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what undreamt-of distance has Egyptian chronology retreated! Yet how many such steps must we repeat ere we alight upon the first vestiges of man! and how many more to exhaust the relics of life and death upon the world! We have learned to recognize the composite structure and low date of the Pentateuch; the progression of religious doctrine through the Old Testament; its variety in the New; the mixture of unhistorical elements in both, and of human opinions long ago corrected and expectations never fulfilled. In what state of mind would the scholar be who did not know these things? or the reasoner who should suppose that they left all as it was before? All that is real, indeed, all that is divine. . . . they and similar changes without end sweep past, and leave more majestic than before. But he only can feel the serenity of this assurance to whose trust no constants are essential beyond the irremovable realities. James Martineau.

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SECTS. We know well the anger and antipathy of all the elder parties towards every phase of the new sentiment. We are accustomed to their absurd and heartless attempt to divide all men between the two poles of their logical dilemma,—either absolute Atheism or else "our" orthodoxy. But these are only symptoms that the new wine cannot go into the old bottles. They do but betray the inevitable blindness of party-strife, the increasing selfseeking, the loss of genial humility, the conceit of finished wisdom which mark the decadence of all sects. Precisely in the middle of this pretended alternative of necessity-far from "Atheism" on the one hand and from most "Orthodoxies" on the other stand at this moment the vast majority of the most earnest, devout, philosophic Christians of our time; men with trust in a living Righteousness which no creed of one age can adequately define for the fresh experiences given to the spirit of another. To them, and not to the noisy devotees and pharisees of party, do we look for the faith of the future. James Martineau.

MANNER. In dealing with children, a certain distinct suggestiveness of manner does more to secure promptness of obedience than any system of rewards or punishments; and in the miniature battles of every-day life, the power of tacit dictation is to actual force of character almost what powder is to shot. Saturday Review.

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CRAMMING. The health of the mind, as of the body, depends more upon the digestion than the swallow. Horne Tooke.

WALK WITH THE BEAUTIFUL. [The following "gleaning” was printed to accompany the other extracts from the exercises of the young ladies at the Normal Schools in our last number, but was omitted for want of room.]

A great and good artist, for many days noticed, on entering and leaving his studio, a child sitting on the threshold. His ragged garments and thin, wan face told all too well of poverty and sorrow. The kind heart of the painter was touched by the mute sadness, so that he could not pass him carelessly by, but often gave him alms wherewith to buy bread. Still, on returning, the artist beheld the boy before his door; and this befell for many days. At last the master stopped, and, looking kindly down into the wistful eyes of the child, he said, "Little one, dost thou require aught of me?" The tearful eyes said what the quivering lips in vain essayed to utter. But the friendly voice reassured him; "Gladly will I grant thee all in my power." Timorously the boy murmured, "Might I but enter with thee

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Day after day, the poor child, now rich, sat gazing with eager eyes upon the beautiful statues and pictures; day by day, he gained from each face, from every graceful form and attitude, from leafy covert and endless desert plain, new knowledge and joy. And as his soul thereby grew strong and great within him, he went forth into the world to test his newly-gotten strength. Years, passed. Great was his fame throughout the land, and great the sorrowing at his death. Many tongues blessed him, that, through him, they had been raised from the gloom of ignorance to the light of God's goodness and power.

Death stood beside the venerable master, but not alone. An angel form glided before him, and a face of marvellous sweetness bent toward him; while a strain of heavenly music filled his ears. Thy Lord now calls thee home. To me is it granted to come to thee, that thou mightst be assured. Noble has been thy past work -the lifting of many above their low aims. And thou didst well

in giving of thy charity to the beggar at thy door; but in that thou didst satisfy the cravings of an immortal soul, thou art thrice blessed!"

We too sit humbly at the doors of the great masters, and rejoice even at a glimpse of the grandeur within. We are striving ever to become worthy to penetrate the highest and most secret recesses. We can, at first, see but dimly the wonders beyond; but, as we learn and understand the beauties that first meet our eyes, and as we advance day by day the heavy drapery which seemed to separate the apartments, becomes a soft mist, and finally vanishes to give us a free way onward to higher things.

