dence. But for the grumblers, the Garrisons, Adamses, and Phillipses, the dark wing of slavery would be still overshadowing our land; while in Europe, but for such faultfinders, the despots, wherever there is a spark of liberty, would trample it out by violence or quench it in blood. Paradoxes WHAT startling contradictions, what bein Belief. wildering paradoxes, do we often find in men's opinions and conduct! It is said of "the most Christian king," Louis XV., whose life was one long orgy, that he was strictly orthodox in his religious belief. The victims of his vile pleasures were carefully instructed in the Catholic faith. While he was wallowing in every pollution, he was anxious to keep his harem free from the heresies of the Jansenists. Apropos to these Jansenists, is it not remarkable that they and the reformers before them should have championed liberty of conscience; and that the Jesuits, who believed in the freedom of the will, should have upheld slavery of conscience? By the same law of irony, Zeno, a fatalist in theory, made his disciples heroes; and Epicurus, the upholder of liberty, made his disciples languid and effeminate. So, again, free-thinkers in religion are absolutist in politics, witness Spinoza, Hobbes, Bolingbroke, Hume, and Schopenhauer; while men of cast-iron creeds are democratic. Again, you will sometimes meet with a Darwinian who is a fanatic for equality, and is shocked when he sees the "big fish" in the financial world devour the little, yet who all the while affirms that, by the laws of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, this is precisely what is going on in the animal world, and that the law is beneficent, being indispensable to progress. She did as HAVE you ever read Mrs. C. M. Kirkland's Requested. books, "A Western Home; Who 'll Follow?" "The Evening Book," etc.? She was one of the most attractive female writers of the first half of this century, and the forgetfulness into which she has so speedily sunk, with all her wit, wisdom, and shrewd sense, strikingly shows how fleeting is literary fame. A friend in Chicago, where she once resided, and who knew her well, told me one day the following anecdote in illustration of her vein of pungent satire. An acquaintance of hers, whom we shall call John Jones, asked her to embroider his name on some fine linen handkerchiefs. "How will you have them embroidered?" asked Mrs. Kirkland. "Oh," was the reply, "with simple John Jones, that is all." Judge of his surprise and mortification at finding on them, when returned, beautifully but too plainly embroidered the words, as directed, " Simple John Jones!" It is not often that ignorance or carelessness is so neatly rebuked. Championing WHAT is more distasteful to a thinking Christianity man, who has weighed the arguments of in the Pulpit. modern disbelievers in Christianity, and knows how subtle and difficult to answer satisfactorily they often are, than to hear a preacher newly-fledged from a theological seminary refute them, as he fancies, with occasional thrusts of satire, in a Sunday discourse? We doubt whether the pulpit is the place even for trained and veteran Christian athletes, master of all the arts of fence, to cope with agnostic doubts and objections; but how disastrous must be the result when an over-eager, half-instructed, inexperienced controversialist essays to overthrow them! Often the frequent mention of errors imposes on the imagination of the hearer and gives them an exaggerated importance, while it rouses sympathy with the objects of these reiterated attacks. Again, as an able Baptist preacher in England has most wisely said, there is absolutely no connection between being forced by stress of argument to accept the doctrine of the cross of Christ and being led as a sinful man to put my trust in him as my Saviour. Rather, "the whole point of view and attitude of the man must be altered before the eager disputant becomes the earnest evangelist, and the convinced listener passes into the penitent disciple. You may shiver to pieces all the intellectual defences, but the garrison still gathers unsubdued into the central citadel of the heart. You cannot take it by batteries of argument. Another power alone will make the flag flutter down. Faith is an act of the will as well as of the understanding. Therefore, not logic, but the exhibition of Christ in his love and power, evokes it." Being and WHAT a prodigious waste of force would Seeming. be prevented, if persons ambitious of distinction would act upon the motto of Lord Somers, esse quam videri, "to be, rather than to seem "! How many disappointments and heart-burnings would be spared, if men could be persuaded that one can never long cheat the world regarding his merits; that, despite all tricks and devices, he can prove himself to be only what he actually is! If a man lacks genius, knowledge, goodness, courtesy, or any other desirable thing, he is continually betraying the fact by his arduous make-believes as fatally as if he babbled it in his sleep. It oozes out in tone, in look, in act, by a thousand unguarded apertures. Let a man be noble, and his work will have the stamp of nobility. Every great achievement, artistic or literary, political or philanthropic, must be born out of a great atmosphere. The artist who would produce noble work must live nobly, in the atmosphere of ideas, and not in that of the marketplace. The preacher who would induce his hearers to be spiritually-minded and self-sacrificing, must be spiritual and self-sacrificing himself. Qualis homo talis oratio has a larger application than Erasmus gave to it. As the latent disposition of an author peeps through his words in spite of himself, and vulgarity, malignity, or littleness of soul is betrayed by the very phrases and images of its opposites, so every other work of a man is the faithful mirror of his nature, the reverberation of the soul itself, the outcome of all his mental and moral qualities. That thoughtful writer, Samuel Bailey, has justly said that in a long tissue of sentiment and reasoning, the real properties of the mind cannot fail to manifest themselves. A mean, hypocritical, servile spirit can no more assume, through a long investigation, the moral carriage of the liberal, the candid, the upright, the noble, than it can produce in itself the feelings by which they are animated. No art, however great, will suffice to suppress certain infallible symptoms of what lurks beneath the surface, while it will be utterly incapable of counterfeiting, because unconscious of, many other indications universally attending the qualities which command our admiration or esteem. An experienced counsellor once told R. W. Emerson that he never feared the effect upon a jury of a plea by a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that his client ought to have a verdict in his favor. If he does not believe it, his unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, and will become their unbelief. That which we do not believe we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the words ever so often. A great orator sometimes wonders that his most masterly effort fails to impress his fellow-men. The secret of his failure may be revealed in the admirable words of Odysseus to Euryalus in the eighth book of the Odyssey: "There is again One who in force may match the Immortal Gods, Daniel Web- THE ignorance sometimes betrayed by eduster's Rôles. cated or titled Englishmen regarding certain well-known facts of literature or history, is almost incredible. Lord Kenyon, one of England's chief-justices, used to speak of "Julian, the Apostle;" and men of the same country, who have moved in its higher circles of society, have referred to Hyde and Clarendon, of the Charles' time, as two different persons. When, in conversing with a graduate of the University of Cambridge, the rector of an English church in Worcester, whom we met with in Paris, we made some allusion to Sir Thomas Browne's writings, he petrified us with the query: "Sir Thomas Browne! Who is he?" But marvellous as are these self-exposures, they are altogether eclipsed by an observation made by an English nobleman to our late minister at the court of St. James, Mr. Phelps. "Is it not very remarkable," said the nobleman, "that Mr. Web |