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the Jewish rabbi, the Roman Catholic priest, and the Congregational preacher could all look to it at least for certain forms of special instruction. As we understand it, there is nothing in the charter or constitution of Union Theological Seminary to prevent engrafting upon it this larger life, provided the necessary funds can be secured and given to the Board of Directors to use for this purpose. The name and the traditions of Union Theological Seminary both fit it for this enlargement of its functions, and its President-elect possesses that combined spiritual conservatism and intellectual progressiveness, that intense loyalty to Christ, and that open-mindedness to truth which peculiarly fit him for leadership in such an enterprise.

Even more important than this intellectual broadening of the Theological Seminary into the Theological University is its equipment with means for the development of the spiritual life of its students. The advice which the pious mother gave to her son, to be careful not to lose his religion in getting theology, was not needless. It may be difficult to say why it is the fact, but that it is the fact cannot be doubted, that medical students in studying medicine are in danger of losing their humanity, and divinity students in studying theology are in danger of losing their spirituality. The methods which Dr. Hall has devised for meeting this difficulty seem to us very wise. His residence is to be practically under the same roof with the theological students. They will thus, to a considerable extent, share his life with him. As far as an adjoining home can relieve an institution from its purely institutional aspects, this will be done. Scarcely less important is the proposal to make the Seminary Chapel the center of a spiritual life, not for the students only, but for the community. Daily prayers open to the public will be something of a novelty in this great commercial city. It will be interesting to watch the success of the experiment. We do not see, however, why, wisely conducted, it may not attract a worshiping congregation somewhat as the Harvard Vespers have attracted a worshiping congregation on Thursday after noons through the winter in Cambridge, Mass. Making the Seminary Chapel a platform for university sermons is perhaps

less of an experiment. We suspect that admission to these services will have to be by ticket. The chapel is not large, and the experience of Harvard University and Cornell University, in neither of which is there so great a community from which to draw a congregation, would indicate that the problem of the Seminary will be, not to find auditors, but to furnish seats. If this should prove to be the case, and Union Theological Seminary should be able to put into its pulpit from time to time some of the great preachers of the country, as Cornell and Harvard have done, the influence on the religious life of the students cannot be otherwise than great and beneficent.

We Can

In every man there lie dormant powers which he does not know he possesses. Every man has more ability than he thinks he has. However self-conceited he is, he has more ability than he thinks he has, although he may not have the kind of ability which he thinks he has. There is in every man, potentially, power that he never suspects-power that never will come to anything unless it be quickened by a power without himself, as the seed in the ground will come to nothing unless the sun shines on it. To this power in every man Christ appeals. To every one waiting for some external gift, dreaming what he would do if he only had some one else's powers, lying idle in the expectation that some angel will come down and trouble the water, and then his time will come, Christ says, as to the cripple of olden time, "Rise, take up thy bed, and walk." In every miracle he gave the healed something to do. The only way to receive help is to help ourselves. The only way to help others is to help them to help themselves.

The best word of Christian philanthropy, generally, to the unfortunate is, "Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I unto thee. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk." To open, as the Salvation Army has recently done in New York, a free lodging-house, and advertise it far and wide; to open, as a newspaper has done in New York, a free soup-house, and to advertise it far

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and wide, is the way to impoverish the poor, to aggravate distress, to increase difficulty, to injure humanity. That is not the work of Christian love. For there can be no love without thought, without labor, without some measure of self-sacrifice. To fling a quarter to a beggar in the street is not love, it is laziness; it is at best but an idle, inefficient, and indifferent good nature.

We do not believe in "Christian

Science" or "mind-cure" or "faith-cure' or any other of the isms that every now and then walk across our stage, like ghosts, to disappear when the cock crows. But in them all, and giving significance to them, is the truth that the spirit has more power over the body than we have been wont to think. There is an effect of body on soul, but there is also an effect of soul on body. There is a power in the human will to control the nerves and to minister to the physical or ganization. There are not a few persons who really need no medicine but this: a vigorous, emphatic command—“ Rise, take up your bed, walk." There are invalids who need nothing more than this: "In the name of Jesus Christ I command thee, Rise," and then a helping hand to put them on their feet.

