directly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect? All the triumph of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling; by the lonely lamp of Erasmus; by the restless bed of Pascal; in the tribune of Mirabeau; in the cell of Galileo; on the scaffold of Sidney. But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage. To how many the studies which took their rise from her have been wealth in poverty, liberty in bondage, health in sickness, society in solitude. Her power is indeed manifested at the bar; in the senate; in the field of battle; in the schools of philosophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,-there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens." If every good gift is from the Father of Lights, whence must Athenian philosophy have had its source? Even to that Mohammedan state which we now chiefly associate with the stolid, the decadent, the unspeakable Turk, was there not a past worthy of other than condemnation? It is not only the poet who tells us of a "Something which possessed Apart from place, withholding time, But flattering the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid." History has told us also of the golden prime of the nation, of the time when a mighty government, grasping the sword and proclaiming the name and unity of God, went nigh to conquer the world, and to conquer it not only by the sword, but by its own order when Christendom was devoured with disorder, by its own zeal for God when Christendom was dead with unbelief—a government so majestic in its strength, so inexhaustible in its vitality, so automatic in its movement, that even to thoughtful and Christian minds it seemed likely to overpower and outlast all Christian polities and governments. It may be true, as Dr. Hamlin thinks, that there is none that doeth good, no, not one, in the Greek, Mohammedan, and heathen systems of to-day; but nothing can invalidate the testimony of the world to the benefits which it has received from the fruit of those systems in their prime. Because rankness and wrong characterize their decadence, it does not follow that they owe their origin wholly to these sources. The light that shone upon these upward ways, that guided human intelligence towards truth and beauty and love, that softened fate and glorified pain, and purified passion, and revealed wrong with its illuminating torch—was light from Heaven. It is not creditable to learning, it is not stimulating to piety, to deny it. If the same tests were to be applied to Christianity that the professors of Christianity apply to the ethnic religions, is it certain that even Christianity would have an assured and permanent position as the one divine religion? Dr. Hamlin's convictions give us a chill doubt. He seems to imply that the Greek and Armenian churches are as proper places for missionary work, as thoroughly remote from Christianity as are the heathen temples. He includes in one hopelessness, "heathen, Moslems, nominal Christians." "Oriental apostasy from Christ" he presents as equally unproductive of progress, hope, freedom as Buddhism. But there must have been a time when the pure truth of the gospel lay in the Greek church. Theology as it left the lips of Christ was Greek theology. If in so few years the pure gospel of Christ can be hardened, neutralized, lost in nominal Christianity and oriental heresy, in arrested civilization and a warped and stunted intellectuality, why may it not be that other faiths, corrupt and deadening now, had once their moment of pure, free flow from the fountain of divine truth? John Coleridge Pattison, the delicately-reared and carefullyeducated child of a titled English family, gave his life to the upbuilding of the kingdom of heaven on those parts of the earth that were least uplifted above the kingdom of beasts. All the civilization of Greece and Rome and England he abandoned for the redemption of savages; of cannibals. A singular power of acquiring languages he considered as a Pentecostal gift of tongues, and he consecrated it to the islands of Melanesia, preaching Christ to twenty barbarous tribes, speaking to each in his own dialect wherein he was born. To do this it was necessary to encounter a climate so near the equator that a European was reckoned to be able to exist in it only three months of the year. To secure the confidence of his savages he threw himself greatly into their power. His wont was to row in as far as might be and then swim or wade ashore. With his own hands he taught pupils to sweep and care for their rooms; to print and to weave nets. With his own hands he made them garments and performed all menial work, that he might thus lead them to the lowest stage of civilization and show them the nature and the dignity of work. To win their entire trust, this high-bred Englishman, the cultured and fastidious child of a nation that lugs its bath-tubs across every desert and up every mountain the round world over, chose and firmly kept the horrible solitude of close companionship with barbarism, lived among filthy and fetid cannibals, lay down at night in a long hut side by side with forty or fifty naked savages-wildest, beastliest mould of heathendom-and rose up in the morning to shape this dreadful mass into the likeness of God. And when his work had begun to reveal itself, when he had rescued from their beastliness a group of Christian pupils, loving, lovable, intelligent, devoted to himself, and joining