fore the honesty of manhood and be forgotten, like the prattle of our infancy, or the changing tints upon last summer's cloud, but the mortifying fact will forever remain, that the world's foremost Nation took them as the most splendid gifts that a man could present to his brethren. Lastly, Heaven sent Charles Dickens with his noble translations of the Sermon on the Mount, and never before did any preacher, who wrote his sermons, sway such vast audiences.

Or course we have, in America, our progress, and looking around for its exemplification, we need not be long in finding it. There is a man over whom Mr. Honeyman sneers and whines by turns because he is so very wicked; to whose name a condemnatory adjective must be appended by each student in his essay, else it will display a crude and wayward judgment, and will never take the prize. Now, there are some of us who have never been blessed with the discipline necessary to a well-balanced mind, (which, by the way, a careful study of the mathematics beautifully imparts,) and it is not to be marvelled at if such persist in seeing something extraordinary in Wendell Phillips. I do not know precisely what his religious belief may be, nor do I care. I know, in place of it, that he reverences Truth, and carries a heart heavy on account of Wrong, and looking back two thousand years, I see the man of Nazareth making his life and death a sacrifice to these two holy attributes. People will deplore him as an infidel, and with a shake of the head that defies contradiction, decide him to be chimerical, who never were virtuous in their lives for the reason that their stupidity precludes all opportunity to be vicious; who, I am sure, take—if no more-fifty-two naps per annum because they attend church every Sunday; who suppose him to be chimerical because he says something they cannot understand without an effort. To be sure, one is not an incurable son of Belial because he does not adore "the silver-tongued orator;" but I maintain that no one of us has a right to censure him, if he is not living as earnest a life. My scripture-reading brother, do you remember why the man who wanted to, didn't throw a stone at the woman guilty of adultery? If we think best, we can pray that the Almighty may thicken his tongue and confuse his brain, but I guess that the petition of a lazy man is tardily answered.

It will be borne in mind, all along, that the writer of this article, is neither endorsing nor rejecting the unusual opinions which Phillips may hold concerning life and duty. He is by far too circumspect for that. There is a mild uncertainty lingering about non-committalism, which is truly charming. For anything that can be gathered to the

contrary from this paper, he may be a zealot, partial to a broiled or parboiled heretic, or believe that every slaveholder is far along on the road to glory. To me what Phillips believes-what opinions he may argue pertaining to Society, are matters of very inferior importance. Reasoning, after all, when it gets above the sphere of bread and butter, is not much better than a vexing puzzle. Give a person good powers of scholarship, a plausible address, and an ingenious disposition, and with this reason he will prove all sorts of chagrining absurdities. Can any one tell how many replies to David Hume have been published? But does Phillips really believe such things? Isn't there a possibility of a mistake on our part? We all recollect the story of the timorous traveler. How, in going along a lonely road one dark night, he saw, to his unspeakable horror, standing directly in his way, an enormous giant, evidently wanting for his evening repast a man of our traveler's precise dimensions. And we have not forgotten how, when a flash of lightning revealed surrounding objects plainer, he saw the voracious monster was nothing but a brown, storm-stained old wind-mill, harmless enough,-in all points very unlike a roaring heathen of a bloody giant-under whose eaves little birds had built their nests, and whose patient sides daily received a saxeous basting from mischievous urchins. So it has appeared to me, that we-scared by the unusual presentment of the subject-will sometimes quake at a tenet which appears altogether heterodox and law-subversive, but which, on a closer examination, will prove to be an old acquaintance, first learned while sitting on our mother's knee, whose depth of meaning we have never realized before. It is well on towards nineteen hundred years, I believe, that we have had a Bible in our family, and one would imagine that we understood it all, or, at all events, practised all we understood; yet a judicious compiler can gather a collection of texts which should startle, in their extreme application, even a weak conservatism. As I take it, Phillips' speeches are nothing but verbose renderings of the Golden Rule; rarely, now-a-days, a Diana will say to an erring sister-no matter how grief-stricken-"Neither do I condemn thee," and probably it would amaze Mrs. Potiphar, when contemplating Five Points with unutterable disgust, to hear its vilest denizen, with an invincible force of logic, cry out to her, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." Its unpleasantness makes it none the less true, that we do not fully believe the Bible. This reprobate of a century-already turned sixty-in its iniquitous old age is afraid to confess ownership to the myriad sheaves of wild oats which its frolicsome youth so successfully sowed; and when a

teacher commences to repeat Gospel to it, saying, “blessed are the pure in heart," (thereby implying the disagreeable conclusion, cursed are the impure in heart,) on such occasions it stops its ears, this hoary old century, and hardens its callous neck, and gnashes upon him with its ugly fangs; all because he tells the truth.

To bring these gamboling thoughts under some control, let me state the sole reason why I admire Wendell Phillips. Because I consider him an earnest, honest man. Is this not reason enough? My friends, don't we find it a dreary, loathesome job, to be genteelly worldly all the time, or, at the highest, maintaining a state of only tepid godliness? We might be better-that's a fact-but we do have some good thoughts, once in a while. At intervals we pause and think. Then we get tired out with life as it seems from our view. We abhor Lincoln, Douglas, and the whole litter of coarse-voiced politicians. It appears to us that rascal and law-giver are synonyms-that sordidness has crept into the sacredest places--that genuine religion is getting rarer and rarer-till it seems as if an angry Creator had turned away from us, and was letting us dash along throughout his universe ungoverned, to be in the end a frightful warning to all worlds. Then it softens our misanthropy-or indigestion, if you must have it so-to hear a man in our midst who still has faith in Truth, and who dares to proclaim to a herd of fellow-creatures, that every animal of their number must endeavor to diminish the crime about him, or be responsible for it on the Judgment Day. Let us never forget this fact; the greatest work he is accomplishing is not repulsing the Democratic party, or helping "the cause of the oppressed Slave," by no manner of means.. It is that he is presenting the spectacle of a mind breaking from all retarding social regulations, and speaking and acting simply because it is right to do so. If I was not afraid of being called extravagant I would confidently assert that Webster-(I don't care if his brain was as ponderous as any pumpkin that, sucking nourishment from one of New England's macadamized fields through its stem, like an old topergot bloated to tremendous size, and sprained the back of the Yankee farmer who lifted it)-I say I would call Webster, diplomatizing and establishing boundary lines-as much inferior to Phillips, or any other: conscientious preacher, preparing men for death, "the beginning of life," as I would esteem a dish of pork and beans lower than an eternity of happiness. Allow, for a moment, that he is an irreparable en-thusiast. Can we not find it in our hearts to pity the faithfulness that should make him constantly mindful of the one purpose of his life? Small reward is his at present! A hundred times I have talk

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.

e greatparty, or of means from

Life Questions.

INDING ourselves inhabitants of this lower world, endowed with ower of breathing, and the ability to think and speak, furnished sly with a life lease of the privileges and advantages of this 1 with abundant opportunities of glancing upward toward rhaps better worlds, the questions-What are our respecnd how shall we best perform them?-are to us fraught interest. As every means employed implies an end istence given supposes a mission intended, and it is and partly by reason, that we no sooner become our existence, than we grapple fiercely with ong questions. What am I to do, and how m the first quiet breathings of a new-found le between soul and body, these are the cape them we cannot, and ignore them itimate offspring of truth and reason; hem in the humanity of to-day, are of the purity and wisdom of the ithersoever we may, and be we these life questions are still will ever remove them from grow with our years and art of an honest, earnest Solution. And if, by an g these mighty myste