humanity may rightly join with us in religious fellowship and communion. We hold public meetings to which all are invited for such a purpose. We sometimes appoint such meetings in our State Prisons and Penitentiaries

-not asking the convicts to come together to hear preaching, for this we never promise them, but to sit down with us in spiritual communion, that we may hold a religious meeting together as Friends and Brothers—all children of one common Father. Can those who thus invite religious

fellowship with "State-prison birds" and Penitentiary convicts rightly disown a brother for contributing, in the exercise of a good conscience, to the support of a Chadwick or a Beecher; -men who perhaps are doing more good in their respective callings than all the Yearly Meetings of Friends combined are doing in theirs? Brethren let there be no strifes, nor dissensions, nor disownments among us; but "These things I command you, that ye love one another."

A MEMBER OF BROOKLYN MEETING.

HE

E who is conversant with the American mind in general, and is at all observant of its action, needs not to have the patent fact repeated here of its great matter-offact bias. It is one which would hasten means to ends, pass from embryology to fruition were it possible, transposing the apple-bud of the spring time to the ripened fruit of the fall; skipping the interstitial seasons of buds, blossoms and growth; but as such cannot be they palliate nature's course with the thought that the finality justifies their toleration, and think not of Beauty's interponant workings. In short we have gone mad after the more obviously Usefuls of Life, unmindful of its notwithstanding more truly profitable Beautifuls.

In the religious world, too, cold theologic discussions and repulsive dogmas take the place of more simple faiths and imaginative beauties; though in our Modern Radicalism, under all its various phases, there seems to appear proofs of the Beautiful existing in its internal aspects, but it is mostly,

to me, the beauty of the ice-berg, towering grandly aloft towards heaven, and reaching, too, deep into the mobile sea-heart of humanity,—yet withal 'tis frigid-cold. withal 'tis frigid-cold. It is of the head, not the heart. It is to be regretted that this should be wholly or for the greater part so, for humanity can better be drawn by the heartstrings of affection, than the unimaginative logic of Reason. I may be mistaken in my view of the workings of the radical mind, but as a whole I believe Radicalism, to too great an extent, to be devoid of those finer and more beautiful qualities which exist more in the heart.

There is in every mind a greater or less capability of perceiving the Beautiful; in some it is latent perhaps ; in another and the greatest class, it is awakened, but not finding its legiti mate channel by reason of malformed societary laws, false inculcated views of life and religion, and unnatural education, it is dammed and gorged, and finds other outlets, warped, unnatural, and meaningless. The third

class are those who though imperfect, have thrown their feelers out in the right direction-Godwards, through Nature, and who might be denominated the Perfectionists in the cultivation of the Beautiful.

Of the first and last classes I have naught to say now; but of, and to, that great and constantly increasing number who fall under the middle classification," it behooves to speak." An idea to become useful and practical in the world, however exalted it may be, must come down to the level of that it would move. So to make the Beautiful wholesomely useful it must address itself to the plane of Common Life. Speculations concerning life in the stars are as naught to him who knows nothing of life in its deeper and higher sense on our own little planet. Hence, your pardon, O transcendentalist! for being so untranscendental in what I say.

Physical beauty is doubtless the initial step to the perception of the Beautiful in Nature, but I leave this to him whose office it is the Physiologist and begin with Moral Beauty. Goethe says: "The Beautiful is higher than the Good; for the Beautiful includes the Good within it as a part."

To gain a high perception of the Beautiful, one must, interiorly, be beautiful. Like attracts like. And so, of course, it follows that to be interiorly beautiful one must first be good, albeit an earnest goodness.

The Beauty of Religion few have or know. The Catholic says he has it in his chants and chimes, incense, statues, altars, ceremonies, and grandly swelling music. To the Catholic it is naught. But he says it ministers to the eye and ear if not to the head. My answer still stands the same. Το

him only, who has gotten up, out, and beyond the letter of these symbolic works, does the Spirit of Beauty denude herself, and standing forth from these embodiments, appear and become truly beautiful.

The heathen worshipper says he has found it when he selects from the wide domain of Nature that symbol, inanimate, animal or reptile, which to his mind appears the noblest and highest, through which to worship Divine Beauty. The iconoclastic Spirit of Reason giving him a little higher ideal of what Beauty is, or should be, he changes his symbol for one more advanced, until at last he comes to realize that Man himself is the topmost step of Nature's creative ladder, and then transfers his worship to him as a medium.

