it; we are his workmen; he is carrying out his ideas through us; from him we get our daily wage and profit. Nor can we work without much loss and suffering, without much seeming unreward; for what we do we cannot always see our money. We are in that undeveloped state where we make mistakes, do ourselves wrong, and do others wrong. We have feeble perception, imperfectly developed minds, weak wills, and oftentimes are unaccountable for our conduct. Still, God is working in us; he is the conscience in us; he is the heart in us that loves what is right and good; he is the power in us by which we are trying to rectify our lives.

Even death we cannot think of as extinguishing the light that is in us, because we cannot conceive of such love and reason as dwell within the human breast except as of eternal continuance, and as rehabilitating themselves for new service in a realm of spiritual activities of whose range and duration we can form not even the dimmest idea. Hence we say that "God's in his heaven," and "All's right with the world."

Another thing that helps us to see and feel it is the constant cumulation of knowledge, the constant increase of spiritual forces. We are most certainly making spiritual gains. Notwithstanding there are enough to say they cannot see where virtue gains in the long run, we must still adhere to our assertion.

Are we not in the habit of estimating spiritual gains and losses by material standards? and do we not thus sometimes err in our reckonings? For example, if I have expended a given quantity of physical strength in hammering out a piece of iron or in adding up a hundred columns of figures, physically I am by such measure exhausted. But, if I have expended a given amount of moral energy in an act of heroism or charity or patient devotion, I have not by so much diminished the moral force of my being. On the contrary, I have increased it: I have doubled it; it may be that I have trebled or quadrupled it. No one knows how much I have increased it. But it is certain that I have given it an incalculable increment.

The world's moral and intellectual capital is upon the increase. You see it growing in literature, in the social elevation of the race,

in the vastness of human discovery and research, in the increasing power and activity of man in all these things, and especially in the accumulating quantity of character which you find in the multiplying biographies of mankind. The material building and production of the past is gone or fast going from sight. You can hardly trace the foundations of great empires or locate their most magnificent structures. Their arts are lost, and we have only fragments of their genius for building. But see how the spiritual forces of mankind have propagated themselves above all this desolation,-how they have stored themselves away in the world's heart to be reproduced million-fold in the increasing enlightenment and the developing conscience of mankind as we know it to-day. It is on the ground that the expenditure of moral force by the individual does not diminish or exhaust, but, on the other hand, increase and strengthen him,increase and strengthen him indefinitely. Every conquest you make makes you doubly strong to resist when a new occasion arises. When you have said, "No, I will not," and said it with firmness, you have not only never to say it again, but the moral force within you will have accumulated to such serene and inviolable strength that afterward evil will not dare approach you with its solicitations.

Well, there is the same cumulation of spiritual strength from the discipline of life. You are never left at just the same level after a new trial that a former trial left you. Every added trial may, I confess, in some instances, injure the natural buoyancy of the heart; but with most persons it is met with an accumulated force of religious feeling that makes it less difficult to bear than preceding trials of a similar kind. We learn how to bear our troubles. The more we are afflicted, the deeper insight we get into things,-not to know and understand them by any means; indeed, to know but very little compared with what we cannot know; yet more, and yet still more. The increasing insight gives us a stronger hold on hope. And the continuance of blessings all through our afflictions adds more and more to our trust and confidence. Were it not for this, we might feel that "all's wrong with the world." As it is, we cannot feel so. The good spirit sooner or later comes to the

front; the hosts of Satan get beaten back, and are at a disadvantage; they have finally to surrender. Even a criminal is a selfcondemned man: he knows that he has stolen or has murdered; he acknowledges it to himself, acknowledges it before God. The libertine wearies of his lust and violence, and hurries himself out of existence, withered by the scorn and contempt and fear which his own divinely implanted sense of the pure and uncontaminated heaps upon him. Dishonesty, untruthfulness, any kind of lying or wrong, is weak and vulnerable; it hides and sneaks; it is destitute of bravery; it has no power of self-defence. Α criminal may break jail, but he cannot escape public opinion nor the condemnation of his own conscience. Evil is under guard. It is watched. It has no freedom. But, whatever sword-thrusts the right may receive, it cannot be slain.

