SERMON. 1 



BY THE REV. A. P. PEABODY, D.D., LL.D. 



" I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish." JOHN x. 28. 



As most of you well know, I am among those who attach to declarations 

 like this from our Saviour infallible authority, and who believe that his prom- 

 ise of eternal life was sealed and confirmed by his own resurrection from the 

 dead. But did I not thus believe, I still should derive from him my strongest 

 argument for immortality. If he bore no specially divine commission for 

 mankind, if he simply took and holds, like any other man, the place due to 

 his ability and character, I still must recognize him, the world tacitly 

 recognizes him, as the greatest of men, the greatest both intellectually and 

 morally, and especially so, in that in him, mind and heart, the intellect and the 

 spirit, were unified as we know not of their having been in any one beside. 

 He knew human nature so well, that while all moral and spiritual teaching 

 not of his school has had but a brief currency, the world has been constantly 

 growing into the appreciation of his teaching in the precise proportion in 

 which it has advanced in intelligence and culture. At the same time, in 

 strength and in beauty, in purity and in love, in those virtues that give might 

 and glory to manhood, in the gentler graces that enrich and adorn quiet 

 scenes and uneventful life, we know not h ; .s peer. No other character pre- 

 sents an aspect equally blameless and lovely in every view, to all conditions 

 of men, and in all time. 



Such a spirit as his cannot but have the clearest spiritual insight. He 

 convinces me by my conversance with him that he knows more about the 

 realm of spiritual being tban any one else who ever trod the earth, that he 

 beheld God, entered into the Divine mind, drank in truth from its living and 

 eternal fountain, as no other human being ever did; and what he says, with 

 entire assurance, with regard to God and man, commends itself to my im- 

 plicit reception. What he professes to know I must believe. What I of 

 myself dimly see and faintly hope looks clear and certain, if it has his attes- 



1 Delivered in Appleton Chapel, Sunday morning, Oct. 10. 