This symbolism at length degenerates and merges into making the man, symbolic of the Principle worshiped, the Principle itself; and here Christianity comes running in its naked enthusiasm, crying “ Eureka,” at last! Partially true at first, perhaps, but at the present later day, judge ye of its claims. Where rest then? Where find it? The age is solving the problem. In grand simplicity_only_can we reach and see the Beauty of Religion which Christ saw. The complicity of the present day faiths cannot perforce see beauty in religion; if from nothing else, from sheer bewilderment.

That beauty is the highest which appeals to all the faculties of one's being alike. Hence the truest and highest beauty is found in Nature's unhindered courses, perhaps too in her less mindful embodiments-those farther from man, nearer to God. To her, artistic skill goes for its models, the Poet for his grandest thoughts and best similes. She is Beauty's mother, a universal teacher and minister, God the Father. So he who would become a pupil must first go to her; she will make him a minister of the Beautiful to all men. But he who attempts to make artificial beauty take the place of natural, repeats a fatal mistake of the age. I have stood by and listened to all the over-wrought expressions which the imagination could invent, and the tongue give utterance to, lav

etc."

ished upon some work of art, which, as a copy, displaying faithfulness and great skill, was "grand, exquisite etc. It is well-it is man's work; give him his meed, but-go beyond. These same persons, most of them, never think or if so, simply as a matter of consequence of its original. Unlimited sums of money are paid for scenes on the limited littleness of the canvas, which God or Nature is constantly producing for us on a scale of grandeur and beauty to which the transcription would be an insult. Yet there are those who would not think this worth their attention-" why that's a matter of course-but come and see-'s last painting." How many thousands of ladies have poured their torrents of praise on the statue of the Greek Slave, and yet a thought would never enter their minds of the horrid deformities they were producing upon their own persons by the follies of fashionable dressing. So, the Physiologist becomes a Minister of the Beautiful, and the reign of the Beautiful begins with Physical Reform. Art studies will only become greatly useful as dispensers of the beautiful, as Art becomes less limited to the few, more broad, more common. The mass of people have too distant an idea of its application to, or connection with, themselves. It should be a part of all liberal education. Painters too must address themselves

to the mind and understanding, as well as to the eye.

Bailey says: "Poets are henceforth the world's teachers,-"would it were more practically true, yet the same objection is found here as before; there lives a mistaken idea of its selectness.

"But poetry is not confined to books. For the creative spirit which thou seekest is in thee, and about thee, yea it hath God's everywhereness.”

Think not that beauty has her chiefest habitation in the grand and greater objects of Nature. There is beauty too in the little things of earth -ay! grandeur in the animalcula. Settle it not in your mind that such is, and such is not, an object of loveliness and life. Most all agree that Niagara is grandly beautiful,—how is it with the worm at your feet? Exempli gratia: Take the large green beauty-the tomato worm (ugh! ugly thing!) overcome your prejudices, study it, watch its habits, keep it long and you will find beauties you dreamed not of. Feed and attend it. It dies. Does it? Watch! and soon comes forth a "wanderer of the air," king of the butterflies, resplendent in its manifold colors. So Beauty too, “hath God's everywhereness."

I have but thrown out a few general suggestions hoping, mayhap, some one more capable might take up the strain and carry it on.

G. M. GOULD.

Lancaster, Ohio.

PR

ROFESSOR E. P. EVANS, whose admirable translation of Stahr's "Life of Lessing" appeared a few months ago and procured for him so many genuine thanks from all the lovers of good books, has now increased our debt of gratitude by an equally faithful and felicitous translation of M. Coquerel's little treatise on "The first historical transformations of Christianity." His publisher Mr. W. V. Spencer, has for some time had the reputation of bringing out books of a high order, and this volume will take nothing from a fame which, by his publication of the works of Mill and Martineau and others hardly less able, has been so firmly established.

