them. Their platform is knocked from | as a reformer, and held out to them a under them; the institution feebly upbears large hope. The restless longing of the them; the class as a class, the profession poor was on his side. Now he is part of as a profession, is of far slighter account the system- a system which somehow than of old. But if a man can preach, if suffers the city slums and the village lairs his word is with power, never perhaps was of the poor to grow up in the heart of a there a time when he had a more open Christian civilization. Their slums and field for his activity, or a fairer hope of hovels are the fruit of their own improvi influence on a large class of his fellow-men. dence, say the censors. There is justice. Mr. Spurgeon's truly remarkable minis- in the answer, "Had you been nursed try can by no means be overlooked in any under such conditions, perhaps it might thoughtful estimate of the work of the have been thus with you." Be that as it preacher in our times. We may have our may, the preacher has now at his back the thoughts as to his theology, and yet hold whole system of things of which, rightly him in hearty honor for the firmness with or wrongly, the poor complain. There are which he has stood so long in slippery the pomp, the wealth, and the respectabil places, growing wiser and stronger under ity of Churches, established and free; the influences which would have been fatal to former connected in their minds with exacmost men, and for the hold which he has tions and tyranny, the latter with interestmaintained on multitudes who, but for his ed professional zeal. There must be a ministry, would have been morally and so- great breaking up of things before the cially wrecks. And quite recently Lon- working-classes can be brought into any don and all our great towns have been fair relation with the preacher and his stirred to an extent hardly paralleled in gospel. But when the shock is over — history by the American revivalists. What- and there are signs that it is at hand — it ever we may think of their methods, it is in the Bible that the preacher to the poor cannot be denied that for a time the inter- will find "the word in season to proclaim est was profound and universal. It was their needs, to assert their rights, to exaltogether the dominant topic while it pound their duties, and to rule and hallow lasted. Their preaching was a matter of their lives; nor know I anywhere a vision such large public interest that, Noncon- so charged with a blessed and beautiful formists as they were, it drew forth a hope for the poor as the Scripture vision thoughtful and kindly letter from the of the kingdom of heaven. primate; while all classes, from the highest to the lowest, swelled the throngs which hung upon their lips. The influences which are sapping the order of things which made the pulpit a great power in its time, favor the preacher if he knows how to handle them. As far as this aspect of things is concerned, there is little sign that the foolishness of preaching is about to perish out of the world. But, after all, does this touch the real heart of the subject? Granted that the solid middle class has been touched or even moulded by the pulpit, there is the great working-class at one end of the scale, and the great cultivated class at the other. Does not the one regard it with rough indifference, and the other with polished scorn? I confess to being very sceptical as to this alienation of the masses from the truth as it is in Jesus. I fear that it is the Christianity which is wanting, and not their interest and hope. We know what a pastor of a right noble Christian type could accomplish at Eversley; and wherever a man or a woman clothed with meekness, or the power which is fed from the higher springs, goes forth on a Christlike errand of mercy, where are they so sure of loving reverence and loyal honor as among the poorest of the poor? Were the Master with us, "Blessed be ye poor!" would be his sentence still. But at the other end of the scale there is the rapidly growing intellectual class, which we are told is coming to regard the preacher and his unverifiable assertions with quiet indifference or scorn; and it is confidently predicted that, as culture advances, the pulpit, and the whole system of things in which it is a power, will be left behind among the worn-out superstitions of mankind. There can be no doubt that there is a peculiar virulence in the tone of some of the doctors of the school which has now justly the ear of the public towards the preacher and his thoughts and ways. And hence arises a truly formidable danger. But I hold that for this antagonism the pulpit is mainly responsible. It is reaping as it has sown, and it has to pass through its time of humiliation. The preacher readily entertains the notion that the whole scheme of things is laid out to his small understanding in the word of God. He seems as if he came down on the vast range of subjects which he is tempted to handle as from a superior height; and this is what the scientific mind can never endure. The place of theology in the sphere of man's knowledge tempts its doctors to believe that it confers the right of speaking with a certain decision on all kinds of topics; and there has always been a sort of omniscient tone in the pulpit method of handling intellectual questions which stirs fierce rebellion in cultivated minds and hearts. treated its Bible as a book of directions, rather than as a light by which to see the way. Perhaps there is a season of great darkness before us, or a great fanaticism, or a dreary "centre of indifferences" to pass through on our way to the "everlasting yea" of the future. There is truth in the idea that this is the positive stage of our development. Nothing can be juster than the law which Comte has formulated. First the theological stage, then the metaphysical, then the positive. But the development has yet to complete itself in the circle, and, gathering up the fruits of these successive efforts to penetrate the mystery of