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We must ever seek companionship with all beauty and holiness, that we too may become beautiful and holy. Or in the quaint words of a writer of olden days,

"Unless above himself he can

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"

Still farther, it is our duty in this world, full of God's love and majesty, to become nobler and stronger. We are so made, that it seems to us culpable to rest satisfied at any one stage in our progress; for, apart from our own advancement, others are depending upon us for aid and encouragement. We have each a studio in which we perfect our most cherished designs. Are we mindful of the souls without? (for there are always those without eager to enter.) Do we satisfy ourselves with alms-giving? Have we indeed toiled so long, and with such disheartening results, that they are not worthy the entrance of the veriest beggar? Alas! If it be so, let us cast aside our worthless achievements, and, with humble faith, begin anew. Let our chiselling be in deeper, heavier lines, and let the firmness and truth of our paintings equal their delicacy and coloring. As we paint or carve, we paint pictures, we make figures into which enters something that we have gained from the study of others. But this which we have gained enters our minds, and in each individual is changed by his manner of regarding it, and becomes essentially a new idea; and hence a new, and perhaps a more beautiful feature than the original, is the result. So we are

always giving and receiving. So shall our life-work be, to our possible degree, like that of Michael Angelo.

"The hands that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;

The conscious stones to beauty grew."

May these creations reveal to us anew the Infinite Wisdom, and may the thought of the breadth and depth of God's love and goodness expand our hearts with the strongest, deepest of brotherhood; so that our studios may each moment be more beautiful than before, and ever thronged with earnest souls who will receive through us higher life.

Schiller tells us

"Achieve the Good, and Godlike plants possessed

Already by mankind thou nourishest;

Create the Beautiful, and seeds are sown

For Godlike plants as yet to man unknown."

Sarah B. Morton (Salem.)

Editor's Department.

CULTURE, "PHILISTINES" AND MATTHEW ARNOLD.

We hope that many of our readers have seen the essay by Matthew Arnold, reprinted from the Cornhill Magazine in Messrs. Ticknor & Fields' excellent little miscellany, Every Saturday, on Culture and its Enemies. It has all the grace of style which marks the prose of the accomplished Oxford Professor of Poetry, and it has also the defect in argument which seems to us to pervade his views. We have neither time nor space for a formal criticism, but we here give some notes of thoughts that occurred to us while reading it.

In his plea for Culture as against any and all mere utilitarian views of education, we think Mr. Arnold's position impregnable. It will be an evil day for the interests of the most practical of practical studies when it shall be looked upon solely from the pot-boiling point of view; and studies, if such there are, which cannot be used for purposes of culture, had better at once be relegated to the

care of "Business Colleges." So far, we are entirely at one with Mr. Arnold; but the grand question is, What is Culture - what are all the elements which should go to make up our highest ideal of it? and in the answer which Mr. Arnold gives, we think he betrays the narrowness of his own.

We will not try to show this by an elaborate examination of his Essay, but will only give one or two illustrations. One of the most characteristic of its sentences is the following:-"Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers' voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakspeare or Virgil - souls in whom sweetness and light and all that in human nature was most humane, were eminent accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakspeare and Virgil would have found them!" A greater poet chose Virgil as the companion of his journey amidst even grimmer than Puritan company; and, as for Shakspeare, though we could conceive of Matthew Arnold finding the Puritans of the Mayflower intolerable company if we could only first conceive of the possibility of his ever joining them, yet Shakspeare was a robust, manly soul, who would have fully appreciated the manliness of the Puritans; would not have so miserably misunderstood them as to suppose they made their stormy voyage, and endured the hardships of the wilderness simply to open mines of coal and iron and to get comfortably rich, and become Philistines. Spite of their outward unloveliness, he would have seen the soul within, and would himself have caught from them that deep religious fervor which was the one thing lacking to the symmetry of his great nature. He would not have talked of culture and stood a long way off, for fear the flavor of a Philistine should come between the wind and his nobility.

Religion has landed England in tea meetings and the Non-Conformist! It is sectarianism not religion that lands there. Mr. Arnold does not know where to look for religion. Nothing less than a sublime religious trust could have carried the poor Lancashire weavers,—who haven't a grain of culture, through the suffering and starvation which our slaveholding war brought upon them, and still kept them in sympathy with a cause from which Mr. Matthew Arnold, along with the rest of Englishmen of "culture," daintily kept himself aloof. And it was the Puritanism at which he sneers which worked out that great Emancipation for America which is destined merely by its reaction to do more to elevate his own country in the next ten years than such kid-glove culture as his will do in a century.

We have a profound faith in culture, but not in a culture of Mr. Arnold's kind. We believe that all studies, yes, even all the honest occupations and callings of men, rightly pursued, conduce to culture. Wealth, wrongly pursued, makes a man a Philistine. Poetry and Greek plays, wrongly pursued, make Matthew Arnold a dilettante. The latter is the more elegant result, but in point of real value, we do not think there is much to choose. It is the condemnation of the Oxford and Cambridge style of culture that it cuts off clever young men from the possibility of really understanding the world they live in, while at the same time it fills them with self-conceit. Matthew Arnold is too

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