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2. IMMORTALITY. — Original Translation from Massillon.

JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON, one of the most eloquent preachers of any age, was born in Pro ence, France, in 1663. He became so celebrated for his eloquence, that he was cailed to Paris, #here he drew crowds of hearers. In 1717, he was made Bishop of Clermont; and died, 1742.

If we wholly perish with the body, what an imposture is this whole system of laws, manners and usages, on which human society is founded! If we wholly perish with the body, these maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude and friendship, which sages have taught and good men have practised, what are they but empty words, possessing no real and binding efficacy? Why should we heed them, if in this life only we have hope? Speak not of duty. What can we owe to the dead, to the living, to ourselves, if all are, or will be, nothing? Who shall dictate our duty, if not our own pleasures, if not our own passions? Speak not of morality. It is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention, if retribution terminate with the grave.

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If we must wholly perish, what to us are the sweet ties of kindred? what the tender names of parent, child, sister, brother, husband, wife, or friend? The characters of a drama are not more illusive We have no ancestors, no descendants; since succession cannot be predicated of nothingness. Would we honor the illustrious dead? How absurd to honor that which has no existence! Would we take thought for posterity? How frivolous to concern ourselves for those whose end, like our own, must soon be annihilation! Have we made a promise? How can it bind nothing to nothing? Perjury is but a jest. The last injunctions of the dying, what sanctity have they, more than the last sound of a chord that is snapped, of an instrument that is broken?

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To sum up all: If we must wholly perish, then is obedience to the laws but an insensate servitude; rulers and magistrates are but the phantoms which popular imbecility has raised up; justice is an unwarrantable infringement upon the liberty of men, —an imposition, usurpation; the law of marriage is a vain scruple; modesty, a prej udice; honor and probity, such stuff as dreams are made of; and incests, murders, parricides, the most heartless cruelties, and the blackest crimes, are but the legitimate sports of man's irresponsible nature; while the harsh epithets attached to them are merely such as the policy of legislators has invented, and imposed on the credulity of the people.

Here is the issue to which the vaunted philosophy of unbelievers must inevitably lead. Here is that social felicity, that sway of rea son, that emancipation from error, of which they eternally prate, as the fruit of their doctrines. Accept their maxims, and the whole world falls back into a frightful chaos; and all the relations of life are confounded; and all ideas of vice and virtue are reversed; and the most inviolable laws of society vanish; and all moral discipline perishes; and the government of states and nations has no longer any cement to uphold it; and all the harmony of the body politic

becomes discord; and the human race is no more than an assemblage of reckless barbarians, shameless, remorseless, brutal, denaturalized, with no other law than force, no other check than passion, no other bond than irreligion, no other God than self! Such would be the world which impiety would make. Such would be this world, were a belief in God and immortality to die out of the human heart.

3. THE UTILITY OF THE BEAUTIFUL.- John Ruskin.

MAN's use and function-and let him who will not grant me this follow me no further is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness. Whatever enables us to fulfil this function is, in the pure and first sense of the word, useful to us. And yet people speak, in this working age, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment, were alone useful; and, as if sight, thought and admiration, were all profitless so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers and hus bandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew, and the water they draw, are better than the pine-forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like His eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that though God "hath made everything beautiful in his time, also He hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.”

This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganization,

they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the deliverance, the faith. Deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also,a fear greater than of sword and sedition, that dependence on Gol may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water is sure: that gratitude to Him may cease, because His constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world; that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vain-glory. and love in dissimulation; that enervation may 'succeed to strength apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and the foulness of

dark thoughts to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which, so long as they are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty, but, when the stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust.

4. THE WORLD WITHOUT AND WITHIN.-Thomas Noon Talfourd. EXISTENCE has become almost a different thing since it began with some of us. It then justified its old similitude of a journey,― it quickened with intellect into a march; it is now whirling with science and speculation into a flight. Space is contracted and shrivelled up like a scroll. Time disdains its old relations to distance. The intervals between the "flighty purpose" and the "deed" are almost annihilated; and the national mind must either glow with generous excitement, or waste in fitful fever. How important, then, is it, that throughout our land the spiritual agencies should be quickened into kindred activity; that the few minutes of leisure and repose which may be left us should, by the succession of those "thoughts which wander through eternity," become hours of that true time which is dialled in Heaven; that thought, no longer circling in vapid dream, but impelled right onward with divine energy, should not only outspeed the realized miracles of steam, but the divinest visions of atmos pheric prophecy, and still "keep the start of the majestic world"!

