those, he made his ink with water of Helicon; but these inspirations prophetical were distilled from above; in those are weak motions of Nature, in these raptures of Grace." Chief of these prose compositions is "A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson: His Character and Rule of Holy Life." This is a unique work. It is a minute picture of parochial labors, responsibilities, pleasures; in essential points as timely now as two centuries ago. It must have been written from the every-day experience of its author, and may be read as a clerical autobiography: happy the pastor who can as truthfully record his own life-history among his people, in memorials like these. "The dignity" of the priesthood, he says in the opening chapter, "is in that a priest may do that which Christ did, and by his authority, and as his vicegerent. The duty, in that a priest is to do that which Christ did, and after his manner, both for doctrine and life." The conception of the sanctity of this office is penetrating and pervasive. It lifts the veil and goes within the holy of holies with the solemn tread of the old Hebrew hierarch. What a condemning and damaging contrast to the levity with which too many, in more than one among the churches, lay their hands on these sacred mysteries. And yet there is, as there should be, a chapter on "The Parson in Mirth," a short one indeed; but long enough to remark that "he sometimes refresheth himself, as knowing that Nature will not bear everlasting droppings, and that pleasantness of disposition is a key to do good." Here is a basket of the mellow fruit laid up in this storehouse. in this storehouse. In prayer, the parson's

"Voice is humble, his words treatable and slow; yet not so slow neither as to let the fervency of the supplicant hang and die between speaking, but with a grave liveliness, between fear and zeal, pausing yet pressing, he performs his duty." "The pulpit is the parson's joy and throne." "The character of his sermon is holiness; he is not witty, or learned, or eloquent, but holy." "The Parson's method in handling of a text consists of two parts: first, a plain and evident declaration of the meaning of the text; and secondly, some choice observations drawn out of the whole text, as it lies entire and unbroken in the Scripture itself. This he thinks natural, and sweet, and grave. Whereas the other way of crumbling a text into small parts, as the person speaking or spoken to, the subject and object, and the like, hath neither in it sweetness, nor gravity, nor variety, since

the words apart are not Scripture, but a dictionary, and may be considered alike in all the Scripture." "His wife is either religious, or day and night he is winning her to it. Instead of the qualities of the world, he requires only three of her: first, a training up of her children and maids in the fear of God, with prayer and catechising, and all religious duties. Secondly, a curing and healing of all wounds and sores with her own hands; which skill either she brought with her, or he takes care she shall learn it of some religious neighbor. Thirdly, a providing for her family in such sort, as that neither they want a competent sustentation, nor her husband be brought into debt."

Though the second of these requisites be hardly looked for in our day, there are not wanting examples of its value as an adjunct to the clergyman's office, and not a few of our modern female accomplishments might profitably exchange places with the qualifications of a good nurse. It is recorded of the pious John Eliot, that having heard that a man, who had been his bitter enemy, was suffering from a severe wound, he caused him to be brought to his house, where his wife's surgical skill and Christian gentleness cured him both of his wound and of his enmity. But even more would we commend the Parson's "thirdly" to the thoughtful regard of our gentle secretaries of the treasury. Its final clause has a touching significance, and never more than now.

It is worth studying the language of Herbert with reference to contemporary authors, to note its singular advancement beyond the standard of the age. Spenser preceded him with the first three books of the "Faerie Queen" only about forty years; but that great poem needs a copious addenda of footnotes to interpret its obsolete words, while Herbert's pages, in their unaltered original dress, contain hardly any superannuated expressions. His diction is modern above that perhaps of any one who wrote at that period. Many of his prose works, possibly some of the best of them, have perished. Of the others which survived the burning of a friend's mansion, not long after their author's death, are "Jacula Prudentium," a collection of proverbs full of wisdom, a translation of an "Italian Treatise of Temperance and Sobriety," a few letters throbbing with the warmest of hearts, a "University Oration," and "Preface and Notes to the Divine Considerations of a Spaniard"-John Valdesso.

ARTICLE III.

THE SWORD AND CHRISTIANITY.

Ir is interesting to notice revolutions of thought which minds pass through, when cherished opinions are tried by unexpected ordeals of experience. Reasons of a very feeble strand hold a faith to ride out the easy swells of ordinary life; but when the tempest comes down, the virtues of tow are found to be not equal to the virtues of manilla. Opinions, then, for which one had been willing to endure a social martyrdom, are tossed to the winds, and the mind girds itself with new thoughts adequate to a day of storm.