The religious movements that have been taking place in England during the last few years, have been watched with a great deal of interest on this side of the Atlantic. The famous

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Essays and Reviews," together with the Broad Church and Low Church replies which they provoked, found many readers in America, while the writings of Colenso, and still later "Ecce Homo" and its companions and antagonists, found almost as many readers here as on the ground where they were written. In the meantime but a small number of persons have been aware that movements equally interesting and important have been taking place across the English Channel—that France is being agitated by a class of thinkers quite as bold, progressive and original, as Jowett or Colenso or the unknown author whose "Ecce Homo" has won for him a notoriety that is out

of all proportion with the merits of his book. Not but that Carlton's worse than contemptible translation of Renan's "Life of Jesus" and “the Apostles" has been read among us, but that they have been regarded as entirely sui generis and representative of nothing but a solitary thinker's thought, while the much wider movement that has so deeply affected the French Protestant Communion has gone on almost unheeded. The organ of this movement is the Strasbourg Nouvelle Revue, its leaders are Nicolas, Reuse, Colani, Scherer and the two Coquerels. Whether its fruits are life-giving or poisonous they are certainly significant, and as yet none of them more so than this little book of Coquerel's.

When we consider by what springs of bitter personal grievance these thoughts first took their root, it is a matter for surprise and joy that they bear no witness to any feeling of personal ill will. Though banished from his pulpit, despite the wishes of his congregation, by the illiberality of his superiors, he pleads for liberality in so impersonal a way, that one would never guess that he is pleading his own cause, and to plead for liberality is the whole purpose of his book. It is written in no dogmatic spirit, though unavoidably it dogmatizes here and there. It is written wholly in the interest of toleration, to prove that there is no such thing as orthodoxy, and that hence there can be no such thing as heresy, and that hence again, all persecution and illiberality towards those who differ from us in theological opinions, is sadly out of

place. The argument is simple, and can scarcely fail to interest even where it cannot equally convince.

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It is a law of history," says M. Coquerel, "that every religion is being transformed continually and naturally in order to respond to the spiritual wants of those who profess

it." This law he seeks to establish

first, by a priori arguments, and sec. ondly, by instances drawn from the history of various religions. In the history of Greece it is shown by the various forms imposed upon the myth of Hercules, and by the changes that took place in her philosophy from Thales to Plato. So long as a religion is alive, it changes spite of ali that can be done to keep it immutable. When it is dead it is no longer susceptible of change. In vain when polytheism was once dead did men try to galvanize it into life. More striking instances to the same effect are found in the history of Judea, previous to the coming of Christ. Nothing can be falser, we are told, than the idea that Judaism only changed its rites and forms. Hebrews, Israelites and Jews, were different men, with widely different faiths. The Hebrew worshipped God under the name of Elohim, a plural word signifying powers. The Israelites worshipped Jehovah (the I am); the Jew incorporated with this simple faith many ideas borrowed from foreign creeds.

The transformations of religion before the time of Jesus having been reviewed, the teachings and character of Jesus are next spoken of. The substance of his teachings was the reign of God in us, the love of God, and of men, the pardon of sins, and the spiritual life. Everything else in the Christian Church can and should vary unceasingly. A belief in his miracles, his divinity and his resurrection is not, according to M. Coquerel,

and received into the kingdom of God, believers who had never heard him speak of his divinity, never seen his miracles, nor had any conception of his resurrection." It appears from the context that M. Coquerel is not himself heretical on any of these questions. His liberality, therefore, is all for others, he is not here pleading for himself.

But by far the most interesting portion of the book is that devoted to the successive changes that have taken place in Christianity itself. first great change was that which tended to make Christianity another. Jewish sect. The representative of this phase was the apostle James. Then came the first reformer, Stephen, and the still greater Paul, striving to defeat the Judaizing tendency of James. But Paul was not merely a reformer. He was a theologian, and by his theologizing gave Christianity certain aspects that it did not have before. Half-way between the Christianity of Paul and that of James, is that of Peter. “Neither Paul nor James carried the day; the victory belonged to the medium illogical tendency, of which St. Peter was the organ. The secret of his thought's success was that he thought very little. A smaller scope of mind and a feeble character, such were the advantages of Peter over Paul, and they were sufficient to give success to his cause." The triumph of Petrine Christianity was the Roman Catholic Church. But Paul could bide his time. Great Luther was his avenger. Protestantism is the Christianity of Paul.

But while the contest was still rife between Judaizing Christianity on the one hand, and that of Paul on the other, a very different type, the Hellenistic was springing from the fertile brain of the apostle John. This type was theosophic, mystical, and with its doctrine of the word made flesh, its language borrowed from the Platonists of Alexandria, remained the