Hence, if we will only be willing to wait and be patient, if we will be observant and philosophical, we shall see that, after all, the world's coming out right in the end. What is required of us is that we shall not brood over things that are wrong except so long as it is necessary to make them better; that we shall not torture ourselves by magnifying the exceptions to the rules, the breaks in the laws, the sufferings that are transient. We must look straight at the everlasting good, and make everything serve it. Sometimes we say it is fruitless to pursue these questions. But it is not quite so. New lights are thrown upon the ways of the spirit by the inquiring mind: so are they by faithful service of the good. There is no problem, whether of evil or suffering, or social morals, or death or the future, upon which, when we earnestly set about it, we do not come out to comforting and satisfying conclusions. The more we reflect upon these things in the spirit of learners, hopeful and desirous of knowledge, the more light we get. SAMUEL B. STEWART.

Lynn, Mass.

He is well poised on this round, rolling sphere who is balanced, on the one hand, by pleasant memories wrought out in a goodly way in the past, balanced, on the other hand, by bright hopes well earned, waiting a happy realization in the future.W. M. Bicknell.

"A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM."

A group of merry children were at play
In the door-yard of a farm-house large and old,
One bright-eyed boy with curly hair of brown,
Two little girls with sunny locks of gold.

O happy little ones, with hearts of joy,
And lives that yet know not the touch of care!
While at the window, watching, mother sits,
With threads of silver gleaming in her hair.
Across her vision to and fro they pass,
Within her heart their merry laughter rings,
As, drawing threads o'er holes in little socks,
She sits awhile, and works, and softly sings.

Anon a hush comes o'er the children's glee,
And grouped in earnest converse now they stand.
See, there, the subject of their talk, a great,
Green worm the boy holds in his outstretched
hand!

"It must be so," says Bess, the older girl,
With voice so sweet and eyes so bright and blue,
"My teacher told us, and she would not say,
I'm very sure, a thing she thought not true."
"But, Bess," says little Dot, "how could it be?
That beautiful, big butterfly to come
From anything so ugly and so mean
As that, that dreadful, horrid, great, green
worm!"

The boy looks grave a moment, then he turns,
And towards the door he looks, then quickly goes.
"Come, girls, papa is in the house," he says.
"Come, Dot and Bess, come in: our father knows."
O mother heart, beat high within thy breast!
Let fall upon thy cheek the glistening tear!
Thy bright-eyed boy has caught the utmost lore
A waiting world may ever hope to hear.

Those words, so fraught with tender, reverent love!

How with the passing years their meaning grows
From simple adoration of the child

To fuller, deeper love that manhood knows!
Our Father! "Tis the prayer that Jesus taught.
On through the years its music sweetly flows,
The answer to our unbelief and doubt.
O restless heart, be still! Thy Father knows!
NELLIE MAY BENNETT.
Roxbury, Mass.

PHILLIPS BROOKS'S ORATORY.

I have heard many of our ablest orators,Edward Everett, George William Curtis, Wendell Phillips; but I set Phillips Brooks beside the best of them, because he so surpassed them all in putting the art of his oratory wholly out of sight. "He's but a poor speaker," everybody said. I smiled when I heard them say it. Ars est celare artem. In some of the highest elements of

oratory he was the most consummate and skilful speaker to whom I ever listened.

First of all, I never saw any other man of such commanding presence who could so quickly make his hearers wholly forget him, turn their attention from his personality, and fix it intently on the message he stood there to deliver. Eager to see him, intent on watching every motion, curious as to his dress, his looks, his eyes, his hair, his gestures, his manuscript, those hearers found that within five minutes they had forgotten all that, and were looking eagerly into his face, often leaning forward in their seats, listening with breathless interest to the word he came to speak.

His

I see three elements-and there must be many which I do not see-that contributed thus to his mastery over men. First, his very rapid speech was one very marked source of his power. It compelled people to listen. It made his audience instantly silent, breathless, and deeply attentive. It made them at once feel their unity as it forced on them a common effort, and the sense of a common need or desire. It banished all diverting thoughts. It immediately hushed any audience with the sense of some earnest need and common longing. own style, and the whole method, aim, and burden of his oratory, forced on him that rapidity. Never remotely approaching the verbose, he yet was most voluble. The words rushed on with terrific speed, but the thoughts were always well separated: they were never huddled together, never bunched or crowded into the hearer's mind. The listener always had time fairly to take in one idea before being dragged away by another. The six thousand words he would speak in thirty minutes contained fewer thoughts than Frederic Henry Hedge would have put into two thousand words.