In such a time no doctrines have vanished more pitifully under fierce trial, than those which have lashed minds with questions concerning human society out of joint. The social man is miserably sick; and the everlasting problem with humane thinkers has been, how to put him firmly on his legs again. Impatient at the slow promises of Christianity, mettlesome spirits have devised quicker methods of cure. There have been reform associations and peace societies; winsome quietings of the devil in man's heart by breathing in soft sentiments of a religion of the finer feelings; dainty persuasions about the beauties of society bound together in the proper adjustment of the affinities of love; or Olympian utterances, after the manner of that great Scotch catapult, flinging out ragged thoughts about the sublime achievements of mighty souls and the opening paths of grand action, in which all men may become heroes travelling towards Deity. But after human pride and impatience have slid the wisdom of Christianity into an asylum of the effete and worn out, and the ordeal of experience has come, then has the heavenly philosophy of Christ, like a mount of fire that blazes out only in times of earthquaking, shot up and drawn again the averted eyes.

Contemplating social peace from afar, the Gospel pursues it as an end by a system of making war. For reconstructing human society, its first work is to throw a new and fundamen

tal discord into it. Divisions are split through families, between father and son, dividing brother and brother, separating household from household. Yet in these rendings which Christianity carries even to the hearthstone, the conflict is not one of simple passion. Thought is harnessed for the battle. Truth is girded for the strife. Opinions grapple in the contest. Faiths, like wrestlers, agonize for the mastery. Doctrines, as gladiators, strike the two-edged steel in the clash. And around this contest of thought with thought, this bat tling of opinions, there gathers often a storm of passion. The doctrines of Christ, coming down into the world and shoving right across old ways of thinking, arousing the mind and compelling it to stand on the defensive, must make strife. And that strife so organized on the one side with the vital principles of Jesus, principles that will not sleep nor suffer a peace with principles of wrong, is a peculiar glory of Christianity. No other system of thought, which has not at least stolen its vitality from the Christian religion, can make even a pretension to such a glory. Not till the doctrines of Jesus began to move upon the world, was there ever known such a thing as a great popular conflict of opinion. Conflict there was enough of it; interest with interest, pride with pride, passion with passion, scandal with scandal, duels of invective, wringing the ears of neighborhoods, moving persons to hate, communities to depredation, and peoples to war.

But the unique genius of Christianity throws into all that striving materials of thought, round which these fires of human nature gathering shall burn with nobler passions and purify themselves in burning. And that material is new doctrines of God and man, going abroad in society and energizing old doctrines.

The cavil of unreflecting scepticism is frequent, that certain truths or moral precepts, professed by the disciples of Christ, had been current thoughts of a pagan literature from time immemorial. "That great genial precept of social love and forbearance," we have heard it said, "is no discovery of the Gospel. Long before cur Lord preached on the Mount, very many of his thoughts had been anticipated by other moralists. He taught, indeed, well; perhaps better than any one before

him; he disclosed some new truths it may be; yet much of his moral teaching was only the reproduction of old things in a new form. Even that golden rule which is so much shown around by his followers, as if it had struck a placer in the Gospel, is found just as well minted in the works of that great Chinese teacher." To which we answer, be it so. Even if such cavalier assertions were false, we would not be at great trouble to prove them false. False or true, the wisdom of Jesus shines with the same splendor. Always assuming that sufficient fingerposts had been set up in nature to guide the inquiring mind in ways of righteousness, Christianity has never plumed herself on discovering what man ought to have discovered, or on doing for man what he might be expected to do for himself. Claiming to reveal some things which man. had never thought of, and some things which he could never have been sure of, she has brought that into the world which energizes all the new and all the dead old of religious truth. And, here, mounts up the true glory of the Christian religion as a moral power for turning society upside down. By her demonstration of God as the tender, loving, suffering Father of mankind, she has done that without which all human discovery in the field of morals, had been in the world what a flower-garden was in the field of Antietam, for turning aside the storm of war. She has taken the impotent precepts of morals and clothed them with power. She lays her hand on those shaky truths of human discovering, and behold! they spring up clad in rattling mail. "Jesus Christ paraded stolen gems of truth!" Does that flippancy of mind ever think that those old truths were dead as the bones in the valley of Ezekiel, until the philosophy of a vicarious atonement breathed life into them and sent them forth upon the earth mailed for battle in the cause of humanity? Yes, some of the truths of Christianity had already been old; old as Bunyan's superannuated giant was old, crazy in the joints, shattered in the head, blind, toothless, and incoherently mumbling his anathemas to a laughing world.

From the beginning, then, the genius of the Gospel has been such as to carry strife among men. Moving with principles which would not sleep, nor allow principles of wrong