Ir is a remarkable feature in the economy of God that, in fulfilling his great designs, He ordains a long-continued work of preparation. Four thousand years of promises and hopes, of types and shadows, of preliminary providences and miraculous prodigies, preceded the coming of the Redeemer of the world. How long was the series of generations of wise men and prophets, who looked and longed to see the things which were to be seen, and to hear the things which were to be heard, when the Desire of all nations should come, but died without the sight! The whole history of the world is but a progressive revelation of God's hid treasures. We see in it all a rainbow of promise in respect to the grand consummation of the purpose of Infinite Wisdom towards the creatures to whom He has given this world as their inheritance. Slowly and often silently, but by a constant, resistless, all-sweeping progress, the preparatory work goes on. One kingdom is crushed and another rises in its place. One great system of religious error is exploded and another is invented and proclaimed. One martyr burns and another rises up to bear witness to the truth. One chain is broken from bleeding humanity and another is forged. One great principle of truth is demonstrated and another offers itself for investigation. And in all this work of ages the mountains and hills are brought low, and the crooked places are made straight to prepare the way of the Lord. The earth's lifetime is wearing away in patient labor to prepare a glorious inheritance for her children.

That such a grand inheritance is in store for them we may, with full assurance, infer from the extent of the physical and mental resources of the creation.

In some dark, undiscovered mine, the mysterious chemistry of nature has been working, through the slow and silent lapse of centuries,

to create the precious diamond; and, when formed by this inimitable workmanship, that diamond lies hoarded away in nature's hidden treasury through the long lapse of other centuries until, opening at length her glittering casket, the generous earth brings forth her precious gem to sparkle in the diadem of some queenly brow. So the golden, glittering bracelet, that dazzles your admiring eyes, has been idling away one half of the world's existence, as mere shining dust, amidst the sands and floods of Californian placers, or along the scorched and silent plains

"Where Afric's sunny fountains

Roll down their golden sand.”

And the same law of long waiting holds true touching the most substantial riches of the creation. During some past and distant ages, the earth was rearing upon its bosom a then useless growth of gigantic forests, and when they had gained their towering stature there came on some terrible convulsion of nature, sweeping away those forests in magnificent ruin, and burying them in broad mountain - heaps, to be there transmuted into inexhaustible ranges of coal-beds, for the use of the generations that are to live when no portion of the earth's surface can be spared for forests, but every wilderness shall become a ploughed field.

And so, likewise, throughout the vast prairies of an unexplored continent, for century after century, the exuberant vegetation of nature arose and ripened and decayed, accumulating a soil from which the then far-future generations of men were to gather the bread that would feed unnumbered millions. Every where industrious nature has been laying up in store her exhaustless supplies for the wants of her growing family in coming years.

And these are the riches of creation, always