That was the second element of Phillips Brooks's power: he was not primarily dealing with "thoughts." He was not lecturing. He was not didactic. He was directly dealing with something higher and deeper than thoughts. He wholly subordinated the intellectual to the spiritual. He spoke to men's sympathies, longings, self-reproaches, regrets, and hopes. He was not arguing, seldom reasoning. He thus spoke with authority. He spoke as did Christ Jesus himself,-not as a rationalist, seldom as an in

structor, but as one who stood face to face with God, and merely bade men look up and see that which he himself saw.

His profound sincerity, his unconsciousness, his deep seriousness, the eager earnestness of his speech, thus took hold profoundly on any hearer's sympathies; while the tremendous rapidity of that verbal river added immensely to the moral momentum, till the hearer, now wholly swept away, felt that this was, indeed, deep calling unto deep.

A third factor contributing to his forensic or oratorical force was the fact not of the lowness of his tones, nor yet of their sadness, but that they were always pitched in the minor key. His very low beginnings were indeed elements of oratorical skill. That compelled his audience to an instant silence and breathless attention, which at once forced on them the effort other orators at first take upon themselves. It gave an air of importance to what he said, or a suggestion of his own sense of its value, as he knew men would so eagerly listen to it. But, low or loud, his tones never took on the brilliant qualities of stage or platform oratory. This differentiated his word from that of any other orator known to me. With a most joyful, hopeful, optimistic faith, he yet ever spoke like a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. It has been said that nature's voices are all pitched in the minor key. I know not why such tones are or should be called sympathetic. Joy is far more contagious than grief or pain. Possibly, that is why we do not call out to others to share it, knowing that it is self-diffusive, while true sorrow hides and shrinks, and needs to be sought and shared and sympathetically lured to its confession and cure.

But the tone that goes straight to the human heart, always and everywhere, is that low and kindly tone of earnest, simple, true, and unassuming fellow-feeling. That was Phillips Brooks's key-note. He demanded of you nothing for himself. He but asked to show his belief in you at your best as a son of God, and his faith that you would yet rise to realize that awful and mighty fact. He thus spoke to the universal human heart. He spoke one day the same discourse to the boys in the Concord Reformatory and to the girls at Wellesley College. It was just as well suited to the one company as to the other. The same

His lofty ideal of the preacher's function helped him to banish all double consciousness from his own mind, to sink his individuality out of sight, and to fill his heart with an absolute humility.

On concluding his grandest sermon, he seemed but to turn to God in humiliation and contrition that, on so momentous an occasion and on so magnificent a theme, he had been able to make only so miserable a speech. Who could ever detect in him the conceit of self-satisfaction or the gleam of a pride that exulted in its own power?

One thing now I do miss and lament. One high act and service was needed to round out and complete his official life and his message to his fellow-man: that was that he should presently have been called to Cambridge to give the Dudleian Lecture on the Validity of non-Episcopal Ordination. I had ventured to suggest it. I do not suppose the suggestion had yet reached him.

He would not have done it, I am sure, early in his episcopate, as though to provoke his critics, and needlessly to wake discord within his own Church or diocese. But after a few years I believe he would have taken up the task as a high duty; and his unflinching testimony would have given us an epoch-making word in the life of our American Church.

He never shrank from testifying against what he calls the "fiction of an apostolic succession in her ministry." "There is no such peculiar commission belonging to her or any other body." ("Twenty Sermons," p. 56.) He says elsewhere, “There is no line in the Prayer Book which declares any such theory." (Sermon after the General Convention in 1886.) Phillips Brooks's life has, however, a wonderful completeness and symmetry just as it stands. He had said enough. He had more nearly and fairly shown us his full measure than most great men do. It is marvellous that there are now so few flaws in the work or defects in the record.

If any yet fail to see his vast mental superiority over any of our didactic or

or Joseph Cook type, let them read his "Lectures on Preaching," and then re-read them, and then read them again. I believe neither the English language nor any other has anything worthy to stand beside them, treating such a theme,-judging the wide reading, the wit, the wisdom, the mental grasp of the problem, the keenness of the analysis, the profoundness of the insight, the earnestness of the plea, or the perfect comprehension of the problems of our day, when, as he says, men of science "repeat on their own ground every offensive and arrogant peculiarity of the priestcraft whose historical enormities they so fondly and truly upbraid" (p. 226). That book I would lay beside the Bible of every young minister to-day. I would have every preacher read it every year as long as he lives.

