or dressing, it is mournful to see how many of our youth of both sexes are sacrificing substance and sense, ingenuousness, vigorous thought, and true manliness of character. It is daubing the temple of our eternity with untempered mortar. Under such influences, and guided by such aspirations, what wrecks are made! The youthful voyager on life's river, nobly freighted, nobly destined, is caught in one of these side eddies, where feathers and drift wood circle away their existence. Here he sports in the foam, till, with the common drift, he disappears through the giddy, turbid centre.

ary

To gratify this passion for enjoyment, feasting and display, gold is in large demand. So to appearance the love of it is the master passion of the nation. And yet we incline to think that we are not so much a money-loving, as a money-using people. It is not characteristic of the Americans to amass and hoard, but rather to get and use. Hence this passion is rather auxiliand instrumental to the others that we have mentioned. They can be gratified only through money, and so they goad us on to toil for it, and toil we do. To get gold we fill up valleys, tunnel mountains, bridge rivers, and pour them through cotton factories. We stretch the iron track away for thousands of miles, that dollars may come to us faster and easier. We harness the lightning to the endless wire, and convert the bolts of heaven into couriers, to run express to and fro for our purses.' Just now we are threading the icebergs of the arctic with our speaking wires that we may be on social terms and in daily intercourse with the north pole and all beyond about per cents. We vex the waters of the Yellowstone, the Amazon and the Nile. We make glass beads for the Indian, and railroads and steam engines for the autocrat of Russia. We pick gums, spices, and precious stones, from the scorching sands of the equator, and through the frozen oceans we chase the whale. We chaffer with the Arab of the desert, with the animal Hottentot, the ice-housed Laplander, and the polyglot swarms of middle and southern Europe. We retail Fresh Pond ice in the streets of Calcutta, and calico in the city of the Caliphs. And but yesterday our navy began to stand off and on the strange shores of Japan, with the true American question, "How will you trade ?" There is no ocean breeze but it fills an American

sail, no navigable stream, but it boils in the wake of an American keel. No island, but the footprints of Americans are on it, no tribe or city, but there is heard therein our accent of barter and trade.

And all this for gold! To multiply dollars, our vast population, from ocean to ocean, is a bee-hive of agitation, an ant-hill of labor, each tugging to carry off his particle of dust.

We are aware that this passion and work are mingled with love of country, of knowledge, of national fame, and of the spread of noble principles. We by no means forget or lightly esteem our national enterprise. We love to think of the iron energy of a people whose will is as destiny, whose perseverance is as untiring as gravitation, whose footsteps go forth as the morning into all lands, whose hands gather treasure from city and desert, ocean and mountain-top, palace and iceberg. We love to dwell on the hardy enterprise that yearly turns a vast wilderness into a fruitful field, that pushes along the panting steamer, where till yesterday was only the Indian canoe, that makes the forest of to-day give place to-morrow to the bustling, jostling, struggling sons of trade. We love to contemplate the sublime project of sundering two continents, mingling two oceans, at the isthmus of Tehuantepec, and of casting up a highway for the nations across our entire continent, having one depot at the rising and one at the setting of the sun, and thereby enriching ourselves with the trade of all the Orient, and forming a new pathway for the commerce of the world. And yet, despite all the good or the glory of this, the admission is forced from us that the motive power and mighty aim of very much of this enterprise is the gain of gold.

So much and so far as this is the end, so far is it temporal and earthy, a reproach to our immortality, and a perversion of our destiny. Or if we regard it as a means, and then scan, as we have, the prominent uses to which it is put, we find the relative position of the mind to the body inverted. The sovereignty of the thinking part of man is usurped by the physical, and thus the quality, as the destiny, that distinguishes him from the mere animal, is obscured and forgotten. Here, then, in this insatiable thirst for gold, a sort of disease, national and chronic, we have another of those influences that distort the

aim, and contract the compass of a just and complete civiliztion.

What is to be done? We must habitually and practically make a more serious and just estimate of man in his nature and worth. In doing this we are not to examine the assessors' list, or call in a surveyor to count his acres, or ask the effect of his nod on exchange. We must look not in his larder, wine cellar, or wardrobe. We must inquire not if his coach be of solid silver, as in the days of Nero, or if his mansion cost one hundred and thirty thousand dollars in borrowed money, as did Cicero's, or if his wife wear one hundred and forty thousand dollars' worth of jewelry, as did Caligula's. These are the common questions, leading to the common error, in the estimation of men.

