of beauty and acts of loving attention and sympathetic interest.

And yet, by such a comparison, we but faintly see how great have been the effects by this change in the methods of religious training, and how great has been the progress of this law of love.

You have followed me patiently and are asking what share the instructor in the public schools of to-day has in the use of these more favorable methods of religious training in the education of the children of our city and nation. Your opportunity is hardly surpassed even by the parent and home. You have the best of soil the world produces to plant the genial seeds of noble character, and nourish the flowering and the fruitage. You have the first fifteen or twenty years of life-always the best for educational purposes-for always frank, honest, truthful, confiding, and full of enthusiasm and hope, as a rule.

You are not expected or permitted to teach systems of theology, or creeds, and beliefs of any sect of religionists. But you are expected to inculcate and develop that which is far higher and better, the fundamental principle of all true religion-truth and honesty. With these, well understood in theory and constantly practiced in childhood and youth, all other essentials to a perfect character will come in due time. John Stuart Mill says: "Education includes whatever we do for ourselves, and whatever is done for us by others, for the purpose of bringing us nearer the perfection of our nature." In all its lines education is, therefore, an evolution, a development of powers possessed in a more or less dormant state, and not an accretion. It is the culture and strengthening of, and a knowledge of the right use of our faculties of body, mind and soul. It is not cramming ourselves with the attainments of another; but the power to use our own forces to the attainment of the best results we are capable of reaching. Pilate's question, "What is truth?" has been asked in every age since man became a reasoning being, and we may ask it again, and shall probably get no better answer than he received. But for our present purpose, we all know by either inspiration or intellection, what it means in practical life. Truth may be said to be a principle of rectitude, or a criterion by which we measure all our actions. And honesty is the measure of our fidelity in living up to the standards of truth, in all of our relations in life. Our conceptions of truth

will vary at times in our individual lives, and with no two will they appear to be exactly the same; but this is no cause for apprehension, or excuse for want of honest effort to live up to its requirements. The law of growth in all departments of life necessitates a constant margin of incompleteness, and the great crime of every age is not so much improper conceptions of truth, as a lamentable failure to live up to its standards. If the standards of truth rise higher-as they ought to each day -then the honest effort to reach them should be more enthusiastic, determined and persistent. Your mission, as regards religious training, is to hold up these standards of truth higher and higher, and to kindle the zeal of the ardent souls committed to your care to reach them by every means in your power. Everything brings forth after its kind. It is the root of the matter that determines the fruit.

The most conspicuous sin of the age is dissimulation and downright dishonesty. It permeates all branches of social, political, commercial and religious life and practice, and begins largely in the family home circle and in the schools. It enters the very citadel of the soul, and seems to control the whole being. If the youth of our day can be taught to stand up to their convictions of truth, and every faithful effort encouraged, and the least feigning or dissimulation frowned down, the foundations of a good character will be laid. The practice of working scholars-of crowding them forward for passing grades and the rivalries among teachers in this direction--all tend to untruthful and dishonest efforts on the part of pupils, and they soon learn that to pass the examination, or grade, is the thing aimed at, no matter at what expense of character or truthfulness. The examples held up as ideals often have the effect to make the pupil only an imitatorand instead of honestly working with his own faculties, he finds it convenient to borrow of another to help him through his lesson, and early imbibes the practice of using the powers of another instead of his own, which is fatal to all self-dependence and development, besides a fraud upon the other scholars and his teachers and parents. Fifteen years of such practice will make any one thoroughly dishonest and untruthful, when any temporary advantage is to be gained by it. You hold the very gates to the city of true effort in your pupils' lives, and they cannot be too well guarded. It is the little foxes that destroy the vines.