But these are only illustrations of the higher truth: Every one of us can do the work he ought to do. Opportunities are commands, and when the command comes the power comes also. No man can tell what he can do by consulting his own self-consciousness. The only way is to try. There are some men who sit so long wondering whether they can do a thing or not that the next-door neighbor, who is not so strong, has arisen and accomplished the task. The mere attempt accomplishes something. The mere endeavor creates the power. Could Moses have imagined, while he was the herdsman at Mount Sinai, that he was to be a great statesman? Could David have imagined, when he was feeding his father's flock on the hillside of Judea, that he was to be the organizer of the kingdom of Israel? Could Paul have imagined, when in Jerusalem, that he was to be the founder of European Christianity? Could Abraham Lincoln have imagined, when he was splitting rails, that in him was the power to lead a nation through the travail

of civil war ? The conduct of Israel through the wilderness made Moses; the kingdom made David; the Apostles' preaching made Paul; the Reformation made Luther; the Civil War made Abraham Lincoln. We are made by what we do: our activity creates us. The man who sits with folded hands until the angel has come down and troubled the water never accomplishes anything. Endeavor does not always achieve success; but it can always achieve the greatest of all successes-character. The door of opportunity is always an invitation from God, and with that invitation comes the command, and with the command the power. There is in every church in America a great deal of latent force not set to work. If only a Christ could come through our churches, and, looking in the face of every waiting disciple idly receiving instruction and serving in nothing, could say to him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk," and every one into whose eyes he looked should attempt to serve, we should see a very different church from the church we see now. Nothing that ought to be is impossible. To Christ's question, Can you drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and be bap tized with the baptism that I am baptized with? the Christian's answer should always be, We can. For God's child can always bear the burden the Father puts upon him, can always accomplish the task the Father sets him.

66

The Outlook Vacation

Fund

readers of the opportunities it is possible for The coming of the spring will remind our them to give the working-girls of the Greater New York. Money is needed now every day to provide the opportunity to the tired-out, and often the worried-out, working-girl to have a two weeks' vacation. This week a girl sixteen years old, who has been the main support of a family of seven, must be sent away at once, for a month.

One of the delightful events of the week in connection with The Outlook Vacation Fund was the receipt of a letter with a check for fifty dollars from a group of friends who wished to furnish a room in memory of one who had died.

The students of Houghton Seminary at

Clinton, N. Y., furnished the library at Cherry Vale when the house was enlarged. This year they will send about eighty volumes of carefully selected books for the library there. The books now at Cherry Vale will be sent to Elmcote, at Craigville, N. Y., and the books at Elmcote will be sent to one of the houses at Santa Clara, in the Adirondacks. The houses are nearly all ready for occupancy, and money is needed to make them available. For this we depend on our readers.

THE VACATION FUND

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Total....

The Spectator

$7,293 38
200
20 00
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2. 00'

1 00 2 50

26.00 200

4.00

1 00 10 00 50 00 50 00

5.00

7,497 88
3.00

to that asks, "Who tied that little man sword?" That misfits abounded in the ancient as in the modern world is clear from the observations of the Book of Proverbs on the bore, the sluggard, and especially the simpleton, of whom it has so much to say that it is our chief literary source for a full morology, or science of fools. The Spectator has heard Welshmen contend that their tongue was used in Eden. There is even more reason for supposing that the Irish were the primitive race, from whom mankind have inherited their propensity to "bulls." A misfit, as between desert and award, is also the essence of the tragic as distinct from the epic, as when Socrates is put to death, or a cyclone makes a shambles of a school-house.

The misfits of the world, and the tragic or comic situations they create, seem to grow mostly out of a sort of genius the most widely diffused of any a genius for blundering, 25 00 getting the round peg into the square hole, and vice versa. An up-to-date journal has been known to return with the stereotype letter of thanks-which, like Mercury, the conductor of souls to the place of the dead, $7,500 88 accompanies a rejected MS. to the darkness of the writer's drawer-an early news item briefly reporting the death of a distinguished person. Seeing that this human genius for blundering is conspicuous in sub-human nature also, the Spectator has wondered if it were not an inevitable incident of the development of the unconscious into the fully conscious-at which, though we fancy it otherwise, none of us has yet arrived. To be sure, we hear it said that Nature never blunders a remark made plausible by a certain strictness of sequence in her movements. Nature, indeed, never freezes the Amazon, or spawns fish on shore, but her malformations are ubiquitous. What else means the grim formula, "survival of the fittest," but that the evolution of the fit is accomplished through the extermination of the misfit?

