The Chautauquan, March 1883

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[The Chautauquan.]

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE PROMOTION OF TRUE CULTURE. ORGAN OF
THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CIRCLE.

Vol. III. MARCH, 1883. No. 6.

Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

President, Lewis Miller, Akron, Ohio.

Superintendent of Instruction, J. H. Vincent, D. D., Plainfield, N. J.

General Secretary, Albert M. Martin, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Office Secretary, Miss Kate F. Kimball, Plainfield, N. J.

Counselors, Lyman Abbott, D. D.; J. M. Gibson, D. D.; Bishop H. W. Warren, D. D.; W. C. Wilkinson, D. D.

Transcriber's Note: This table of contents of this periodical was created for the HTML version to aid the reader.

Contents

[REQUIRED READING]
FOR THE
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle for 1882-83.

MARCH.

[HISTORY OF RUSSIA.]

By Mrs. MARY S. ROBINSON.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE LITHUANIAN AND LIVONIAN ORDERS.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, three new races entered Slavonia whose character essentially modified its subsequent history. From the northwest came the Germans, from the east the Tartar Mongols, from the west the Lithuanians. The modern Russian divisions of Livonia and Esthonia, with the outlying regions, were peopled in the ninth century with the Tchud or Lett tribes, of the Finnish race,—the most ancient, it is believed, of living European peoples. The Russian Finns of the present time number one and a half million souls; but though they long retained their distinctive nationality, they have yielded to the process of “Russification,” and to-day, among the majority of them, their ancient character is noticeable merely by certain peculiarities of physiognomy and dialect. They are short and thick of stature, tough as oak, and of a hickory hue. The countenance is blurred and unfinished, so to speak. The face is broad and flat, the cheek bones high, the nose depressed and bridgeless. Their dialects are primitive and meager. Their manners and superstitions are traceable to the earliest of known races; their religious observances antedate those of any known form of paganism. They remain, in fact, pagan at heart, loyal to their ancient gods, though with these they are willing to give Saint Nicholas some qualified homage. They recognize a good and an evil principle, both to be equally revered. An offspring and mingling of the two is Keremet, who, with his progeny of Keremets, is more mischievous than malevolent, and to whom, far in the depths of the forests, offerings and sacrifices are made. The evil principle is Shaïtan, philologically allied with the Arabic Shatana, and the still older Hebrew Sâtân. The Finn buys his bride, by paying to her father a kalm or fee. With his fellows he practices an agricultural communism. Through a thousand years he has remained without education, incapable, apparently, of progress, unchangeable. At present, however, the Russian Finn, along with the other races of the country, is being merged into the ubiquitous, self-asserting Russian.

The Baltic Letts, occupying Esthonia, had been subjugated by the Dane, Knut the Great, the conqueror of England. But Livonia had submitted to the arms of Iaroslaf the Great, who founded there Iurief, later called Dorpat; and Mstislaf, son of Vladimir Monomakh, had taken one of the chief cities of the Tchudi. The princes of Polotsk and the republic of Novgorod claimed the country and virtually bore rule over it. To Livonia early in the twelfth century came the German merchant in search of trade, and the Latin priest, seeking souls for his hire and subjects for his Pope. The monk Meinhard, commissioned by the Archbishop of Bremen, compulsorily brought the Livonians under his sway, and was constituted bishop of their country. But this invasion of a stranger race bearing the wares of commerce, and the authority of Rome behind the symbol of the cross, implied the overthrow of the untutored but brave descendants of the Tchud hero Kalevy, the extinction of their liberties and their independence. In 1187 Meinhard completed a church at Uexhüll, and surrounded it with a fortification. Eleven years later the tribes revolted against their episcopal master, and killed him in open warfare. They then plunged into the Dwina to wash off and send back to Germany their baptism, and restored to their shrines their ancient gods. Innocent III preached a crusade against them, and another bishop, commander of a large fleet, built for his capital the town of Riga (1200). In the following year was established the Order of the Brothers of the Army of Christ, or the Sword Bearers, later known as the Livonian Knights, “men of iron,” who broke the strength of the tribes, and against whom the Russian princes, occupied with their own dissensions, made no united resistance. The knights intrenched themselves firmly in the regions whither they hewed with the sword a pathway for the cross, and built fortifications of cemented stone, that were a wonder and a terror to the simple natives, who were driven in herds to the waters of baptism, or massacred if they offered resistance. A song of the Tchudi of Pskof, entitled “The Days of Slavery,” commemorates this period of misery: “Destroying fiends were unchained against us. The priests strangled us with their rosaries, the greedy knights plundered us, murderers with their weapons cut us in pieces. The father of the cross stole our wealth; he stole the treasure from the hiding place. He hewed down the sacred tree, he polluted the fountain, the waters of salvation. The axe smote the oak of Tara, the cruel hatchet the tree of Kero.”

About 1225, a second military order established itself in Livonia, and built four considerable towns, among them Thorn and Koenigsberg, in the depopulated country. Their black cross was borne, along with the red cross of the sword-bearers, and in course of time the two orders became associated, and together imposed a crushing servitude upon the remnants of the Tchudi, who were reduced to a form of serfdom; and though in later times their liberty has been yielded them again, the German nobility retained their lands. The aboriginal Livonian remained ever separate from his conqueror, the Papal German. The Kalevy-Poeg, the epic of the Tchud Esthonians, recites the career of the son of Kalev, the personification of the race, the hero of Titanic force. He swam the Gulf of Finland. His club was the trunk of an oak; with his horse and his immense harrow he plowed all Esthonia; he exterminated the beasts of prey, conquered the magicians of Finland, and the genii of the caves. He descended into hell and had single combat with Sarvig, the horned. He sailed to the ends of the earth, and when the fiery breath of the northern spirits burned his vessel, he built another of silver. When the heavens were lurid with the flames of these spirits, he laughed and said to his pilot: “With their darts of fire they light us on our way, since the sun has gone to rest, and we are passed beyond the daylight.” No fury of the elements could destroy him. He went to the isle of flame, of smoke, and of boiling water, where the mountains throw forth fire (Iceland). There he encountered a giant woman, who, plucking grass for her kine, crushed with it several of his sailors, as if they had been insects. He fought with men whose bodies were those of dogs, possibly the Greenland Esquimaux; and pauses in his onward strides only when told by a magician that the wall of the world’s end is still far away. When he is told of the landing of the sword-bearers, the men whose armor can neither be pierced with the spear nor cleft with the axe, his unconquerable heart is troubled. He seeks the tomb of his father for counsel, but the place is silent; the leaves murmur plaintively, the winds sigh, the dew itself is moved, the eye of the clouds is wet, all Esthonian nature shares in the forebodings of the national hero. He gathers his warriors by the Embach, and raises the battle cry. Bloody is the field, mournful the victory! All the brave are slain, the brothers of Kalevy-Poeg among them. His charger is cut down by the hand of the stranger. He who had overcome the demon Sarvig, who had laughed at the spirits of the north, could not subdue the men of iron, whose strength surpassed that of the gods. Captive to Mana, god of death, his wrist held fast in a cleft of the rock hard by the gate of hell, he comes no more to vindicate the liberties of his sons, his people. Long looked they for his return; but like his kinsman, perhaps his sire, Kolyvan, who lies under the rock whereon is built the city of Revel, he is holden captive of Mana. Thus sorrowfully closes the career of the Arthur of this primitive people.

The German planted region was destined to be a thorn in the side of Russia. Protracted wars were maintained between the foreigners of the west and the Slavs of the realm. Four hundred years passed ere an appearance of tranquillity and of union was attained; and even now the governments of Esthonia and Livonia are not among the more trusted provinces of the empire. The people of that region, restive under absolutism, dimly conscious of rights withheld, and of oppressive restrictions, encourage the spirit of revolution, and invite to their sea-bordered home many of the malcontents of the empire.

Up to the opening of the thirteenth century, Russian civilization had kept a relative pace with that of the east. Receiving industries, arts and religion from Byzantium, and civic form from Scandinavia, it had been united under Iaroslaf the Great, and had maintained with some degree of order feudal divisions corresponding to those of the other European nations in the same centuries. This relative development the empire bade fair to maintain without serious lapses, when a calamity utterly without precedent, immeasurably disastrous, suddenly fell upon the realm, and shattered her incipient civilization beyond the power of repairing. Nature has been a step-mother to Russia, says one of her native historians. Fate was a second, a harsher step-mother.

“In those times, (1224) there came upon us, on account of our sins, unknown nations,” write the chroniclers. No one could tell their origin, whence they came, what religion they professed. “God alone knew who they were: God, and perhaps a few wise men learned in books.” All Europe was affrighted at the apparition of these Asiatic hordes. The Pope and the sovereigns prepared to meet them with combined forces. But upon Russia alone fell the shock, the subjugation, the humiliating servitude, imposed by these numberless and mysterious armies, whom it was whispered among the people were Gog and Magog, prophesied to come at the end of the world, when all things would be destroyed by anti-Christ.

The Ta-ta, Das, or Tatars were Mongol, pastoral tribes, settled at the base of the Altai Mountains. Occupied exclusively with their flocks, they wandered from pasture to pasture, from river to river. The Land of Grass is the name given to-day, by the inhabitants, to modern Tartary. They built no walls nor towns, knew nothing of writing or of arts beyond the simplest. Their treaties were made orally. They were equally destitute of laws and of religion, save perhaps a vague adoration of the sun. They respected nothing but strength and bravery: age and weakness they despised, and like other barbarians, they left the pining, the feeble and the aged among them to perish. Their food was milk and the flesh of their herds: their clothing was made of the skins of their animals. They practiced polygamy, and had a community of wives; when the father died the son married his younger wives. Trained to ride from their infancy, they were taught also to let fly their arrows at birds and other small creatures, and thus acquired the courage and skill essential to their predatory existence. They had no infantry, and laid no sieges. When they would capture a town, they fell upon the suburban villages. Each leader seized ten men and compelled them to carry wood, stones, and whatever material was accessible for the filling up of fosses. The prisoners were also forced to dig trenches. But save for purposes of utility, they took no prisoners, choosing rather the extermination of the entire population.

This barbarous and appalling people, in their earlier advances, invaded China, whither they passed with incomprehensible suddenness: nor of the direction of their movements, nor of their departure could aught be presaged. The present dynasty of that country is of the Mantchoo Tatars, who, in respect of political influence, are dominant in the empire.

As they increased and formed a rude nationality, a mighty chief arose among them, Temutchin, or Genghis Khan. In a general congress of their princes, assembled early in the thirteenth century, he proclaimed himself emperor, averring that as but one sun shone in the heavens, in like manner the whole earth should be subject to one sole sovereign. Placing himself at the head of this nation, composed of half a million armed cavalry, he initiated a widely devastating conquest, by destroying the teeming populations of Mantchuria, Tangut, Northern China, Turkestan, Great Bokhara, and the remainder of Western Asia to the plains of the Crimea.

The ruin inflicted by these wild hordes has never been repaired. During the captainship of Genghis Khan, an approximately correct estimate shows that eighteen million five hundred thousand human beings were slaughtered by his horsemen in China and Tangut alone. Turkestan, once called the Garden of the East, and Great Bokhara, after the lapse of six centuries, bear the evidences of the Tatar invasion on their many depopulated wastes. Upon the occupation of Nessa, a town in Kiva, the people were bound together in couples, and above seventy thousand were despatched thus by the Tatar arrows. At Merv, seven hundred thousand, or, according to another authority, one million three hundred thousand corpses were left to corrupt the atmosphere once teeming with life, and rich in its bountiful fruitfulness. At Nishapoor, in Persia, seven hundred and forty-seven thousand lives were extinguished. To prevent the living from hiding under the piles of the dead, the bodies were decapitated. At Herat, in Afghanistan, one million six hundred thousand were mowed down by the Tatar cimetars. After the enemy had vanished, forty persons, the mournful remnant from the massacre, came together in the principal mosque of the ruined city. These regions have never recovered a tithe of their former prosperity.

[To be continued.]

PRONOUNCING LIST OF RUSSIAN PROPER NAMES.

Explanation of signs used: [=a], [=e], [=i], [=o], [=u], long, as in fate, mete, mite, mote, mute.

[)a], [)e], [)i], [)o], short, as in add, met, if, off.

ö like the prolonged sound of e in her.

ä, the Italian a, as in arm.

ï, the Italian i, like [=e].

o, in the syllables of most Russian words, has a sound between [=o] and [)o]. For typographical reasons, however, we give simply the [=o], advising that the vowel sound be not made too long.

u, in most Russian syllables, has a liquid sound like yu.

Consonants, when succeeding one another, unite their sounds rapidly. Thus, in Svi-at´o-slaf, the sounds of s and v follow one another much as s and t unite in the English word step.

• Altai´; altäï.
• Apemas; ä´pe-mas.
• Askold; as´kold.
• Baikal; ba´kal.
• Blachernae; blä-cher´nae.
• Buslaivitch; bus-la-é-vitch.
• Dir; dïr.
• Dnieper; dnee´per.
• Dniester; dnee´ster.
• Dwina; dwi´na, or dwï´na.
• Esthonia; es-tho´nia.
• Ezeroum; ez-er-oom´.
• Finningia; fin-ning´ia.
• Galitsch; gäl´-itsch.
• Gallicia; gallic´ia.
• Iaroslaf; yar´o-slaf.
• Iaropolk; yar´o-polk.
• Idano; ï-dä´-no.
• Ienikale; yen-i-kä´le.
• Igor; i´gor.
• Ilmen; il´men.
• Izborsk; iz´borsk.
• Kalmuck; käl´mook.
• Kama; kä´ma.
• Karaites; kar-a´tes.
• Karamsin; kar-äm-sin´.
• Kazan; kä-zän´.
• Kazarui; kä-zar-uï´.
• Kherson; ker´son.
• Kiakta; kï-a´kta.
• Kief; keef.
• Kirghiz; keer´jeez.
• Kliasma; klï-as´ma.
• Koenigsberg; kö´-nigs-berg.
• Kroats; kro´äts.
• Kroatia; kro-a´tia.
• Kuria; qu´ria.
• Kyrie Eleison; ky´rie el-ei´-son. (Lord, have mercy upon us. Opening of the Greek Liturgy.)
• Lithuania; lith-u-a´nia.
• Livonia; liv-o´nia.
• Meria; me´ria.
• Mikula Selianinovitch; mik´-u-la
• sel-ian-in´ovitch.
• Mir; mïr.
• Morea; mo-re´a.
• Moscow; mos´ko.
• Moskova; mos-ko´va.
• Mstislaf; ms-ti´slaf.
• Murom; mu´rom.
• Muromians; mu-ro´mians.
• Mursk; mursk.
• Neva; ne´va.
• Niemen; nee´men.
• Nijni-Novgorod (Lower Novgorod); nijnï-novgorod.
• Novgorod-severski; nov´gorod-sever´ski.
• Novgorod (Veliki, or the Great); nov´gorod.
• Oka; o´ka.
• Okof; o´kof.
• Oleg; o´leg.
• Olga; ol´ga.
• Olgovitchi; ol-go-vitch´ï.
• Osmomuisl; os-mom´u-isl.
• Peïpus; pay´ee-pus.
• Perum; pa´rum.
• Periaslaf; pe-ri´a-slaf.
• Petchenegs; petch´en-egs.
• Polotsk; pol´otsk.
• Polovtsui; pol-ov-tsuï´.
• Poliane; po-li-ä-né´.
• Pskof; pskof.
• Riazan; rï-a-zan´.
• Rogneda; rog-ne´-da.
• Rurik; ru´rik.
• Russkia pravda; russ-ki´ya präv´da.
• Rostof; rost´of.
• Samoyedes; sam´oi-ëdes.
• Scythia; cith´ia.
• Sineus; sin´-e-us.
• Slav; släv.
• Slavic; släv´ic.
• Slavonic; släv-on´ic.
• Slavonia; släv-on´ia.
• Staraïa Rusa; star-a´-ya ru´-sa.
• Stanovoi; stän-o-voï´.
• Sud; sood.
• Suzdal; suz´däl.
• Sviatoslaf; svï-ä-´to-slaf.
• Tatar; tä´tar.
• Taurid; tau´rid.
• Tcheki; tchek´ï.
• Tcherkess; cher´kess.
• Tchernigof; cher´ni-gof.
• Tcheremisa; tcher-e-mïs´a.
• Tchudi; tchu´di.
• Tchud; tchud.
• Tobolsk; to´bolsk.
• Toropets; to´ro-pets.
• Truvor; tru´vor.
• Tsargrad; tsar´grad.
• Ukase; yu-kase.
• Valdai; väl-däï´.
• Varangian: vä-räng´ian.
• Variag; vä´ri-ag.
• Variag-Slav; vid. Variag and Slav.
• Vasili; vas´-i-li.
• Veliki; vel-ï´-ki.
• Ves; ves.
• Vetché; vetch´é.
• Vladimir; vläd´i-mïr.
• Voivodui; voï-vo-dui´.
• Volhynia; vol-hyn´ia.
• Volkhof; volk´hof.
• Volos; vo´los.
• Zagorodni; zä-go-rod´-ni.
• Zimisces; zim-is´ces.

[A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SCANDINAVIA.]

V.—THE ROMANCE OF AXEL.

Translated by L. A. SHERMAN, Ph.D.

We promised ourselves at the beginning of these papers a little entertainment betweenwhiles, and we have had rather dry reading lately. The political history of Scandinavia is not very fascinating, except here and there a period or a reign. Let us then declare a breathing space, and spend half an hour with Tegnér [Teng-nar´], the most brilliant and popular poet of the Swedes; besides, it will not be out of order, for it is of the glorious Carolinska Tid, or age of Charles XII., that we shall hear. Of Tegnér we shall learn hereafter, and I hope when we have read his poem we shall want to know a great deal about him. The story is called “Axel” [Ahk-sel], from the name of the hero, and explains itself. We make no pretentions to reproducing the poetry, but only something of the directness and force, of the original.

The ancient days are dear to me,

The days of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden,

For they were blithe as peace of Eden,

And they were bold as victory.

Nor yet their after-glow hath faded

From northern skies which time hath shaded,

But tall and stalwart forms we view,

With belts of gold and coats of blue,

Move up and down when evening blushes.

With reverence my spirit hushes

To see you, men of nobler day,

With jerkins buff and steel array.

I knew in childhood’s days long flown

One whom King Charles had held of worth.

He still remained upon the earth

A trophy, ruinous and lone.

From locks a century old there shone

The only silver he possessed,

And scars told on his brow and breast

What runes tell on a bauta-stone.[A]

Though he was poor, he understood

Want was no foe, but friend concealed;

He lived as if still in the field,

His home a hut within the wood.

Yet had he treasures twain in hoard,

And deemed them of all wealth the best,—

His Bible and his ancient sword,

Which bore Carl Twelfth’s name deep impressed.

The mighty king’s illustrious deeds,

Which now no farthest zone but reads

(For wide that eagle flew around),

All lay within the old man’s mind

As urns of warriors lie enshrined

Within the green-clad burial mound.

Oh! when he told of risks gone through

For Charles, and for his lads in blue,

How swelled his frame, how proud and high,

How brightly gleamed his kindled eye!

And mighty as a sabre stroke

Rang every word the old man spoke.

Thus oft till late at night he sat,

And told again the tales we claimed,

And every time King Charles was named

Failed not to lift his tattered hat.

I stood in wonder at his knee

(No higher reached my wistful face),

And pictures of his hero-race

Hath memory kept till now for me;

And many a saga then enshrined

Hath since remained within my mind,

As iris-germs beneath the snow

In slumber wait their time to grow.

The old man sleeps in death forgot:

Peace to his dust! A tale which stirred

My youth receive. When thou hast heard,

Weep, North, with me for Axel’s lot.

Beside the old man’s words sublime

My song is weak, in humble rhyme.

———

In Bender Sweden’s sovereign lay.

His foes had torn his lands away,

His glory sinking out of sight.

His people, like a wounded knight,

Who even feels death’s creeping chill,

Rose on its knees, resisting still,

And hope of rescue there was none,

Except in Charles, the absent one.

Although the leaves in Fate’s dark book

Turned in the storm, though nature shook,

He stood calm like the bomb-proof wall,

When sacked and burning cities fall,

Like rocks lashed wildly by the wave,

Like Resignation on a grave.

The king had called, one afternoon,

Young Axel in, the brave dragoon.

“Here, take this letter, and—away!

Ride for your life both night and day,

And straightway when you reach our land,

Deliver to the council’s hand.

Go with God’s help, set forth to-night,

And greet our hills and northern light!”

Young Axel dearly loved to ride,

And glad he sewed the letter in

His hollow belt. At Holofzin

His father fell the king beside,

And orphaned thus this son of arms

Grew up amid the camp’s alarms.

His frame was strong, such as of old,

Whose like have not yet vanished all,

Fresh as a rose, but slight and tall,

Like pines upon the Swedish mould.

******

The keen-eyed king had placed him in

His body-guard, souls near of kin.

They numbered seven, a slender troop

As are the stars of Charles’s Wain,

At most nine, like the muses’ group,

And hard the honor was to gain.

By sword and fire their claims were tried,

They were a Christian viking-stock,

Not unlike that which once defied

All dangers of the wave and rock.

They never slept upon a bed,

But on their cloaks spread on the ground,

In storms and northwest snows as sound

As if on daisied meads instead.

A horse-shoe they could press together,

And never in the wildest weather

Approached the hearthstone’s crackling light,

But warmed themselves with shot,[B] each one,

As red as when the rayless sun

Goes down in blood some winter’s night.

The rule was when in strife exposed

That one might yield if seven opposed,

His breast still turned to their attack,

For none must ever see his back.

And last there was this law beside,

The most austere, perhaps, of all,

To let no maid bring them in thrall,

Till Charles himself should take a bride.

However blue two eyes might smile,

However red two lips beguile,—

They all must shut their eyes—or flee:

Their swords were pledged, they must be free.

Young Axel saddled glad his steed,

And rode both night and day with speed.

When Ukrane’s boundaries drew near

The sudden gleam of lance and spear

Flashed round him, spurring through a wood.

At once the ambush rose and stood:

“Thou art the bearer of commands;

Give up the letter to our hands,

Dismount and give it up, or die.”

Then rang his sword its swift reply,

And he who spoke, grown wondrous meek,

Bowed to the earth with piercing shriek.

His back now screened against an oak

Now Axel meets each stroke with stroke.

Wherever fell that ponderous sword,

There knees were bent and blood was poured;

And thus he gave his oath support.

Not one to seven, that were but sport,

But one to twenty rang his blade:

Resistance such as Krakë made.

To life by hope no longer bound,

He sought but fellowship in death.

The purple mouth of many a wound,

Now whispers with enfeebled breath

That strength and life are taking flight.

His hand no longer knows the steel,

And swooning darkness sets its seal

Upon his eyes, he sinks in night.

“Halloo!” With shouts the wood resounds,

And falcons bold and faithful hounds

Press hard upon their frightened prey,

And now the hunters dash this way.

And first upon a roan-flecked steed,

And vying with the wind for speed,

An Amazon rides like a queen,

With cheek of rose and robe of green.

