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political enemies knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was it but her constancy. united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier-who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold as his tribute of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow-suddenly to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood? What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his share in the tragedy? And if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He

did so. The fiery smoke rose up in billowy columns. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only for him, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own preservation, but to leave her to God. That girl, whose latest breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not utter the word recant either with her lips or in her heart. No, she did act, though one should rise from the dead to swear it.

How Curious It Is.

When the life of Daniel Webster-that grand drama--was about drawing to a close, he is represented to have said, "Life— Life-how curious it is!" The word curious was deemed a strange one, but it expressed the very thing. How curious life is, from the cradle to the grave! The forming mind of childhood, busy with the present, and unable to guess the secret of its own existence, is curious. The hopes of youth are curious, reaching forward into the future, and building castles in the perspective for those who entertain them, that will fade away in the sunlight of an older experience. How curious is the first dawning of love; when the young heart surrenders itself to its dreams of bliss, illumined with moonshine! How curious it is, when marriage crowns the wishes, to find the cares of life but begun, and the path all strewn with anxieties that romance had depicted as a road of flowers! How curious it is, says the young mother, as she spreads upon her own the tiny hand of her child, and endeavors to read, in its dim lines, the fortune there hidden! Curious, indeed, would such revealing be. How curious is the greed for gain that controls too much the life of man, leading him away after strange gods, forgetting all the object and good of life in a chase for a phantom light, that ends at last in three-fold Egyptian darkness! How curious is the love of life that clings to the old, and draws them back imploringly to earth, begging for a longer look at time and its frivolities, with eternity and all its joys within their reach! How curious it is, when at length the great end draws nigh, the glazing eye, the struggle, the groan, proclaiming dissolution, and the still clay-so still!-that lately stood by our side in the pride of health and happiness! How curious it is that the realities of the immortal world should be based upon the crumbling vanities of this, and that the path to infinite. life should be through the dark shadow of the grave! How curious it is, in its business and its pleasures, its joys and its sorrows, its

hopes and its fears, its temptations and its triumphs; and, as we contemplate life in all its manifestations, we needs must exclaim, "How curious it is!"

The Puritans.

The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an over-ruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great end of existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremonious homage which other sects substituted for the pure worship of the soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on the intolerable brightness, and to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference between the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority but his favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registers of heralds, they felt assured that they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked down with contempt; for they esteemed them

selves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language, nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged, on whose slightest actions the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest,—who had been destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes had been ordained on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will by the pen of the evangelist and the harp of the prophet. He had been rescued by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had arisen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God.

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men: the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In hig devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the scepter of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or on the

field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were, in fact, the necessary effect of it. The intensity of their feeling on one subject made them tranquil on the other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors, and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means.

Changes of Matter.

The universe is everywhere in motion. The atmosphere is agitated by winds; the world of waters is in perpetual circulation; plants and animals spring from the earth and air and return to them again; all substances around us are undergoing slow transformation; the stony record of the strata are but histories of past revolutions; our ponderous earth shoots swiftly along its orbit, while the mighty sun, with all its attendant planets, is sweeping cn forever through shoreless space. Nothing around or within us is absolutely at rest.

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