The sign, "Misfit Parlor," met the Spectaeye one day, and set him to thinking, What is the world itself but just such a show of misfits! Hence its tragedy and its comedy, its tears and its mirth. The college professor who chose for the theme of a talk to certain inmates of a retreat for the insane "The Con. ditions of Success in Life," and the wretched Ephraimites in the Book of Judges who got their throats cut for saying "sibboleth" instead of "shibboleth," represent the contrasting hemispheres, light and dark, of this world of misfits. One is at times fain to fancy Mother Eve as a sort of Mrs. Malaprop, whom more or less we all take after. Certainly at the critical moment of her life she said yes, when she should have said no.

Mr. William Mathews, in his capital book, "Wit and Humor," says there is nothing new in that line, but modern jokes have an ancient lineage. Our troglodyte ancestors at their raw-meat banquets wagged their dolichocephalous heads and grinned with their prognathous jaws at the same sort of things we laugh at. The essence of the ludicrous, now as then, is undoubtedly a perception of incongruity in a case of misfit, as when Cicero sees dwarfish Lentulus wearing a long sword, and

"Lord" Timothy Dexter, a rich simpleton of Newburyport, was fortunate in being served by sensible men. Cajoled, for a joke, into the belief that he would do well to send a cargo of warming-pans to the West Indies, he actually shipped them. But when the "cute" Yankee skipper reached the land of the sugar-cane, he separated the long-handled pans from their perforated covers, and fitted handles to the latter. Then he did a good business by selling them to the sugar-planters for ladles and strainers, and "Lord " Timothy grew richer thereby. This story

has suggested to the Spectator how on a universal scale the blundering of the unconscious or semi-conscious may be taken up into the intelligence of a Directive Consciousness for the ends of perfect wisdom. Surely,

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

And the success of education is essentially in the development of consciousness to larger perceptions and completer control. But there is, as the Spectator thinks, no greater mistake than the fancy that the most developed human consciousness is as yet more than fragmentary.

Few of us have dreamed what a cellar, and sub-cellar too, there is in the house Wonderful which each calls I. Thanks to the Society for Psychical Research, "wonder, the parent of philosophy," has already issued in some dim conception of the unexplored depths beneath that surface of ordinary thought and memory which we call our consciousness. The sub-conscious has already been registered among the subjects of laborious study. Genius, too, has been defined as the faculty of drawing at will upon sub-conscious stores that are latent in every man. What if it should turn out that we have been living in cottages over a gold-mine! What may yet be possible when mankind has reached the still distant goal of the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself," where a fully developed consciousness supervenes upon that less than semi-consciousness whose blundering now fills the world with misfits? Was it a true presentiment of this that made Tennyson ex. claim,

Ah, what will our children be, The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?

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Meanwhile, we could not get on without the misfits-at least as the Spectator views them. First of all, we must have, amid the world's stress and strain, something that we can laugh at without malice-as when an ardent but impecunious lover, writing by the same mail to his sweetheart and his tailor, puts the letters into the wrong envelopes. Whether, as some opine, monkeys are, or are not, a part of the creative plan for this mode of relief for the over-serious, misfits answer to it as nothing else could. Even the religious papers, with their frequent tragic misfits of rigor in the wrong place, have learned that the humanization of religious earnestness requires the column of which the comic misfit is the staple. Even in laying his neck upon the block the pious Sir Thomas More availed himself of this relief among his last consolations. Carefully lifting his beard from

under his neck, "Pity that should be cut," said he, "that has never committed treason."

An oracular person once remarked that it was well there were so many unsettled questions, else we should lack material for mindimproving discussions. The Spectator has misfits for much of its best literature. Not conceived that the world is indebted to its to mention the inexhaustible mine they furnish to the tragic and comic poets and story. tellers, special works of great pith and merit are devoted to them. Horace, in his celebrated" Art of Poetry," has dealt with them from the literary critic's point of view, and has bequeathed to us some oft-quoted lines thereon; as,

and

The mountain labors to bring forth a mouse,

Bring in no god to untie a simple knot. Even Holy Scripture devotes two books to the subject-notably, the Book of Job, and next the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose recurrent refrain, "Vanity and vexation of spirit," may be regarded as the Hebrew idiom for misfit, as in the cases he cites of servants on horseback with princes on foot, just men who perish while wicked men prolong their days.

