not have been as gloomy and as dreary as those of the disciples, when He was dead who they “trusted should have redeemed Israel?” In both cases the body was gone or was altered—­the spirit had arisen.

And precisely so it is with our fears and unbelieving apprehensions now.  Institutions pass—­churches alter—­old forms change—­and high-minded and good men cling to these as if they were the only things by which God could regenerate the world.  Christianity appears to some men to be effete and worn out.  Men who can look back upon the times of Venn, and Newton, and Scott—­comparing the degeneracy of their descendants with the men of those days—­lose heart, as if all things were going wrong.  “Things are not,” they say, “as they were in our younger days.”  No my Christian brethren, things are not as they then were; but the Christian cause lives on—­not in the successors of such men as those; the outward form is altered, but the spirit is elsewhere, is risen—­risen just as truly as the spirit of the highest Judaism rose again in Christianity.  And to mourn over old superstitions and effete creeds, is just as unwise as is the grief of the mother mourning over the form which was once her child.  She cannot separate her affection from that form—­those hands, those limbs, those features—­are they not her child?  The true answer is, her child is not there.  It is only the form of her child.  And it is as unwise to mourn over the decay of those institutions—­the change of human forms—­as it was unwise in Jonah to mourn with that passionate sorrow over the decay of the gourd which had sheltered him from the heat of the noontide sun.  A worm had eaten the root of the gourd, and it was gone.  But he who made the gourd the shelter to the weary—­the shadow of those who are oppressed by the noontide heat of life—­lived on:  Jonah’s God.  And so brethren, all things change—­all things outward change and alter; but the God of the Church lives on.  The Church of God remains under fresh forms—­the one, holy, entire family in heaven and earth.

 II.  Pass we on now, in the second place, to consider the name by which
 this Church is named.  “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” the Apostle says, “of
 whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.”

Now, every one familiar with the Jewish modes of thought and expression, will allow here, that name is but another word to express being, actuality, and existence.  So when Jacob desired to know the character and nature of Jehovah, he said—­“Tell me now, I beseech thee, thy name”.  When the Apostle here says, “Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,” it is but another way of saying that it is He on Whom the Church depends—­Who has given it substantive existence—­without