worldly-wise and prudent; and, when at last the horizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the places which have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to say with the regal voluptuary of old: "This also is vanity and a great evil; for what hath a man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored under the sun?" But is this the end? Has God's universe no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts in our nestling-place? Has life's infancy only been provided for ; and beyond this poor nursery-chamber of Time is there no playground for the soul's youth, no broad fields for its manhood? Perchance, could we but lift the curtains of the narrow pin-fold wherein we dwell, we might see that our poor friend and brother whose fate we have thus deplored has by no means lost the reward of his labors, but that in new fields of duty he is cheered even by the tardy recognition of the value of his services in the old. The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours; and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the Past, flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves planted on the banks of Time. Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which the benefactors of our race are at length regarded, may not be to them in their new condition of being sweet and grateful as the perfume of long-forgotten flowers; or that our harvesthymns of rejoicing may not reach the ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds of blessing? Great truths when first told are not always believed, and for that very reason are the more needed, for it is evermore the case that the right word, when first uttered, is an unpopular and denied one. Hence he who undertakes to tread the thorny pathway of Reform-who, smitten with the love of truth and justice, or indignant in view of wrong, and insolent oppression, is rashly inclined to throw himself at once into that great conflict, which the Persian seer not untruly represented as a war between light and darkness—would do well to count the cost. To the reformer, in an especial manner, comes home the truth that whoso ruleth his own spirit is greater than him who taketh a city. Patience, hope, charity, watchfulness unto prayer, how needful are all these to success! Without them he is in danger of ingloriously giving up his contest with error and prejudice at the first repulse; or, with that spiteful philanthropy which we sometimes witness, taking a sick world by the nose, like a spoiled child, and endeavoring to force down its throat the long rejected nostrums prepared for its relief. What then! Shall we, in view of these things call back young and generous spirits, just entering upon the perilous pathway? God forbid! Welcome, thrice welcome, rather. Let them go forward, not unwarned of the danger, nor unreminded of the pleasures which belong to the service of humanity. Great is the consciousness of right. Sweet is the answer of a good conscience. He who pays his whole-hearted homage to Truth and Duty-who swears his life-long fealty on their altars, and rises up a Nazarite consecrated to their holy service— is not without his solace and enjoyment, when, to the eyes of others, he seems the most lonely and miserable. He breathes an atmosphere which the multitude know not of—“a serene heaven which they cannot discern rests over him, glorious in its purity and stillness." Nor is he altogether without kindly human sympathies. All generous and earnest hearts which are brought in contact with his own beat evenly with it. All that is good and truthful and lovely in man, whenever and wherever it truly recognizes him, must sooner or later acknowledge his claim to love and reverence. His faith overcomes all things. The future unrolls itself before him, with its waving harvestfields springing up from the seed he is scattering; and he looks forward to the close of life with the calm confidence of one who feels that he has not lived idle and useless; but with hopeful heart and strong arm has labored with God and nature for the Best. And not in vain. In the economy of God, no effort, how ever small, put forth for the right cause, fails of its effect. No voice, however feeble, lifted up for Truth, ever dies amidst the confused noises of Time. Through discords of Sin and Sorrow, Pain, and Wrong, it rises in deathless melody, whose notes of wailing are hereafter to be changed to those of triumph, as they blend with the Great Harmony of a reconciled universe. -F. G. Whittier. FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. The doctrines of forgiveness and love, taught by Jesus, are not, as men seem to suppose, mere beautiful sentimental theories, fit only for heaven: they are rational principles, which may, not only safely, but profitably, be reduced to practice on earth. All divine principles, if suffered to flow out into the ultimates of life, would prove the wisest political economy. The assertion that society makes its own criminals, interferes with the theological opinions of some. They argue that God leaves the will of man free, und therefore every individual is responsible for his own sin. Whether the same action is equally a sin in the sight of God, when committed by individuals in totally different circumstances, I will not attempt to discuss. Such questions should reverently be left to Him who made the heart, and who alone can judge it. But I feel that if I were to commit a crime, with my education, and the social influences that prop my weakness in every direction, I should be a much worse sinner than a person guilty of the same deed whose childhood had been passed among the lowest haunts of vice, and whose after years had been unvisited by outward influences to purify and refine. The degree of conviction resisted would be the measure of my sin. The simple fact is, human beings stand between two kinds of influences, the inward and the outward. The inward is the spirit of God, which strives with us always. The outward is the influence of Education, Society, Government, etc. In a right state of things, these two would be in perfect harmony; but it is painfully obvious that they are now discordant. Society should stand to her poor in the relation of a parent, not of a master. People that are most unwilling to admit that external circumstances have an important agency in producing crime, are nevertheless extremely careful to place their children under safe outward influences. So little do they trust their free will to the guidance of Providence, they often fear to have them attend schools taught by persons whose creeds they believe to be untrue. If governments took equal paternal care, if they would spend more money to prevent crime, they need spend far less to punish it.-Lydia Maria Child. SPIRITUAL CHRISTIANITY. In its first movement in Christian history that Spirit was unfettered by creeds, in the modern sense. St. Paul had no theology, according to our use of that term, and no literature to impose as law for the Church, and as the channel of grace in the future of Christendom. He struggled with all his fervor to get the idea of a free and common communication of the Divine Spirit to all races, through a risen head of our humanity, enthroned over the whole Christian mind as its only mental creed and bond. What we call his theology was mostly his interpretation of the religious records and movements of the past—and that for an immediate, a temporary and pressing issue. He strove to convince the Jewish part of the Church that, out of their own documents, they were condemned for exclusiveness in denying the equal in all nations by the plan of Divine Providence. And the New Testament documents taken together do not present any shapen, interlocked, systematical system of Christianity to the understanding. They were never intended to fix the form, and to enfigure infinite truth for the intellect of a church that was to last thousands of years in an advancing civilization. It is very difficult for any scholar, studying the facts without prejudice, to make the philosophy of religion by St. James coincide with that of St. Paul; or the conceptions of the church in the Apocalypse and in Galatians identical. We do not get the light of theological science in equal clearness, or in harmonious hues, from these fragments of the primitive thought of the church. But we do get the spirit through them all in uniform intensity. They give us truth of the eternal order; heat, and electric currents, and charges from the invisible world in equal measures. Of what consequence is it how ade_ quately or accordantly they convey the perceptions of the infinite reason in the mysteries of theology, if they flood us with the deeper truth of the infinite essence; if they are batteries for shedding the "powers of the world to come" on the torpid conscience, the disloyal or flaccid will, the corrupt imag ination, the withering heart; if they make us feel the holiness, the justice, the unsounded charity of God; if they restore the proportions of things to our moral vision, reducing this world to a speck within the soul's world, and curtained from it by a film that may break for us to-morrow? Ah, how brutally these marvelous records have been treated under our theories of a minute and infallible intellectual inspiration! How men have crushed and cut them to make poetry, and precept, and vision, and mystic vagueness of utterance, and Oriental hyperbole, and hot rhetoric for an emergency, and well-weighed judgments, and lyric raptures, fit together like the puzzle-maps of wood with which children play, into an outlined map of eternal wisdom, consistent and complete! It is not more reverent and wise to look at those chapters of fragmentary scrolls of an inspiration that breathed the forces, and not the science of the Infinite into the first generations of Christendom? Shall we not thus see them set around with the pure splendor of the Spirit, deeply tinged with different human temperaments, as types of the diverse genius which the gospel has sanctified in history? * * * And we have a right to say now, in the interest of vital |