The robber gang affrighted fled,

But she whose steed chafed at the dead

Dismounted with a single bound

Where lay he, as within some dale

An oak thrown prostrate by the gale

Lies on the copse which clothes the ground.

How fair he lay, though bathed in gore!

And over him Maria[C] bent,

As fair Diana long before

On Latmos, also well content

That dogs and din of chase were gone,

Bent over her Endymion.

The slumberer who caused her bliss

Was surely not more fair than this.

A spark of life had still endured

Within his breast, and, soon procured,

They raise the fallen to a bier

Of interwoven twigs, and bear

It slowly forth with reverent care,

And seek her dwelling, which was near.

She sat beside his couch, oppressed

With anxious cares that leave their trace,

And fastened on his pallid face

A look well worth a realm’s acquest.

She sat as in the groves of Greece

(That land of beauty overthrown),

The wild rose blooms in noiseless peace

By prostrate Hercules in stone.

At last he wakes to consciousness,

And looks around him in distress.

Alas! his eye before so mild

Now glares deliriously wild.

“Where am I? Girl, why art thou here?

To King Carl’s service I am bound,

And must not look on thee; thy tear

I will not have within my wound.—

My sire beyond the milky way

Is wroth: he heard the oath I took.

How fair, though, is the tempter’s look!

How winning! Satan, hence, away!—

Where is my belt and my commands?

I took them from my king’s own hands.

My father’s sword is good, it smites

With special hate on Muscovites.—

Oh! what delight it was to slay!

I would the king had seen the fray:

Like prostrate harvests lay the dead.

It almost seemed I also bled.—

I bore dispatches from the war,

My honor stands in pledge therefor.

Waste not a moment more,—away!”

She heard his ravings with dismay,

While swooning sank her hero then

Exhausted on his couch again.

Thus grappled life with death anew

Till life had won the youth at last,

And slowly was the danger passed,

When Axel now could calmly view

With glance restored, though weak and dim,

The angel bending over him.

She was not like the idyl’s queen,

Who roves and sighs in groves of green,

The counterfeit of languishing,

With locks bright gold like suns of spring,

And cheeks deep-dyed as Julian flowers,

And eyes like blue-bells after showers.

She was an Oriental maid.

Her dark, rich locks which fell unstayed,

Seemed midnight round a bed of roses;

And on her brow was throned the grace

Of cheerfulness, as in the face

An Amazonian shield exposes,—

The face and mien of victory.

Its hue was like Aurora’s haze,

Which artists paint with clouds of rays.

Of form so shapely, gait so free,

She seemed a Dryad from the grove;

And high and deep her bosom’s sea

Of youth and health swelled ceaselessly.

A body all divinely wove

Of roses red and lilies white,

A soul of only fire and light,—

A summer and a southern sky

With fragrance filled and golden beams.

She cast on all a glance as proud

As looks Jove’s eagle from the cloud,

Yet mild as are the doves that bear

The car of Venus through the air.

O Axel! Wounds soon lose their smart,

And nothing but the scars remain.

Thy breast is healed, thy thoughts are sane,

But ah! how is it with thy heart?

Look not so fondly at the hand

Which bound thy wounds with gentle band;

That hand as white as sculptor’s stone,—

It must not linger in thine own.

It is more dangerous by far

Than angry Turkish hands last year,

In Bender, callous with the spear

And cimeter, and many a scar.

Those lips so fresh in changeless red,

Which only whisper when they ope

In spirit-lays of trust and hope,—

Far better didst thou hear instead

Czar Peter’s hundred cannon roar

In line at Pultava once more.

When pale thou walkest in the heat,

With drooping limbs and stumbling feet,

Lean, Axel, on thy sword alone,

Not on that arm beside thine own,

Which Love hath formed so round and fair

That he might make his pillow there.

O Love! all miracles in one!

Thou breath of universal bliss!

Thou breeze of heaven which comes to kiss

Life’s groves beneath their sweltering sun!

Thou open heart in Nature’s breast,

The solace both of gods and men!

Each ocean-drop clings to the rest,

And all the stars that smile above

Wind on from pole to pole again

Their bride-dance round the suns they love.

Yet love is in the human mind

But twilight of remembered rays

From fairer and from better days,[D]

When once a little maid she twined

The dance in heaven’s azure hall

With silver crowns on arch and wall,

And when in weariness would rest,

Slept nestled on her father’s breast.

Then was she rich as reason’s powers

Of growth, her speech was only prayer,

And each her brother of the fair

And winged sons in heaven’s bowers.

But ah! she fell; and here her love

Is no more pure like that above.

Yet in the lover oft she traces

Lines from her heavenly kindred’s faces,

And hears their voice in notes of spring,

And in the songs the poets sing.

How glad, how sweet that moment is!

As when upon some desert track

The Swiss hears sounds which straight bring back

His Alpine childhood’s memories.

The sun was sinking. Evening lay

Still couched and dreaming in the west,

And mute as priests of Egypt pressed

The stars along their opening way:

And earth stood in the evening’s hush

As blessed as a bride stands fair

With diamonds in her raven hair,

And veil which hides not smile or blush.

From all day sports now seeking rest

The Naiad smiled in glad repose,

While twilight’s blush with hue of rose

Glowed tremblingly upon her breast.

The Cupids, bound while day-beams crown

The gazing sky, are loosed and rove

With bow and arrows up and down

Upon the moon-beams in the grove,—

The darksome green triumphal gate

Which spring had entered through of late.

From dripping oaks the nightingale

Struck notes which echoed through the dale

As tender, innocent and chaste

As lays which Franzen’s[E] muse has graced.

It was as if, her cares dismissed,

Now nature kept her hour of tryst,

All stir, and yet such hush complete

Thou might’st have heard her bosom beat.

Then did the twain in winsome bliss

Together rove the hours away.

As groom and bride change rings, so they

Exchanged their childhood’s memories.

He told her of the days he spent

Still in his mother’s house content,

Which, built of fir and painted red,

Stood lone, with pines on every hand,

And of his cherished fatherland,

And of dear sisters, all now dead.

Then told he how his soul was stirred

By all the battle-songs he heard,

And sagas which, whoever reads,

Will wake desire for valiant deeds,

And how he dreamed full many a night

He sat in armor burnished white

Upon the giant charger Grane,

And rode like Sigurd Fafnisbane

Through Vafur’s flames, to where the maid

Of memory dwells in castle walls

Which gleam afar when evening falls

Throughout the mountain laurel glade.

Thick grew his breath, close grew his room,

He rushed out in the forest’s gloom,

Climbed up and joined with boyish glee

The eagle on the highest tree,

And rocked before the northern blast.

It cooled his cheek, it cooled his heart.

How happy could he but depart

Upon the cloud-wain hurrying past,

And wend him yonder through the air

To that far world, so bright and fair,

Where victory beckons, and renown

Stands holding out her laurel crown,

And where King Charles (though he has known

But seven more years of youth than thou),

Is plucking crowns from Europe’s brow,

And keeping none except his own.

“At length I won at fifteen years

My mother’s blessing, and with tears

Embraced her, and to camp I went;

And there my life has since been spent,

And has shone true as beacon rays

Amid the rage and rush of men.

Yet saw I birds come back again,

And feed their young on summer days,

Or saw I boys who lay and played

Beside some brook in flowers and shade;

Then did the roar of guns grow faint,

For peaceful visions rose between

Of golden harvests, groves of green,

And children glad in unrestraint;

And by a quiet cottage door

A maiden stood, and evening’s flame

Lit up her face, which was the same

I oft in dreams had seen before.

And now these pictures seek me here,

And in my mind throng ceaselessly;

I shut my eyes, and yet I see

Them not less animate and clear,—

And find the maid of my idea

An image of thyself, Maria!”

Embarrassed then replied Marie:

“How blest of fortune is your sex!

No chains of destiny can vex

Your strength, born only to be free;

And danger’s spell, and honor’s throne,—

Yea, earth and heaven, are yours alone.

But woman’s destiny is sealed

As man’s appendage to his life,

A bandage on his wounds in strife,

Forgotten when they once are healed.

She is the sacrifice, but he

The flame that soars, and shines afar.—

My sire fell battling for the Czar;

My mother’s face can memory

But dimly trace, and here her child

In solitude grew strong and wild

Within these halls, without caress,

Where worship serfs, if in each whim

Their master find they humor him,

The idol of their wretchedness.

The noble soul must grow ashamed

Of life so willing to be tamed.

Hast thou seen roam the steppe’s vast space

Our beautiful, wild charger race?

Bold as the chief, fleet like the doe,

It serves and knows no master’s will,

But pricks its ear, and, standing still,

Scents danger in the winds that blow,

Then sudden in a cloud of dust

It darts away from its mistrust,—

Fights all the foes it ever had

With hoof unshod, chafes, or is glad.

‘How blest ye children of the plains,

How sweet and free your green domains?’

So have I cried and bid them stay,

Whenever on my Tartar steed

I have approached with careful speed

Their throng, and myriad-answering neigh.

Obeying not with scornful eye

They looked at us, and passed us by.

Intolerable then became

These halls, so endlessly the same.

Then zealously I won the skill

To brave the wolves upon the hill,

The vultures in their native air,

And rescued often from the bear

A life before of little worth.

Alas! although we strive from birth,

We can not, Nature, thwart thy will.

Be it a throne she sits upon,

As peasant maid or Amazon,

Thy woman is a woman still,

A withering vine if not upheld,

A being with its half withheld:

No unshared joy can she possess,

For twin-born is her happiness.

Within my heart there ever beats

A pain, yet sweeter borne than not,

A yearning for I know not what,

So grievous, yet so full of sweets.

It has no limits, has no aim:

It is as if with wings it came

And bore me upward from the base

And groveling earth to yonder space,

Where stars and suns with gathering light

Surround God’s throne in farthest night;

Again as if, I fell apace,

Down from the dizzy heights above,

Ye dear existences, to you,

Ye trees with which through life I grew,

Thou brook, with all thy songs of love,

Thou cliff with flowers upon thy brow!

A thousand times have I seen you,

But as a statue’s face might view,—

I love you now—first love you now!

I do not love myself so much,—

A sentiment of nobler touch

I find within, since I. . . .” Then sped

Across her cheek the deepest red,

And what her words left unexpressed

Was in a half-sigh uttered best.

And all was hushed except the lone

Far nightingale renewed its song,

And in a kiss that lingered long,

Their souls communing blissfully

Dissolved in perfect harmony.

They kissed as kiss in sacrifice

Two altar-flames, which thus unite,

And shine with an intenser light

As nearer heaven’s door they rise.

To them the world had fled from sight,

And time desisted from its flight.

Each hour of time’s mortality

Is measured by the strictest line,

But death’s cold kiss, and love’s divine

Are children of eternity.

[To be continued.]

“There is in human nature a general inclination to make people stare; and every wise man has himself to cure of it, and does cure himself. If you wish to make people stare by doing better than others, why make them stare till they stare their eyes out! But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes. You remember the gentleman in ‘The Spectator,’ who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap. Now, sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best: but, relatively, the advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys run after him.”—Boswell, reporting Samuel Johnson.

[PICTURES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY.]

By C. E. BISHOP.

VI.—A PICTURESQUE HALF-CENTURY.

A picture of the times of Edward III should be one of strong lights and shades. His fifty years were crowded with events remarkable in their nature and of powerful influence on England, then and thereafter. His wars by land and sea revolutionized the military ideas of Europe; the invincible English infantry rose, and the thunder of the first cannon proclaimed the end of chivalry; the organization of the House of Commons and the enlistment of soldiers for stipend introduced in its full effect the safe policy of “control of the sovereign by the control of his purse.” The foundation of Flemish manufactures in England, and the opening of the New Castle coal trade on the one hand, with the labors of Wickliffe and Chaucer on the other, were alone sufficient to make any reign memorable.

It is a matter of wonder that “philosophers of history” have not made more study of the pregnant events of this reign. It is a matter of greater wonder that writers of romance and the drama have not more utilized its highly-colored scenes; the reigns of John and Richard II, which Shakspere seized as food for his pen, seem tame in the comparison—the more so because Froissart’s minute and picturesque “Chronicles” have preserved a wealth of material of these events ready to the modern adapter’s hand. This variety of strong situations should have half a dozen “pictures” instead of one. Perhaps we can “photograph them down” into a group of seven vignettes for our one “Picture.”

First shows us Edward, the boy of ten years, taken by his mother to her brother’s court at Paris and there made the unwitting tool to work the dethronement and death of his father (Edward II). His mother has sold his hand in marriage to the Count of Hainault’s infant daughter for troops to invade England withal. He becomes nominal king at the age of fifteen, but his mother and her brilliantly bad paramour, Mortimer, are the real rulers of England. His luckless Scotch campaign should be seen, in which his army was wasted and used up without a blow being struck, because the Scotch on their Highland ponies, with a bag of oatmeal dough and a pan-cake griddle at their saddles, needed no base of supplies, and just starved out and tired out the richly equipped English army—Isabella and Mortimer plotting the whole thing to ruin the young king’s popularity and avert the catastrophe which their black prophetic souls but too surely anticipated. For there is Nottingham Castle, the home of the two conspirators. The guards are changed every night and the keys kept under the queen’s pillow; and no nobleman is allowed to bring his retinue nearer than five miles from the walls. Good reason have they to be thus careful and suspicious after their five years of riot and usurpation; but their care avails not. The king is twenty years old and the only man in England capable of delivering her. We can see to this day the underground passage beneath the castle walls, where Edward and his few trusted knights went in and burst open Mortimer’s bed-room, where he was himself plotting the death of Edward. Comes the queen rushing in, en déshabillé, screaming, “Do not hurt my darling Mortimer!” Mortimer goes to the block, nevertheless; and the scene closes with the guilty queen’s agony for the loss of the only love of her unhappy life, her succeeding years of alternate brooding and raving, while all Europe is ringing with the feats of her son and grandson, (the Black Prince), not one ray of which glory penetrated the gloom of her solitary mourning over a lost and guilty passion. Is not this opening picture of the reign sufficiently tragic?

Next we should have the first exhibitions of the equally unholy passion of Edward for foreign conquest. His intrigues in the Netherlands for the invasion of France are a study in early diplomacy. A foremost figure in the scene is the remarkable “Brewer of Ghent,” de Artevelde, whose romantic career and tragic death at the hands of the people he most loved and benefited, because they resented his devotion to Edward, “read like a novel.” Here appear, too, the sturdy burghers of the Netherlands, painted by Motley’s matchless pen:

“Commerce plucks up half drowned Holland by the locks and pours gold into her lap. Fishermen and river raftsmen become ocean adventurers and merchant princes. Flemish weavers become mighty manufacturers. Armies of workmen, fifty thousand strong, tramp through the swarming streets. Silk-makers, clothiers, brewers, become the gossips of kings, lend their royal gossips vast sums and burn the royal notes of hand in fires of cinnamon wood. Wealth brings strength, strength confidence. Learning to handle cross-bow and dagger, the burghers fear less the baronial sword, finding that their own will cut as well, seeing that great armies—flowers of chivalry—can ride away before them fast enough at battles of spears and other encounters.... And so, struggling along their appointed path, making cloth, making money, making treaties with great kingdoms, making war by land and sea, ringing great bells, waving great banners, these insolent, boisterous burghers accomplish their work.”

These burghers took all Edward’s money for fighting and did not fight. From three invasions of France their armies came back with whole skins and full pockets, until Edward was beggared, his crown jewels pawned, his estates mortgaged, and he at last obliged to give hostages to the thrifty Dutchmen for payment of their claims.

But, three things resulted: (1) “The Brewer of Ghent” advising it, Edward laid claim to the throne of France as next in succession by his mother’s prior right, and thus began the Hundred Years’ War, of great portent to both countries. (2) Edward and his queen, Phillippa of Hainault, transplanted colonies of Flemish manufacturers to England, and laid the foundation of her wealth and independence. (3) Edward’s necessity proved England’s opportunity, and every appropriation for his wars was the occasion of new demands for parliamentary privilege and popular rights.

This vignette closes with the great naval battle off Sluys (June 24, 1340), so quaintly described by Froissart; in which we have the strange spectacle of iron-clad French knights fighting on shipboard, sturdy English sailors boarding and incontinently pitching them into the sea, where, like Falstaff, they “have a kind of alacrity in sinking,”—the result being a victory so striking that it “made the Channel an English lake for two hundred years,” and a calamity so complete that no one dared to break the news to the French king, and so they set the court fools to berating in his presence “the cowardly English who dared not jump into the sea as your majesty’s soldiers did.” This victory redeemed Edward’s military renown, and began to stir the slow blood of England at last. The idea of annexing France, which had so long regarded England as only a Norman-French colony, began to take a hold on all classes.

The third scene should open with the little wars in Little Britain, the “wars of the two Janes,” wives of the dead dukes of Brittany, England and France aiding respective sides. Jane de Montfort’s heroic defense of Hennebon; her promise to her despairing garrison to surrender within three days should not the English succor arrive; her discovery of the English fleet in the offing at day-break of the third day; and how she came down from the walls after her allies had beaten and driven off the French and “kissed Sir Walter Manny and all his knights like a noble and valiant dame;” and then her subsequent naval victory in the channel, when she stood on the deck of her flag-ship, in complete armor, and vanquished her assailants—all this was just the thing to “fire the hearts” of English chivalry. It only needed in addition the promise of unlimited booty to raise an army of English yeomen—not of Dutch burghers—for the invasion of France (1346). The Norman spoliation is requited with interest after two hundred and eighty years; booty and prisoners are sent home by the ship load; the very hostlers of Edward’s army wear velvets and fine furs every day. Now we come to the wonderful battle of Cressy—more full of romantic incident than any other of modern times, save possibly that of Poictiers, its companion-piece, in the same reign. On the English side 7,000 jaded, retreating men—on the French, 60,000 of the best and freshest recruits. But this handful of men, untitled and unarmored, shall overthrow that host of steel-clad warriors, with genealogies as long as their lances, and an ancient culture of arms as useless as their metal overcoats before the English yeomen, in their buff and green jerkins. Here the peal of the new bombards—“the thunder of God,” the French called it—also told of a new order of war. The world had moved and the French had not discovered it; while the English had, for they moved it! The picture is full of incident. There stands Edward, on the hill by the windmill, refusing to send reinforcements to the beset Black Prince. “Let the boy win his spurs. This shall be his victory.” Over here is the brave, blind, old king of Bohemia, who has heard the battle is going badly, and he insists on being led into the fray where he may strike one blow for France and honor, and is struck down. Ich dien[F] is blazoned on his crest—a motto which an admiring and commiserating foe is to take up and fulfill in proud humility, a young warrior of sixteen years—

Edward, the Black Prince,

Who on the French ground played a tragedy,

Making defeat on the full power of France,

Whiles his most mighty father on a hill

Stood smiling to behold his lion’s whelp

Forage in blood of French nobility.

The slaughter of thirty thousand French—Edward had them carefully counted—by this handful of English made French prowess forever after despised in the homes and market-places of England.

The next condensed picture is of the siege of Calais. An English city springs up around the doomed fortress, and for a year the English trade, feast, game and tourney before the starving garrison. Scotland thinks this a good time to strike England. Queen Phillippa is anon in the field with an English army, and at Nevill’s Cross (October, 1346) there is another exhibition of Amazonian chivalry. King David of Scotland is taken prisoner and by a common soldier, plain John Copeland, as if everything must be extraordinary and strange. John hurries his royal prize away to the castle of Ogle, and sturdily refuses to give him up to the queen or to any man but King Edward himself. Just the same John was knighted and rewarded; he would have lost his head in any other country. Phillippa goes happy enough over to Calais to spend Christmas and receive the plaudits of Europe and of her lord, which she thought more of. We must take in Froissart’s fancy sketch of the surrender of Calais. The six wealthy burghers voluntarily march out, barefooted, in their shirts, halters about their necks, to die vicariously for the rest of the Calaisians; at the pitiful sight all the English generals intercede with Edward for mercy, but he will not; the queen goes on her knees and pleads so eloquently that the stoutest warriors drop surreptitious tears; the king, with recollections of Nevill’s Cross and the anticipation of another royal child soon to come, can not withstand this, and he says, rather ungraciously, he wishes the queen had been farther away that day, but he supposes she will have it so; and she gives the six citizens each his life, his liberty, a good suit of clothes and a banquet—the last being esteemed not the least of the gifts after their long diet on dogs and horses. All this dear old Froissart tells, and it does not impair its acceptation in history that he evolved the whole incident from his inner consciousness—any more than does the fact that good parson Weems invented the incident of George Washington and the cherry tree injure that story’s currency. In fact, sober history of those times is more marvelous than anything that even the imaginative Froissart could invent. Calais remained an English stronghold and base of English operations in France for two hundred years.

It is now 1347, and all England gives itself up to months of festivity, and patting its own back for its French feats. There are brilliant tournaments and balls, in which the captive king of Scotland and captive French nobles take part as heartily as if they were victors. The Noble Order of the Garter is established with imposing ritual and brilliant festivities, and St. George becomes England’s titular saint. Now occurs Edward’s attempted intrigue with the Countess of Salisbury, who is as wise, brave and pure as she is beautiful. The noble part she played makes her, in our eyes, a greater heroine than Phillippa and “the two Janes.” She taught Edward such a lesson of propriety that he was able to turn her own confusion at a court ball into a lesson in modesty to the tittering lords and ladies, as he clasped the lost garter on his own knee and said, “Evil be to him who evil thinks.” And so it comes that the highest order of English nobility and the noble motto on her coat of arms commemorates a pure woman’s holding fast to her integrity. Is not this the best of all the vignettes?

But there is an awfully dark background to it. A rude stop was put to all these rejoicings by the Black Death (1348-50). This Chinese epidemic swept desolation over all Europe. One-third of the population of England was carried off; half the people of London died, and it was difficult to find places of burial. The king’s daughter was one of its victims, and her death took place while she was en route to Spain to be married; she was buried in the church she was to have been married in. The loss of laborers and beasts was so great that famine was added to pestilence. But these dreadful dispensations contributed to the overthrow of slavery and hastened the downfall of the Plantagenets. To counteract the effects of the scarcity of help the Statute of Laborers was passed, a law which attempted to fix the price of labor and to prevent villeins leaving their masters. This act was at the bottom of Wat Tyler’s rebellion in the next reign, and that was the beginning of the end of slavery. The revolt of the laboring classes proved a powerful aid to the spread of Lollardism, and that was the beginning of the Reformation. Thus do remote blessings flow from dark and inscrutable causes.

A more resplendent scene follows, by way of contrast again: The wonderful battle of Poictiers (September 19, 1356), in the heart of France, whither the Black Prince has recklessly pushed his maraudings. Here ten thousand English defeated sixty thousand French, and took the French king, John, prisoner. This completed the humiliation of France, and “she found in her desolation a miserable defence against invasion.” King John was borne to London in honor—for the chivalrous prince would not triumph over his captive, and humbly waited on him at table as his superior in rank. Then did his motto, Ich dien, shine brightly.