Mr. Canning once boasted, of his South American policy, that he had "called a new world into existence, to balance the old." Be it your nobler endeavor to preserve the balance even between the world within us and the world without us; not vainly seeking to retard the life of action, but to make it steady by Contemplation's immorta freightage. Then may we exult, as the chariot of humanity flies onward, with safety in its speed, for we shall discover, like Ezekiel of old, in prophetic vision, the spirit in its wheels.

All honor, then, to those who, amid the toils, the cares, and the excitements, of a season of transition and struggle, would rescue the golden hours of the youth around them from debasing pleasures and more debasing sloth, and enable them to set to the world, in a great crisis of its moral condition, this glorious example of intellectual courage and progress!

5 THE MECHANICAL EPOCHI.— Hon. John P. Kennely.

THE world is now entering upon the Mechanical Epoch. There is nothing in the future more sure than the great triumphs which that epoch is to achieve. It has already advanced to some glorious con quests. What miracles of mechanical invention already crowd upon Look abroad, and contemplate the infinite achievements of the

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steam power. Reflect a moment on all that has been done by the railroad. Pause to estimate, if you can, with all the help of imagina tion, what is to result from the agency now manifested in the oper ations of the telegraph. Cast a thought over the who.e field of scientific mechanical improvement and its application to human wants, in the last twenty years, to go no further back, and think what a world it has made; - how many comforts it has given to man, how many facilities; what it has done for his food and raiment, for his communication with his fellow-man in every clime, for his instruction in books, his amusements, his safety! - what new lands it has opened, what old ones made accessible ! how it has enlarged the sphere of his knowledge and conversancy with his species! It is all a great, astounding marvel, a miracle which it oppresses the mind to think of. It is the smallest boast which can be made for it to say that, in all desirable facilities in life, in the comfort that depends upon mechanism, and in all that is calculated to delight the senses or instruct the mind, the man of this day, who has secured himself a moderate competence, is placed far in advance of the most wealthy, powerful and princely of ancient times, might I not say, of the times less than a century gone by?

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And yet we have only begun ;- we are but on the threshold of this epoch. A great celebration is now drawing to a close, the celebration, by all nations, of the new era. A vast multitude of all peoples, nations and tongues, has been, but yesterday, gathered under a magnificent crystal palace, in the greatest city of the world, to illustrate and distinguish the achievements of art, no less, also, to dignify and exalt the great mechanical fraternity who have filled that palace with wonders. Is not this fact, of itself, charged with a volume of comment? What is it but the setting of the great distinctive seal upon the nineteenth century?— an advertisment of the fact that society has risen to occupy a higher platform than ever before? - a proclamation from the high places, announcing honor, honor immortal, to the workmen who fill this world with beauty, comfort and power; honor to be forever embalmed in history, to be perpetuated in monuments, to be written in the hearts of this and succeeding generations!

6. THE MIND OF MAN. - Mark Akenside. Born, 1721; died, 1770

SAY, why was man so eminently raised

Amid the vast creation, - why ordained
Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame,
But that th' Omnipotent might send him forth,
In sight of mortal and immortal Powers,
As on a boundless theatre, to run
The great career of justice; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds ·

To chase each partial purpose from his breast,
And through the mists of Passion and of Sense,
And through the tossing tides of Chance and Pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of Truth and Virtue, up the steep ascent
Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,

The applauding smile of Heaven? The bigh-born soul
Disdains to rest her Heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft

Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the volleyed lightning through the Heavens
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the Northern blast,
Sweeps the long tract of Day.

Mind, Mind alone (bear witness, Earth and Heaven'
The living fountains in itself contains

Of beauteous and sublime: here, hand in hand,
Sit paramount the Graces; here, enthroned,

Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,

Invites the Soul to never-fading joy.

Look, then, abroad through Nature, to the range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense;
And speak, Cinan! does this capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots, and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove,

When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,
And bade the father of his country hail?
For lo! the tyrant prostrate in the dust,
And Rome again is free!

7. THE TRUE TO-DAY -H. Withington. Born, 1818; died, 1848.

ALL that there is in what we call To-day is in the life of thought thought is the spirit's breath. To think is to live; for he who thinks not has no sense of life. Wouldst thou make the most of life,

wouldst thou have the joy of the present, let Thought's invisible shuttles weave full in the loom of Time the moment's passing threads. To think is to live; but with how many are these passing hours as so many loose filaments, never woven together, nor gathered, but scattered, ravelling, so many flying ends, confused and worthless! Time and life, unfilled with thought, are useless, unenjoyed, bringing no pleasure for the present, storing no good for future need. To-day is

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