When we seek a just valuation of a man, we must mainly remember that he has a head and a heart; and in making out our inventory we must note carefully his golden opinions, his jewels of thought, his brilliant ideas. We must turn to every light the diamonds of truth, for which he has delved deep and long and hard, in the mines of knowledge. We must examine, with most absorbing interest, the pearls of great price that adorn his heart. We must prize, not the massive chain on his chronometer, but the iron links of his logic, by which he binds his erring fellow to truth. We must mark, not his leading in the fashions, but his power of word and life, by which, with gentle force, he leads to eminence in virtue and purity. We must inquire, if in giving and receiving knowledge, in the marts of learning, exchange is always above par in his favor. We must ask if he can honor drafts at sight, and to any amount, on his intellectual capital. We must know if his endorsement of a principle is as good as the golden truth counted out thought by thought. We must examine whether his wealth, intellectual and moral, is in good investments, paying sure, frequent and just dividends.

We must look carefully at the amount of mortgage he holds on the libraries of the dead. We must criticise his skill in converting the obsolete and curious literary coin of Greece, Rome and Venice, into the currency of to-day. Specially and above all, we must ask how much of all his treasure he can take with him

when the spirit returns to God who gave it, and how much at the same time will be left as an undevised yet precious inheritance to a growing civilization.

ARTICLE V.

THE POWERS OF THE WORLD TO COME:

AN EXEGESIS OF HEBREWS VI. V.

Δυνάμεις τι μέλλοντος αἰῶνος: What is the meaning of this phraseology, rendered in the common English version, "The powers of the world to come"?

There is no similar formula in the Greek New Testament, nor in the LXX.'s translation of the Old Testament. Therefore we must take the words separately, in order to come at their meaning.

But there is no small difficulty in this, since there is such a multitude of passages in which each word occurs. Thus δύναμις and its derivatives occur in one hundred and eighteen instances in the New Testament, and in no less than one hundred and thirteen in the LXX.; and Trommius gives the following words as its different meanings, viz: potentia, altitudo, vir, opes, copia, robur, turba, vis, manus, castra, bellum, agger, servus, populus, os, exercitus, and militia. In looking through the whole, we may perceive that the single term "influences" may represent them all, and thus we have "The influences of μέλλοντος αἰῶος,” whatever those words may indicate.

Again, μ and μéliovros occur in one hundred and ten passages in the New Testament and in seven of the LXX., if we include the Apocrypha; and in them all we have the meaning "about to be," or "about to come." Thus we have "The influences of the coming air," whatever that may mean.

And now we come to the hill of difficulty," which is to fix the meaning of air. If we refer to its derivation we get the

αἰῶν.

meaning "always existing"; and yet the usus loquendi in Hellenistic Greek is exceedingly diversified. It occurs in no less than four hundred and four instances in both Testaments.

And to give a specimen of the great diversity of usage, take the following passages: Isa. lxiik 9, tàs imigas toù alŭros, "days of old." Ps. cxlii. 3, os vexgous aloros, "as among those long dead"; and, in many passages, where it is used without adjuncts, it seems to be equivalent to "seculum," "ævum," æternitas." These are so numerous that they need not be specified. Again, with various prepositions we have such formulas as the following, viz: d' aivos, "through ages"; s tov alova, "for ever"; siç tov aiova aivos, "to eternity of eternity"; εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων, " for ever and ever.”

Again, it is used as the dwelling place of the Most High; as in Isa. Ivii. 15: τάδε λέγει ὁ ὕψιστος ἐν ὑψίστοις κατοικῶν τὸν αἰῶνα, "Thus saith the high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity."

Again, it seems to mean the earth or the frame of nature; Prov. viii. 23 ; Πρὸ τοῦ αἰῶνος ἐθεμελίωσέ με ; "Before the world was he established me"; and that this was the idea of the LXX. appears from the parallelism that follows; viz., èv kozỳ ngò toũ τὴν γῆν ποιῆσαι, Thy yy joan, "In the beginning, before the making of the earth."

So also in the New Testament, Heb. i. 2; di' ov zai inoiŋoe Tous

ἐποίησε τους

alovas, "By whom he made the worlds." In passing, we may remark that there is no good sense in rendering this phrase according to the Unitarian exegesis; "By whom he constituted the ages," meaning the patriarchal, Mosaic and Christian dispensations. For, although the word might have been thus used by the Jews, it could not have been so used by the writer of the Hebrews; for it would make nonsense in this connection. For the words indicate a physical creation, as all the ancient Fathers from Justin the Martyr downward, strenuously maintained, and such appears to be its logical connection.

To make this the more certain, see Hebrews xi. 3; nioTEL νοοῦμεν κατηρτίσθαι τοὺς αἰῶνας ῥήματι θεοῦ, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the word of God." Notice, moreover, what sense it would make to adopt the Unitarian exegesis of "the ages," in connection with the next phrase,