truth, satisfy with a larger, diviner theology, man's aching, longing heart. The preacher will best help that consummation by letting the light of his gospel shine clearly, and troubling himself for the present little with theodicies. We are not God's advocates, we are his wit We have no case to establish for him.or for his truth. We have simply to bear witness to the truth wherever or however we discern it, and leave God to be his own advocate, and truth to win its own victory. What is now chiefly needed is a new conviction of the reality and the power of the life which we believe was manifested in the Redeemer, and is the true light of men. For teachers who know that eternal life, who can utter its word by their lips, and show its light in their lives, there will be need and work, not through this generation only, but through all generations, till the final fire. And the kingdom of heaven which we have preached is but a narrow and poverty-nesses. stricken realm. There is something which unprejudiced minds, minds not formed in a groove of belief, find it impossible to receive, in the idea of God, his methods, and his purposes, which our popular theology has presented to mankind. How much of this unbelief of our times is of the texture of the unbelief of Lucretius, a revolt against incredible conceptions of nature, of man, and of God? Revolt is mostly blind at first, and there is great blindness now to the inner light, the hidden life, and the higher world. But it is blankly incredible that men can long rest content in their blindness, and that the great questions of being which have perplexed and tormented all the human generations since man emerged on the platform of this earth to sin, to suffer, and to be redeemed, can long be laid to rest by the nescience of a knot of professors, who shut out from their field of thought all that man has cherished as his dearest possession, and, while professing to confine themselves to positive knowledge, confuse themselves with hopelessly untenable metaphysics. In truth, signs are not wanting that it will not be long before the question of the "above" and the "beyond "again forces itself even on agnostic sight. The pulpit has had a grand opportunity, and has wasted it. In all ages there have been preachers who have borne on the torch in the van of progress, and, like their Master, have paid by suffering for their power to lead mankind. Such lofty spirits have not been wanting to our own. But the pulpit, on the whole, has cast in its lot with the narrower view and the poorer realm. It has We may venture to speak of "the final fire," for here science is at one with reve lation. The sun's furnace seems to be fed by the cosmical matter which is constantly being drawn in. Slow changes in the orbit of our earth surely prophesy for it a similar doom. "The elements shall melt with fervent heat." And then is it all ended, and forever? Is the man of this vanishing world a part of the system of things which is doomed to perish, the highest outcome of all the toil and struggle of creation? With infinite pain "the creature" has brought him forth, and has made the highest form of him the man of sorrows; for philosophy now pleads passionately that as man rises in the scale of culture he must arm himself for suffering and sacrifice. Her chosen symbol also is the cross. And are all the toils, the tears, the aspirations, the heroisms of the human generations to be swept into the Gehenna, mere fuel for the cruel wasting flame? If this be truly the human outlook, there remains but to retrace an an From The Philadelphia Weekly Times. TRANSLATED BY HELEN STANLEY. ON the night of the 1st of August, 1793, the guardian of the prison of the Concier cient lesson, and to study again the art of suicide as they studied it in imperial Rome. The elder Mill is right; if death is to break the bench of life forever, life is a business that does not pay. The belief that this is but the threshold of existence, that man is the meeting-point of two worlds, that the creature who is the head and crown of the natural is born agerie was busy arranging a little cell situchild into the spiritual and eternal sphere, and that the issues of life's toils, tears, and martyrdoms lie beyond the gate of death, has furnished to man the inspiration to endure. But this, we learn from those who would bury life in profound and hopeless sadness, is illusion, benign illusion; when it has strung man's energy to toil and suffer, its work is done, there is nothing beyond! One thing only is wanting further some knowledge of the demon who has made, and who rules, the universe on this scheme of illusion, and has been able to persuade the human generations to toil, to suffer, to agonize, upon a lie. No! while the bird still "flies into the lighted hall out of the night, enjoys the brightness and warmth for the moment, and then flies out again into the night," the "whence" and the "whither" will be the absorbing questions of interest to mankind. And it is in "the great congregation," where heart beats with heart in concord, and breaths conspire, where common beliefs and common experiences draw the children of toil and pain into close, dear fellowships of sympathy and hope, that the answer will best be given, and the man who can utter it will be most lovingly heard. There is a power in public worship, in the utterance of common sorrows, needs, and hopes, in the prayer that is breathed and the praise that is sung in concert, not with the crowd that fills the sanctuary, but with the innumerable company of all lands and ages who have drunk of the same spring and gone strengthened on their way, which they strangely miss who teach that worship is a worn-out superstition, and that only in the clear light of law can men walk and be blest. While man sins and suffers, while there is blood-tinged sweat upon his brow, while there is weeping in his home and anguish in his heart, that voice can never lose its music which brings forth the comfort and inspiration of the gospel which tells the sin-tormented