appreciate what he lacks; and any demonstration of it stirs his anger and scorn. "Neither cast ye your pearls before swine lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you;" for what can their filthy greed make of aught that is not to be bemired and devoured? Baseness does not believe in generosity, and libels every handsome offer as not made in good faith.

Selfish people think all is selfish. They cannot conceive a generous intent. They impute munificence to mean motives, which they spy out. What is their benefactor after? His own interest somehow! There is a cat in the meal, or infernal machine in the carriage; which, once admitted on their premises, will blow them to pieces; for to them the world, with its floor of rock and ceiling of stars, as it cleaves the eternal deep, is but a shop, and its inhabitants all hucksters. So Satan's favorite trap is trade. How many are caught, till some great credit fails like the stopping of the main wheel in a mill, and the ruin overtakes all who have been unwary in their trust; as some Black Friday dawns with panic over the land, and neither gold nor greenbacks can be paid. Government aid is implored. "Tis interfering with a tornado and thunder-storm sent to clear and purify the commercial air! Utter destruction is feared; but no such squall can wreck the common weal. The ocean is large; leaky and unseaworthy vessels founder or are overset ; rotten enterprises, rash undertakings and over-venturesome speculations burst or sink in the financial blast, as the great balloon was rent apart. But for such providential rebuke, greed of gain would go mad, and all conscience of right

among operators in stocks disappear. Disaster is God's messenger. Insolvency is the judgment-day. Woe to those whom the lightning feels after with the sentence of its sword! But well for the community when the bolt falls! When one was asked to subscribe money to save folks from going to hell, he replied, Not enough of them go there now! It is a sad commentary when our talk is only of unhappy consequences, and not of the sins of business from which they flow. So many millions of property have vanished; but what, in the newspaper, is told of the sacrifice of truth and equity? Who has reckoned the waste of soul? We emphasize calamities, not crimes. But the prosperity of the country is not swamped. Bright spots, which we call Fairs, all over New-England, are proof that, however many swindle, more produce; and, with all honest labor of hand or brain, the hope of a nation thrives.

On the worth of the soul our toiling fathers stood. In their thrift they chose sandy wastes for their burialgrounds. But out of the barren enclosures what immortal expectations rose! The soul is not obsolete. We know the lovers and believers of our kind. know the true-hearted and sincere. It was written of the Roman Coriolanus:

"His nature is too noble for the world;

He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,

We

Or Jove for his power to thunder. His heart's his mouth; What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent;

And, being angry, does forget that ever

He heard the name of death."

Of yet grander stamp I imagine a religious man. He

leans on no external things. He dissolves everything into a thought. He smiles at the trifles men contend about. He drops all dispute. He aims at no victory out of himself. He has no doubt of his destiny; for immortal life is not a question, but a property of the soul. The French Joubert is described as a soul which, having come across a body, made the best of it. To every living spirit the fleshly organs are but temporary tools.

In investments we esteem values that do not fluctuate; not up to-day and down to-morrow. Many species of property hardly trembled in the blast while the North Pacific and Western schemes tumbled with a crash. But all the bonds and mortgages will go by and by! The soul, all we have of it, will stand by us and go with us. In an old Scandinavian legend we read that the king and his warriors were in a long dark hall around a fire. It was night, and in the winter time. Suddenly a little bird flew in at one door and out by another. The king said, That bird is like man on the face of the earth; he flies hither out of the dark, and he only stays for a moment in the light and warmth. Sire, answered the oldest of the warriors, the bird is not lost in the dark, he will find his nest. The soul is the bird; it comes from and returns to the dark; only dark to us with excessive light. It will find its nest! Some recent English voyagers to Spitzbergen by chance carried with them in their cabin a swarm of flies, which they came to regard as companions from their far-off comfortable home. In the extreme Arctic cold the flies began to pine and stiffen and die. The sailors, touched with compassion for their little fellow-creatures, strove

to keep them alive by feeding them with sugar and putting them in the warmest place in the sun on the window-pane. But at length the last one turned over on his back from his tiny feet and gave up the ghost. The men said, to explain their nursing care, that they remembered they were but themselves a sort of flies, perhaps close to the same fate. But the soul is not a fly. It shall never stiffen or grow cold or fold up its wings.

With some shame one presumes to treat such a theme. Talkers and writers run to words, as a poppy to seed, with the same virtue to put people to sleep. Every one must see the picture for himself. My companion in the boat is not content with my telling him of the phosphoric blaze in the hot summer-night as the bow cleaves the smooth bay, but is justly eager to see it himself. Why climb to the main-top of truth through the lubber-hole of authority? Why limit vision to any prophet or chosen race? I am glad to read the Golden Rule in Confucius too, as the florist rejoices to find in Arctic regions some familiar plant, and the English traveller wept over a violet in bloom near the Pacific Sea. Goodness is native in every land, and truth an exotic for no clime. The Lord gives a monopoly of his witnesses to no tribe. No Protective System is established in his domain. Free Trade in goods or ideas must at last prevail; and the branches overhang opposite continents from one root.

IN

X.

VALIDITY.

N religion there are among us three parties in the field: Christian, Extra-Christian, and Anti-Christian; and these exhaust the subject.

Our religion, as observed and established, has a value it is impossible to increase, and to defend the inheritance, to which we have a warranty-deed, is our whole duty; or it is an antiquated superstition, an incumbrance on our property, like Turkey, "the sick man”; or it is an estate to be altered and enriched, as we put new fertilizers into our field, or the modern improvements into a house; a capital not to lie dead but changed, reinvested in a thousand forms, and run like blood in the social frame. The methodical way is not to begin squarely outside of Christianity, and end with impeachments against it. One need not refer to what he is alien from. He has no interest in a duel with it. His true logic were indifference. We are more independent of Great Britain than we were in the revolutionary war; and the Israelites were freer of the Egyptians with the Red Sea rolling between. So, when a religion is done with, you will not talk about it. Yet destructiveness is not the character of any great man, Moses, Mahomet,