Another contrast: “Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion” to honor and fame on the part of Edward III. Phillippa was dead. The Black Prince had died, his last battle being disgraced by an inhuman slaughter of all his prisoners. The great warrior king in his dotage is the degraded creature of wicked Alice Perrers. Faction and contention rule at court, and discontent is in the land. The old king is on his death-bed. Alice Perrers hastily gathers her wealth, seizes the king’s jewels, even strips the rings from his fingers, and flees. The servants rifle the palace, and the mighty conqueror is left to meet a mightier—alone. Thus a wandering friar finds the apartments deserted, the doors standing open, and a wasted, gray old man dying alone.

“Mighty Cæsar, dost thou lie so low?

Are all thy conquests, triumphs, glories, spoils,

Shrunk to this little measure?”

The true glory of the reign remains to be told. Wickliffe’s brave revolt against Rome called to life the love of religious liberty there was in English character, and it never went out again even before the fires of persecution; while Chaucer called to life the hidden riches of the old-new English tongue, and the revelation drove the Norman speech, the last relic of England’s subjugation, out of court, school, and Parliament, in a statute formally recognizing the King’s English. The complete organization of the House of Commons adds another land-mark of the world’s progress.

Thus the chief glories of Edward Third’s time were not of his securing or voluntary promoting, and the resulting advantages to the world can hardly be in their fullness ascribed to any direct human agency. To whose, then?

[To be continued.]

[SUNDAY READINGS.]

SELECTED BY THE REV. J. H. VINCENT, D.D.

[March 4.]

THE FALSE BALANCE DETECTED BY THE TRUE.

By Rev. WM. ARNOT, D.D.

“All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits. Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established.”

The first of these two verses tells how a man goes wrong, and the second how he may be set right again. He is led into error by doing what pleases himself; the rule for recovery is to commit the works to the Lord, and see that they are such as will please him. If we weigh our thoughts and actions in the balances of our own desires, we shall inevitably go astray; if we lay them before God, and submit to his pleasure, we shall be guided into truth and righteousness.

Such is the purport of the two verses in general; attend now to the particulars in detail: “All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes.” To a superficial observer this declaration may seem inconsistent with experience; but he who wrote these words has fathomed fully the deep things of a human spirit. As a general rule, men do the things which they think right, and think the things right which themselves do. Not many men do what they think evil, and while they think it evil. The acts may be obviously evil, but the actor persuades himself of the contrary, at least until they are done. There is an amazing power of self-deception in a human heart. It is deceitful above all things. It is beyond conception cunning in making that appear right which is felt pleasant. Some, we confess, are so hardened, that they sin in the face of conscience, and over its neck; but for one bold, bad man, who treads on an awakened conscience in order to reach the gratification of his lust, there are ten cowards who drug the watcher into slumber, that they may sin in peace. As a general rule, it may be safely said, if you did not think the act innocent, you would not do it; but when you have a strong inclination to do it, you soon find means to persuade yourself that it is innocent. After all, the real motive power that keeps the wheels of human life going round is this:—Men like the things that they do, and do the things that they like. In his own eyes a man’s ways are clean: if he saw them filthy, he would not walk in them. But when he desires to walk in a particular way, he soon begins to count it clean, in order that he may peacefully walk in it.

In his own eyes: Mark the meaning of these words. Be not deceived; God is not mocked. Eyes other than his own are witnessing all the life-course of a man. The eyes of the Lord are in every place. He does not adopt our inclination as the standard of right and wrong, and he will not borrow our balances to determine his own judgment in that day. “The Lord weigheth the spirits.” Not a thought, not a motive, trembles in the breast which he does not weigh; more evidently, though not more surely, are the gross and palpable deeds of our life open before him! He has a balance nice enough to weigh motives—the animating soul of our actions; our actions themselves will not escape his scrutiny.

Before we proceed to any “work” we should weigh it, while yet it is a “spirit” unembodied, in the balances which will be used in the judgment of the great day. Letters are charged in the postoffice according to their weight. I have written and sealed a letter consisting of several sheets; I desire that it should pass; I think that it will; but I know well that it will not be allowed to pass because I desire that it should, or think that it will; I know well it will be tested by imperial weights and imperial laws. Before I plunge it beyond my reach, under the control of the public authorities, I place it on a balance which stands on the desk before me—a balance not constructed to please my desires, but honestly adjusted to the legal standard. I weigh it there, and check it myself by the very rules which the government will apply. The children of this world are wise for their own interests. We do not shut our eyes, and cheat ourselves as to temporal things and human governments; why should we attempt to deceive where detection is certain and retribution complete? On the table before you lies the very balance in which the Ruler of heaven and earth will weigh both the body of the act and the motive, the soul that inspires it. Weigh your purposes in this balance before you launch them forth in action. The man’s ways are unclean, although, through a deceitful heart, they are clean in his own eyes; by what means, therefore, “shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word” (Ps. cxix:9).

A most interesting practical rule is laid down as applicable to the case—“Commit thy works unto the Lord;” and a promise follows it—“Thy thoughts shall be established.” It is a common and a sound advice, to ask counsel of the Lord before undertaking any work. Here we have the counterpart lesson equally precious—commit the work to the Lord, after it is done. The Hebrew idiom gives peculiar emphasis to the precept—Roll it over on Jehovah. Mark the beautiful reciprocity of the two, and how they constitute a circle between them. While the act is yet in embryo as a purpose in your mind, ask counsel of the Lord, that it may either be crushed in the birth or embodied in righteousness. When it is embodied, bring the work back to the Lord, and give it over into his hands as the fruit of the thought which you besought him to inspire; give it over into his hands as an offering which he may accept, an instrument which he may employ. Bring the work, when it is done, to the Lord; and what will follow?—“Thy thoughts shall be established.” Bring back the actions of your life to God, one by one, after they are done, and thereby the purposes of your heart will be made pure and steadfast; the evil will be chased away like smoke before the wind, and the good will be executed in spite of all opposition; for “when a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.”

A boy, while his stock of experience is yet small, is employed by his father to lend assistance in certain mechanical operations. Pleased to think himself useful, he bounds into the work with heart and hand; but during the process, he has many errands to his father. At the first he runs to ask his father how he ought to begin; and when he has done a little, he carries the work to his father, fondly expecting approval, and asking further instructions. Oh, when will the children of God in the regeneration experience and manifest the same spirit of adoption which animates dear children as an instinct of nature toward fathers of their flesh! These two rules, following each other in a circle, would make the outspread field of a Christian’s life sunny, and green, and fruitful, as the arching of the solid system brightens and fertilizes the earth.

Perhaps this latter hemisphere of duty’s revolving circle is the more difficult of the two. Perhaps most professing Christians find it easier to go to God beforehand, asking what they should do, than to return to him afterward to place their work in his hands. This may in part account for the want of answer to prayer,—at least the want of a knowledge that prayer has been answered. If you do not complete the circle, your message by telegraph will never reach its destination, and no answer will return. We send in earnest prayer for direction, and thereafter go into the world of action; but if we do not bring the action back to God, the circle of the supplication is not completed. The prayer does not reach the throne; the message acknowledging it comes not back to the suppliant’s heart. To bring all the works to the Lord would be in the character of a dear child: it would please the Father. A young man came to his father, and received instructions as to his employment for the day. “Go work in my vineyard,” was the parent’s command. “I go, sir,” was the ready answer of the son. Thus far, all was well; but the deed that followed was disobedience. The son went not to work in the father’s vineyard; but we do not learn that he came back in the evening to tell his father what he had done. To have done so would either have kept him right, or corrected him for doing wrong.

But some of the works are evil, and how could you dare to roll these over on the Lord? Ah! there lies the power of this practical rule. If it were our fixed and unvarying practice to bring all our works and lay them into God’s hands, we would not dare to do any except those that he would smile upon. But others, though not positively evil, may be of trifling importance, and the doer may decline to bring them to the King, not because they are impure, but because they are insignificant. The spirit of bondage betrays itself here, and not the spirit of adoption. They are small; they are affairs of children; trouble not the Master. Ah! this adviser is of the earth, earthy: he knows not the Master’s mind. The Master himself has spoken to the point: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” Be assured, little children, whether in the natural family of man or the spiritual family of God, act in character. There is no hypocrisy about them. The things they bring are little things. Children speak as children, yet he does not beckon them away: he rebukes those who would. He welcomes and blesses the little ones. Nay, more; he tells us plainly that we must be like them ere we enter his kingdom. Like little children without hypocrisy bring all your affairs to him, and abandon those that he would grieve to look upon. Bring to him all the works that you do, and you will not do any that you could not bring to him.

“When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him” (ver. 7). There is, it seems, such a thing as pleasing God. If it could not exist on earth, it would not be named from heaven. Even to try this is a most valuable exercise. There would be more sunlight in a believer’s life if he could leave the dull negative fear of judgment far behind as a motive of action, and bound forward into the glad positive, a hopeful effort to please God. “Without faith it is impossible to please him” (Heb. xi: 6); therefore with faith it is possible. “They that are in the flesh cannot please God;” therefore they that are in the Spirit can. In this aspect of a believer’s course, as in all others, Jesus has left us an example that we should follow his steps: “I do always those things that please him” (John viii: 29). The glad obedience of the saved should not be thought inconsistent with the simple trust of the sinful. A true disciple is zealous of good works; it is a spurious faith that is jealous of them. Those who, being justified by faith, are most deeply conscious that their works are worthless, strive most earnestly to do worthy works.

This, like that which enjoins obedience to parents, is a commandment “with promise.” When your ways please God, he will make even your enemies to be at peace with you. This is one of two principles that stand together in the word, and act together in the divine administration; its counterpart and complement is, “If any man will live godly in Christ Jesus, he must suffer persecution.” They seem opposite, yet, like night and day, summer and winter, they both proceed from the same God, and work together for good to his people. It is true that the mighty of the earth are overawed by goodness; and it is also true that likeness to the Lord exposes the disciple to the persecution which his Master endured. Both are best: neither could be wanted. If the principle that goodness exposes to persecution prevailed everywhere and always, the spirit would fail before him and the souls which he has made. Again, if the principle that goodness conciliates the favor of the world prevailed every where and always, discipline would be done, and the service of God would degenerate into mercenary self-interest. If the good received only and always persecution for their goodness, their life could not endure, and the generation of the righteous would become extinct: if the good received only and always favor from men, their spiritual life would be overlaid, and choked in the thick folds of worldly prosperity. A beautiful balance of opposites is employed to produce one grand result. It is like the balance of antagonist forces, which keeps the planets in their places, and maintains the harmony of the universe. Temporal prosperity and temporal distress, the world’s friendship and its enmity, are both formidable to the children of God. Our Father in heaven, guarding against the danger on either side, employs the two reciprocally to hold each other in check. Human applause on this side is a dangerous enemy, and it is made harmless by the measure of persecution which the godly must endure: on the other side, the enmity of a whole world is a weight under which the strongest would at last succumb; but it is made harmless by the opposite law,—the law by which true goodness conciliates favor even in an evil world. A Christian in the world is like a human body in the sea,—there is a tendency to sink and a tendency to swim. A very small force in either direction will turn the scale. Our Father in heaven holds the elements of nature and the passions of men at his own disposal: his children need not fear, for he keeps the balance in his own hands.

[March 11.]

THREE DISPENSATIONS IN HISTORY AND IN THE SOUL.[G]

By Bishop F. D. HUNTINGTON, D.D.

The spiritual growth of mankind has proceeded through three great stages. Each of these has been marked by the evolution of one predominating element, or salient principle of religious action. On examination, we shall be able to discover an impressive correspondence between these successive epochs in the history of humanity at large, and the process of life in a well-disciplined, Christianized individual. This analogy is so thickly set with points of interest, as well as so fruitful of practical suggestions touching right religious ideas, and right living, that I shall let it fix the form, and be the subject of the discourse. That subject is: The threefold discipline of our spiritual experience, as compared with the threefold order in the expanding nurture of the human family.

The three Biblical dispensations are types of three great principles of conduct, or rather three schools of religious culture, under which we must pass as persons, just as the race has passed in history, before we can be built up into the symmetrical stature of a Christian maturity.

I. First, was the dispensation of natural religious feeling. The race was in childhood. It acted from impulse. It obeyed no written code of moral regulations, but, so far as its life was right, it either followed some free religious instincts, or else depended on direct intimations from the Deity, directing or forbidding each specific deed. The man chosen as the representative of this period was Abraham. The record of it is the book of Genesis. That writing is the first grand chapter in the biography of man; and its very literary structure—so dramatic in contents, and so lyrical in expression, so careless of the rules of art, so abounding in personal details, and graphic groupings of incident; so like a child’s story in its sublime simplicity—answers to the spontaneous period it pictures. “The patriarchal age” we call it. The term itself intimates rude, unorganized politics; the head of each family being the legislator for his tribe. But, in the absence of systematic statutes, every man, by a liberty so large as to burst often into license, was likely to do very much what was right in his own eyes. If he had strong passions, he would be a sensualist, like Shechem, or a petty tyrant, like Laban. If he were constitutionally gentle, he would be an inoffensive shepherd, like Lot. Such were the first two brothers. Cain’s jealousy made him a murderer; Abel was peaceable, kept sheep, and the only voice he lifted up against outrage, was when his blood cried from the ground. Some of these nomadic people, having devout temperaments, “called upon the name of the Lord,” we are told, like Enoch and Noah. Others were bloated giants, mighty men in animal propensities, gross and licentious, given to promiscuous marriages; so that presently God saw that the wickedness was so great, and the imaginations of men’s hearts were so evil, that he must wash the unclean earth with a deluge. But there was no permanent restraining power; no fixed standard of judicial command; and so, when the flood dried, the tide of sin set in again, streaked only with some veins of nobleness. On the plains of Shinar pride fancied that it could build a tower that should overtop the All-seeing Providence; and it had to be humbled by a confusion of tongues, scattering the builders. Even Noah, a just man for his times, so pure in that comparison, that he was carried over on the waves from a drowned generation, to install a new one, had scarcely seen the many-colored splendors of the promise in the rainbow, before he was drunken of overmuch wine. Abraham himself, so full of trust that his trust finally saved him; strong enough in the power of it to lay his son on an altar; at an earlier age stained his tongue with a cowardly falsehood, calling his wife his sister for safety’s sake—first pattern of politicians of mere expediency—and was rebuked for it by a Pharaoh, who had seen less of the heavenly visions than he. Sodom, with its indescribable pollutions, was not far from Beth-el—house of God. Jacob received a revelation from opened heavens; yet he over-reached his brother to appropriate the family blessing, and defraud his father-in-law.

Throughout the whole of this patriarchal era, reaching from Adam to Joseph, and covering, by the common computation, twenty-three hundred years, there were beautiful virtues, flowering into the light by the spontaneous energy of nature, but poisoned in many spots by the slime of sensuality. The human stock threw out its forms of life with a certain negligence, as the prodigal force of nature does her forests—as a boy swings his limbs in the open air. There were heroic acts; but they were dispersed over intervals, with dismal contrasts of meanness and cowardice between. There were ardent prayers; but foul passions often met and put to flight the descending hosts of the angels of God. Character needed a staunch vertebral column to secure its uprightness. No permanent sanction lent impregnability to good impulses. Even the saint, whose spirit rose nearest to heaven, walked on the verge of some abyss of shame. For though Abraham believed, Moses had not yet legislated, nor Christ died.

Corresponding, now, to this impulsive religious age of the race, is the natural state of the individual. It is the condition we are born into, and the multitudes never pass beyond it, because they are never renewed, or made Christian. Morally they are children all their lives. Bad dispositions mix with good; one moment holy aspirations; the next a flagrant immorality. What is wanting is a second birth of spiritual conviction. Conduct is not brought to the bar of a governmental examination, and judged by an unbending principle. Temptation is too much for this feeble, capricious piety. Nature, true enough, is always interesting; and spontaneous products may be beautiful. But man, with his free agency, beset before and behind by evil, is not like a lily growing under God’s sun and dew, with no sin to deform its grace or stain its coloring; he is not like the innocent architecture of a cloud, shaped by the fantastic caprices of the summer wind; nor yet like the aimless statuary of the sea-shore, sculptured by the pliant chisel of the wave. He has to contend, struggle, resist. He is tried, enticed, besieged. Satan creeps anew with every new-born child into the Eden of the heart, and flaming swords are presently planted on its gates, proclaiming—no return that way to innocence. The natural religion, of which modern mystics are so fond, and modern peripatetics prattle, is not enough for him. It might possibly answer in the woods, unless this feeble pantheism would substitute artistic ecstacy for worship, and moonlight for the sun, that flashes down the glories of revelations; or in some solitary cell, though even there monk and hermit have often found the snare of impure imaginations spread too cunningly for it. But let the boy go to the shop, and the girl to school; let the young man travel to the city, and the young woman lend her ears to the flatteries of that silver-tongued sorceress, Society; and all this natural piety is like a silken thread held over a blazing furnace. We may put ourselves at ease, fancy we shall fare well enough under so kind a Father; come out comfortably at last; there is such tender pity in the skies. But the dispelling of that delusion will be the sharp word out of the throne of judgment—“Depart from me, I never knew you.” No Babel of refuge will be built to the top. No friendly intervention will avert the perdition of the Sodom in the heart. No Tamar of custom will cajole with her coquetry the ancient and everlasting justice. No thrifty leagues of a low commercial instinct, postponing conscience to the arithmetic of traffic—no corrupt political majorities, subscribing patriotic manifestoes as stock for party or private dividends, though they be as eleven against one, and though they piously profess to be sons of Israel by church subscriptions, shall buy national prosperity by their brother Joseph’s blood.

There is often a vague assumption that certain principles of natural right, evolved and compacted by ethical science, might save our social state. But, remember that society, without Christ, in its philosophy, its literature, its art, its morals, obeyed a law of deterioration and decay. Without him, it would have been sinking still. Instead of the Christian justice that hangs its balances over our seats of lawful trade to-day, we should have not even Punic faith; but something more treacherous than that—not even the hesitating Roman honesty, but a zone of restraint more dissolute than the Corinthian, and principles looser than the Spartan’s. Instead of a respected merchant, or a steady mechanic, going out to his business to-morrow, amid a public order that Christ has organized, might have been seen a barbarian, with the concentrated falsity of a hundred Arabs, waking into a world convulsed with perpetual anarchy, or skulking away to transact his base affairs in a worse than Circassian mart. We may baptize the interesting displays of our intermittent virtue with a Christian name; but they may yet contain no quality of Christ’s peculiar sanctity. They may leave human life quite untouched by that unrivaled glory, however bright their transient beam. They are not redolent of the New Testament. Their uprightness does not bear the sanction of the Sermon on the Mount. Their slender rectitude is not the principle that treats men justly because they are God’s children, which was the law of Christ’s great honesty. Their kindness is not the sweet charity of the beatitudes. Their moderation is not guarded by those majestic warders, reverence for God, and a Savior’s love. Nor is their worship, if they adore at all, fervent with the prayers of Olivet and Gethsemane.

And as the first dispensation ended in a slavery in Egypt, or broods darkly over pagan nations waiting to be brought nigh by the blood of Christ to this hour, so the lawless motions of every self-guided will end in a servitude to some Pharaoh in the members that cries aloud for emancipation—a settled alienation from the household of the good.

[March 18.]

THREE DISPENSATIONS.

Next after this impulsive or spontaneous period, which is the period of childhood, comes the legal or judicial—a second stage in the history of the religious consciousness. Moses, the law-giver, is its representative. From this crisis, the chief significance of the world’s religious experience is concentrated, for some sixteen hundred years, in Judea, and human progress runs on through the channel of Hebrew nationality. Other families have wandered off into hopeless idolatries. The religion of instinct has found its appropriate termination in a degraded Egyptian priesthood, mixing civil despotism with the incantations of an impure mythology.

And now, God calls up Moses out of his miserable oppression into the summit of Sinai, and appoints him the head of the second august human epoch. A period of laws, after instinct, begins. Instinct must be curbed, for it has done mischief enough. Impulse must be subjected to principle, for it has proved itself insufficient alone. There must be positive command, controlling wayward inclinations. “Thou shalt,” and “Thou shalt not,” are the watchwords. It is an age of obedience. Ceremonies and ordinances are set up to bring the wild will under discipline. And the better to secure exact obedience, a visible system of formal observances is announced—so many sacrifices every day, and so many meat-offerings, drink-offerings, cattle, doves, fruits, cakes, for every sacrifice. To withstand the surrounding seductions of nations still steeped in the vices of their natural propensities, a scheme of coercive restraints comes in. The people must have multiplied festivals, jubilees, national gatherings, regularly kept, and by divine appointment. To draw them, there is a gorgeous temple with an imposing altar, a tabernacle, a covenant, a shekinah lighted from heaven, a priesthood clad in the splendid garments, and all the superb apparatus of a magnificent ritual. Even the daily habits, materials of common dress, qualities of food and kinds of flesh, are all to be regulated in detail by specific statutes. Law reaches down to determine the most minute particulars—the cleansing of houses, the shape of the beard, the sowing of the field—all having reference to neighboring idolatrous usages, of which these twelve tribes must, by all means, be kept clear. And for the breach of every law, from greatest to least, there must be penalty. That part of human nature, that terror and dread appeal to, is addressed. On the transgressor woe is denounced. There is a Mount Ebal, full of menacing curses, as well as a Gerizim pledged to blessings. Smoke, earthquakes, thunders and lightnings, marshaling their awful pageant about Sinai when the law was given, only prefigured punishments that should always torment the disobedient. And, accordingly, down through all the Hebrew fortunes, while prophets were set to admonish and call back the rebellious, the great staple of Israelitish history was, the divine chastisement that followed violations of law, and the prosperity that rewarded its observance. Sieges and campaigns, conquests and captivities, judges and kings, Joshua, Gideon, and Ezra, David, Saul, and Rehoboam—all were of less consequence, as events, or as individuals, than as instruments of that mighty, organized power lying behind them—Moses and the law.

So with all of us; there comes a time when we feel that we cannot act by inclination, but must follow law. The principle of duty is that law. Babyhood is past, and its instincts suffice us no longer. To do as we like, would still be pleasant; but it is dangerous and false. We become stewards and must give account of our stewardship. Life has put its harness upon us, and we must work in it. Passions have sprung up, and conflicts have commenced within us, that make impulse an unsafe guide. We find a meaning in that hard word must. We are free to do as we will, and yet we feel somehow bound under God’s necessity. It begins to be evident that as sure as a stone falls or fire burns, sin will bring trouble; indulgence, pain; impiety, remorse; dissipation, disease; dishonesty, infamy. The spendthrift must be pinched, the fraudulent bargainer lose his soul though he gain the world, and the false professor be spiritually damned. Here are laws—laws of the Almighty’s ordaining—laws that bring retribution. If we would live peaceably, we must come under them and obey.