spirit the tale of the Infinite Pity, and bids it lay its sobbing wretchedness to rest on the bosom of the Infinite Love. J. BALDWIN BROWN. ated at the end of a long, black corridor. The cell was dark, damp, and unhealthy; daylight scarcely ever reached it, and when it did it seemed as though it fell regretfully athwart its heavy iron bars that were full of rust. In this miserable little room, the jailor placed a small iron bed, covering it with two straw mattresses, a sheet, a blanket, and by the side of the bedstead left a small earthen wash-basin and a little stool. Surely if the guardian of this prison made such preparations as these, he must have been expecting the arrival of some important person to occupy it. Alas! it was the queen of France, the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, who was to arrive. It was three o'clock in the morning; already the sky was colored by the rosy tints of an August dawn. It was no longer night, nor scarcely yet day - it was the hour when often the queen of France, opening the window of her apartment in the palace at Versailles, would await alone in silence, and in happy reverie, the sun's first rays and the first songs of the awakening birds. How beautiful the gardens of Versailles were at that hour! The crystalline murmuring of its fountains, as the water stole softly between green lawns and luxurious flowerbeds, the crowd of statues around them seeming as though they were still asleep, the superb old trees which had overshadowed the great king and the great century, the sombre paths where Bossuet had walked, and further on, at the end of the great avenue, the Little Trianon, the marble cottage of which the queen was shepherdess; such was the scene which used to greet her eyes. But on this day we name, at three o'clock in the morning, the queen was rudely awakened from her slumbers. "Get up! get up!" they said to her, for she was to leave the Temple for the Conciergerie, the cell she then inhabited being thought too good for her. She arose at the voice of the two gendarmes and got into a small common cab with them. The blinds of the carriage were lowered, so that the royal captive should not see the bright dawn even through its dirty windows. There were to be no more happy dawns for the queen, no more sum- | grating of her iron doors, as they opened mer's sky, not a bird to sing, not a flower and shut to change the guards. No other to bloom; the executioner was all that noise than the rumbling of the charrette was left to her. as it rolled away each morning, carrying its daily food to the monster guillotine. But toward the middle of September Reaching the Conciergerie, its heavy door soon closed upon her, and it seemed as though she already knew all the Fouquier-Tinville went into the queen's ways of this new prison, so quickly cell, drunk with rage. All of the republic did she pass through its gloomy corridors. was in excitement about this prison. The She walked through this obscure laby-guards were changed, the jailer was put rinth as calmly as though she were in irons, and they placed a sentinel before traversing the gallery of Lebrun to enter the king's apartment. Then suddenly, from its narrow door, its menacing aspect, and its approach guarded by spies, she divined the cell that was intended for her and entered it. They brought her the jailer's book, in which she signed her name with a firm hand, then taking out of her pocket a white handkerchief she wiped her lovely forehead several times, which was covered with great drops of perspiration from having driven for so long in the closed cab in which she had been shut up with the two gendarmes; after which her gaze fell upon the damp walls that surrounded her. She saw at a glance all the new misery about her, the cold stones, the iron doors, the low-vaulted ceiling, all the nakedness of her tomb. For an instant her heart sank, but she soon regained her noble calmness. Then taking from her bosom a little watch, which they had left her, she saw it was four o'clock. She then hung her watch on a nail which she discovered in the wall, which was its sole ornament, and as she had said her prayers the night before on going to bed in her other prison, she undressed herself to lie down on the iron bed, with its poor straw mattresses. the window of this unhappy woman, and he walked before it day and night. It was, you must know, because a little pink had been thrown in at the queen's window and fallen at her feet. She supported these new outrages without complaining; she was passive, like the beautiful marble which represents Niobe, and so calm and sad that the coarsest jailers became silent as they approached her, and took off their hats involuntarily. For once the sentinel who marched beside her window did not dare to look into her cell, for there seemed to radiate from it a holy sadness which commanded respect. One day she said to the little servant," Rosalie, comb my hair," and bended toward the young girl her beautiful head, which was to fall so soon, with its lovely locks, whose beauty had inspired all the poets of the day-Tultastasio first among them. The jailer forbade Rosalie to arrange the queen's hair, however, and, saying it was his right," he endeavored to take it out of the young maid's hands; but the queen arranged it herself - no one but the executioner having a right to touch her thenceforth. When she had arranged her lovely blonde hair, which grew about her forehead with so majestic and natural a grace, she parted her curls in There was in the queen's cell the front and covered them with a little perguardian's wife and her servant, who was fumed powder, and then she put on a siman honest little Breton maid, who, pitying ple little cap which she had worn for twelve the queen, offered to aid her to undress days. The next day, being kindly disherself. The queen was astonished at posed, the Revolution permitted them to this kindness, and on looking at the young bring from the Temple to the queen a few girl she discovered her face was full of batiste