PREFACE. THIS little volume has been prepared for the use of the members of the Church of the Covenant, and their friends and well-wishers, at the request of the Ladies' Sewing Society of the Church, who desired it for their annual sale. The proceeds of its sale, as of the articles prepared by the industry of the ladies themselves, will be appropriated to the building fund of the Church. It preserves in convenient shape, the history of the organization and first year's work of the Church of the Covenant. It will, with God's permission, be followed in successive years by similar records, which can be bound up with them in one volume. The contents of these pages will awaken many tender memories in the first friends and organizers of the Church. May they serve as a new bond of union, to draw us near to each other, and to deepen our devotion to the sacred cause in which we have embarked together! Philadelphia, April 13th, 1858. D. A. T. The Church of the Covenant. A SERMON PREACHED IN NATIONAL HALL BY THE REVEREND DUDLEY A. TYNG, MARCH 1, 1857. "This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." MATT. xxi. 42. No words could more fitly describe the feelings which swell in my own heart on this occasion; the circumstances of the moment, and the whole chain of events which has led to them, were so totally unexpected, and so plainly bear the impress of God's overruling Providence. Truly, the Lord hath led us all as the blind, by a way that we knew not. It is now almost three years since, in a Western city, I received an urgent invitation to remove to this city, and undertake the pastoral care of a church founded by my own father, and in which my boyhood had been spent. A network of influences, so clearly illustrative of the will of God that it seemed impossible honestly to escape it, enveloped me, and constrained the sundering of as happy a bond as ever united pastor and people together. How such a threefold cord could be broken is to this hour a mystery. It was "the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." Surely, I said, there is a great work to be done, or the Lord would not thus have dragged me from a sphere in which such great usefulness had already been attained. And, all sore and bleeding from the sudden disruption, I put my hand to the plough. How bright was expectation! How many pleasing associations clustered around the opening work! Once more in the home of my boyhood, surrounded by the friends of my youth, kindly welcomed by those to whom in early life I had been taught to look up I thought, here is to be my home till death; here, amidst warm and charitable hearts, I am to labor for my Master, and to find the sympathy and support which the careworn ministers of Christ so greatly need. Unsought, unexpected, undesired as the position had been, there seemed every reason to expect a long and happy work. But such was not the Lord's will. Sorrows and cares of a new and more aggravated character had to be experienced. More bitter disappointments had yet to come. The heart had yet to learn the worthlessness of human friendships, before it could know the worth of Him "who sticketh closer than a brother." Events too painfully familiar to be recalled, severed the union so auspiciously begun, and left me with "the wounds wherewith I was wounded in the |