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have pocketed with the money would not stand the test of a scrupulous analysis. The main point seems to be to get the money, and do the good with the least possible sense of sacrifice; as a man goes to a charitable ball, and pays two dollars for the privilege of dancing all night, in order to give a shilling of profits to the widow and fatherless without feeling the burden of the charity.

Of all the means of doing good, I know of none so repulsive as that which is purely professional. I think we do not have so much of this in these days as our fathers had. Our pastors are more thoroughly our companions and friends than they used to be. They do not assume to be our dictators and censors as they did in the earlier days of Puritanism. The idea of the regular parochial visit is essentially changed. But I know clergymen, even now, who visit the house of mourning professionally, and give their professional consolation in a professional way, and depart feeling that they have faithfully performed their professional duty. I know clergymen who go round from house to house with their professional inquiries, and do up any quantity of professional work in a day. The family come in, (those who do not run away,) and take seats around the room, and answer questions, and listen to a prayer, and then they bid their pastor a good afternoon with a sense of relief, and go about their business again,

while he pushes on to his next parishioner, and repeats the professional task. It is all a dry and unfruitful formality on the part of the families visited, and a professionally-discharged duty on the part of the pastor, and a pitifully-ridiculous caricature of the visit of a religious teacher to his disciples every way. What shall be said of an interview of which the pastor's part consisted of these words: "Very late spring-Hem! " (looking out of the window)-" who is building that barn?-potatoes seem to be getting along very well;" (turning to a member of the family)—" Jane, how do you enjoy your mind?" A spiritual frame that could stand such a transition as that, without taking a fatal cold, must be based upon a very sound constitution, and toughened by frequent repetition of the process.

I suppose there will always be obtuse men in the pastoral office-men who know no way of getting into a sensitive soul except by knocking in the door and walking in with their boots on; but all such men are out of their place. The souls of an average peopletied to the tasks of life, burdened by care, oppressed by routine, and depressed in many instances by bodily weakness--need sympathy more than counsel, and encouragement and inspiration more than a solemn, professional catechetical probing of their religious state. But I think, as I have already said, that the world is improving in this matter. Our pastors are more social,

more facile, more appreciative of the fact that, in all their personal intercourse with their people, they must win love and give sympathy if they would do good in the line of their profession.

So much in the vein of criticism; and if I am asked what guide a man shall have in the matter of doing good in the world, I shall answer: a loving, honest, and brave heart, and a mind that judges for itself. The heart that loves its fellow-men will move its possessor to do good; and the mind that thinks and judges for itself will decide in what direction its efforts ought to be made. If a man be moved to do good, he will do it, and his heart will lead him in the right direction. Under a mistaken sense of duty, inculcated by incompetent counsellors, men find themselves in fields of benevolent action to which they are very poorly adapted; and the world is full of these blunders; but an honestly-loving heart and an ordinarily clear brain, that nobody has been allowed to meddle with and muddle, will tell a man where he belongs and what he ought to do. If a man have a gift for ministering to the sick, let him do it. If he have a gift for dealing personally with the poor, let him do that. If he have a gift for making money, and none for properly applying his charities, let him hand his money to those who are competent to dispense it. I do not believe that many loving hearts, coupled with unsophisticated judgments,

are engaged in indiscriminate and random efforts to act for religious ends upon the minds they meet with. I believe that with all such hearts and judgments there is connected a sense of that which is fit and proper in time, place, and circumstance, so that wherever they strike they leave their mark. I believe that such hearts and judgments will scorn to do that by indirec tion which they can do better directly, and that if it be fit and proper for them to offer reproof to a man, they will do it by the brave word of mouth, and not sneak up to him and put a card or a tract into his hand. I believe that men with such hearts and judgments would prefer making a subscription directly to a charitable object, to making one indirectly by paying double price for articles they do not want. And last, I think that pastors, with such hearts and judgments, are not at all in danger of becoming coldly professional in their noble duties. A life in any sphere that is the expression and outflow of an honest, earnest, loving heart, taking counsel only of God and itself, will be certain to be a life of beneficence in the best possible direction.

LESSON XV.

MEN OF ONE IDEA.

"Cultivate the physical exclusively, and you have an athlete or a savage; the moral only, and you have an enthusiast or a maniac; the intellectual only, and you have a diseased oddity-it may be a monster. It is only by wisely training all three together that the complete man can be formed."

W

SAMUEL SMILES.

HEN the heats of summer have dried up the

streams, and cataracts only trickle and drip, and the dams of brooks and rivers cease to pour the arching crystal from their lips, I have always loved to explore the forsaken water-courses. An imprisoned fish, a shell with rainbow lining, a curiously-worn rock, a strangely-tinted and grotesquely-fashioned stone— these are always objects of interest. Then to sit down. upon a ledge that has been planed off by ice, and smoothed by the tenuous passage of an ocean's palpitating volume, and watch the shrunken stream slipping around its feet, and hear the gurgle of the faintly-going

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