chemises, some handkerchiefs, sympathy, and could hardly believe her fichus, silk stockings, and a white peignoir eyes. "Thank you, my child," she said for the morning, a few nightcaps and some to the young Breton peasant, "I have waited on myself for a long time now," and then she lay down. Two gendarmes guarded the cell, named Dufrene and Gilbert. She remained thus for forty days, with no other misery than the misery of every new day a widow and alone, having not a word of news of her son, the king of France; not a word of news of her children; not a word of news of Madame Elizabeth! No other sound than the little bits of white ribbon. The queen smiled sadly as she received these poor relics of her former grandeur. Ah!" she said, "I recognize my sister's kind thought of me in these." For it was Madame Elizabeth herself who had sent these clothes to her. When seeing all this unexpected wealth the queen took courage, and asked for a second mourning cap; but finding she could not pay for it she thought, perhaps, there was enough lawn in her one cap to make two." Tell me, do you know a greater mourning than that, or one so humbly worn? even took pity on them, and taking his sabre scraped with care all the moisture which covered the tiny soles. In the adjoining courtyard, with eyes fixed on the iron bars that separated them from their sovereign, were kept some prisoners from the Temple, royalists devoted even to the death. There were aged priests of the Church, old officers of Fon the guillotine, and all of them forgot their captivity, their present misery, their approaching death, to think only of their queen, shut up there in her miserable cell. And so it happened that when these poor unfortunates saw the gendarme wiping the queen's shoes, they held out their hands to him in supplicating prayer, and he out of pity passed one of the little shoes between the bars to them, who, taking it, kissed it with reverent, faithful lips. The order was that the prisoner should not be allowed any books or paper, or even thread or scissors, in order, no doubt, that she should be deprived of everything that might distract her from her sorrows. But she, however, finding a little bit of old carpet in her cell, pulled out the threads from it, and with them amused herself by mak-tenoy, and some noblemen forgotten by ing a little braid, her knees serving her as a cushion and some pins doing the rest. Sometimes on Sundays her jailor brought her a few flowers in an old earthen pot, which alone would make her smile sadly - she who never smiled any more, and who loved flowers so dearly. Ah! the lovely flowers of Trianon, the dear friends of her leisure hours! The sweet roses she cultivated with her own hands, the pinks that bore her name, the tender marguerites that bloomed at the caressing touch of their queen, and the soft, pearly dew which fell from those multitudinous fountains that were silent neither day or night. Ah! the fields enamelled with wild flowers that she loved to wander in, shaded by her large straw hat, or the white does that would come to eat out of her small white hands; ah me! where had they fled, those happy days? Soon the jailer ceased bringing her any roses; they gave the captive too much pleasure, and he was afraid of FouquierTinville. They saw that the queen, too, loved the sweet face and tender, pitying look of the young Breton peasant girl, so they placed an enormous screen to separate them; but sometimes with difficulty, Rosalie would stand on tiptoes and look over the barrier, as though to say to the poor queen: "I am still here, madame." But then those moments were so short. At twelve o'clock the jailer would bring the queen her dinner, which consisted of half a chicken and a few vegetables, which she was forced to eat with a common pewter fork. The queen would eat this from off a little table, no one waiting on her. More than one prisoner, though, would wait till her meagre repast was over, and beg for some of the crumbs which had fallen from this poor, but still royal table, and happy and proud was he who could drink from the queen's glass; for bending low, with uncovered head, he would drink to her Majesty's health. There was neither bureau, or wardrobe, or even a little mirror in her cell, but after many prayers the queen obtained permission to have a small paper box in which to keep her few clothes, and a tiny looking glass, which she hung on the same nail where she had kept her watch, and on that day she was as pleased as though they had brought to her the loveliest Venetian mirror and the handsomest furniture in Boule. Behind this screen were placed the gendarmes, and with them a liberated convict, named Barassin, who was so dirty Soon, however, the Revolution thought that when he would leave the place for a it was too much luxury for the queen to little while, the queen, made almost ill by have half a chicken and a plate of vegethe foul atmosphere of the cell, would beg tables for her dinner, and it suppressed Rosalie to burn a little piece of paper to half of her already small ration, so that change the air. Rosalie had obtained even the market-women had no longer the permission to brush the queen's shoes. consolation of saying to the prison cook, They were pretty little black kid ones, "Here, monsieur, take this poor chicken which easily could have been taken for to our queen." But even in this complete Cinderella's, so small they were. All abandonment, in the mists of this horrible France had been prostrated before these poverty, and overwhelmed with all her two little feet, that would have been adored sorrows, she still remained the lovely for their beauty alone, even were they not woman and the great queen of her prosthe feet of a queen. The cold and humid-perous days; and she held out her pewter ity of the prison floor clung to these light cup for the jailer to fill with water from an shoes as mud would have done on a win- old earthen jug with the same majestic ter's day. One day a republican gendarme grace she was wont to hold the golden |