You will allow me, I trust, to suggest what you all know,

that your pupils are often helped, or hindered, by a look, a trivial act, a careless attitude, a sneer, a smile, a habit of dress, a wrong use of words, or an unpleasant or undignified attitude or bearing of the person. In fact your every act tends to strengthen or weaken the character of those subject to your influence. You are always under the white light of the severest criticism, because usually honest criticism. Your scholars, as a rule, look through honest eyes, and usually form wonderfully correct conclusions. They come to you prepared to obey and love you, and cheerfully to work with you. What a field for the highest and most lasting influence you have. If its burdens are heavy, the opportunities and rewards are past measure. No clergyman, or statesman, or even writer, has such a privilege, or can wield such an influence. And when rightly and well used, the memory of those dear ones in the long years to come, amid the dusty conflicts of life's battles-in the sloughs of despond-on the Beulah hill-tops of success-in the cottages and palaces of future generations from crushing sadness of defeat, and from the centers of influence and power-will bring up with love and gratitude, and with thanksgiving, the forms and forces and loving efforts of the faithful teachers; and the victories of to-day in the school-room will be rehearsed to loving ones around the fireside, and you will be held up as the chief inspiration to their successful efforts, and to you will be given the meed of praise. Verily, you shall have your reward.

The Arabian stories tell us of ships pulled to pieces by the loadstone mountain, which drew the nails out of them as they approached. Love and sympathy are the magnets of the race, and will draw to pieces any opposing forces. The pupils must be magnetized by a higher and stronger force than they possess, and while this is hard often upon the magnetizer, yet it perfects the magnetized. This transmission of force to all the parts from the higher to the lower is the law of life.

St. Paul and Herbert Spencer agree as to the conditions of normal growth-the co-operative forces of the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth according to the effectual working in the measure of every part. Neander had two methods for imposing Christian civilization upon the German barbarians. The one was to work downward through some single predominant power; the other, to work from within outward, from a multiplicity

of centers. Both can be most effectively used in the religious training of to-day; the teacher's example, the predominant force working downward, and the child's truth and honesty working upward. Matthew Arnold says that "conduct is three-fourths of life." If there is any truth in this, the teacher who works for conduct works far more efficaciously than the one who labors for intelligence alone. Ethical doctrines must be translated into the social, intellectual and spiritual life to become operative among the people.

Hugh Miller in his dream that the rose could be soon lifted to exalted plains of life by education, and Jeremiah, the old Hebrew prophet, when he said to his people, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good who are accustomed to do evil," were both greatly mistaken as to the laws of education in all its lines. It cannot be obtained suddenly or in brief spaces of time, as Miller would intimate; nor is it impossible, as the prophet Jeremiah would have us infer. But it is a normal. harmonious growth which is more or less rapid according to the environments amid which it is undertaken. The present is the time. The heart, soul and head forces the soil, and the endless future the time for the flowers and the fruits.

III.

THE DARK AGES.

THE CONDITION OF WOMAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL CIVILIZATION.

"Out of the shadow of night
The world moves into light:
It is daybreak everywhere."

-Longfellow.

The central truth revealed in all history is the progress of the race. Not all generations are superior to their immediate successors; but as a whole are continually advancing, and will continue to improve until the consummation of human happiness. And he who cannot recognize this sublime truth of the ages fails to comprehend the import of history. Here and there are nations and periods of experience, which may seem to conflict with this assertion; but the whole scope of the race in its ever varying and yet ever monotonous career will sustain the claim that the movement is ever onward and upward.

In the brief time allotted us we cannot enter as much into detail as would under other circumstances seem desirable, and can only specially instance the greatest exception in the written history of the race, which from its extended period of time, and the widespread influence it excited, might seem to overthrow this rule of progress.

It matters not what era or nation we select, whether the most brilliant or depraved, we shall find the same principles contending for the supremacy, and the results always consummate with the opportunities afforded. Adam and Eve's life, and yours and mine, were and are, in all their essential manifestations much the same. The Egyptian and American, in the main elements of their individual and national life, are as nearly alike as two apples, or boarding school girls. The principal difference is one of degree and not of kind. This must necessarily be so, as human nature, the prime