Very often it happens that by obeying a law, we acquire superiority to it. Voluntarily submitting to certain rules for a time, our virtue is strengthened and finally becomes independent of them, so that it can go alone. The inebriate binds himself by a pledge, and thus regains his freedom. The disciple appoints specific hours for praying, and by that means gains the devout spirit which breathes a perpetual aspiration, at last inaugurating a silent converse of the soul with heaven, as natural as the pulse in the veins. The methodical division of time for business is only a form of law, coercing industry and efficiency. Many a man has to spur his sluggishness, by definite tasks; and many more would bring nothing to pass, but for fixed methods and seasons. Without a morning and evening sacrifice, forgetful worldliness would render poor service to God; and memories, like Martha, so careful and troubled about many things, would fail of Mary’s one thing needful. The laying apart of exact sums for charity has been all that stood between some men and the doom of avarice; benevolence had to be put out to school, and philanthropy be drilled into promptitude like a cadet. Let us not despise law, for every day practical proofs are scattered before us, that it is a school-master to lead us to Christ.

Even fear, though fastidious nerves are apt to discredit it as a lower sentiment, has its office in disciplining thoughtless and stubborn wills, breaking down pride and prompting insensibility, till it is ready to hand us over to motives of a nobler order. There is a meaning in a tradition of an ancient German prince, who, in early life, was bidden by an oracle to search out an inscription on a ruined wall which should prefigure his mortal fate. He found the Latin words, signifying after six. Supposing they revealed the number of days he was to live, he gave himself for the six days following to his hitherto neglected soul, preparing himself to die. But finding death did not come, he was still held to his sober resolutions by supposing six weeks were the interpretation; and then he prolonged his holy life to six months, and six years. On the first day of the seventh year, by reason of the excellent manhood into which he had thus formed his character, he had gained the confidence of the people, and he found the fulfillment of the ambiguous prophecy, by being chosen Emperor of Germany. Here is a figure of common experience. We may conceive it to have been a mere “spiritual” process, that the prince should have been drawn to piety, by loving goodness for its own sake. But it was the timid dread of dying that drew him, and the royal benefactions of a truly Christian monarch justified the agent. Have you never known a fever, or an accident, or the incipient symptoms of a consumption to be the determining cause that bent the whole current of a life from earthward to heavenward? Have you never known that a mere dread of punishment or pain, of hell or disgrace, has stopped the erring feet of lust, silenced profanity, driven back the Sabbath-breaker? God is not ashamed to take into the sublime economy of his purposes these stimulants to virtue; and let not us, in our puerile conceit, venture to pronounce them unworthy. Outgrow them if you will, and can; but take care that you are not found, after all, below, instead of above the plane of their influence.

For be assured, though we have read the New Testament, named the name of Jesus, and quite looked down on the Jews, some of us have not yet climbed up so far as to Moses and his Jewish law. In the Bible’s older Testament there are needed examples for us yet. Not all of us have learned that majestic, unchangeable fact, that God is Sovereign; nor those related facts that, if we will perpetrate the wrong, we must suffer the penalty; that we can not dodge the consequences of what we do; that indolence must sap our strength; that selfishness must end in wretchedness; that falsehood is a mint, coining counterfeits that must return upon our hands; that hypocrisy to-day is disgrace to-morrow. This is law, everlasting, unrepealable law; and our poor attempts to resist, or nullify it, avail not so much as a puff of mortal breath against the gulf stream in the Atlantic. Blessed will it be for our peace, when we accept it, and bow to it, turning it into a law of liberty.

Remember that the grandest examples of sainthood, or spiritual life, that the ages have seen, have been souls that recognized this truth—the firm, Puritanical element, in all valiant piety; and without it mere amiable religious feeling will be quite sure to degenerate into sentimentality. We need to stand compassed about with the terrible splendors of the mount, and with something of the somber apparatus of Hebrew commandments, to keep us from falling off into some impious, Gentile idolatries of the senses. Holy places, and holy days, and solemn assemblies, still dispense sanctity. Our appetites have to be hedged about with almost as many scruples of regimen for Christian moderation’s sake, as the Jew’s for his monotheism. “We wish,” says some one, “that it was not so difficult to be good. We wish that we could be self-indulgent, and yet be good for all that; that we could idle off our time, and yet be wise for all that.” The worldling wishes that he could combine his worldliness now with a heaven hereafter; the voluptuary, that he could have “the clear eye and the steady hand of the temperate;” the vain, ambitious, capricious woman, that she could exhibit the serenity that comes of prayer. But Sinai stands unmoved, at the outset of every life-journey through the wilderness; and at the further end, beyond the river, Ebal with his curses, and Gerizim with its blessings. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

[March 25.]

THREE DISPENSATIONS.

But there is a third dispensation, profounder and richer than that of statutes; and, at the head of it, one greater than Moses. The period of literal commandments was insufficient; humanity outgrew it. It became a dead profession, a school of foolish questions, a shelter of hideous hypocrisies. Lo! the enlarging soul of the race asks a freer, more sincere, more vital nurture, and it comes. If the simple religious instincts of Abraham had been accepted for righteousness; if the law had been given by Moses; grace and truth enter in by Jesus Christ; grace for the heart, truth for the understanding; favor for man’s stumbling feet, and light for his eyes. Christ does not abrogate law, but by his own life and sacrifice first satisfies its conditions. He says expressly, “Think not that I came to destroy Moses, but to fulfill.” The cross does not unbind the cords of accountability, but tightens and strengthens them rather. The gospel affords no solvent to disentegrate the commandments; it only lets “the violated law speak out its thunders” in the tones of pity. Divine laws never looked so sacred as when they took sanctity from the redemption of the crucified.

Witness now a new light, “lighting every man that cometh into the world.” It is the deliverance of the heart. It is the purifying of the life. It is the sanctification of the spirit. The law, by which no man living can be justified, because no man ever yet kept it inviolate; which makes no allowance for imperfect obedience, and yet never was perfectly obeyed—which, therefore, is a rule of universal condemnation when standing alone—this stern, unrelenting law gives place to a gospel—gladder tidings—a voice that comes not to condemn but to save, a ministry of mercy, asking only a penitent spirit that it may offer forgiveness, and only inward faith changing the motives that it may confer eternal life.

Law and prophets, then, are not annulled; what they lacked is supplied. They are absorbed by evangelists. The gospel takes up all their contents, recasts them, and quickens them with the vitality of a fresh inspiration. Moses remains, but only as a servant to Christ. The decalogue still stands; but the cross stands on a higher pedestal, invested with a purer glory. Humble Calvary is the seat of a loftier power than towering Horeb. We must still be under discipline; but the Lawgiver is lost in the Redeemer. What was a task is transfigured into a choice. The drudgery of obedience is beautified into the privilege of reconciliation. Love has cast out fear. Man no longer cowers before his sovereign with terror, but pours out his praises to a Father. The soul is released from the bondage of a thrall into the liberty of a child. Out of the plodding routine of mechanical sacrifice, it ascends into spiritual Joy, where the handwriting of ordinances is done away; the Great High Priest has ascended once for all into the heavens, and suffering is willingly borne because it makes the disciple like the Lord.

Thus the word spoken by the third epoch of religious culture is not, “Act thy nature out and follow thy lawless impulses”—nor yet, “Do this circle of outward works, and then come and claim salvation for thy merits”—but, believe, first, and then out of thy faith do the righteous works which thou then canst not but do. Repent of thy short comings, and be forgiven. Lean on Christ, thy Savior. Love God, thy Father. Help men, thy brethren. And come, inherit thy immortal kingdom!

Now, at last, if it only keeps on in the path divinely marked for it, the soul emerges into that wide fellowship of Christ—that open hospitality of spiritual freedom, where the impulse of nature is only guided, not stifled, by law; where law is ripened and fulfilled into faith. The highest victory of goodness is union with God. The union comes only by a Mediator. For reconciliation between finite and infinite, there must be a Reconciler combining both. The way to peace lies by Calvary. Humanity realizes its complete proportions, only by inward membership with him who fills all the veins of his living body with his blood, and the chambers of his church with the glory of his presence to-day. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

For, observe, by all means, this striking condition pertaining to the doctrine; that neither of these three stages, whether of the general or the personal progress, denies, or cuts off, its predecessor. Nature prepares the way for law—making the heart restless, by an unsatisfying experiment, without it. Abraham saw more glorious ages coming than his own, and the promise given to him and his seed, Emmanuel accomplished. The law disciplined wayward, uncultured man, making him ready for the Church that was to descend “like a bride out of heaven.” Every ordinance in its ritual was a type; every statute was a prophecy.

All Judaism was prospective. Moses looked forward to the Messiah. So, in the heart of childhood, there are expectations, vague and yet brilliant, of the responsible second stage of manhood; it is too thoughtless yet to look beyond, to the age of mature Christian holiness. But see, again, when that second age of stern command and strict obedience comes, it grows sober and reflective. It feels heavily that it is not sufficient to itself. It must look longingly forward for the consolations of the cross. Nature does not comprehend law, nor law gospel; Abraham Moses, nor Moses Messiah; but the Son of God understands all, and the gospel, in its majestic orbit, while embracing law and nature, transcends them both.

Remember, also, for its practical fruit’s sake, this fact, that each stage requires fidelity in the preceding. You must have been true to the better impulses of youth, that you may be, to the best advantage, a servant of the law of maturity. You must be faithfully obedient to duty, before you are fit to be a subject of grace. Do not imagine you can glide over into the favor of heaven, without first keeping the commandment. It is a strait gate, and a narrow way that leads to life. I must be a cheerful servant, before I can know the joy of adoption, and cry, “Abba, Father.” Willing to be constrained by the positive precept, I may hope, by-and-by, for the freedom of a child and heir. Many things that I would rather not do—irksome to the sluggish will, hard to the love of ease, offensive to pride, bitter to selfish pleasure—I must do, before I can ascend to that sublime self-mastery with Christ, where I shall desire to do only what I ought. You have seen a seabird, which in rising from the waves has to run some way with difficulty upon the water, striking the surface laboriously with its pinions; but when it has once lifted itself into the upper air, it balances its flight with a calm motion, and enfranchised into the freedom of the sky, the slow beat of its wings are imperceptible. It is by pain and toil under the commandments, that the soul gets the liberty of its faculties; but when it has been taken up out of itself by love and trust, it moves in harmony with God. The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might “be justified by faith.” But “after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.” “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” No longer at Gerizim, nor yet at Jerusalem, but everywhere, we may worship the Father!

You have seen the religionist of mere passion. That impulsive temperament is doubtless capable of good services to the master. But, to that end, the master must have the reforming of it. That unsteady purpose must be made steadfast through a thoughtful imitation of the constancy that said, “Behold, I go up to Jerusalem to be crucified.” That fluctuating wing of worship must be poised by some influence from those hills, where whole nights were not too long for a Redeemer’s prayers. That inexpert swimmer in the sea of life, now rising, now sinking, and now noisily splashing the waters, must be schooled by sober experience to glide onward with a firmer and stiller stroke. Ardor must be matched with consistency. You are not to be carried to heaven by a fitful religion, periodically raised from the dead at seasons of social exhilaration; not by a religion alive at church, but stagnant in the streets and in the market-places; not by a religion kindling at some favored hour of sentimental meditation, only to sink and flicker in the drudgery of common work. It is to little purpose that we read, and circulate, and preach the Bible, except all our reading and all our living gain thereby a more biblical tone. And it is quite futile that our breasts glow with some fugitive feeling in the house of God, unless that feeling dedicates our common dwellings to be all houses of God.

So have you seen the religious legalist. In business, in the street, in sanctuaries, at home, you have seen him. In business, measuring off his righteousness by some sealed measure of public usage, as mechanically as his merchandise, and making a label or a dye-stuff his cunning proxy to tell the lie that some judicial penalty had frightened from his tongue; disowning no patent obligation, but cheating the customer, or oppressing the weak, in secret. In the street, wearing an outside of genial manners, with a frosty temper under it, or a cloak of propriety with a heart of sin; in the sanctuary, purchasing, with formal professions, one day, the privilege of an untroubled self-seeking the other six, or possibly opening the pew door and the prayer-book here to-day, with the same hand that will wrong a neighbor to-morrow; and at home, practicing that reluctant virtue that would hardly give conjugal affection but for the marriage-bond, and that, by being exported to another continent, would find a Parisian atmosphere a solvent of all its scruples. Not descending, at present, to the depth of depravity, he certainly never rises to a pure piety. Whatever respectable or admirable traits you see in him, you miss that distinctive mark which every eye takes knowledge of as a spiritual consecration.

Engraft, now, on that “wild olive” stock, the sweet juices of Christian love, drawn from their original stock in Bethlehem, “of the seed of David and the root of Jesse;” soften that hard integrity by Christian charity; in place of duty done from sheer compulsion, put duty done from a willing, eager, and believing heart. Do this, and thou shalt live.

Abraham, Moses, Christ; impulse, discipline, faith; nature, law, gospel; instinct, obedience, grace; Mamre, Sinai, Calvary; this is that divine order—not bound by rigid rules of chronological succession, but having the free play and various intershadings of a moral growth—to which we are to conform our lives. When the “Thus saith the Lord” shall have controlled our impatient will, our hearts will be ready to say, “Our Father, who art in heaven!” Seek, first, after that indwelling goodness that has its fountain in the center of the soul, and good works will be the constant stream. Be children of light. Live by the spirit, not the letter; by faith, not by fear. For you are called to be disciples of Jesus. Henceforth the Christian is to be known, and to be saved, not by the hand so much as by the heart; not by a righteousness that is legal, but spiritual. Let not your piety be the occasional piety of Rabbinical Sabbaths, with ghastly intervals of worldliness between, like isolated springs in a desert of sand; but a piety, whose perennial influence, like the river that keeps the meadows always green, shall penetrate and fertilize the whole soil and open field of your being, and thus make glad the city of your God. No rich, or beautiful, or excepted life can be had by us, except Christ be its inspiration. Hope will not reach up to immortality, except it climb by the cross. Let not your lives be dead shapes of outward decency—the carved and gilded wood of an ark and a tabernacle deserted by the Spirit—but vital branches, filled with leaping and vigorous currents of holy feeling, on the living vine! “For if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.”

[PRACTICE AND HABIT.]

By JOHN LOCKE.

John Locke, the author from whose writings we quote the article below, made his reputation chiefly by his famous essay on the “Human Understanding.” The article on “Practice and Habit,” together with “Thoughts and Aphorisms,” by Jonathan Swift, constitute the “Required Readings” from English History for the month of March. Swift was famous alike for his wit, his genius, his love affairs, his political warfare, “Tale of a Tub,” and other works.

PRACTICE AND HABIT.

We are born with faculties and powers capable almost of anything, such at least as would carry us farther than can be easily imagined: but it is only the exercise of those powers which gives us ability and skill in anything, and leads us toward perfection.

A middle-aged ploughman will scarce ever be brought to the carriage and language of a gentleman, though his body be as well proportioned, and his joints as supple, and his natural parts not any way inferior. The legs of a dancing-master, and the fingers of a musician, fall, as it were, naturally without thought or pains, into regular and admirable motions. Bid them change their parts, and they will in vain endeavor to produce like motions in the members not used to them, and it will require length of time and long practice to attain but some degrees of a like ability. What incredible and astonishing actions do we find rope-dancers and tumblers bring their bodies to! not but that sundry in almost all manual arts are as wonderful; but I name those which the world takes notice of for such, because, on that very account, they give money to see them. All these admired motions, beyond the reach and almost the conception of unpractised spectators, are nothing but the mere effects of use and industry in men whose bodies have nothing peculiar in them from those of the amazed lookers-on.

As it is in the body, so it is in the mind; practice makes it what it is; and most even of those excellencies which are looked on as natural endowments, will be found, when examined into more narrowly, to be the product of exercise, and to be raised to that pitch only by repeated actions. Some men are remarked for pleasantness in raillery, others for apologues and apposite diverting stories. This is apt to be taken for the effect of pure nature, and that the rather, because it is not got by rules, and those who excel in either of them never purposely set themselves to the study of it as an art to be learnt. But yet it is true, that at first some lucky hit which took with somebody, and gained him commendation, encouraged him to try again, inclined his thoughts and endeavors that way, till at last he insensibly got a facility in it without perceiving how; and this is attributed solely to nature, which was much more the effect of use and practice. I do not deny that natural disposition may often give the first rise to it; but that never carries a man far without use and exercise, and it is practice alone that brings the powers of the mind as well as those of the body to their perfection. Many a good poetic vein is buried under a trade, and never produces anything for want of improvement. We see the ways of discourse and reasoning are very different, even concerning the same matter, at court and in the university. And he that will go but from Westminster Hall to the Exchange will find a different genius and turn in their ways of talking; and one can not think that all whose lot fell in the city were born with different parts from those who were bred at the university or inns of court.

To what purpose all this, but to show that the difference so observable in men’s understandings and parts does not arise so much from the natural faculties as acquired habits? He would be laughed at that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger at past fifty. And he will not have much better success who shall endeavor at that age to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory. Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

This being so, that defects and weakness in men’s understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds, I am apt to think the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them. We see men frequently dexterous and sharp enough in making a bargain, who if you reason with them about matters of religion appear perfectly stupid.

[THOUGHTS AND APHORISMS.]

By JONATHAN SWIFT.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them, as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible and agreeing with what he fancied.

Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination. This I once said to my Lord Bolingbroke, and desired he would observe that the clerks in his office used a sort of ivory knife with a blunt edge to divide a sheet of paper, which never failed to cut it even, only requiring a steady hand; whereas if they should make use of a sharp penknife, the sharpness would make it often go out of the crease and disfigure the paper.

“He who does not provide for his own house,” St. Paul says, “is worse than an infidel;” and I think he who provides only for his own house is just equal with an infidel.

I never yet knew a wag (as the term is) who was not a dunce.

When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.

The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.

Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation to posterity, let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.

One argument to prove that the common relations of ghosts and spectres are generally false, may be drawn from the opinion held that spirits are never seen by more than one person at a time; that is to say, it seldom happens to above one person in a company to be possessed with any high degree of spleen or melancholy.

It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next: “Future ages shall talk of this;” “This shall be famous to all posterity:” whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.

I never heard a finer piece of satire against lawyers than that of astrologers, when they pretend by rules of art to tell when a suit will end, and whether to the advantage of the plaintiff or defendant; thus making the matter depend entirely upon the influence of the stars, without the least regard to the merits of the cause.

I have known some men possessed of good qualities, which were very serviceable to others but useless to themselves: like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbors and passengers, but not the owner within.

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

The reason why so few marriages are happy is, because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit. Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives, and the sincerest part of our devotion.

The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter, and a scarcity of words: for whoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt in speaking to hesitate upon the choice of both; whereas common speakers have only one set of ideas, and one set of words to clothe them in; and these are always ready at the mouth: so people come faster out of church when it is almost empty than when a crowd is at the door.

Johnson’s Opinion of his Roughness.—While we were upon the road, I had the resolution to ask Johnson whether he thought that the roughness of his manner had been an advantage or not, and if he would not have done more good if he had been more gentle. I proceeded to answer myself thus: “Perhaps it has been of advantage, as it has given weight to what you said: you could not, perhaps, have talked with such authority without it.” Johnson: “No, sir; I have done more good as I am. Obscenity and impiety have always been repressed in my company.” Boswell: “True, sir; and that is more than can be said of every bishop. Greater liberties have been taken in the presence of a bishop, though a very good man, from his being milder, and therefore not commanding such awe. Yet, sir, many people who might have been benefited by your conversation have been frightened away. A worthy friend of ours has told me that he has often been afraid to talk to you.” Johnson: “Sir, he need not have been afraid, if he had anything rational to say. If he had not, it was better he did not talk.”—Boswell.

[THE COMET THAT CAME BUT ONCE.]

By E. W. MAUNDER, F.R.A.S.

Not quite a year ago the “Threatening Comet,” which some too-imaginative writers foretold would return in fifteen years, and occasion the entire destruction of our earth, by rushing into the sun, and exciting it to a terrible degree of heat was foretold. How little reason there was to fear such a catastrophe! We never expected that, so far from having fifteen years to wait before the truth or error of the prediction was demonstrated, in less than six months a glorious stranger would present himself to our gaze, and reveal that, in one way or another, the dismal prophecy had been wrong. The message which the wonderful comet, that was so impressive an object in the morning sky of last October, had to convey has been interpreted in various senses. Perhaps the most probable is, that he and his bright predecessors of 1880 and 1843, which had been supposed to be one and the same object, were not really so, but only members of the same family. If so, then the very groundwork of the theory, on which the return in 1897 was foretold, would be cut away, and in its place a whole vista of marvellous possibilities would be opened out to us.

But our present purpose is not to dwell on these, nor to enlarge on the history, past or future, of any comet which from time to time has returned, or may return, to our skies, but to read the lesson conveyed in the marvellous fact that there are comets which visit us but once.

The devout Kepler, after his last great discovery, sat down content “to wait a century for a reader.” He had not long passed away ere the reader was sent, one who read his book to good purpose indeed. Kepler had been able to discover three laws to which the planets were obedient, but as to whether there was any connection between those laws, why the planets followed them rather than any others which might have been framed, and what laws the satellites and comets of the system were subject to, Kepler could not tell. Newton, on the contrary, discovered the great underlying principle, of which the laws of Kepler were only some of the necessary consequences, and showed not merely how the planets moved, but also to a great extent why they did so.

Newton had not long established his law of gravitation before he arrived at a strange discovery. Assuming his theory to be correct, he worked out by rigid mathematical processes the shape of the orbits which the planets must follow. Since we know that they travel in ellipses, we should naturally have expected that an ellipse would be the resulting orbit, but instead Newton found he had arrived at an expression which embraced not one curve but four.

Of these four, one was the oval or ellipse, another the circle, but the other two were curves of a very different shape indeed, curves which did not enclose a space, but which had each two ends, which, however far they were prolonged, could never meet. And directly this fact was recognized, an unlooked-for truth was made plain. Comets, which had hitherto been regarded as perfectly lawless bodies, as irregular and uncontrolled as the thoughts of an opium-dreamer seem to be, were now seen to be integral parts of our solar system. For though so many of them enter our system but once, never having visited it before, never to visit it again, yet since these all travel, in obedience to the sun’s attraction, in one or other of these strange unending curves, curves which are a necessary consequence of the law of gravitation, they are manifestly members of the solar family; without them it would be imperfect, without them the law of gravitation were but partially illustrated.

