ed to my fellow-citizens, and a hundred times they have hissed me, he says. This sounds but little like imposture; it sounds more like the voice of a brave man, who believed it to be his duty to unmask devilment whereever found, and to make of this world as tolerable a habitation as circumstances will permit. If we consider that he is totally wrong, shall we sneer even in this case? How do we know but what his mission is to be wrong-terribly wrong, and thus to make such fierce assaults upon our dearest beliefs, that we may be aroused from our indifference, and cherish them with increased watchfulness? Shall we not think that a man who does this, is performing an invaluable work for his generation? But I cannot think him knave or simpleton. He seems the mark of the maximum of American thought, indicating, that we common folks are,-despite many backslidingsslowly getting on. I think him the farthest thinker we have―(which does not necessarily mean the most correct thinker, or the most available thinker,)--because he has excelled all in his endeavors to solve that old riddle which has perplexed men's brains through all the dark and golden ages, how to harmonize theoretical and practical virtuehow to so get the upper hand of carnalism, that the mind can rise where a defective education or our forefather's errors shall never come to trouble it. Socrates had, according to most accounts, a large share of this spirit. As we value our own well-being, may we never cease loving the unobtrusive goodness which is content to labor in a narrow sphere, and look higher than this world for approval; but we are compelled not only to love but to venerate the philanthropist, who goes, like a forlorn hope, before the Age. How lonely such an one must feel, as he stands guard over the gross multitude. The camp-fires have gone out, one by one, and the loiterers lie down, refusing all protection, till he remains alone. In front, silence and the thickest midnight; behind, nothing save the harsh murmur of some plethoric conservatist, grumbling in his sleep. Yet, as he gazes heavenward, from every star seems dropping the old command, Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel!"

I have read, in some strange old book, of a huge grim fortress in a distant land, named Yale College; and that its granite walls had been growing harder and harder through a hundred and fifty years. Its chieftains, shut out from the world, had held absolute dominion so long, that many thought that they would always rule without foreign disturbance, and that their great gates never could be made to tremble. So the little inland bay thinks that the swell of the tide can never come so far as to reach it; but, by-and-by, long after the broad ocean

has been heaving under the wave twining about the Globe, the little bay, too, begins to heave. And accordingly, long after the world outside had changed its habits somewhat, the book said that the gates swung open, and the chieftains thought best to make changes in their government. And I took up the story in my own mind and looked ahead, and wondered if-as time went on and the fortress grew grayer and its chieftains wiser-the gates would not be unbarred many times more, and the government be changed often. Let us all hope so! Let us all hope that the rulers will become kinder and their subjects less deserving of coercion!

S. S.

Life Questions.

FINDING ourselves inhabitants of this lower world, endowed with the power of breathing, and the ability to think and speak, furnished gratuitously with a life lease of the privileges and advantages of this planet, and with abundant opportunities of glancing upward toward other and perhaps better worlds, the questions-What are our respective missions, and how shall we best perform them?-are to us fraught with the deepest interest. As every means employed implies an end sought, so every existence given supposes a mission intended, and it is partly from instinct and partly by reason, that we no sooner become realizingly conscious of our existence, than we grapple fiercely with these life-born and life-long questions. What am I to do, and how must, or can I do it? From the first quiet breathings of a new-found life, up to the parting struggle between soul and body, these are the queries that ever meet us. Escape them we cannot, and ignore them we must not, for they are the legitimate offspring of truth and reason; and truth and reason, as we find them in the humanity of to-day, are the faint reflections yet remaining of the purity and wisdom of the originally created man. Turn we whithersoever we may, and be we as thoughtful or thoughtless as we will, these life questions are still before us, and nothing, save our graves, will ever remove them from our mental vision. Born with us, they grow with our years and strengthen with our strength, and it is the part of an honest, earnest manhood, to humbly, yet boldly, attempt their solution. And if, by an honest earnestness, we can succeed in unraveling these mighty myste

ries, that seem interwoven with the very warp and woof of our life, happy, thrice happy are we. With many-alas, with how manydoes the struggling and toiling with these questions, make up the whole sum of their existence. Roaming about with eager though aimless restlessness, common, every-day life becomes to them invested with more of deep, dark mystery, than was the Cretan labyrinth to Theseus of olden time, for, in all their wanderings, they chance upon no love-smitten Ariadne, ready to give the clew of thread that will guide them in safety out of its winding darkness. Through every public avenue and private by-path, do they rush with breathless haste, crying out with all the bitter urgency of unsatisfied hearts, "What am I and why am I," and tired at last of hearing no cheering answer, but only deafening echoes of their own questions, "What and why," they sit them down, weary and desponding, and sadly sing over the graves of blasted hopes and unrealized aspirations,

"What is this life, wherein God has formed me,

But a bright wheel which burns itself away,
Benighting, even night with its grim limbs,
When it hath done and fainted into darkness."

