feet, to one for whom the boon of life has been in the scales overweighed by distress, to one who has tasted the cup containing not gall, but treachery, overreaching ceases to be prudential and the knave becomes the fool. O God, he will say, let me cheat and equivocate no more! All I had or am in this world was in pawn. But I have redeemed my perjured or spendthrift life. On the verge of ruin, I have from the just Judge and mighty Disposer bought my forfeited existence back.

"And in the light of truth

Thy bondman let me live,"

is not to any abstract Duty my prayer.

Out of chasten

ings sore and terrible, childhood is the lesson I have learnt, with graduation beyond all that first innocency knew. Sacred poetry errs not, speaking of

"The Eternal Child."

It is no individual man, but the soul from which all that is manly and womanly is a twofold branch. In an instinct of dependency or derivation, German mystic and American dogmatist alike make piety to consist. We are children of that from which our quality is drawn. So by a metaphor we style one of bright warm temperament a child of the sun. They were 66 sons of thunder" who would call down fire from heaven, and the devil was father of those who would lie and bewray; while even the Pharisees' indignant claim, out of that shameful brand, of God as the real parent is the spirit in every breast affirming its own. nature, origin, and end. Are we part of that we spring

from? So far dependence is lost in communion, and trust becomes assurance. In conscious identity with deity we cannot conceive of death, or experience degeneracy, or be in any state diverse from peace; for the parent shares every privilege with the child.

THE

VII.

TRAINING.

HE impossibility of reducing to unity all qualities suggests for our culture a certain balance. Not too much is the Latin motto; not overdo or o'erstep the modesty of nature, Hamlet's advice to the players. If all be the same as ever, as Hebrew sceptics said, and will be the same a thousand years hence and there is nothing new under the sun, yet all is change, evolution the wheel that never stops, development the blossom never in full bloom. No individual Jesus, but Difference, is that Son of God which is of eternal generation, and of which no metaphysics can give any account. So our wisdom is to avoid excess or defect, and preserve the air, yet please with the variations of the tune we play. Every motion of body or mind is to trim the boat; and nothing within our reach is absolute. It is always a question of more or less, and an impression grows that we have taught inordinately, and not trained enough. We have neglected the material part in favor of the intellectual, and at the cost of the whole. We admit the gymnastic, not like the Greeks as education, only as exercise and recreation for the new mental tasks alone considered worthy an immortal soul.

Base-ball is a nuisance to annoy the passers and hurt real estate. But physiology is informing us that the entire man or woman, of which the boy or girl is the bud, is the subject in hand, and the object a perfect physical as well as spiritual frame, while a class of political and moral monsters that infest the market and senate to mortify honest merchants and honorable men, hint the importance of moral as well as logical lessons in our colleges and schools.

"If

But how lead this human nature? Learning to speak in different dialects disputes the palm with science as a method, and is thought by Max Müller and other philologists, to be the impassable boundary between man and beast, though it is a question if the dog, horse, monkey, parrot, do not take the sense of some words beside the sound of their own names, which they recognize when their back is turned. How far they discriminate and classify, it is impossible to say. a pig could say, I am a pig, he would be a man.” What germ of humanity is in a brute, biology may some day decide; meantime human genius is shown less in the number of tongues spoken, living or dead, than by proficiency in the natural language understood so largely by the brute, and used by the actor on the stage. We run into such diffuse writing and talk, the point now is to reduce the number of vocables, and have " more matter and less art." The ringing in the belfry makes me more religious than the sermon in church, and the music of the choir is more touching than the verses they sing. A venerable clergyman, being deputed by his brethren to thank Madam Sontag for her free concert, prayed that when her time came to

go, she might sing more sweetly if possible in heaven. We shall not be able to carry Bible or hymn-book thither; perhaps mortified that we cannot pick up a word of English or French, or remember the sectarian terms in which we now contend; some new language displacing all the old ones on which an oblivion will fall more fatal than the old confusion of tongues. But we shall utter, somehow, the universal language of love, comprehended by the bird that hops after the crumbs, and the fishes that come in the pond to be fed. How ashamed will be contentious theologians who cannot any longer denominate God or Christ, or angels as they did, nothing left of the Babel they so laboriously built. Let us begin with our children the only conversation we can contine!

Industrial Education hints an idea holding, more than any other, our future destiny. I remember when a boy how the great kite, I flew, pulled so hard I had to be spelled by my playmate; and this idea now draws upon a thousand heart-strings. But the flaming sword, that turned man out of Eden to till the thorny field, has bequeathed such a prejudice against labor that one of its champions has said it cannot now be elevated into a sentiment. Still sticks the Eastern contempt of matter as something God would not soil his hands with; and so, like an artist with apprentices, he employed demons to make the world. The Prussian instruction is mainly a soldier's drill; and our civilization will be barbarism on system, a polish on the weapons of war, till everybody is taught some art of peace. If Adam and Eve fell when they had to work, whoever enriches not the earth falls lower than they or