Let us follow in imagination the travels of one such comet through the untold ages of its life. It may have started on its tremendous voyage whilst the earth was yet a star, or rather a miniature sun, instinct with fire and light, and all through the long ages during which the earth was cooling down and becoming fitted to be the habitation of living things, the comet slowly but steadily pursued its way. On the earth one form of life succeeded another, the sea overcame the land time after time, and time after time the continents flung off the yoke, and emerged with ampler borders and fairer scenes. At length the predestined prince came to his heritage, and Man was made ruler over the perfected earth—too soon, alas! to forfeit his vice-regal crown by an act of flagrant rebellion. And still through all these ages, compared with which the whole lifetime of our race is but a moment, that distant comet held on its course, never swerving by a hair’s breadth from the appointed path, obedient to the law, the self-same law that decrees the fall of the ripened fruit. But it was still far away, and still it pressed slowly but steadily forward, whilst kingdoms rose and fell, and nations multiplied and decayed. But gradually a quicker energy began to throb within it, and a stronger impulse drew it forward. The old slow pace could not suffice for its growing impatience, and it pressed forward with ever-increasing speed. At length it dashes across the orbit of Neptune; it has entered the solar system at last. No lingering now, no slow and halting pace; quicker and quicker it presses on, and Uranus is past. A shorter interval still, and glorious Saturn, with his noble rings and numerous satellites, is left behind, and a few years more and it shoots across the path of the giant planet Jupiter. The asteroids and Mars are passed by next, and now, filled with a passionate desire, it whirls along, brightening as it speeds, and flaming streamers flying behind it. Moving more quickly still, it crosses the orbit of the Earth. Venus is reached next; traversing now in a moment of time space it once took a year to travel over, it rushes past Mercury. And now the bright goal is at hand, and quivering through all its mighty length with the fierce excitement, it speeds forward at a swifter pace still. And now, glorious with jets streaming ten thousand miles before it, and tail ten million leagues behind, it hurls itself into the corona, the region of that strange pearly glow which in total eclipses is seen to surround the Sun. And still it hurries forward, but not into the Sun, its headlong speed is now far too great for even that mighty attraction to be able to check it in its course, and draw it in to itself. It ploughs its way perhaps even at the rate of a million miles an hour, round nearly half of the circumference of the sun, through the regions where the prominences play—those rosy flames that rise and rush with such terrific heat and force from the Sun’s glowing bulk; and its brief period of splendor is over. Away from the Sun, it falls back through the corona, across the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and the Earth, with ever-slackening speed, and fading as it goes, it recedes toward outer unknown space. Never again in all eternity will it approach our Sun, never again will it know the fierce throbbings of that four hours’ sojourn in the home of the prominences; never, too, will it revisit those places where it was wandering in the outer darkness when it first heard the imperious summons which it had thus obeyed. Slower, ever slower will it travel, out in the fathomless night, the solar system left far behind. Once and once only has it entered it, once and once only could it enter. The Earth, with its attendant Moon, has revolved for millions of years, enjoying without cease spring, summer, autumn, and winter. But this strange body, whose winter was from creation, whose summer lasted but a few short hours, and whose second winter, so far at all events as it derives heat and light from our Sun, shall last till heaven and earth depart like a vesture that is rolled together, whose movements are so unlike our evenly moving earth, is no mere lawless wanderer—is no intruder on the happy family of the solar system; it is ruled in its every movement by the self-same law that guides our earth. Without it, or bodies like it, gravitation would be but imperfectly illustrated, and but part of the homage due would be paid to our Sun.

How great a change has taken place in our views since the time when men looked upon comets as miracles and portents, as special acts of creation, obedient to none of the ordinary laws of nature! And since Newton’s day, changes as great as that which he effected in astronomy have been effected in other sciences; and the unity of law, and the universality of its reign, are acknowledged on every side. The idea of special acts of creation, or that God interferes with the regular working of his laws, is discredited, and creation itself is pushed far back into the unfathomed past.

But this view opens out a most serious question. If God’s only work was to make the world at the beginning, and give it wholesome laws, leaving it then to itself, what room is there for religion and prayer—for faith and hope? And indeed, arguing in this very manner, there are men of science who tell us expressly that the only good which prayer can do is to make the petitioner feel more at ease in his mind; that Elijah praying for rain was no whit wiser than a Kaffir or Ashanti conjuror.

But God has not left his world to itself, and every law of nature is nothing but the expression of his all-pervading, ever-acting will. How else can the sun, which can not, according to Newton’s first law, of itself move a single inch, make the earth spin round it, at the rate of many miles a second? It explains nothing, it is only to put the fact into other words, if, when an apple falls, we say “the earth attracted it.” But “it is the will of God” is an explanation and a sufficient one, and we may be well assured that unless he expressly ordered it, not even a toy, released from a baby’s feeble grasp, could ever move downwards toward the ground. Were he to cease to will, the universe would cease to be, for in the beginning it came into existence by his simple word, and from that time “he upholdeth all things by the word of his power.” And in these words revelation teaches us what science never could—behind dead nature to see an ever-living, ever-acting God.

The mistake men made was this: Some things seemed to them to be orderly and regular, others disorderly and irregular; and they foolishly fancied the latter to be therefore more immediately God’s work than the former, thinking him “altogether such an one as themselves.” And so, when further knowledge showed that those things which had seemed irregular were as fully ordered by law as any of the others, it appeared as if God’s authority and power were diminished, since, in their ignorance, men had thought disorder a proof of his more immediate acting. But “God is not the author of confusion,” nor is he touched with caprice or change, for he hath declared “I am the Lord, I change not.” Perfect law and perfect harmony, are what the Scriptures teach us to expect in all God’s works, and that every advance of science shows such perfection far to transcend all our previous conceptions, should surely not shake our faith in him and in his word, but strengthen and confirm it.

But yet another difficulty remains. If everything in the universe is ordered according to law, how is it possible for miracles, and in a more general sense, answers to prayer, to take place? Perhaps the comet may help us here. Could anything seem more miraculous, more to contradict the general experience of the solar system, with its planets ever revolving in closed orbits round the sun, than the appearance of a body which rushed straight toward the sun, took one half-turn round it, and then receded from it by a different path, never, never to return? Could anything seem more like an interference by the Maker with the laws which he had made? It did seem so until the underlying law was discovered, and then the seeming discord was perceived to be really the note needed to complete the perfect harmony. We at best only stand where Kepler stood, we know only little fragmentary laws, and we can not affirm that occurrences which seem as much outside their scope as comets are outside Kepler’s laws, are not really necessary members of the greater system of which we have no knowledge as yet. That miracles are ruled by law may be gathered from many a passage in the Holy Word. Miracles are “set” in the Church, as much as apostles and teachers. “This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting;” “he could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief,” are not obscure hints of such a law—a spiritual law, it is true, but none the less a law.

We can watch the progress of science, then, without anxiety or fear; “rooted and grounded in faith,” believing that the Lord is King.—London Sunday Magazine.

[End of Required Reading for March.]

[MY WINTER GARDEN.]

By HARRIET MABEL SPALDING.

The frost lies thick upon the pane,

The fields are white with falling snows,

O’er frost-bank, in meadow-lane,

The drifted ice of winter glows.

The buds that crowned the mountain-side,

The moss that fringed the lakelet’s shore,

Passed with the fleeting summer-tide,

And spring’s fair graces are no more.

I trace the pictures on the pane,

Then turn, where in my quiet room

The summer lives for me again,

And June’s sweet gifts in freshness bloom.

’Mid emerald moss and growing vines,

The fair lobelia’s lifted face,

Nestled among the lilies shines,

That blossom in their snowy grace.

With tender hands I lift them up,

Sweet flowers, no breath of winter dimmed!

How pure each radiant jeweled cup,

Each vase with sparkling nectar brimmed.

The aloe’s flood of molten flame,

The vervain with its crimson hue.

The rose that with the spring-time came,

And in the mountain’s fastness grew.

The white alyssum, small and fair,

The red camelia’s blushing dyes,

The jasmine’s golden blossoms rare,

The larkspur, blue as summer skies,

The sweet narcissus’s yellow blooms,

The zinnia, with its violet rays,

The pink, with all its rich perfumes,

The crowning charm of August days.

Without the snowflakes softly fall,

An airy mist from cloud and sky,

Within, their perfume over all,

The buds in rosy fragrance lie.

The pale acacia’s tinted gleams,

The white carnation’s heart of gold,

The phlox that grows beside the streams

That gem the forests dim and old.

I wonder when life’s spring is past,

And snows are falling soft as now,

When autumn glories fade at last,

And frosts lie thick upon the bough,

If some true deed that I have wrought,

May, like the flowers, its blooms unclose,

Some fair and unforgotten thought

Grow grand beneath life’s winter snows.

[SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE.]

By CHARLES KINGSLEY.

The scientific method needs no definition; for it is simply the exercise of common sense. It is not a peculiar, unique, professional, or mysterious process of the understanding; but the same which all men employ, from the cradle to the grave, in forming correct conclusions.

Every one who knows the philosophic writings of Mr. John Stuart Mill, will be familiar with this opinion. But to those who have no leisure to study him, I should recommend the reading of Professor Huxley’s third lecture on the origin of species.

In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well as with some humor, how the man who, on rising in the morning finds the parlor-window open, the spoons and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on the window-sill, and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and comes to the conclusion that someone has broken open the window, and stolen the plate, arrives at that hypothesis—for it is nothing more—by a long and complex train of inductions and deductions of just the same kind as those which, according to the Baconian philosophy, are to be used for investigating the deepest secrets of Nature.

This is true, even of those sciences which involve long mathematical calculations. In fact, the stating of the problem to be solved is the most important element in the calculation; and that is so thoroughly a labor of common sense that an utterly uneducated man may, and often does, state an abstruse problem clearly and correctly; seeing what ought to be proved, and perhaps how to prove it, though he may be unable to work the problem out for want of mathematical knowledge.

But that mathematical knowledge is not—as all Cambridge men are surely aware—the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.

There are sciences, again, which do not involve mathematical calculation; for instance, botany, zoölogy, geology, which are just now passing from their old stage of classificatory sciences into the rank of organic ones. These are, without doubt, altogether within the scope of the merest common sense. Any man or woman of average intellect, if they will but observe and think for themselves, freely, boldly, patiently, accurately, may judge for themselves of the conclusions of these sciences, and may add to these conclusions fresh and important discoveries.

Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. A man—I do not say a geologist, but simply a man, ’squire or ploughman—sees a small valley, say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in any country. He wishes to ascertain its age.

He has, at first sight, a very simple measure—that of denudation. He sees that the glen is now being eaten out by a little stream, the product of innumerable springs which arise along its sides, and which are fed entirely by the rain on the moors above. He finds, on observation, that this stream brings down some ten cubic yards of sand and gravel, on an average, every year. The actual quantity of earth which has been removed to make the glen may be several million cubic yards. Here is an easy sum in arithmetic. At the rate of ten cubic yards a year, the stream has taken several hundred thousand years to make the glen.

You will observe that this result is obtained by mere common sense. He has a right to assume that the stream originally began the glen, because he finds it in the act of enlarging it; just as much right as he has to assume, if he find a hole in his pocket, and his last coin in the act of falling through it, that the rest of his money has fallen through the same hole. It is a sufficient cause, and the simplest. A number of observations as to the present rate of denudation, and a sum which any railroad contractor can do in his head, to determine the solid contents of the valley, are all that are needed. The method is that of science: but it is also that of simple common sense. You will remember, therefore, that this is no mere theory or hypothesis, but a pretty fair and simple conclusion from palpable facts; that the probability lies with the belief that the glen is some hundreds of thousands of years old; that it is not the observer’s business to prove it further, but other persons’ to disprove it, if they can.

But does the matter end here? No. And, for certain reasons, it is good that it should not end here.

The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to see if he can disprove his own conclusions; moreover, being human, he is probably somewhat awed, if not appalled, by his own conclusions. Hundreds of thousands of years spent in making that little glen! Common sense would say that the longer it took to make, the less wonder there was in its being made at last: but the instinctive human feeling is the opposite. There is in men, and there remains in them, even after they are civilized, and all other forms of the dread of Nature have died out in them, a dread of size, of vast space, of vast time; that latter, mind, being always imagined as space, as we confess when we speak instinctively of a space of time. They will not understand that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; that if we were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be a thousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousand times faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than it is; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, to whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. I believe this dread of size to be merely, like all other superstitions, a result of bodily fear; a development of the instinct which makes a little dog run away from a big dog. Be that as it may, every observer has it; and so the man’s conclusion seems to him strange, doubtful: he will reconsider it.

Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones: and if he be a modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtful men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say, that the glen can only be a few thousand, possibly a few hundred, years old. And he will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far as it is, like his own, drawn from facts, but no further.

So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have been produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a shorter time.

1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides are identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.

2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at the upper end before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run in at the upper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel-beds of the horizontal moor, without channel or depression.

3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of the sea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end spreads out like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do.

But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no vast unbroken flat behind the glen. Right and left of it are other similar glens, parted from it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained on the same hypothesis; but they can not. For there could not have been surface-drainage to make them all, or a tenth of them. There are no other possible hypotheses; and so he must fall back on the original theory—the rain, the springs, the brook; they have done it all, even as they are doing it this day.

But is not that still a hasty assumption? May not their denuding power have been far greater in old times than now?

Why should it? Because there was more rain then than now? That he must put out of court; there is no evidence of it whatsoever.

Because the land was more friable originally? Well, there is a great deal to be said for that. The experience of every countryman tells him that bare or fallow land is more easily washed away than land under vegetation. And no doubt, when these gravels and sands rose from the sea, they were barren for hundreds of years. He has some measure of the time required, but he can tell roughly how long it takes for sands and shingles left by the sea to become covered by vegetation. But he must allow that the friability of the land must have been originally much greater than now, for hundreds of years.

But again, does that fact really cut off any great space of time from his hundreds of thousands of years? For when the land first rose from the sea, that glen was not there. Some slight bay or bend in the shore determined its site. That stream was not there. It was split up into a million little springs, oozing side by side from the shore, and having each a very minute denuding power, which kept continually increasing by combination as the glen ate its way inwards, and the rainfall drained by all these little springs was collected into the one central stream. So that when the ground being bare was most liable to be denuded, the water was least able to do it; and as the denuding power of the water increased, the land, being covered with vegetation, became more and more able to resist it.

So the two disturbing elements in the calculation may be fairly set off against each other, as making a difference of only a few thousands or tens of thousands of years either way; and the age of the glen may fairly be, if not a million years, yet such a length of years as mankind still speak of with bated breath, as if forsooth it would do them some harm.

I trust that every scientific man will agree with me, that the imaginary ’squire or ploughman would have been conducting his investigation strictly according to the laws of the Baconian philosophy. You will remark, meanwhile, that he has not used a single scientific term, or referred to a single scientific investigation; and has observed nothing and thought nothing, which might not have been observed and thought by any one who chose to use his common sense, and not to be afraid.

But because he has come round, after all this further investigation, to something very like his first conclusion, was all that further investigation useless? No—a thousand times, no. It is this very verification of hypotheses which makes the sound ones safe, and destroys the unsound. It is this struggle with all sorts of superstitions which makes science strong and sure, and her march irresistible, winning ground slowly, but never receding from it. It is this buffeting of adversity which compels her not to rest dangerously upon the shallow sand of first guesses, and single observations; but to strike her roots down, deep, wide, and interlaced, into the solid ground of actual facts.

It is very necessary to insist on this point. For there have been men in all past ages—I do not say whether there are any such now, but I am inclined to think there will be hereafter,—men who have tried to represent scientific method as something difficult, mysterious, peculiar, unique, not to be attained by the unscientific mass; and this not for the purpose of exalting science, but rather of discrediting her. For as long as the masses, educated or uneducated, are ignorant of what scientific method is, they will look on scientific men, as the middle age looked on necromancers, as a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste, possessed of mighty secrets; who may do them great good, but also may do them great harm. Which belief on the part of the masses will enable these persons to install themselves as the critics of science, though not scientific men themselves: and—as Shakspere has it—to talk of Robin Hood, though they never shot in his bow. Thus they become mediators to the masses between the scientific and the unscientific worlds. They tell them, You are not to trust the conclusions of men of science at first hand. You are not fit judges of their facts or of their methods. It is we who will, by a cautious electicism, choose out for you such of their conclusions as are safe for you; and them we will advise you to believe. To the scientific man, on the other hand, as often as anything is discovered unpleasing to them, they will say, imperiously and ex cathedrâ, Your new theory contradicts the established facts of science. For they will know well that whatever the men of science think of their assertion, the masses will believe it; totally unaware that the speakers are by their very terms showing their ignorance of science; and that what they call established facts scientific men call merely provisional conclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow without a pang were the known facts explained better by a fresh theory, or did fresh facts require one.

This has happened too often. It is in the interest of superstition that it should happen again; and the best way to prevent it surely is to tell the masses, Scientific method is no peculiar mystery, requiring a peculiar initiation. It is simply common sense, combined with uncommon courage, which includes uncommon honesty and uncommon patience; and if you will be brave, honest, patient, rational, you will need no mystagogues to tell you what in science to believe and what not to believe; for you will be just as good judges of scientific facts and theories as those who assume the right of guiding your convictions. You are men and women: and more than that you need not be.

[THE SORROW OF THE SEA.]

By ALEXANDER ANDERSON.

A day of fading light upon the sea;

Of sea-birds winging to their rocky caves;

And ever with its monotone to me,

The sorrow of the waves.

They leap and lash among the rocks and sands,

White lipp’d, as with a guilty secret toss’d,

For ever feeling with their foamy hands

For something they have lost.

Far out, and swaying in a sweet unrest,

A boat or two against the light is seen,

Dipping their sides within the liquid breast

Of waters dark and green.

And farther still, where sea and sky have kiss’d,

There falls, as if from heaven’s own threshold, light

Upon faint hills that, half enswathed in mist,

Wait for the coming night.

But still, though all this life and motion meet,

My thoughts are wingless and lie dead in me,

Or dimly stir to answer at my feet

The sorrow of the sea.

[ANECDOTES OF FASHION.]

By I. D’ISRAELI.

The origin of many fashions was in the endeavor to conceal some deformity of the inventor; hence the cushions, ruffs, hoops, and other monstrous devices. If a reigning beauty chanced to have an unequal hip, those who had very handsome hips would load them with that false rump which the other was compelled by the unkindness of nature to substitute. Patches were invented in England in the reign of Edward VI by a foreign lady, who in this manner ingeniously covered a wen on her neck. Full-bottomed wigs were invented by a French barber, one Duviller, whose name they perpetuated, for the purpose of concealing an elevation in the shoulder of the Dauphin. Charles VII of France introduced long coats to hide his ill-made legs. Shoes with very long points, full two feet in length, were invented by Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou, to conceal a large excrescence on one of his feet. When Francis I was obliged to wear his hair short, owing to a wound he received in the head, it became a prevailing fashion at court. Others, on the contrary, adapted fashions to set off their peculiar beauties; as Isabella of Bavaria, remarkable for her gallantry, and the fairness of her complexion, introduced the fashion of leaving the shoulders and part of the neck uncovered.

Fashions have frequently originated from circumstances as silly as the following one. Isabella, daughter of Philip II, and wife of the Archduke Albert, vowed not to change her linen till Ostend was taken; this siege, unluckily for her comfort, lasted three years; and the supposed color of the archduchess’s linen gave rise to a fashionable color, hence called l’Isabeau, or the Isabella; a kind of whitish-yellow-dingy. Sometimes they originate in some temporary event: as after the battle of Steenkirk, where the allies wore large cravats, by which the French frequently seized hold of them, a circumstance perpetuated on the medals of Louis XIV, cravats were called Steenkirks; and after the battle of Ramillies, wigs received that denomination.

The hair has in all ages been an endless topic for the declamation of the moralist, and the favorite object of fashion. If the beau monde wore their hair luxuriant, or their wig enormous, the preachers, as in Charles the Second’s reign, instantly were seen in the pulpit with their hair cut shorter, and their sermon longer, in consequence; respect was, however, paid by the world to the size of the wig, in spite of the hair-cutter in the pulpit. Our judges, and until lately our physicians, well knew its magical effect. In the reign of Charles II the hair-dress of the ladies was very elaborate; it was not only curled and frizzled with the nicest art, but set off with certain artificial curls, then too emphatically known by the pathetic terms of heart-breakers and love-locks. So late as William and Mary, lads, and even children, wore wigs; and if they had not wigs, they curled their hair to resemble this fashionable ornament. Women then were the hair-dressers.

The courts in all ages and in every country are the modelers of fashions, so that all the ridicule, of which these are so susceptible, must fall on them, and not upon their servile imitators the citizens. This complaint is made even so far back as in 1586, by Jean des Caures, an old French moralist, who, in declaiming against the fashions of his day, notices one, of the ladies carrying mirrors fixed to their waists, which seemed to employ their eyes in perpetual activity. From this mode will result, according to honest Des Caures, their eternal damnation. “Alas!” he exclaims, “in what age do we live: to see such depravity which we see, that induces them even to bring into church these scandalous mirrors hanging about their waists! Let all histories divine, human, and profane be consulted; never will it be found that these objects of vanity were ever thus brought into public by the most meretricious of the sex. It is true, at present none but the ladies of the court venture to wear them; but long it will not be before every citizen’s daughter, and every female servant, will wear them!” Such in all times has been the rise and decline of fashion; and the absurd mimicry of the citizens, even of the lowest classes, to their very ruin, in straining to rival the newest fashion, has mortified and galled the courtier.

[LANGUAGE IN ANIMALS.]

By RICHARD BUDD PAINTER.

No one who has clearly observed animals, birds, bees, and other creatures, can possibly deny their possession of a faculty of communicating ideas to one another.

Admitting this fully, my object therefore will be, while elicitating some of the facts concerning animal language, to maintain the consistency of my argument in regard to man, as contrasted with animals, by showing that such animal language is not of an intellectual kind, but only such as is necessary for the conduct, and use, of the highest phases of the animal “instinctive mind,” according to its ordained capacity in each species.

In my opinion, every kind of animal possesses a different sort of language; and which is peculiar to its genus; just as in the case of different races of man, a language which though capable of interpretation by a member of the group which speaks it, can not be generally understood by other races in minute detail; although among both men and animals there are a few cries, etc., that can be generally understood; as those of alarm communicated by screams, stamping of the ground, etc. But we must note that whatever may be the kind and extent of language in animals, it is in them always expressive only of animal sensations and sense impressions and reasonings.

Particular animals, birds, insects, etc., bark, gibber, bray, sing, crow, grunt, rub their wing-cases (crickets), etc., showing that each has a different language, and different modes of expressing emotion: showing, too, by these differences that their sorts of minds must vary much more from one another, than do the minds of men in their different human varieties; for men do not employ such immensely different modes of conveying their ideas and feelings by sounds as is the case in animals with their lowing, snorting, barking, etc.

The making of these very different sounds by different animals is therefore to me the clearest possible proof that different animals possess different sorts of mind; yet of course there is some general resemblance, as is the case in so many of God’s works made diversely in specific instances, yet on the same general plan in the main. I said just now that, while fully admitting the possession of a kind of language by animals, I should maintain strictly that it is not of an intellectual character, and I may be asked what I mean by this assertion.

My answer is that I believe the language of the animal is limited chiefly to the expression of animal needs; and animal sensations; and the conveyance of such requirements, and feelings to their kind; although it can doubtless be used also for communicating in some slight degree such ideas concerning animal experiences and feelings as their feeble reasoning powers enable them to arrive at; such as the devices for protection, and escape from danger; and the manifestation and interpretation of the sort of questionings, and answerings which occur when two dogs meet, as shown by the wagging of tails, and pleased looks, or the reverse; and which seem to indicate as if the dogs could by gesture, etc., ask, and reply to one another, whether it is to be peace, or war.