With these men, life ends with earthly existence, and beyond this they have no hope, no thought. Human life is to them as a strange play, with whose acts they are entirely unacquainted, and, when the curtain drops at the end of the first act, they know not that others are to succeed. Novices in respect to the greatest play of the Greatest Author and the noblest actors, they knew not at the outset what to expect, and hence know not at the end whether or not to be satisfied with what they have seen and heard. And so they writeand justly too-their lives as failures, and, because they are compelled to write failure upon the tomb-stones that mark the memory of buried years, they manifest naught but a wholesale distrust of the whole play, with its Author and its actors, of life, God, and men. Existence is only the commencement of life, an ante-chamber, from which a careful, thoughtful culture is to take and guide us farther on, where the mystery of existence becomes lost in the grandeur of an active life. And most miserably shall we fail of answering what we are designed to, unless we see before us a life-long purpose, towering mountain high above the simple plane of existence. Art is too long and time too fleeting to permit us to sit quietly down and consider that breathing is living; for, no one can live truly and successfully, no one can reach that region of mysterious grandeur where living is acting, unless there

is a broad and comprehensive view of the needs that are to be answered by Divine mechanism, clad in human forms. If you are to cross the ocean, it is not enough that you take your place in a vessel, for, unless you weigh anchor, and spread your canvas to the winds, you cannot cleave the azure waters. And so, unless we give ourselves up heartily and earnestly to true and noble purposes, we shall not accomplish what reason tells us we were created for. The difference, then, between those who fail and those who succeed in life, is, that the one class fail to take any just conception of life's purposes and aims, while the other, as best they can, make those purposes a constituent part of their being, and reach out toward those aims with a hearty will. To ascertain, then, what these purposes are, and, having ascertained them, to make them the working basis of our faith, is the initiatory step in an earnest life. And if this be done, the answers to the questions, "What are we and Why are we ?" will be plainly written, so that we cannot fail to read them; and, when we have once read them, it is but just and reasonable that we should act in accordance with them. We are the intelligent creations of an Intelligent Creator, created that we may answer to powers, both human and Divine, for the thousand responsibilities which Omnipotence has invested in us. And if we would honor our own intelligence, and, in honoring that, honor the Author of that intelligence, and answer, too, to the responsibilities which we inherit by virtue of our humanity, we must be governed by those laws which a wise Creator has stamped upon his whole creation.

Upon every individual work, God has left the impress of his hand, and there is one grand universal law that stands graven upon a tablet as long and as broad as his whole creation. Written upon the delicate veins and fibres of the wind-tossed leaves, stamped upon every flower-bud that lives in the sunlight, and interwoven with the very texture of the physical, intellectual and spiritual life of man, do we find the law of progress. It is the inborn consciousness of the existence of this law, which induces the eager unrest of men, and plants in the mind and soul so many longing aspirations and eager lookings upward.

Since that morning of creation when Eden first knew her human master, voices within have continually chidden manly hearts for their lack of activity, and have sought to lead them out into a life of truth and earnestness. And so men have been groping, slowly and cautiously, in a toilsome winding way, now struggling with problems of science, now waging the fierce battles of political warfare, and again

grappling boldly with theories and systems of religious faith and practice, making perceptible advancement, not in days and years, but only in centuries and ages. Every well-defined era in the world's march onward and upward, stands out in bold relief, to bear fresh witness to the perpetual stability of the law of progress. And so it will be as other ages shall roll around, and all alike shall teach the same great lesson,

"Our life is onward,

And our very dust,

Is longing for its changes."

Yes, "Our life is onward;" for our thoughts, outstripping even the fleetness of the movements of time, are continually overleaping the barriers of the present, and we are to-day living in imagination a full score of years farther onward in the future. And so it is not enough that we should look simply at to-day, but we must take our stations where we can take a broad view of that great beyond, toward which we are all so speedily drifting. It is the lack of this precaution that has strewn the beaches all around us with so many wrecks, to which we must give ample lee-room, if we would safely float on ourselves. In this way existence becomes, not a mystery beyond human ken, but a living fact, invested with both privileges and responsibilities, which conscience forbids us to evade.

Intelligent answers to these life questions which crowd upon us, point, with unerring hand, to a warfare that human hands are made to wage. Nor are we left unprovided with weapons for the conflict, which a Divinity has thrust upon us. The instrument with which we are to work out our personal destiny, and contribute too to general growth and progress, is thought. But, even as the swift lightning's flash becomes serviceable to men only when it has been chained and subdued, so does its intelligent counterpart, thought, require a faithful, thorough culture, before it becomes a means of progress.

To secure this culture, and thus to be prepared to answer our life questions by worthy deeds, is the reason why you and I are kneeling, to-day, before the altars of dear old Yale. A century and a half have come and gone since youthful pilgrims first turned their steps hither, to catch a little of the inspiration that a literary culture, based upon a religious faith, is sure to afford. Those years have had a history that speaks in trumpet tones of the worth of that culture, and their very memory comes to us new-fragrant with the rich incense that has arisen from the altars of grateful hearts.