Finally, I am glad that I have lived to see the bishop's lawn stretched to invest so great a man. The new labors may have prematurely ended his life. Even so, it was nobly concluded. I know that dear and valued friends of his dreaded to see him so invested. I myself shrink from that photograph of the bishop with the ruffles about his wrists. They look girlish, and seem silly. They remind me of a memorable scene at Cambridge, when his friends were agitated over the suggestion of his accepting the episcopate. He sought the opinion of one valued counsellor, then as now a high officer of the college, who vigorously answered him:

"Well, sir, I have seen an eagle in many aspects. I have seen him soaring in the sky. I have seen him stuffed and mounted in the museum. I have seen him shut up in a cage. But, sir, I never before saw an eagle that was willing to come down and shut himself up in a cage.”

"It's a bold figure! It's a bold figure!" rejoined the coming bishop, walking vigorously up and down the room. It was, and it was a good one. HENRY C. BADGER.

New Haven.

Causes which make us ashamed of our race lie close alongside of causes which make us proud of mankind. Such is the way of the world and the going on of a ceaseless creation.-W. M. Bicknell.

Tennyson's eloquent epitaph upon Gen. Gordon seems, in its brief suggestiveness, well fitted to voice the universal feeling, not merely of the hour, but of posterity, concerning Bishop Brooks. When Schiller died, the German nation proudly exclaimed, “Er war unser!" "He was ours!" And our own land now may echo this over the grave of Phillips Brooks, especially here in Philadelphia, the scene of his earliest labors, where, after Boston, is probably felt the deepest sense of loss.

Many of us can remember how, as long ago as 1861, we first heard of this brilliant young Bostonian, rector of the rather out-ofthe way Church of the Advent, who attracted crowds from other congregations, astonishing old and young alike by a style of preaching such as they had never heard before. We recollect a Sunday when he was invited to preach at one of the old "downtown" churches, and the singular way in which he handled his text, "Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope." Some felt so bewildered by the rush of his unique manner of thought and speech that they hardly knew what to make of him, while others said they would like to hear him always.

All know how, in January, 1862, when just turned of twenty-six, he assumed charge of the Church of the Holy Trinity, every seat of which was habitually filled, while crowds had either to stand or go away. It was frequently said that his preaching reminded us of Robertson's; yet, save for their unrivalled eloquence and tone of Broad Church thinking, at that time a novelty, their sermons seem to have little in common. "The greatest English preacher of this century, the gifted Frederick Robertson," as Dean Stanley called him, refers, as it were, more constantly to the darker and deeper side of human experience, and loves to handle the story of life's mystery with a more tragic force. In reading his sermons, we feel the contact with a poet-nature, a

saint, and a soldier, yet of one even morbidly alive to "the sense of tears in human things." He seems far older, far graver and sadder, even in his early manhood, than Phillips Brooks did in all his life. It was not that the latter tried to evade the

deep questions or to ignore the sad problems of existence: he gave them all their fitting place. We can recall his saying that "the greater part of any one's life was generally passed in suffering," and again that "pain may be called a sort of universal sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disorder." Yet, even when least hopeful and in his saddest moods, we were conscious of a certain healing in his touch, a sense of imparted comfort and of strength. Perhaps the feeling produced by listening to him may be compared with our sensations when first visiting the cathedrals of the Old World, when our own sense of personal insignificance seems met by the counter-current of some wonderful uplifting power which soothes us by its strange restfulness, blending stimulus with tranquillity, even while kindling and arousing our nobler selves to their very core.

It was in this high element of the very essence of poetry, this undying youthfulness of soul, that there lay one great secret of the power of Phillips Brooks over his fellowmen. Even the dullest, least imaginative, was made to feel that here was one who had brought with him from the spirit-world more than an ordinary mortal's share of those "trailing clouds of glory" which Wordsworth sang of, and who was forever accompanied on his pathway by "the vision splendid" that, for him, seemed never doomed to fade into "the light of common day."

Hence it was with no idea of any lack of reverence that many, when they met the great preacher out of doors,-whether it were long ago, when his gigantic, youthful figure used to march with swift, swinging strides along the streets of Philadelphia, his hands in his pockets, and his head thrown back as if he were contemplating the sky, or in later years, with added dignity and hair grown gray,-felt as if they had seen one who to all his weighty attributes of character and genius united the cheerful buoyancy and healthful simplicity of an ideal boy. The words "Such a fine fellow!"