My beautiful first-born! Life seems more fair
Since thou art mine. How amid its flowers
Thy little feet will gambol by my side,

My own pet lamb. And then to train thee up
To live above, and live for God-

O, glorious thought!

The sons of light and the daughters of love are the offspring of uncontaminated conjugal relations. A libertine cannot produce an unmixed child, although married to the purest and most chaste of women. Hybridity, or some evil eccentricity of either body or character will be the child's earthly inheritance.

Absolute reform must begin with the formation of soul and body. Hereditary transmission is regulated by a law so mathematical, so all-comprehensive, and with all, so exquisitely delicate and celestial, that polygamy or free-love relations cannot be practiced without incurring frightful risks and lasting punishments. Incestuous relations begin the moment there is the least departure from the sphere of true wedlock.

Every child yearns to be legitimate, to be a purely derived offspring of a truly wedded pair. Give to woman a true mate, and let man be a true husband, and in that family we shall not see human hybrids, moral monsters. It takes mother-nature two or three generations of difficult labor to bring such progeny to the fullness of stature. The world's hybridized population is demonstration enough that the conjugal element cannot be used with impunity, out of the true monogamic relation.

Nothing can expiate the transgression of any law. If a man sins, he as certainly suffers, not from any arbitrary infliction of punishment, but wholly from the natural consequences attending the peculiar matter of his sins. Every unholy thought is a prisoner before the bar-reason; and

thus every person experiences the legitimate consequences of wrong doing which cannot be forgiven, only outlived by a righteous life.

The result of actions cannot be avoided. There is not a thought or an act, or an impulse in the life of a human being but starts a train of effects, which roll on and on through the most distant future, and nothing can erase them from the immortal memory. He who commits a wrong will surely suffer for it; this inherent sickness renders evil a self-punishing process.

Society and individuals are equally the causes and victims of sin, and society never inflicts a punishment upon an individual which is not paid back with interest compounded. Revenge and wrong and evil, according to the laws of cause and effect, are certain to reproduce their kind. No one should suffer premature death by arbitrary means. We need not make haste to aid Providence in applying the appropriate penalty. The God-code of punishment is the best. Therefore, let us abolish the death penalty, a relic of barbarism and a shame to civilization. Arbitrary punishment is not the catholicon; arbitrary and procrastinated punishment, in theory, lay the foundation of much deformity in practice. Wisdom should regulate the science of life, and thus save the race from all the inharmonies which grow out of human ignorance and misdirection. Evils will be overcome and abolished just as fast as man's spiritual faculties, including his reasoning endowments, become developed and inherently harmonized.

We should have an enlarged view of the universal family. Happiness is the end of all human desire and endeavor, and spiritual culture is the agency by which it may be obtained. We should begin each day with a sympathetic endeavor to bring peace and happiness on earth. We should

have more comprehensive views of God and nature, and aspire to a true harmonious life. This individual life will spread over families, societies and nations, and then the whole will represent the individual, and the individual will represent the whole, and God will be All in All.

Look on man! there is an order

Of mortals on the earth, who do become
Old in their youth, and die ere middle age,
Without violence or warlike death:

Some perishing of pleasure-some of study-
Some worn with toil-some of mere weariness—
Some of disease-and some of insanity-
And some of withered or broken hearts;
For this last is a malady which slays
More than are number'd in the lists of fate.
Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.

PART EIGHTH.

LIFE JOURNEY.

LIFE IS A PLENARY INSPIRED BOOK.

Life is a book, and we write in it every day something, be it little or much, and what we write we may not, cannot unwrite.

O, to live is something awful,

And I knew it not before;

For I dreamed not how stupendous

Was the secret that it bore.

Life is a fixed fact, a stern and solemn reality. Every mind is compelled to take upon itself individual responsibility. Our bark is launched by other hands than ours. The currents of this great sea are all setting outward from the port we have left. Go we must. We can neither stop nor turn back. The journey must be performed. Resistance is vain. Sighs are useless, murmurings are unwise. Wisdom's voice is for the most active diligence, both for the profit and pleasure of the voyage. We can make it intensely delightful and almost infinitely profitable or we can make it miserable, and a prodigal waste of the most precious means of enduring wealth.

Everything should be converted into a benefit. Many people make the worst of life for want of true knowledge of means, uses and opportunities. The true purgatory of our earth is the want and bitter disappointment resulting from the carelessness of those who are forever offering the timeworn excuse for unutilized opportunities, I did not think.

We should improve upon the past and derive a moral lesson from our own failures and from our neighbor's failures. The great object of life is to learn how to live, for we take the quality of what we live on, bodily and mentally.

There are no sweeter or higher influences than those which flow out unconsciously from good lives. A really good life is one to which truth and kindness and nobility have become habitual. The whole nature may become so charged with these qualities that they affect even the smallest acts, and their beauty is present in the most trivial and unconsidered word or deed. Such a person goes surrounded with a moral atmosphere as constant as the perfume which a rose sheds around itself. People meeting such a person are made happier without being conscious of the real cause. Every one possessing moral worth, desires to be of use in the world, and it is the grief of many that they seem shut off from opportunities of usefulness. But simple growth in right life is growth in usefulness. Just as fast as we acquire in ourselves the spirit of purity and love, we send out an influence of purity and love upon others, whether we know it or not.

The greatest moral force in the world is of the silent and secret kind. The youth is shaped in some degree by moral instruction, but in a far greater degree by father and mother and companions with whom he is brought in ceaseless contact. As we are pure or base, selfish or loving, so do we give our own color to those with whom we are in any degree of proximity.

Life is where there is hope, faith, reverence, love, and sense of the beautiful. Our habits of moral feeling are formed by life, and they are strengthened by the pictures of life. The ideals of life and happiness must involve a more or less positive ethical character. What these ideals are,