My belief is that the mind of the mere animal is in no ease able to reach beyond the limit of simple ministration to the animal needs, and animal feelings, and instincts of the creature according to its kind; and that it can never form pure intellectual ideas, such as those of intellectual love; intellectual hatred; intellectual ideas as to time; space; God, etc. Nor can it form the mental abstractions—words—and by the use of these arrive at the intellectual operation of mind which their employment renders possible.

MODES OF EXPRESSING LANGUAGE IN ANIMALS.

These may take place—

First—By vocal intonations (as in man) in brutes and birds: and I may remark that all brutes possess a tongue, larynx, and vocal cords; and that birds have these also, with the exception that the bird’s larynx (syrinx) is rather modified from that of man and the mammalia; still we know its perfection; and we know how the parrot can use it.

Secondly—By gesture and visual regard, as seen in dogs, and in birds.

Thirdly—By means of sounds other than vocal, as is witnessed in the stamping on the ground by various animals to intimate danger. Also the noises of insects made by rubbing their wing-cases (elytra) together, as in the cricket, etc.

Fourthly—By means of touch, as in the cases of ants, bees, and other insects, which can convey meanings by crossing their antennæ.

Fifthly—Other signs, etc., perhaps, with which we have no acquaintance, and can form no conjecture.

Sixthly—Information can also probably be ascertained by smell.

By any one of these means separately, or together, it doubtless is possible for very numerous species of creatures to communicate with their kind by means of a language,—little articulate it may be—but still more or less articulate, according to endowment.

Let us now consider animal language by whatever mode effected; and to do so I propose to divide the subject into two sections.

First—The language of the sensations.

Second—The language of the instinctive mind.

First—The language expressive of the bodily sensations.

This, I have no doubt, is in great measure, if not entirely, automatic, for like as when you tread on a man’s toe, or give him a thump on the back, he involuntarily cries out—Oh! So when you tread on a cat’s tail, she gives utterance to her characteristic scream.

But it is not only bodily pain that can be proclaimed aloud, but hosts of other sensations can also be expressed in various ways. The lamb, or the kitten, feels the sensation of hunger, and it doubtless involuntarily bleats, or mews, for its mother; although it does not in the least know the meaning of “Ba,” or “Mew,” or why it gives utterance to such sounds.

And so of the notes of the crowing cock, the “gobbling” turkey, and the sibilant cricket, etc.

And then as to numbers of other cries, etc., too numerous to mention; such as the chirping of sparrows on the approach of rain, the moaning and whining of animals in pain, the cackling of the hen after laying an egg, etc.,—all these arise doubtless from bodily sensations, and may be termed the language of the involuntary or automatic part of the organic mind.

Second—The language of the instinctive mind.

I have above briefly spoken of the language expressive of the bodily sensations, and have termed it really the automatic language of what I call the “organic mind,” or “vital force.” Now we must speak of the language capable of being used by the “instinctive mind”—a language, I believe, that is sometimes involuntary or automatic, but which at other times is under the voluntary control of such kind of will, judgment, and choice as is capable of being exercised by the creature according to its mental endowment as decreed and specialized.

Thus, by sounds or gestures, or other modes, animals, birds, insects, etc., can express fear of danger, friendliness, hatred, anger, triumph, etc.; and in some instances, as in the bee, can communicate such special information as that the “queen is dead,” etc.

See two dogs meet: they evidently quite understand each other, and by wagging of tails and bright glances, or the reverse; and a cheerful bark or a savage snarl, can quickly intimate whether a gambol or a fight is to result. No doubt, as in man, this result will be greatly guided by the state of the bodily sensations (digestion, etc.), and as to age and natural character; but yet the dogs’ communications, we may be sure are only concerning pure animal sensations or concerns, and never assume an intellectual character, such as, “How is your beloved mistress?” etc.

Then look at the watchful bird on the tree-top, or the sentinel bull on the hillock; each can sound the alarm, because its intuition or its experience tells of danger. And then look at a party of rooks holding a palaver; who can doubt but that in some way they communicate certain feelings and perhaps ideas? And so as to hosts of other birds and beasts; but then their mental processes cannot possibly—for reasons which I have repeatedly given—be considered as of an intellectual sort like that of man, indeed it very probably may be of so different a kind to ours that we can not even guess at the nature of it.

I have not space to illustrate all the visible manifestations of the different phases of mind in animals, but to mention only one other, who can doubt but that in regard to triumph after a victory, the cock when he gets on an elevation and crows must experience some of the pride of conquest, and must have a sort of conception of the abstract idea of exultation in regard to his courage and prowess?

And yet although, as in my opinion, we must not delude ourselves by thinking that the foregoing are simply produced by reflex actions arising only from bodily sensations; so we must not equally be misled by supposing that such results arise from intellectual reasoning. No! in my opinion, although all these acts and sounds are performed, and produced, in some measure—and in some measure only—according to the dictates of a sort of conscious will; and a sort of abstract reasoning (in some cases), yet they can only occur, or be done, strictly according to the caliber, and quality, and specific endowment of the kind of non-intellectual mind with which the creature has been gifted by God—a caliber, and quality, and specific sort of mind which I will not pretend to be able, in any way, to explain the nature of, or essential mode of working.

Those who employ their time ill are the first to complain of its shortness. As they spend it in dressing, eating, sleeping, foolish conversation, in determining what they ought to do, and often in doing nothing, time is wanting to them for their real business and pleasures: those, on the contrary, who make the best use of it have plenty and to spare.—La Bruyère.

Even though it were true what many say, that education gives not to man another heart, nor another temperament, that it changes nothing in reality, and touches only the outside crust, I would not hesitate to say that it is not useless.—La Bruyère.

[THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.]

By A. A. CAMPBELL SWINTON.

It seems at present that electricity is to be the illuminating agent of the future, and that, as gas has now all but superseded candles and oil, so in turn gas will soon be superseded by electricity. The reasons for this change are several and various, and follow that most immutable of natural laws, the law of the survival of the fittest.

About the commencement of the present century, Sir Humphry Davy, the eminent chemist, succeeded in producing at the Royal Institution the most brilliant light then known. By passing the electricity derived from an enormous battery of four thousand plates through two charcoal points separated from one another, he obtained in air a continuous electric discharge four inches in length, which was increased to seven inches when the experiment was repeated in vacuo.

This discharge, or arc, as it is called, consisted of very minute particles of charcoal, which being raised to white heat by the resistance offered by the points to the electric current, were also by its means conveyed with great rapidity from one charcoal point to the other, emitting during their passage a light of dazzling brilliancy. The discharge of heated particles being continuous, the arc could be maintained for a considerable length of time.

This light, however, was entirely impracticable for any but purely experimental purposes. A battery of four thousand plates is not easily maintained in working order, and besides, the expense of such an arrangement puts it entirely out of the question. Of late years, however, a new method of producing electricity on a large scale has been discovered in the dynamo-electric machine, by means of which currents of great volume and intensity can be obtained from the power generated by a steam engine, water wheel, or other prime motor.

This great discovery instigated scientific men to try and bring the electric light within the range of practical utility, in which end they have already been eminently successful.

It was found that as the charcoal points in Davy’s lamp in process of time became oxidized and burnt away, it was necessary to have some arrangement by which they should be maintained at a constant distance from one another. This problem was first solved by Duboscq, a French savant, who by the combined action of the electric current and a system of clockwork, succeeded in obtaining a constant and steady light. Gas carbon, as found incrusted on the inside of gas retorts, was at the same time substituted for the charcoal employed by Davy, as it was found to burn more equally and to last much longer.

In July, 1877, a new form of electric light apparatus was introduced into France and elsewhere, which, from its practical simplicity, attracted a large amount of attention. This invention is due to Mr. Jablochkoff, a Russian engineer, and is known as the Jablochkoff candle. In this form of regulator all clockwork and mechanism are avoided; the two carbons are placed side by side, in parallel lines, and are separated by some substance which, though readily fusible, at the same time offers so enormous a resistance to the passage of the electric current as practically to prevent its passage through it at all. Kaolin clay and plaster of Paris have both been employed for this purpose with success. The current not being able to pass through the insulating material, can only pass between the two carbons at the extremity of the candle, where the arc is therefore formed. As the carbons burn away, the insulating material melts, and an uninterrupted light is obtained. As it is found that one carbon burns away more quickly than the other, in this form of lamp the electric current is supplied alternately in different directions, which makes the carbons burn equally, the reversions of the electricity being so rapid that the arc is to all appearances continuous. This lamp has been largely employed in Paris, and is at present in actual operation on the Thames embankment. Its chief defects are its great expense and the unsteady character of the light, which, owing to the oxidation of the insulating material, flickers and changes color. Another lamp, and one which has been largely used in Europe and in America, is the Brush regulator, called after its inventor. In this form the carbons are vertically one above the other, the upper one being controlled by an electro magnet, which supports it, allowing it to descend of its own weight when, through the distance between the carbons becoming too great, the current is weakened, and the magnet unable to support its load, thus keeping the arc of a constant length. There are a large number of other arc regulators, some of which work very well, and are largely employed; but they are most of them based on a very similar principle to that of the Brush lamp, and therefore they need no special description.

It has been found, however, that, adapted as some of the arc regulators are for the illumination of streets and large areas, none of them are at all able to compete with gas in the lighting of private houses. Not only do they require the constant attention of skilled workmen to renew the carbons and to clean the mechanism, but they give far too strong and dazzling a light for any but very large apartments.

For domestic lighting we therefore come to quite a new departure in electric lamps; instead of the arc we have the incandescent regulator.

If an intense electric current be transmitted through a fine platinum wire, the latter will, in a very few seconds, become white hot, and give a considerable amount of light. If such a platinum wire be enclosed in a glass globe, from which the air has been extracted, we have one kind of incandescent lamp, so called because the light is produced through the incandescence or intense heating of a platinum or other conductor. It was a lamp such as this that, when brought out by Mr. Edison two years ago, produced such a scare among holders of gas shares. It was not, however, a practical invention; it was found that the electric current constantly melted the platinum, or broke the glass envelope, after which the lamp was of course entirely useless. In vain Mr. Edison tried various alloys of platinum and iridium; nothing of that nature was found that could resist the intense heat produced by the electricity. While, however, the incandescent lamp was not progressing very rapidly in America, in England Mr. Swan, of Newcastle, who had been experimenting with the electric light for some time, brought out another kind of regulator, which has given rise to great expectations. The Swan lamp consists of a pear-shaped globe, blown out of glass, and from which all the air, or at least as much as can be, has been exhausted. In this globe there is a tiny carbon filament, manufactured of carbonized thread, in the form of a loop, which is attached to two platinum wires which project through the glass bulb. On an electric current being passed through the carbon, by means of wires attached to the platinum projections, a soft yet brilliant light is obtained. These lamps, which give a light corresponding in power and color to an ordinary gas flame, can now be obtained for five shillings each, and it is probable that this price may yet be still further reduced.

Mr. Edison also, having abandoned his earlier platino-iridium regulator, has brought out another lamp very similar to Mr. Swan’s. In his case the carbon filament is formed of carbonized bamboo, and the glass bulb is of an elongated form. Incandescent lamps have also been invented by Maxim, Crooks, Fox Lane, and others; but they only differ in details of manufacture from those of Swan and Edison.

Among edifices now entirely illuminated by the Swan system may be mentioned twenty-one steam vessels, including several war ships—the City of Rome, an Anchor Liner, which is second only to the Great Eastern in point of size, and several passenger boats in the Cunard and White Star Lines.

One of the greatest objections to gas as an indoor illuminant is the fact that not only does it burn a large amount of the oxygen of the air, but it also gives off during combustion carbonic acid gas and other poisonous vapors, besides a great amount of heat, thus vitiating the atmosphere. In public buildings where there is much gas burnt and little ventilation, this is seen to advantage, the air becoming in a short space of time hot and unwholesome. Now in the case of the incandescent electric light, this is altogether altered, the incandescent filament which produces the light, although in itself enormously hot, is too small in point of size to radiate much heat, and the fact of its being hermetically enclosed in a glass globe, which is impervious to the atmosphere, entirely prevents the escape of any noxious gases. The same circumstance prevents there being any consumption of oxygen.

These facts make the electric light far more wholesome than gas for the illumination of music-halls, churches, or other places of concourse. In a recent trial in the Town Hall at Birmingham, the employment of gas raised the temperature of the atmosphere thirty-eight degrees in three hours, while the building was equally well lighted with electricity for seven hours with a rise in temperature of only two degrees. Thus, after a period of lighting by electricity 2.33 times as long as by gas, the temperature at the ceiling was increased by only 1-19th of the amount due to gas.

Another great advantage consequent to the employment of incandescent lighting, is the greater immunity from accidental fire; for as the carbon filament is instantly entirely consumed, the moment the glass envelope is broken it is impossible for the lamp to ignite anything in its vicinity however inflammable. The experiment has been tried of breaking a lighted incandescent lamp in a vessel containing gunpowder, with perfect safety. As these lamps may be placed in any position, they lend themselves very readily to ornamental and decorative purposes. At the recent electrical exhibition at the Crystal Palace a very beautiful chandelier of Edison lamps was shown, in which the lamps, which were of very small size, formed the petals of finely worked glass and brass flowers. This chandelier had a really magnificent effect when lighted.

These and other facts too numerous to mention, demonstrate that electricity, when properly applied, will be a far more elegant, safe, and wholesome agent for illuminating purposes, than coal-gas as now employed. But in order to have the full benefits of its use, a system is required by which the electric current shall be produced and conveyed to the lamps.

Not only has Mr. Edison invented an incandescent lamp, but he has also identified his name with a very complete system for producing the light on a large scale to suit both domestic and commercial requirements. In the first place he has invented a peculiar form of dynamo-machine, which when driven at great speed by powerful steam or water engines, produces the electricity in great quantity at some central station. From this centre the current is conveyed by copper wires laid under the streets or over the roofs of the houses, these conductors being tapped of their electric fluid by smaller wires which convey the electricity into the houses, in a way similar to that in which gas is conveyed by small pipes from the larger street mains. In each house is an electric meter, a special invention of Mr. Edison’s, which measures the quantity of electricity which passes through it. This meter is very ingenious, and therefore the principle on which it is based may be described. If a current of electricity be passed through a solution of sulphate of copper, contained in a copper jar, the sulphate solution is decomposed and metallic copper is deposited on the inside of the jar. Now it has been proved by experiment, that the amount of copper deposited is always directly proportional to the strength and duration of the electric current. Mr. Edison’s meter consists of such an arrangement, and he finds that by weighing the copper jar, so as to determine exactly what it has gained in weight through the metallic deposition of the solution it contains, he can accurately calculate in units the amount of electricity that has passed through the meter. By means of this beautiful discovery electricity can be supplied and paid for in a manner very similar to that employed in the case of gas at the present time.

Within the building to be illuminated, the electric fluid reaches the lamps along small copper wires, about the thickness of ordinary bell wire, which are covered with a coating of gutta percha to prevent the escape of the electricity, which might cause sparks or even fire, or in any case seriously injure any one who might come in contact with the bare metal, by giving him a very violent if not fatal electric shock. The lamps themselves may be fixed to ordinary gas brackets. Mr. Edison has designed some special ones, and the light can be turned on and off, by means of a tap or button, with as great or even still greater facility than gas.

Mr. Edison has recently established a central station in New York, from which he proposes to light the houses included in an area of a wide radius from the center. In part of this area the installation of the lamps and wires is now complete, and the light is giving every satisfaction, the cost being considerably below that of gas, which in the United States is very expensive. It must be remembered that electric lighting is comparatively a new science, and not yet fully understood. There is very little doubt that, by practice, it will before long approach more nearly to perfection, and sooner or later entirely supersede gas, the arc form of lamp being employed for the illumination of streets and large areas, while the incandescent pattern meets domestic requirements.—Good Words.

[AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.]
[A REMONSTRANCE.]

By the Author of “John Halifax, Gentleman.”

Gray heavens, gray earth, gray sea, gray sky,

Yet rifted with strange gleams of gold,

Downward, all’s dark; but up on high

Walk our white angels,—dear of old.

Strong faith in God and trust in man,

In patience we possess our souls;

Eastward, grey ghosts may linger wan,

But westward, back the shadow rolls.

Life’s broken urns with moss are clad,

And grass springs greenest over graves;

The shipwrecked sailor reckons glad,

Not what he lost, but what he saves.

Our sun has set, but in his ray

The hill-tops shine like saints new-born:

His after-glow of night makes day,

And when we wake it will be morn.

[NEW MEXICO.]

By Rev. SHELDON JACKSON, D.D.

New Mexico is Spain in the United States—a region where the Spanish language, customs, and habits prevail, where the debates of the legislature and the pleadings of the courts are in a foreign tongue; a territory where an American feels as one in a foreign country, and is a stranger in his own land.

While the latest section to receive American civilization, it was the first to be occupied by Europeans. When our pilgrim fathers were shivering through their first New England winter, New Mexico had been settled half a century. When they were making

“The sounding aisles of the dim woods ring

To the anthem of the free,”

the Spanish cavalier was chanting the “Te Deum” in churches even then beginning to be venerable with age. And there to-day are the descendants of those brave old Castilians whose prowess made illustrious the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.

In 1677 a book was published in London giving an account “of America and all the principal kingdoms, provinces, seas, and islands of it.” Mr. Heylin, the author, thus speaks of New Mexico in volume IV: “Nova Mexicana is bounded on the south with New Biscay; on the west with Quivara; the countreyes, on the north and east, not discovered hitherto, though some extend eastward as far as Florida, extended two hundred and fifty leagues from the town and mines of Santa Barbara, and how much beyond that none can tell; the relations of this country being so uncertain and incredulous that I dare say nothing positively of the soil or people, but much less of the towns and cities which are said to be in it.”

New Mexico, as at present constituted, has an area of 121,201 square miles, and in a general way may be said to consist of tablelands, mountains, and valleys. The tablelands rise one above another in well-defined terraces, with an altitude above sea level of from 5,000 feet in the southeast, to 7,500 feet in the northwest. These tablelands cover about two-thirds of the Territory, and constitute the valuable grazing lands. The mountainous region consists of the Rocky Mountains, which enter the Territory from the north in two chains—like the prongs of a fork. The eastern chain terminates a few miles south of Sante Fe, while the western one ends in the broken and detached ranges of the southern section of the Territory. These mountains are rich in gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, and coal. Sections of them are covered with valuable timber, and among them are many medicinal springs. The valleys lie between these mountain ranges, and contain the agricultural lands, and are farmed by artificial irrigation. These valleys produce good crops of corn, wheat, beans, etc., and in the southern half of the Territory raise fine apples, pears, plums, apricots, peaches, and grapes, the grapes up to the present time being more abundant than other fruits. In addition to the above, the Messilla (Ma-see´-ya) valley produces quinces, figs, and pomegranates. Artificial irrigation is supplied from the melting snows of the mountains. The principal streams are the Rio Grande (Ree´-o Gran-da), the Canadian, the Pecos (Pa-cos), the San Juan (San Whan), and the Gila (Hee-la).

The Rio Grande River is the Nile of America. It is 1,800 miles long and of almost equal volume from its source to its mouth, flowing hundreds of miles without receiving a tributary of any size, being fed almost entirely from the snows of the mountains. Along on either side of the river are canals conveying the water to the adjacent farms. The water is exceedingly roily and its annual deposit of sediment upon the land increases its fertility.

The climate is unexcelled by any portion of the United States—being a succession of bright sunshiny days almost the year through. The country is free from malarial, billious and lung troubles, general debility and asthma.

New Mexico has much of antiquarian interest. The mysteries connected with its earlier history and the evidences of former greatness throw a halo of romance around it. The country when first visited in 1536, or ’37, by Spaniards was filled with the ruins of great cities, which ruins are still in existence. In some places, acres of ground are still covered with pieces of broken pottery. The mountains, in sections, are honeycombed with abandoned dwellings, like Petra of old, or with the remains of ancient mining operations, from which were drawn those vast supplies of gold and silver found at Montezuma’s court.

In the Cañon de Chilly (de-shay) high up in the face of perpendicular walls of rock are hundreds of ruins now tenantless and desolate. Among some of these ruins which we have visited are sepulchres, about four feet square, of mortar-laid stone, in which we found human skeletons.

In the Cañon de Chaco are great buildings with three and four stories of walls still standing, built in the most substantial manner of cut stone and neatly plastered on the inside. The country in the immediate vicinity of these ruins is wild and desolate, and no clew to the builders has yet been found. We only know that years, possibly ages ago, great cities grew, flourished and passed away, leaving extensive ruins as the evidence of their existence.

At the close of the sixteenth century the Spaniards took possession of the country, subjugated the native races and made them slaves to work the newly-opened mines. The Spanish rule was so cruel that in 1680 the Pueblos rebelled and drove them from the country. Then commenced a war, lasting many years, making the valley of the Rio Grande classic ground, as the Spanish forces again and again advanced up the valley, only to be driven back by the Pueblos, until, through treachery and dissensions among the native forces, the Spanish were again in full control.

New Mexico became known to Americans first through the explorations of Captains Long, Nicollet, and Fremont. La Londe, a Frenchman, was sent by Morrison, of Kaskaskia, Illinois, on a trading trip in 1804. He was followed by James Pursley in 1805. Pike visited there in 1807, and a train of goods was sent in 1812 by Knight, Beard, Chambers, and eight others. This party were seized by the authorities and held as prisoners for nine years. Caravans of traders were furnished with a government escort in 1829, 1834, and 1843.

In 1848 New Mexico was annexed to the United States.

The majority of the people reside in villages. These are largely of the same pattern, and consist of a large public square, around which are grouped without much attention to regular streets, a number of one-story adobe (sun-dried) brick houses. The individual houses are built around the four sides of smaller squares called placitas. The rooms of the house open on this placita; also the stable. The buildings are usually one story high, with dirt floors and flat dirt roofs. During the rainy season the roofs leak badly. Among the older houses there are but few that have glass windows. A few others have mica windows. The larger number have an open lattice work, protected in stormy weather by a tight board shutter. The roof is made of poles, covered first with grass, then two feet of dirt, and is used for various family purposes. (2 Kings 19: 26; Acts 10: 9.) The floor is the native earth, beaten hard, then covered with a layer of adobe clay. The fire-place is in a corner, and on three sides of the room a raised bench of clay forms a seat, and also a shelf for piling away the bed blankets during the day. Many of the houses, especially of the poorer classes, are without chair, bedstead, or table. Many of the rooms are neatly whitewashed with a white clay found in that region, and the walls hung with crucifixes, mirrors, and lithograph pictures of saints. There is one large opening, or gate, into the placita, admitting alike the family, donkeys, goats and sheep. The streets are narrow, irregular, and without sidewalks. The roads, worn by the travel of centuries, are lower than the adjacent country, and during a rainy season filled with muddy water. Wagons are scarce, as also are the native carts, some of them with a primitive wheel, constructed from a solid section of a tree.

The Mexican’s chief friend is the donkey, and in the streets of the villages are to be seen droves of them loaded with hay, fire-wood, vegetables, crates of fruit, melons, merchandise, casks of whisky, trunks, lumber, etc. It is no uncommon thing to see a drove, each with a heavy stick of timber projecting into the air beyond his head, and the other end dragging on the ground behind him.