sympathetically in his work, what happened? Labor-ships, ships seeking labor, and commanded by white men, came from afar, decoyed his humble people on board, pretending that the bishop was there, put them under the hatches, and sailed away. After that there was danger. The islanders could not always discriminate between the missionary whites and the kidnapping whites. But the greater the danger the more steadfastly the bishop persisted in landing alone, whenever it was not certain that he was well known and there was fear of attack from the alarmed and exasperated natives. Like his Master, his kingdom was not of this world, and, therefore, also like his Master, he would not let his servants fight. And so one day his dear pupils found his boat afloat in the lagoon, and in the boat lay the bishop, dead, with a smile on his face, with a palm-leaf fastened with five knots on his breast, and under the palm-leaf five wounds. Each wound was the vengeance for a stolen friend. Christianity is at present the crowning religion of the world, and it is carrying the good news to the new Free State on the Congo; but the same small vessel in which a Lutheran missionary sailed, carried over also one hundred thousand gallons of New England rum. The evil thus poured into it from the enlightened world threatens to overwhelm all the good which is but slowly transferred. Five years ago, liquor was unknown among tribes which are now perishing under its ruinous influence, and that liquor comes to it, not from heathendom, but from Christendom. In the heathen nation of India, a missionary, still actively engaged in disseminating Christianity, declares that "the destructive influence of Western civilization is at present far more manifest than the renewing power of Christianity. A critical and scientific education, which trains the intelligence and not the will, has succeeded in upsetting altogether the religious faith of multitudes, and with it many moral and social restraints, a condition of things which, if uncared for, must bring blight and death upon the nation." In the Parliament of Cape Town, Africa, not long ago, a bill was reported to be introduced, placing restrictions on the sale of brandy or "Cape Smoke" to the natives. But the farming legislators, most of whom are engaged in the manufacture of brandy, and all of whom are loud in their professions of Christianity, strongly objected. If the natives, they said, were really men, they were not to be treated as children. They were to be left to their own discretion as to how much they should drink. As soon as this restrictive bill was defeated, another bill was introduced giving the natives the franchise. It was at once opposed and defeated by the same members, on the ground that the natives had become sots and were not fit to be citizens. If the religion of the heathen world is to be adjudged wholly and always corrupt, because Paul denounced the unrighteousness which he found in Rome, in Corinth, in Athens, and among the foolish Galatians, by what token shall a religion be accounted divine whose faith hardens into formula, whose children for greed will imbue their hands in the blood of its martyrs, whose professors will carry shame and degradation, ruin and death to the heathen with swifter feet than it carries to them the good tidings of great joy meant for all people? Is it for a religious system which bears life in one hand and death in the other, to cry out that all other systems had no life in them because they had the savor of death? GAIL HAMILTON. THE ANTHRACITE COAL POOL. WHAT terms of condemnation are too severe for combinations to control the supply and enhance the price of the necessaries of life? Imagine that the capitalists engaged in the transportation and distribution of breadstuffs should decide that bread is too cheap. To remedy that unique evil, they combine the transportation routes of the country; gain possession of all the wheatraising lands; cut down the wasteful and extravagant production of 400,000,000 bushels of wheat to 300,000,000; and by that means advance the price of flour from the ruinously cheap level of $4.50 and $5 per barrel to $6 and $7; enforcing upon the consumer on one hand, the lesson that he can subsist on less bread when his money will only buy three-fourths as much flour as formerly, and upon the laborer who raises the wheat, the practical demonstration that he must accept whatever wages may be allotted him. There is no doubt that such a plan might maintain an ideal prosperity for the capital engaged in it; but there is still less doubt that all the rest of the community would perceive in it a grave attack on their rights and welfare. Bread riots, insurrections, and plans for the redistribution of land which such schemes have provoked in ancient times are conceded by modern enlightenment to be blameworthy mainly for the ignorance and violence which made such protests injurious to popular welfare, rather than effective in abolishing the abuses that provoked them. Fortunately the production of food in this country is too vast, and the methods of transportation too varied, to permit a monopoly of food. Twenty years ago, we might also have thought that the laws of commerce were too well understood and the principles of justice too powerful, for the possibility of such schemes. But the success since then of projects differing from this only in the degree of their apparent impossibility, forbids us to longer rely upon |