is trying to separate itself from the natural religion of mankind, and to pass off for something better than a laborer.

What intellect God puts into the strokes of every day, as he thinks it not degrading to have his petroleum ready for the tap, his veins of coal and granite ready for the blaster's drill, his oak rimmed for keelsons with the hardness of a thousand years! He puts slag into his iron, quartz into his gold, wildness and peril into his whales, and rejoices to provoke our honest labor. There is not a stroke made by pen or pickaxe, that is not in answer to the mind of God. He holds the most precious things beyond our arm's length-gems, gold, beauty; he worketh hitherto to make them, and we must work to win them-diamonds in the river channels, pearls in dusky Indian seas, liberty in every acre of the soil. How long His mind must brood before he can bring forests to lignite, and lignite to coal; before carbon will bleach and whiten into the Koh-i-nor, before the soil of a republic can be transmuted into the rights of man!

This is all the industry of God, who knows that idleness is chaos, and an idle man the soul's disorganizer.

* * * *

No privilege is high enough to look down on God's imagination; for having once conceived his own right mind, he devotes eternity to Virtue and the Rights of Man.-John Weiss.

FREE RELIGION AND THE FREE State.

What are the safeguards of a Free State? Intelligence surely is one. But as that advances, it gives the individual mind the consciousness of its own dignity, its command of natural law, its freedom, its direct access to truth, its right to apply the same universal principles to all persons, races, religions. But intelligent mind alone cannot save a State; or Greece had not fallen. There is a little European State which has passed through the intestine strifes of petty cantons in which Greece perished, and come out united and free. Switzerland has large practical intelligence: her schools are the

models of this century; her education of the masses leaves England and France a hundred years in the background. She has another element of stability, behind intelligence,—namely, strength of moral conviction. Now Switzerland is intensely religious. These cantonal wars have not been like the Greek, political, so much as religious; very often pure wars of sect. There is no country where the hostilities of creeds have been so inveterate. The Jew was, until very recently, under heavier disabilities in some parts of Switzerland than in any other enlightened country. Yet such is the moral energy of that people, their sense of justice, their devotion to liberty, that they have put the intensest religious antagonisms underfoot, and are most united by disparagement of mere dogma in the interest of practical duty. The little mountain fastness has been the refuge of free thought for all Europe. It has had to yield now and then a little, as recently in complying so far with the demands of a powerful neighbor as to withdraw Mazzini, the religious and political radical, from its Italian borders; but it is only to hold him closer to its own bosom. Switzerland is saved only by reverence for liberty. once symbol and guardian of a Free

Her mountains are at Religious Faith.

America is trying a more radical and a broader experiment than Switzerland. We are blending the antagonisms of all races and the diversities of all faiths. We are giving equal powers to the best and the worst, to the wisest and the most ignorant, among the tribes of men. The busy, peaceful hordes of Asia re-enforce us from the West; the scum of Europe floats over to us from the East; the barbarous poor white, and his perhaps more barbarous social master, are more than half our South; the very Esquimaux peep in upon our North. And, to meet these multifold demands, we have summoned the free thought and faith, the latest science of the world. We have a new continent, new liberties, new inspirations. Do we imagine that out of these combinations there shall not come creative experience such as never came before since the world was made, not even in that analogous grand concourse of races and

beliefs in the Roman Empire, out of which Christianity first emerged? Our national experiment, covering the race, demands the universal religion that shall spring from the fusion of all experiences and all gifts. Not the blood of all races only is now to be mixed: but the very day is new; the day of mind, of heart, of sun and soil. The free self-governing tribes, face to face with nature, alive with scientific ardor, conscious of unparalleled opportunity, of a spiritual vision peculiar to the hour, are no subjects for the old-world faith in a prescribed historical centre.

Let the free State make free religion; the nation of nations stand open to the coming God, whom the exclusive revelations could not reveal. Stand, each in the spiritual freedom that is open eye and ear, for the practical and intellectual service that shall further others, and soul and State alike are saved.

air that assures us.