But in a still profounder view we could not do without the misfits. One of the Spectator's old pupils, not distinguished in youth as a scholar, has recalled a word of encouragement given him at school: "You can comfort yourself when you have made a mistake: once corrected, you never need make it again." There is more comfort than that: your neighbor sees it and will shun it. Thus unsuccessful explorers promote discovery by writing "No thoroughfare " upon many a blind alley. Now, if cosmos is distinguished from chaos by its eternal fitness of things, then a perceptive experience of the misfit is indispensable to the full development of consciousness into that correlative fitness to the fitnesses of the universe which is the condition of ultimate humanity in its perfected life. Here the Spectator finds in the evolutionary struggle the ethics which Professor Huxley could not discover there. That struggle is not, as in the sub-human world, designed for the extermination of the misfit individual, but for the elimination of the misfit ideas and principles which would debar him from the survival of the fit. Here some one may ask, When this is accomplished, what shall we have left to laugh at? Perhaps nothing. The Spectator thinks it worth the hope that laughter will one day be swallowed up in joy, as the genial twinkle of stars that cheer our night is merged in the light of the sun.

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By Frederic Starr

Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago

FTER twenty-two months of work the Tennessee Centennial is ready for the world's inspection. At the beginning the plan for the Exposition was modest; with development it grew, until now a great international enterprise is launched. Never before has so small a city undertaken so ambitious a celebration; and the stress and toil have really fallen almost wholly upon the city itself. Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, all did well, but general opinion declares that Nashville does better. "Centennial City" lies just west of the "Athens of the South." Imagine a lakelet of irregular outline-it is Lake Watanga about which lie the main buildings of the Exposition in a badly defined ellipse. They are the Woman's, Children's, Administration, Commerce, Railroad Terminal, Transportation, Agricultural, Machinery, Negro, Mining, and Forestry Buildings. In a space between the first and last of these lies the United States Government Building.

Four other general buildings lie within this ellipse; they are the Hygiene and Education, Fine Arts, Historical, and Auditorium Buildings. The second and third of these are fireproof, and will remain as permanent constructions. They are careful copies of two of the world's famous buildings-the Parthenon and the Erechtheon. Both stand on a terrace from which there is a gentle slope toward Lake Watanga. The front of the Parthenon faces eastward, and on the slope before it stands a majestic statue of Minerva, forty feet in height. It is the work of Enid Yandell, and is said to be the largest statue ever made by a woman. To the left of one standing upon the Parthenon steps and looking toward Lake Watanga rises the quaintest building on the grounds-that of the City of Memphis. The name suggested to the architect the construction of a pyramid-shaped building. It is modeled after the Pyramid of Cheops, but the center of each base is pierced by a doorway, which is

developed into the likeness of an entrance to an Egyptian temple. Considerable pains are taken to follow ancient ideas in the columns, friezes, and decorations; the exhibitions within, which represent the products of Shelby County, of which Memphis is the county-seat, are all ar ranged in pyramidal or obelisk forms. Near here the lakelet narrows to a little neck across which is thrown a quaint bridge, a reproduction of the Rialto of Venice with its two lines of little shops. It looks lonely in these surroundings, and needs to be hemmed in between lines of ancient houses to have that touch of reality which shall make it recognizable. One pretty feature in this central part of the grounds—that is, it will be pretty in time-is the presence of long arbors, with benches beneath them. These will be covered with a dense growth of gourds and other vines, and will be delightfully shady resorts for weary sightseers. There is one real blot upon this fair scene; it is a mammoth railroad car painted an ugly green, and bearing advertisements of a railroad company's lands. To place such a structure within that range of grand and impressive buildings was a singular

blunder.

Near the Woman's Building is the Moretti Fountain. Within an arch of stonework stands a female figure, with arms upraised holding a spray of snowy flowers; above, upon the arch top, are two cherubs holding an opened pair of shells forming water-basins; below the arch, before and behind, project shell basins; the water overflows the upper shells and falls in two veils of spray into the shells below. The flower-spray above the maiden's head can be illuminated by electric lights. Considerable use is made of water on the grounds, and with good effect. Besides Lake Watanga, there is near the main entrance-which, by the way, is itself artistic, with Greek columns and surmounted by a Minerva statue-the smaller Lake Katherine. Its outlet is crossed by a little bridge just below a small cascade

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