In the fields are occasional lodges (Isaiah 1: 8) as a shelter while watching the vineyard, melon or grain fields.

Roads for foot-passengers and pack-animals run through the grain and corn fields (Mark 2: 23; Matthew 13: 4) and along the unfenced wayside were the graves of the former inhabitants, or the points where the pall-bearers rested in bearing the body to the grave, marked with a rude board cross and pile of stones (Joshua 7: 26; 2 Samuel 18: 17). The women carry water in great jars on their heads or shoulders (Gen. 24: 46).

They plow like the ancients with a crooked stick fastened to the horns of the oxen—several yoke of oxen following one another (1 Kings 19: 19).

As in the days of Ruth and Boaz, men and women still reap with a sickle and the poor get the gleanings (Ruth 2: 15-23). The grain when reaped is spread out on threshing floors made smooth by packing the earth (Gen. 50: 10; 1 Sam. 23: 1) where it is threshed out by driving around in a circle sheep, horses or oxen (Deut. 25: 4). After cleaning out the bulk of the straw with forks, the wheat and chaff are shoveled into blankets, which by a series of jerks, similar to shaking carpets, toss their contents into the air, the chaff blowing one side and the wheat falling back in the blanket. This process can only be carried on when the wind is favorable; consequently to improve a favorable wind they work all night (Ruth 3: 2). Another process is to lift the wheat and chaff in a bucket as high as the head and empty it slowly upon a blanket spread on the ground. Separated from the chaff, the wheat is taken to a neighboring stream and washed in large earthen jars, after which it is spread upon woolen blankets to dry in the sun.

The principal diet of the people is chile colorado (col-o-row). There are several varieties of this fiery dish; one made of beef is called carne. A more common dish is made of mutton and called carnero. The flesh is boiled to a pulp, to which is added chile. Chile is prepared by rolling red pepper on a stone until pods and seeds are a soft mass. It tastes as red-hot iron is supposed to taste. It is said that a new beginner on this diet ought to have a copper-lined throat.

Many old churches are still in use. They are built of adobe brick, with dirt roof and dirt floor. Some of them possess paintings evidently imported from Spain. There are also many ruder home-made paintings on the walls. They are without seats or pews, the worshippers kneeling or sitting on the floor. They are also generally much out of repair. They contain many images, and in some of the churches a bier with a life-size image of the Savior. At certain festivals this is carried in a procession, and on Good Friday is used to dramatize the crucifixion of Christ. In some of the churches are exhibitions of Scriptural scenes covering the life of the Savior, apostles and early martyrs. Occasionally an image of Christ is rigged with a movable arm, which is turned by a crank. As with the movement of the crank the hand comes up, it is supposed to throw blessings upon the waiting congregation below. Upon one occasion during a long dry spell, they carried an image of the Virgin Mary in stately processions through the fields to secure rain. But the drouth continuing, the people in anger took the image out into the street, took off its costly clothing, and gave it a public whipping. Just then a severe thunder and hail storm came up; vivid flashes of lightning played around them, and the hail destroyed their crops and gardens. Greatly frightened, the ignorant people hastened to re-clothe the image, and prostrate themselves before it in most abject submission. The enclosure in front of these churches, and especially the floor of the church itself, is the favorite burial-place of the people, the holiest place of all being near the altar. Nearness to the altar is graded by the amount of money paid.

The Roman Catholic Church, removed from competition with Protestantism, is a wisely constructed machine for extorting money out of the fears and superstitions of an ignorant people. Baptism, confession, blessings, anointing, burials, and mass must all be paid for at a round price. The weeping friends bring the corpse of the loved one and set down the bier before the closed gates of the church. Then money is laid upon the corpse. Again and again has a priest been known to look out, and if he judged that the money was not as much as the friends could afford to pay, refuse to open the gate, and nothing is left for the friends but to continue adding money to the sum previously collected until the rapacity of the priest is satisfied. An ordinary funeral in a churchyard will cost one hundred dollars, if the family has that much. To be buried in some of the churches costs from five hundred dollars to five thousand dollars, according to position. The corpse is carried on a board or bier (they do not generally use coffins), to the place of burial. If the priest goes to the house, he walks in front of the funeral procession. He has on a scarlet dress with a white over-skirt. At his side is a small boy similarly dressed, tinkling a bell. A few yards in the rear is a second priest, dressed in scarlet and white, swinging a burning censer. Around him is grouped a motley crowd of men, women, and children, carrying lighted candles, the men and boys with uncovered heads, and behind all are men firing muskets into the air to frighten away the devil, who is supposed to be hovering around, waiting a chance to seize the spirit of the departed one. If the corpse is that of a child, it is covered with flowers (the corpse of such is called an angel). From two to four children walk with the bearers. Behind these are other children, who are considered more holy than the rabble that follow. These are followed by four children carrying a richly dressed saint under a canopy. If the family are able to pay for it, the priest comes out to meet the procession, and sprinkles holy water over the corpse, then into the grave. After this the corpse is slid off the board into the grave with but little ceremony, and some dirt thrown upon it. Men then get into the grave with a heavy maul and pack the dirt down solid; then more dirt is thrown in and packed down. This is continued until the grave is filled up level with the rest of the floor of the church. The corpses are placed three or four deep in the same spot, and oftentimes the bones of previous burials are thrown up to make room for the new comer. In one instance that came to light, the spade clave in two the head of a child and threw it out. Nearly all the old churches I have visited smell like a charnel house. A few years ago the legislature of New Mexico forbid further burials in the churches.

With the advent of railways, miners and Americans, the peculiar and old-time customs of the country will speedily disappear, and a new era dawn upon the people. Great changes are rapidly taking place, and New Mexico is waking up from the sleep of centuries.

January 1, 1881, there were 658 miles of railway in operation, which has been greatly increased since. During 1880 the yield of the mines was $711,300. At the same time there were 400,000 head of cattle and 5,000,000 sheep on its pasture lands. Population, 118,430. The census of 1880 gives 38 Roman Catholic, 7 Presbyterian, and 1 Baptist churches; and not mentioned in the census report, the writer knows of several Methodist and Episcopalian churches.

In 1849, Rev. Henry W. Reed, a Baptist minister, opened a school at Santa Fe.

In 1850 Rev. E. G. Nicholson commenced a Methodist mission at Santa Fe, which was abandoned two years after.

In 1857 Rev. W. J. Kephart, a Presbyterian minister, was sent to New Mexico in the anti-slavery interests, and became editor of the Santa Fe Gazette. In 1852 Rev. Samuel Gorman, a Baptist minister, entered the Territory and commenced a mission at Laguna Pueblo.

These missions were all abandoned at the beginning of the rebellion.

In 1866 Protestant missions were resumed by Rev. D. F. McFarland, a Presbyterian minister sent to Santa Fe.

In 1869 the writer of this article was appointed Superintendent of Presbyterian Missions for New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana. The present Presbyterian strength is eighteen ministers, of whom six are Mexicans.

SPECULATION IN THEOLOGY.[H]

By the Rev. R. S. STORRS, D. D.

There are two schemes of religious thought generically in the world, as there has been—and are now to some extent—two systems of astronomical speculation, one obtaining in uncivilized countries, and the other in civilized. One system of astronomical speculation takes the earth as the center around which the heavens revolve. That seems according to our senses; that is the architecture of the heavens according to the natural man. When the Rev. Mr. Jasper, at Richmond, insists that “the sun do move,” he seems to have the judgment and the sense of every seeing man with him. [Laughter.] And we know what comes of it,—uninterpreted and unintelligible and contradictory motions in all the sky; a baffled heaven scribbled o’er with cycle and epicycle. The other system of astronomical speculation takes its start from the sun as the center and the governor of the planetary system, and finds that sun himself, with all his dependent orbs, marching onward through the heavens. And we know what comes of that. (There came a book from Dr. Hill, years ago, which I read with the intensest interest, concerning the relation of the stars.) [Applause.] There comes order and harmony in all the system of the heavens. We measure and weigh the planet in its course. The astronomer catches the comet in its far flight, measures its motion and predicts its course and its return. The butterfly floating in the air is balanced against the sun. Every shell on the beach, every bud on the tree, is brought into relation with the farthest nebula whose lace-work stains the distant azure. It is the astronomy of science; it is the astronomy of advanced and cultivated thought.

There are two systems of religious speculation. The one takes man as its center and starting-point, regarding him as a finished fact, practically. In its grosser forms it does not profess to know, as we have been told by the brother who preceded me, whence he came; but it suspects that his nature is evolved out of the brutal. It does not know whither he is going; but it treats the future as the scoffing French sceptic treated it, as at best “a grand Perhaps.” It does not know about God, or whether there be any God other than the sum of universal forces. It has no moral law except a general average of probable experiences. And so it comes to men and tells them to go on and live as they list. It tells them that there is no fear of retribution, no need of atonement, and it has no place in all its compass for any doctrine of regeneration and of the Holy Spirit of God. I do not mean, of course, that everybody who holds this system will accept fully my statement of it. In fact it is sometimes hard to find out exactly how they state it, or what they mean by their statements themselves. I am reminded occasionally of the man who had a clock which somebody criticised, saying, “Your clock, Mr. Jones, does not keep good time.” “Why,” said he, “it does keep perfectly good time, only you do not understand it. The fact is that when the hands on that clock point to twelve, then it strikes three, and what that means is that it wants twenty minutes to seven. [Laughter and applause.] Now if you will keep that in mind, you will hit the right time in every instance.” [Laughter.] Well, I intend to speak very seriously, and yet I cannot help being reminded by some of the language which is made use of in some of these what-we-call agnostic publications, into which the richest Christian words are sometimes brought as if to give a kind of artificial and fictitious consecration to the doctrine which I think a detestable doctrine underneath,—I can not help being reminded of a very careful paraphrase which was made by a very bright and faithful Indian girl at the school at Hampton. Her teacher told her—she did all of this innocently, of course—to take a certain passage of Roman history and write a paraphrase of it in her own words. So she went at it; and when the teacher read the paraphrase she was astounded at finding this statement in it: That “on a certain time the city was made sick by cooking the entrails of animals.” Well, what on earth that meant she could not imagine, nor how it got into this paraphrase, until she turned to the original passage and then she found the statement that “at a certain time the city was disturbed by intestine broils.” [Great laughter and applause.]

Now, over against that system stands the theology which starts with God as the center, as the Lord and Sovereign and Judge, as well as the Creator of the earth and men upon it; and it takes what God declares, in that which the history of the world declares to be his Word, and what the devout spirit reverently accepts as the Word of God, concerning himself and man, and man’s need, and the hereafter. Here inspiration and redemption, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, retribution in the future, time as the proof of eternity, come vividly before us as the thoughts of God. He shows them to us in characters as broad as if he had written them in a great theodicy of star-fires and enduring orbs in the heavens. This system of theology does not cast any discredit on human nature; it exalts it by showing it the object of divine solicitude. It casts the splendor and the solemnity of eternity upon the present experience and life of man; and it gives to the Bible an immeasurable and an almost inconceivable importance and value.

Now I understand perfectly that the natural tendency of men is to accept the preceding system, as the natural tendency of man is to believe that the earth is the center, and the heavens go around it. Man finds self-consciousness the first element of thought. The impulse of self-assertion appears to be the primary impulse of human nature. It is simply the egotistic man, of whom it might be said, as was said by a friend of mine, speaking rather roughly and not very elegantly about a man who was very egotistic, and who had offended him by his egotism: “I believe that that man thinks that his house is placed where the leg of the compasses was put down when the earth was made round.” [Laughter.] There is a certain tendency in every human heart to feel that it is central, and that it has rights and privileges and possibilities belonging to itself inherently, and with which no being can properly interfere. And civilization works with its multiple forces and instruments and wealth in the same direction, taking a man feeling his lordship of the earth and reminding him more and more, and encouraging him to feel that he is lord of his destiny, and lord of the hereafter as well. There are certain philanthropic sentiments which work in the same direction, no doubt, tending to make men believe that all will be right hereafter somehow or other, and that after some possible brief unpleasantness in the future there will be a universal deliverance and restoration into holiness and its peace. And the secular spirit of the time, intense, widening, ever increasing, moves in the same direction. It enters into literature; it enters into life on every side; it finds no reality in religion; it believes it a matter of poetic aspiration, or of cultivated literary leisure, or of fine speculation, or of social observance, or possibly of ethics, or more likely of æsthetic art; but the grand reality of religion, as a bond uniting the human soul with the divine, it does not recognize or feel. It is this which gives significance and importance to infidel harangues; it is this spirit which spreads beneath and behind them. The harangues are merely the surface pustules, while the disease is within. They are the red and sulphurous flames, while the fires are underneath. And yet they multiply! The business of this city of Portland could not be carried on on the principles of these harangues. There is not a bank or an insurance company here that would not have to shut its doors if it posted within its walls, “This is an agnostic establishment. [Applause.] It is carried on upon these principles: that there is no God about whom we know anything; there is no hereafter probable; man came out of the monkey; and there is no moral law.” Let such sentiments prevail in this city, and it would have been better if the fire of a few years ago had swept away every house within it, and left nothing but the bay and the beach on which to plant a new town. And yet men love to crowd halls and pay money in order to hear these infidel speculations which are in substance as old as the ages.

And thus it comes to pass that religious thought loses its power among those who are not directly touched by such harangues,—that the influence widens continually to make the Bible a neglected book, and to make the Sabbath a secular day, to make the Church a mere convocation of people coming together at leisure to hear a lecture.

It is at such times that the spirit of liberalism, as it is called, in religious speculations tending all the time to loosen the bonds and unstring the strength of the Gospel of Christ, finds opportunity and incitement and comes more widely to prevail. Liberalism! I repudiate the term. [Applause.] I do not understand what function liberality has either in the record or in the interpretation of facts. I do not understand how he is a liberal mathematician who makes his calculations bend to the preferences of himself and of his pupils. I do not understand how he is a liberal chemist who feels at liberty to play fast and loose with the principles of his science, and will not quite affirm whether gunpowder will explode or not when fire touches it. How is he a liberal chart-maker who rubs out all the reefs and rocks and bars and warning headlands from his maps, and shows a smooth coast-line with nothing but smiling shores and welcoming bays? How is he a liberal interpreter of the globe who denies the granite above and the fire beneath, and affirms that the whole is built, if we only knew it, of excellently selected wood-pulp? What possible province has liberality in the record of facts or in the interpretation of them? I understand perfectly what liberality means as toward the opinions of others who differ from us. I understand what liberality means as toward the character of others who are entirely opposed in opinion and in action to us. Coleridge’s canon has always seemed to me perfectly to cover the ground. “Tolerate no belief,” he says, “which you deem false and of injurious tendency, but arraign no belief. The man is more and other than his belief, and God only knows how large or how small a part of him the belief in man may be.” But liberality in the statement of facts—there we want exactness, we want earnestness, we want precise fidelity to the truth of things; and there is no opportunity for what calls itself liberality there. How is it less liberal to tell a man that strychnine will kill him than to tell him that it will certainly give him a pain in his stomach? [Laughter.] How is it less liberal to tell a man that if he goes over Niagara he goes to a sure death, than it is to tell him that if he takes that awful plunge he will almost certainly wet his feet. [Laughter.] No! When a man comes to me and says, “These are the liberal doctrines; there is not probably any God; we do not know where men come from; there is no law above him; there is no retribution—or if there be any, it is a small one—waiting for him,” I say, I perfectly understand your doctrines. There is no reason why I should not. There is nothing immense or complex or mysterious about them,—in fact, they are rather thin. [Laughter.] They remind one of the pillows which one of the waiters stole at a White Mountain hotel where they didn’t have very solid pillows. They knew he stole them, because they found them on him, both of them, in his waistcoat pocket. [Laughter.] We carry these doctrines very easily in our thought and hand. There is nothing massive or majestic about them; there is nothing liberal in them. If a man is true to his convictions, he is true to them; and he has no right to be liberal in the way of giving away a part of what he believes, or hiding it under any mystery of words and imposing upon men with a thought which is not really his. And when I look at the drift and working of such doctrines, I find at once that they tend to build no grand characters; they give no motive to men for repentance and faith; they do not seek, they do not tend, to lift man nearer to the level of the holiness and happiness of God on high; they work only in degradation of character; they authorize and encourage men to imitate their grandfathers, which, on that system of doctrine, is to make beasts of themselves. [Laughter.]

So I turn to the system of truth, which takes God for its center, his law as our rule, his gospel as our light, his Son as our Redeemer, and his immortality as the possible and glorious home of every created being redeemed by the Son of God and renewed by his Spirit; and I say here is the gospel of the ancient time and of the present time. You need not call it antiquated. Everything which is best in the world is old. Sunshine is as old as the earth itself and the sun when the fire-mist was rounded into an orb,—the same to-day, playing on the streets of Portland, as when it played on the bowers of Paradise. The air is old, pouring its refreshing currents into our lungs and renewing our life to-day as in all time past. The great arch of the heavens is old; it has not been taken down and built up again on modern brick-work since the creation. These doctrines are old but full of motion, full of energy as the river is full of movements,—full of life-giving power, as the sunlight and the vital air. They are the doctrines out of which the missionary work sprang,—doctrines in which is all its life and the spring of its power. They are the doctrines of Paul, that first great missionary, of whom we heard in the sermon the other evening. He had strong convictions. He did not doubt. He knew whom he had believed, and was persuaded that he was able to keep him and to save the world. And who is the successor of Paul? Who holds the same faith with him and teaches it with the same earnest fidelity? I do not care to know especially what he believed unless I believe it myself. I do not want any uncertain or broken ice-bridge of outward ordinations between me and the Apostle; I want to have his faith in my heart and to preach it with the emphasis with which he preached it, and then I feel myself a successor of the great missionary to the Roman Empire. [Applause.]

Our fathers had these convictions and because of them they gave of their wealth; they prayed, they sacrificed, they gave themselves to the work. I remember as a lad in a distant school seeing that man to whom our president refers—Champion—who went out from a great fortune to lay his bones in Western Africa in the service of his Master; and though I was a careless boy, unmindful of these things, I remember that his face shone almost as the face of Stephen when he looked up and saw the Lord on high, and the vision of it has never failed to come back to me whenever I have heard his name. They gave themselves. The motive of their missionary work was found in this Gospel of Christ. This was the instrument by which they accomplished their work in other lands. This was the instrument by which Paul wrought his mighty work in his day, and those who followed him in the Empire and in barbarous tribes, wherever they could get access to men. It is this gospel which has built New England. It is this gospel which, under the power of the Spirit of God, is to change the earth—this gospel and nothing else.

Do not let us mask its doctrines in any mystery of words. Do not let us evaporate its doctrines into any thin mist of speculation. Do not let us emasculate it of its energy by taking away any of its vital forces. It seems to me that to state this gospel in novel forms and doubtful forms, in order to conciliate unbelief, is very much like the woman’s wisdom who kept the burglars out of the house by leaving all the valuables on the doorstep. [Laughter.] It seems to me that we shall have no inspiration in us, no great powerful impulse to the work, and no instrument to work with in that work, except as the old gospel of man, not a cultivated monkey but a fallen prince, of God’s law binding on him, of the light of the near eternity flashing on his spirit, of the cross of Christ and its redemptive efficacy, of the Spirit of God with his renewing power—except as this old gospel is not merely in our hands or on our lips, but is in our brains and in our hearts; and then we shall conquer. [Applause.]

Men may object to it, of course—men object to everything. I remember a gentleman on the Hudson who took a querulous Englishman—not a Canadian, [laughter]—who had been finding fault with everything from the constitution of our government down to the shape of the toes of our shoes, out to see from his place the magnificent autumnal forests on the other side of the river, and the forests on the Hudson at this season of the year are as if thousands of rainbows had fallen to the earth and lodged. Said he, “Isn’t that magnificent?” “Well, yes, that is—yes, that is very fine; but don’t you think now that it is just a little tawdry, perhaps?” [Laughter.] There is nothing men may not object to in the works or in the word of God, if their hearts set them in that direction. No matter for the objection! The Gospel of Christ, instinct with power, coming from the heart, coming on the earnest word of him who believes it, goes through objections as the cannon ball goes through mists. Do not let us doubt or fear concerning its success, if we hold it as the fathers held it. Men object to the atonement; why, it has been the life of so many millions of human hearts that the multitudes on high are now uncounted and incomputable. They object to the doctrine of regeneration; that is the doctrine which more than any other exalts man’s nature, showing the royalty of it, the greatness of it, its possibilities, and the glory of its future.

Of course men may object. Do not let us be disturbed; but always remember that, with the word of God within us and the power and providence of God behind us, and the spirit of God going before us to open ways for our progress, victory is sure. Christ seemed insane in his aim at the beginning. Speaking a few words orally to his disciples; writing no line unless he wrote one on the sand; only uttering his thought in syllables that seemed dissipated in the air, and aiming by that to conquer the world to his truth,—it seemed like expecting the whistle of a boy in these mountain valleys to go reverberating as thunder over all the earth in all the centuries. But he did it. It seemed insane to undertake to build a kingdom by gathering a few scattered followers here and there, and especially a small nucleus of obscure and uneducated men bound together by nothing but the simple sacrament of eating bread and drinking wine in memory of him,—without saint or standard or army or treasure or navy or counselors or forum,—it seemed like building another Lebanon with shovelfuls of sand, or building another Jerusalem with charred sticks and straws. But he did it. His kingdom already is in all the earth. The proudest empire which sets itself against it, shivers in the contact. Napoleon saw this on the Island of St. Helena. Comparing himself as a man ruling in the world with Christ as a Godlike person, said he, “He is God and not man.” He has done the work thus far; he is to do it in the future, if you and I adhere to the gospel, if from all our pulpits reverberate the echoes of this great meeting, if the force which is here assembled goes forth to testify of that system of religion of which God is the centre and head, which has its grandest trophy and symbol in the cross of Christ, and which opens the vast and near eternity to the apprehension of every soul conscious of unconfessed sins, and to the desiring and exulting hope of every soul that has found rest in Christ—the gospel that is to fill the world at last.

I remember when a lad, forty years ago last spring, coming for the first time into this beautiful Portland harbor from Boston by the boat. The night was windy and rough. The cabin was confined, the boat was small; and very early in the morning I went up on deck. There was nothing but the blue waste around, dark and threatening, and the clouded heavens above. At last suddenly on the horizon flashed a light, and then after a little while another, and then a little later another still, from the light-houses along the coast; and at last the light at the entrance of this harbor became visible just as “the fingers of the dawn” were rushing up into the sky. As we swept around into the harbor the sunrise gun was fired from the cutter or corvette lying in the harbor, the band struck up a martial and inspiring air, the great splendor of the rising sun flooded the whole view, and every window-pane on these hills, as seen from the boat, seemed to be a plate of burnished gold let down from the celestial realms.

