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We are conscious of our follies, our transgressions, our stumblings by the wayside, and wanderings from the paths of pleasantness and peace. We know how often our hands have wrought iniquity, and we have been mean and cowardly at heart, not daring to do the right which our own souls told us of; and we pray thee that we may suffer from these things, until, greatly ashamed thereof, we turn from them and lead glorious and noble lives.

We thank thee, O Father, for those who make music about our fireside, whose countenance is a benediction on our daily bread, fairer to us than the flowers of earth, or the stars of heaven. We thank thee for those newly born into this world, bringing the fragrance of heaven in the infant's breath; and if we dare not thank thee when our dear ones are born out of this world, and clothed in immortality, yet we thank thee that the eye of our faith can follow them still to the land where tears are wiped away, and the change is from glory to glory.

O Thou who art infinite in thy power, thy wisdom, and thy love, who art the God of the Christian, the Heathen, and the Jew, blessing all mankind which thou hast made to inhabit the whole earth, we thank thee for all thy blessings, and pray that mindful of our nature, and of thy nearness to us, we may learn to live to the full height of the faculties which thou hast given us, cultivating them with such large and generous education that we shall know the truth and it shall make us free, that we may distinguish between those ever living commandments of thine and the teachings of men, that we may enlarge still more the affections that are in us, and that there may be in us such religious trust that all our daily work shall be one great act of service, and sacramental as our prayer.

Thus may we be strengthened, able at all times to run and not be weary, to walk and never faint. Then, when our work on earth is finished, and the clods of the valley are sweet to our weary frames, may we spend eternity in the progressive welfare of thy children. And here on earth may the gleams of that future glory come upon us in our mortal life, clearing

up the difficult paths, and strengthening our hearts. So may thy will be done, on earth and in heaven.

A. B. ALCOTT.

SAVINGS.

-If one's life is not worshipful, no one cares for his professions. Piety is a sentiment: the more natural it is, the wholesomer. Nor is there piety where charity is wanting. "If one love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen." None are deceived as to the spirit of their acquaintances: the instinct of every village, every home, intimates true character. We recognize goodness wherever we find it. 'Tis the same helpful influence, beautifying the meanest as the greatest service by its manners, doing most when least conscious, as if he did it not. Let us have unspoken creeds and these quick and operative.

-Persist in being yourself, and against fate and yourself. Faith and persistency are life's architects, while doubt and despair bury all under the ruins of any endeavor. You may pull all your paradises about your ears save your earliest; that is to be yours sometime. Strive and have; still striving till striving is having. We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes. Nor need we turn sour if we fail to draw the prizes in life's lottery. It were the speck in the fruit, the falling of our manliness into decay. These blanks were all prizes had we the equanimity to take them without whimpering or discontent.

-There is no appeal from the decisions of this High Court of Duty in the breast. The Ought is the Must and the Inevitable. One may misinterpret the voice, may deliberate, disobey the commandment, but cannot escape the consequences of his election. The deed decides.

-Nor is any man greatest standing apart in his individualism; his strength and dignity come by sympathy with the aims of the best men of the community of which he is a member. Yet whoever seeks the crowd, craving popularity for propping repute, forfeits his claim to reverence and expires in the incense he inhales. Stand fast by your convictions and there maintain yourself against every odds. One with yourself, you are one with Almighty God, and a majority against all the world.

Love you none? none? Then are you lost. Love is the key to felicity; nor is there a heaven to him who has it not.

-There is nothing like comparative divinity for emancipating the mind from traditional teachings. Like travel it opens out new and distant regions of the globe of knowledge, and shows the real relations of things to one another.

-What becomes of an age whose youth knows too much? Like the old princes eager to pluck the forbidden pleasures from the stem; the brazen, following fast childhood's golden period, and leaping wildly into the iron, the five points of license; the beautiful bashfulness, nature's ornament and foil, the preserver of chastity, torn, trodden, and lost!

—A period of the world like ours, when thought is so actively engaged in all subjects affecting human welfare, must be deficient in the spiritual element if it have not a solvent for fusing the current creeds, and recombining these in a fresher faith, sufficient for the present, if not for some future generations. In the general diffusion of light, no one can hold the community of minds under the shadow of his special thought, since the revelations made to all races in times past are culminating in a purer dispensation, suited to the new needs of the centuries.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE.

Fear and wonder are the chief elements of superstition. These are supplied by ignorance. Courage and composure. come of knowledge, and grow with it.

The study of the natural sciences—including as it does, the habit of requiring strict proof-constantly diminishes that credulity through which superstition enters, and on which it feeds. Reason and knowledge are conscious of their fallible workings; and therefore do they tolerate differences of opinion. They inspire diffidence as much as ignorance does positiveness. Natural science has already done much to weaken and dispel superstition. It has put astronomy in the place of astrology, and made alchemy and the hunt for the "Philosopher's Stone," and for the "Universal Solvent," give place to Chemistry. It has liberated millions from their degrading bondage to the authority of sacred books, and left their reason as free to play upon the pages of the Bible as us upon the pages of any other book. While the mass of men construct their God out of their dreams and delusions, they who study the natural sciences are carried up through certainties to the certain God. The one imagine, and the other prove the existence and character of God.

The religion of human nature is harmony, not only with human nature, but with all Nature and with God. For every part of Nature is harmonious with every other part of it, and all Nature is in harmony with the Author of all Nature.

And what will become of the Bible when men shall cease to take it as an authority, and to worship it as a fetish, and to possess and prize it as a charm or an amulet? Rather ask, what will become of it in the mean time, and during the superstitious regard for it. For there is no little danger that an age of growing intelligence, disgusted with the exaggerated claims for the Bible, will reject it. But when this book shall, like any other book, be submitted to human judgment, and men feel at liberty to discriminate between the merits of its different parts-as, for instance, the incredible story of Jonah and the whale, and the felt truth of the sermon on the Mount-then will it be a new and inestimable blessing.

Will there, when the priests are gone, be still a demand for preachers? Yes, greater than ever! What will they preach?

Will they, like the priests, spend the time in telling their hearers what religion is? Oh, no; a minute a month will suffice for that! In a dozen words they can say that loving God supremely and the neighbor as ourself, or more briefly, that being true to ourself, is religion; or still more briefly, that being ourself is religion. But the question remains, What will they preach? They will preach duties, they will tell their hearers what religion calls for in the heart and life. And what shall we do for churches when the present ones shall have died out with the priests? We shall have infinitely better; for we shall then have temples in which reason will do as much to enlighten and elevate, as superstition does in the present churches to darken and degrade.

I affirm the supreme importance of religion. The next life is but the continuation of this; and we begin there just where we leave off here. If we are upon low planes here, we shall enter upon low planes there. If here we sustain high relations to wisdom and goodness, we shall there also.-Gerritt Smith.

DISAPPOINTMENT-A TEACHER IN GOD'S SCHOOL.

God keeps a school for his children on earth; and one of his best teachers is named Disappointment. He is a rough teacher; severe in tone and harsh in handling, sometimes, but his tuition is worth all it costs us. We do not pretend to be a very apt learner, but many of our best lessons through life have been taught us by that same stern old schoolmaster, Disappointment.

One lesson we learned was not to be selfish, or imagine that this world was all made for us. If it had been, the sun would have shone just when our hay needed curing, and the rains would have fallen only when our garden thirsted for water. But we found that God ordered things to please himself, and not us. And when our schemes were broken up, and our journey spoiled by the storm, the stern schoolmaster said: "The world was not made for you alone. Do not be selfish. Your

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