It is not possible to make citizenship a dependency on the Messiah. The Constitution wants no name to swear by, concedes to no one religion the sole right to guarantee the Infinite Care. And the whole stress of the time is towards the liberty thus outwardly conditioned. There is something in the very The common sense and practical intelligence of men and women responds to every hint that the old ecclesiastical bondage is but varnish and veneer. The track of American destiny may yet be stormy and perilous; but the Idea that makes our social and political civilization is making our religious faith. Human nature, not exceptional persons; principles before precedents; direct access of each to the light, not approach through title or grace of another; common duties, not exclusive rights; no hierarchies nor lordships, but natural citizenship the highest dignity, to which all exaltation returns,—it is one and the same key that unlocks the great questions, both in law and in faith. The same instinct that lifts the negro to political manhood, and makes democracy a success, refers Jesus to his own spiritual manhood, and vindicates religious freedom.-Samuel Johnson.

CULTURE DEMANDED BY MODERN LIFE

The mind of our age is confronted with a host of urgent questions, such as the Perils of Misgovernment, the Limits of Legislation, the Management of Criminals, of the Insane, the Congenitally Defective, and the Pauper Class; the operation of Charities, the Philosophy of Philanthropy, the Relations of Sex and Race, International Ethics, the Freedom of Trade, the Rights of Industry, Property in Ideas, Public Hygiene, Primary Education, Religious Liberty, the Rights of Invention, Political Representation, and many others, which inosculate and interfuse into the great total of practical inquiry which challenges the intellect of our times; and it is this which the classical scholar evades, when he shrinks from the present and retires into the past. And well he may; for the mastery of the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome, and culture in unprogressive studies, furnish neither suitable ideas nor mental habits for this kind of work.

Science, grounding itself in the order and truth of nature, armed with the appropriate knowledge, and inspired with the hope of a better future, to which it sees all things tending, enters the great field, as properly its own, and will train its votaries to that breadth of view, that robust boldness of treatment, and that patient and dispassionate temper which imminent questions of the times so decisively demand.

In his late instructive lecture on the "Development of Ideas in Physical Science," Professor Leibig shows that it has been a slow organic growth, depending upon deeper conditions than the mere favor or opposition of Church or State. He shows that in Greece the progress of science was arrested by its slavesystem, points out the necessity of abounding wealth to give leisure for thought and culture, and the importance of these social conditions which bring into intimate intercourse all classes of thinkers and workers, upon the mutual co-operation of which the advance of science and of society depends. He says: "Freedom, that is the absence of all restrictions which

can prevent men from using to their advantage the powers which God has given them, is the mightiest of all the conditions of progress in civilization and culture;" and adds that "it can hardly be doubted that among the peoples of the North American Free States all the conditions exist for their development to the highest point of culture and civilization attainable by man.”

These are weighty considerations for the educators of this country. Institutions are but expressions of ideas and habits; and the European policy, governmental and ecclesiastical, is grounded upon a culture suited to its necessities, and which has grown up with it in the course of ages. Both idolize the past; both worship precedent, and authority, and both dread independent inquiry into first principles; one recoils from Freedom as the other from Science. Freedom and Science, on the other hand, have had a coeval destiny; have suffered together and grown together. Both break from proscription and throw themselves upon Nature, and the watchword of both is Progress, which consists not in rejecting the past, but in subordinating and outgrowing it, in assimilating and reorganizing its truth, and leaving behind its obsolete forms. In the last century we threw off the trammels of the repressive system, and entered upon the experiment of Free Institutions; but it avails little to shift the external forms, if the old ideas are not replaced by new growths of thought and feeling.-E. L. You

mans.

THE THINKING MACHINE.

Men admire the steam engine of Watt, and the calculating engine of Babbage; but how little do they care for the thinking engine of the Infinite Artificer! They venerate days and dogmas, and ceremonials; but where is the reverence that is due to the most sacred of the things of time, the organism of the soul? We speak of the glories of the stellar universe; but is not the miniature duplicate of that universe in the living brain a more transcendent marvel? We admire the vast