Ah! my friends, we are drawing nearer to the glory of the latter day. I have thought of that vision often. I thought of it then in my early carelessness, as representing what might be conceived of the entrance into heaven. I have thought of it as I have stood by the bed of the dying and seen their faces flush and flash in a radiance that I could not apprehend. I have thought of it this week as I have been in these meetings. The lights are brightening along the coast; the darkness is disappearing; the harbor is not far off; the Sun of Righteousness is to arise in all the earth, and the golden glory of the new Jerusalem is to be established here. Let it be ours in that great day to remember that we held the faith, we triumphed by the Cross, we stood with Paul and with the Son of God, taking God’s revelation for our inspiration and doing our work under that mighty impulse.

And unto God be all the praise. [Great applause.]

[ADVANTAGE OF WARM CLOTHING.]

[Concluded.]

Now the clear, transparent air permits heat to be shot off, or rayed through it with great freedom. But it does not readily receive heat “by conveyance,” so long as it is still. If you put your hand into still air which is as cold as a cold metal knob, you do not know that the air is so chill as the metal, because it does not make your hand so cold. The heat is not conveyed away from your hand as quickly. When air is moving, instead of being still, the case is, however, altogether altered. A current of air, or wind, carries away heat from warm bodies very quickly as it blows over them. It does so because each fresh little particle of air which is pressed against them, receives its own share of the heat, and conveys it away, leaving fresh particles to come up in their turn, and do the same thing. A pint of boiling water in a metal pot placed in a strong wind having fifty degrees of heat, would lose all its excess of heat as soon again as it would if standing in still air having the same warmth. The old plan of cooling hot tea or broth by blowing it, is correct in principle, though not in accordance with good taste.

The laboratory of the living animal body has the supply of its fuel, and the capacity of its air-blasts, so arranged that just about as much heat is supplied through its internal furnace, as is lost from its surface by “raying off” and “conveyance,” when the surrounding air has a warmth of sixty degrees of the heat scale, and when its surface is somewhat protected by a light covering of clothing, to lessen the rapidity with which the heat is shot off and conveyed away. The heat is then produced as rapidly in the internal furnace, as it is thrown off from the outer surface, and the consequence is that the animal feels comfortably warm. It only feels uncomfortably hot, when more heat is produced in the furnace of the living laboratory than can be scattered through its surface. And it only feels uncomfortably cold when more heat is scattered from the surface than can be kept up through the burning of the inner furnace.

But in winter time the cold external air carries away heat much more quickly from the surface of living animals, than the warmer external air does in summer time. Here, then, is a little difficulty to be met, if the warmth of the body is to be kept precisely the same in both seasons. It is requisite that it should be always maintained at the same point, because that point is the one which is most suitable for the operations which are being carried on in the vessels and chambers of its laboratory. Nature has two distinct ways in which she insures this end.

In the first place, are you not aware that you get more hungry in winter than you do in summer time? All living animals have pretty much the same experience as yourself in this particular, and the reason is that nature intends, during the cold season, to have more fuel introduced into the supply-pipes of the body for the warming of its structures. The furnace of the laboratory gets quickened in a small degree; its slow fires are fanned into slightly increased activity, more fuel is burned, and so more heat is generated to meet the greater demand for it, dependent on the influence of the external cold.

But nature also thickens the clothing of animals during the cold season, and so affords increased obstruction, through which the escaping heat has to force its way. Have you not observed the sleek silky coat which the horse wears through the summer, and then noticed at the beginning of winter how this sleek coat is exchanged for a thick, fuzzy shag, that looks more like wool than hair? The warm winter coat economizes the heat produced in the furnace of the living body, and keeps it from being scattered to waste as quickly as it is through the sleek summer coat. This is nature’s other plan of meeting the difficulty brought about by the changing temperature of the air. Nearly all animals belonging to temperate and cold climates have this change of apparel provided for them in spring and autumn, but in some cases the change is rendered very striking in consequence of a summer garment of bright gay colors being replaced by a winter one of pure and spotless white. The fierce tyrant of the ice land himself, the polar bear, has a dingy yellow coat during the summer, but puts on furs as snowy as his own realms when once the summer sun has disappeared. These white winter furs are always warmer than dark ones. Birds which do not migrate to warmer regions of the earth in the cold season, have winter and summer suits of apparel, just in the same way as quadrupeds. In the winter a lining of the thick, soft white down is added beneath the outer feathers. There is one little bird which comes to England in the late autumn, driven there by the still greater cold further north, and which is familiarly known as having two remarkably different costumes for his English and his foreign residence. In England the snow-bunting appears with a white body and tail, but abroad and in summer time he is distinguished by a brilliant black tail and back, and a body and head of pure white.

Man follows the example which nature has set before him, in the matter of clothing. He prepares himself stout warm garments for winter time, and thin cool ones for the summer; and not only this; in the hottest regions of the earth, where there is most sunshine, he commonly goes nearly naked, while in the coldest regions, near the poles, he puts on the heaviest and warmest woolens and furs that he can procure. Now this is one reason why man has been apparently so uncared for by nature in the particular of clothing. The seeming indifference and carelessness is really consideration of the highest kind. All the different races of the lower animals have their own narrow tracts assigned them for their residence. In these tracts there is no very extreme diversity of temperature, and provision is therefore easily made to adapt their clothing to it just so far as is required. The human race, on the other hand, is intended to cover the entire earth, and to subdue it; to spread itself from the burning tropics to the frigid poles. The heat which has to be borne in the tropics, is as much greater than that which is experienced near the poles in winter time, as boiling water is hotter than ice. At the poles, one hundred degrees of frost often occur. In India, there are occasionally one hundred and thirty degrees of heat under the canvas of tents. It therefore becomes an affair of almost absolute necessity, that the skin of the widely scattered lords of creation should be as unencumbered as possible, and that warm clothing should have to be prepared and added as a covering whenever circumstances call for its use. The head only, of the human being, has a natural fur garment. This part of the body is covered with hair, because the most delicate portion of the entire frame, the brain, is contained within it. The skull is protected by hair, that the brain may not be hurt by too sudden a change from cold to heat, or from heat to cold.

There is another advantage attending upon the arrangement which has left human beings dependent upon an artificial supply of clothing, and which has ordained that they shall come into the world with naked skins. In consequence of this arrangement it is very easy to secure that amount of cleanliness which is necessary for the preservation of the health of such delicately framed creatures. The artificial clothes can be altogether changed at will, and they can be washed and aired, as they never could be if they were inseparably attached to the skin. Then, too, they can be removed from the skin in the early morning, or at convenient intervals, and its surface can be thoroughly cleansed and purified by bathing with water. Just think of the difference of going into a bath of refreshing water unencumbered by clothes, and of doing the same with thick, dabby garments clinging about you, and having to shake yourselves like great Newfoundland dogs when you come out; and also recall to mind the pleasure you experience every time you change soiled linen for clean, and you will become sensible of how much you owe to beneficent nature for having left you destitute of the feathers of the bird, or the fur of the bear. The extreme importance of making a fair use of this privilege has been already alluded to in its proper place.

But nature has effected yet another very bountiful provision for the comfort and safety of her tender charge, the living human animal. Even when only covered by very light clothing, it is possible human beings may be placed in air which is so warm, that heat is not carried off from their bodies so fast as it is produced in the interior furnace. In India, it sometimes happens that the air gets to be even hotter than the living body. All movement of the air, then, heats, rather than cools. Under such circumstances, nature adopts a very effectual course to prevent warmth from collecting more and more in the frame, until a disagreeable and injurious amount has been reached. Having first reduced the supply of fuel to the smallest limits consistent with keeping the fire going, by lessening the appetite, and by taking away the craving for heating food, and having given a hint to adopt such outer coverings for the body as are as little obstructive of the passage of heat as possible, the heat drenches the surface of the frame abundantly with moisture, which has the power to cool by its ready evaporation. Take a small piece of wet linen and lay it upon your forehead, or upon your arm, leaving it freely exposed to the air, and you will find, that as the moisture evaporates from the linen, your skin underneath will feel colder and colder. The heat of the skin is used up in converting the moisture of the linen into steam, exactly as the heat of a fire is used up in converting the water of a kettle into steam when this is made to boil. The steam flies away with the warmth of the skin very rapidly, and consequently the skin soon comes to feel cold. Now, when the body gets to be very warm, and the over-heated blood is rapidly pouring through the channels of its supply pipes, then the three millions of little holes or pores, which lie upon its surface, are opened, and floods of vapor and water are poured through them, producing just the same kind of effect as wet linen would do. This action is termed “perspiration,” or a “steaming through” the pores of the skin. The breathing blows up, or fans the slow furnace contained within the living animal frame, and so heats it above the surrounding air. The perspiration carries away portions of this heat when it has been raised too high, and so cools the heated body down. Some moisture also escapes as steam from the lungs and through the mouth in breathing, thus assisting the perspiring skin in its office of diminishing the excessive warmth of the body. You have often seen dogs, which have been heated by running, pant with opened mouths and outstretched tongues, the vapor steaming forth from their gaping throats. Dogs cool themselves in this way because they have very little perspiration passing through their skins. Their perspiration is really from their throats, rather than from their skins. Human beings sometimes lose, in hot weather, as much as five pints of water in twenty-four hours, by exhalation through the lungs and skin.

Give me now, good reader, your close attention for just a few minutes while I return to the notion with which we started on beginning the consideration of this subject, so that I may fit it into its right place, and leave it well packed away with the other notions that we have gained, while studying the value and uses of air, water, and food. Your body is a living laboratory, formed of an enormous quantity of little chambers and vessels. From a strong central force-pump, placed in the middle of that laboratory, liquefied food, or blood, is streamed out through branching supply-pipes to the several chambers, to carry to them the materials that have to be operated upon in their cavities for the production of animal power and warmth. The force-pump acts by repeated short strokes, but the liquefied food flows through chambers of the laboratory in continuous, even currents, because the supply-pipes are made of yielding and elastic substance, like India-rubber, and not of hard, stiff substance, like metal or wood. As the liquefied food gushes out from the force-pump, the elastic walls of the supply-pipes are stretched by the gush, but directly afterwards they shrink back again, as India-rubber would do, shut close a valve that prevents all return of the liquid into the force-pump, and so compel the liquid to run onwards in the other direction, through the pipes. Before the shrinking in of the pipes has altogether ended, the force-pump renews its stroke, and so the onward flow of the liquid never stays, although the pump has to make beat after beat. The liquefied food gushes out from the force-pump with a speed of about a foot in each second; but it has to supply such an enormous host of small chambers in the remote parts of the laboratory, that it does not flow through them with a speed greater than an inch in a minute. This, however, is no disadvantage, as it affords plenty of time for the full carrying out of all the intended changes in those chambers, whereby animal power and warmth are to be produced.

Remember, then, that as your heart beats in your chest, second after second, the red blood flushes through every crevice and every fibre of your living frame, just as it does through your cheek when it is crimsoned with a blush. Seventy or eighty times every minute, your beating heart pumps, and constantly, so long as you are alive, the flushing blood streams on everywhere. The blood, however, streams on in this continuous way, because its flow is not stopped, even when it has reached the remotest chambers and fibers. The trunks of the supply-pipes divide into branching twigs, which get very fine indeed where they are in connection with the working chambers of the laboratory, and which then lead on into return-pipes, that are gathered together into enlarging trunks, These, in their turn, are collected into main tubes which end in the cavity of the heart. At the extremity of these main trunks of the return-pipes, valves are so placed as to prevent the pumping action of the heart from forcing the blood back into them. Thus, as your heart pumps, swelling out and drawing in its walls, the blood flows into its cavity by the return-pipes, and is squeezed out therefrom through the supply-pipes. It always streams in one direction. It circulates through the living frame which it flushes; that is, it goes in an endless circle, now through the heart, now through the supply-pipes, now through the return-pipes, and now starts once again through the heart.

But as your blood thus circulates, through your living frame, fresh nourishment, newly dissolved food, is added in some places to its streams; in other places nourishment and fuel are taken from it to furnish the active chambers of the laboratory with warmth and power; in other places worn-out substance is added to it to be carried away in its current; and at other places this worn-out substance is poured away from it through the outlets provided for its removal. The principal outlets through which the waste of your living laboratory is poured away, have been already spoken of in detail—they are the pores of the skin, the drains of the laboratory; and the pores of the lungs, that with the mouth form the chimney of the laboratory through which the smoke and the vapors from the burned fuel fly away. In addition to these outlets, there is, however, another series by which some denser matters, which can not be got through either the skin-pores or the lungs, are streamed away. This series is continually in operation, but the details of its arrangements are so ingeniously planned, that it accommodates its work to the demand of each passing instant. When, for instance, the perspiring pores of the skin are widely open for the cooling of the frame, and an increased amount of liquid is consequently steamed away through them, then these outlets are narrowed; but when, on the other hand, the skin-pores are closed, or when any extra flood of liquid is thrown into the interior of the frame during cold weather, then the additional outlets at once are brought into very active play.

Now, just imagine the case of a large town, in which there is a certain quantity of waste liquid needing to be carried away through drain-pipes every day, but in which also there occur occasional excessive floods of rain, which must have a way of escape provided for them whenever they happen. How clever you would think it if some skillful engineer fixed valves in the drain-pipes of that town, which kept themselves fast closed under ordinary circumstances, but which opened of their own accord whenever the pressure of an extra flood came, and so allowed the excess of liquid to flow safely and freely away. Such has really been the proceeding of the skillful Engineer of your living frame. Your body is exposed to the risk of occasional excessive floods. When the weather is very cold, for instance, the pores of your skin are closed, and not more than a single pint of liquid can force its way out through them, in the place of the four pints which would pass in warm weather. Much of the water which would otherwise have escaped from the channels of the supply-pipes, then remains in them, coursing round in the progress of the circulation. Sometimes, too, in all probability you will be tempted to swallow an unreasonable quantity of liquid, beyond any demand the mere process of cooling an over-heated frame can require. But whenever you have thus set up an unusual internal flood, sluice-gates are opened, and through these the excess is rapidly poured until the flood is got rid of. In those parts of your body which have been named the kidneys, there are pores through which waste liquid is always draining, without being turned into vapor or steam; but in the kidneys there are also chambers composed of very fine walls, which are strong enough to prevent fluid from passing through them when it is only pressed by a gentle force, but which are not strong enough to do so when the pressure becomes greater in consequence of the over-flooding of the supply-pipes. The kidneys are the sluice-gates of your body, provided with outlets for common use, and with self-acting valves which come into operation upon occasions of excessive flood.

Thus astonishing, then, is the care which has been taken in perfecting the arrangements of the heating service of that complicated laboratory, your living body. Fuel is thrown into an internal furnace, more or less plentifully, according to need. The fuel is there burned, and fanned by air-blasts, which are strengthened or weakened as the occasion may require. The heat produced by the burning is economized by external packings and wrappings, or it is scattered by the opening of evaporating pores on the external surface, and by the drenching of that surface with steaming moisture; and self-acting valves are provided to regulate the quantity of liquid contained in the supply-pipes, so that the cooling pores may never be forced into mischievous activity by the mere pressure of excess in their channels, at a time when the body is already sufficiently chill.

When cold is suddenly applied to the previously warm skin of the living body, it shuts up all the perspiring pores at once, and then empties its supply-pipes of their streaming blood inwards. You know how pale and numb your skin becomes on a cold frosty day, when you stand quietly in the chilling air. That is because the cold squeezes all the blood out of the small vessels of your skin. But where do you suppose the squeezed-out blood goes to? It flows directly into the several internal parts, choking up and overloading their channels. If the skin be soon made warm again, the overloaded parts of the inside once more get emptied, and recover their usual freedom; but if it be kept cold, then their overloading and choking continues, and great discomfort is experienced. All kinds of inflammations and disorders are produced in this way. What are commonly known as colds are internal obstructions of this nature. Cold in the head is an affection in which the lining of the nostrils is overcharged with stagnating blood. Sore throat is caused by a similar condition in the lining of the throat. And cough by the same state in the lining of the vessels and cavities of the chest.

The mere application of a chill temperature to the skin is not alone, however, enough to give a cold. This result chiefly comes when the application has been made while the body is in a weakened or exhausted state, and therefore has not the power to resist and overcome the internal disturbance of the even blood-flow. Colds are nearly always caught in consequence of a sudden exposure of the body to a chill, either when it is in a state of exhaustion and fatigue from sustained exertion, or when it has been for some time previously over-heated. Excess of heat itself soon produces exhaustion, and depression of the strength and the powers of life. When a chill is applied to the skin while the body is fresh and strong, as, for instance, when a man pours cold water over himself the instant he gets out of a warm bed in the morning, after a sound and refreshing sleep, it does no harm, for this reason: First, the blood is driven away from the supply-pipes of the skin by the cold, and flows inwards; but the refreshed heart, then becoming sensible of its arrival, rouses itself to increased effort, and prevents obstruction by pumping on the liquid more vigorously. By this means blood is soon sent back again to the skin in great abundance, and makes it glow with renewed warmth. It is only when the cold is very severe, or very long continued, that this re-action, as it is called, would be hindered, and internal disorder be likely to be set up.

Here, then, is one of the advantages of employing warm clothing. It prevents the catching of cold by protecting the skin from sudden chills at a time when the internal parts of the frame are depressed and unable to meet, without injury, the effects which follow upon it. If at any time you are very weary, and very warm, remember, then, that you must keep yourself warm by drawing more clothes round you, or by some other plan. Want of attention to this very simple proceeding, or absolute ignorance that it ought to be adopted, is among the common means whereby men lay up for themselves disease and suffering, and cause sickness to take the place of health.

How constantly it happens, at the very first appearance of fine weather in spring, that sore throats and coughs and colds are met with everywhere. This is nearly always because people are then tempted to throw aside the warm clothing which they have used through the winter, and so to leave their skins very much more exposed to the influences of the sudden chills, which are quite sure to occur at this time. Just observe what nature herself does in this matter. She does not take off the horse’s warm coat the moment the spring sunshine bursts out in the sky. She compels him to keep it upon his back, at the risk of his being a good deal encumbered by it now and then, because it is better he should submit to this small inconvenience for a time, rather than be exposed to the danger of a grave disease. As you may advantageously take a lesson from the bee as to the management of fresh air in your dwellings, so you may advantageously go to the quadruped to learn how to manage the alteration of your clothing at the change of the seasons. When you see the horse putting on his fine silken garment for summer, follow his example; but until you do see this, be wise, and still keep within the protection of your winter wools and furs.

There is another plan by which people every day expose themselves to the danger of catching cold, and of so falling into disease. They commonly sit in very draughty rooms; apartments which are warmed by bright fires, but which are at the same time chilled by cold wind rushing in at large crannies and crevices, far beyond the quantity which is needed for the mere supply of pure air. Such rooms are warm and cold climates brought together in a nutshell. There is a scorching summer near the fire, and a freezing winter near the window at the same instant. Merely walking about the room therefore takes the body in a moment from one climate to another, and this must happen sometimes when the body is not prepared to meet, and accommodate itself to, the change. A chilled surface, and internal obstructions result, and colds and diseases follow very soon. The inside of rooms should be in winter time very much what they are in the summer season; that is, not too hot, but equally warm in all parts, and with a sufficient current of air passing through them to keep them pure, although not with enough to set up dangerous draughts. If there are draughts, then the protection of warm clothing must be constantly employed, to prevent the chilling influence from attacking the skin. Warm and undraughty dwelling-rooms are the natural allies of warm clothes in health-preserving power.

There is another very excellent companion and helper of warm clothes in this good work. This helper is “exercise.” If, when you are weary and warm, and have no additional clothes to draw round you on the instant to prevent a chill, you sit down or stand still in the cold wind, you will be nearly sure to catch cold, and to be made ill. But if, on the other hand, you keep moving about until you can either clothe yourself more warmly, or go into a warm room, then you will be almost as certain to escape without harm. Exercise aids the heart in keeping the blood moving briskly, and if at any time there is an inclination for the blood-flow to stagnate and get obstructed internally, then exercise overcomes the obstruction, and sends the lagging blood cheerily on toward all parts of the frame, and back toward the skin. Brisk exercise thus possesses the power to overcome mischief, as well as to prevent it. Its influence in quickening and sustaining the flow of the blood-streams through the supply-pipes of the body, necessarily leads in the end to the strengthening of every structure in the frame, and to the rousing of every operation that is carried on in the living laboratory. Every one who values the blessing of health and strength will do well, if his daily task is not one of exertion in the open air, to make such a task for himself. One hour at least out of the twenty-four should be spent in quickening the blood-streams, and in deepening the breathing by walking briskly in some open space where the fresh winds of heaven have free play.

But we will now imagine that in ignorance of all these particulars, or in consequence of some long-continued exertion and exposure which the demands of duty made it altogether impossible for you to avoid, you have caught a cold, and are beginning to suffer from a sore throat, or a cough, or some other sign that matters within are not as they should be. What, under such circumstances, ought you to do to stop the cold, and get rid of it, before serious disorder is brought about? Here, again, warm clothing is of the highest value. If the chilled surface be at once closely covered up, and be kept covered, the blood is soon drawn back to the skin, and the internal obstructions are in this way overcome. The best possible way to get rid of a cold quickly, for those who can follow it, is to go to bed as soon as it begins, and to keep there until the cold is cured. If you can not follow this plan, then drink as little of any fluid as you can for four or five days, and there will soon be not enough blood, as regards quantity, in your body, to keep internal parts overcharged, and they will be relieved, and you will get well. There is this evil in the first plan of curing a cold: people who have lain in bed for some time, come out of it with the pores of their skins more than usually opened, and more than usually disposed to suffer from any fresh chill. People who pursue the second plan may be exposed in any way without meeting this risk.

There are thus, then, golden rules for the management of the clothing, as well as for the management of the feeding, which all people should have stamped on their understandings, and engraved upon their memories. These are:

Follow the example which nature sets, and wear thicker clothing in cold weather than in warm.

Do not lay aside the warm clothing of winter, as soon as fine, mild weather seems to have begun, but wait until you see that nature is taking their winter garments away from the birds and the beasts.

Never expose yourself to a chill without extra clothing, when you are weary, as well as warm.

Never sit in draughts of cold air without putting on extra clothing.

Keep in brisk exercise when you are unable to avoid currents of chill air, and are at the same time fatigued by exertion, and thinly clad.

Never remain in damp clothes longer than you can help. Damp clothes chill the surface of the body very rapidly by carrying away its heat as the moisture is turned into steam. Wet stockings, and boots, or shoes, are injurious, for the same reason as other kinds of wet clothing. They are not more dangerous than other kinds of damp garments, but they have to be encountered much more frequently on account of the ground often remaining wet for long periods, when there is no great excess of moisture in the air. Wet feet produce harm more frequently than wet clothes, because they are much more common.

By a careful and constant attendance to the principles laid down in these golden rules, the attacks of many grave diseases may be avoided, and the advantage which is intended to result from the influence of warm clothes may be most certainly secured.

[IN HIM CONFIDING.]

The clouds hang heavy round my way,

I can not see;

But through the darkness I believe

God leadeth me.

’Tis sweet to keep my hand in his,

While all is dim;

To close my weary, aching eyes,

And follow him.

Through many a thorny path he leads