alt and strengthen it. It is not enough to endorse it when it is right, nor to stand out against it when it is wrong, nor to appeal from its undeserved condemnation to eternal justice. Recognizing its growing power for good or evil, every man should seek to make a positive contribution to its vigor and its character. It needs the scholar's knowledge, the Christian's conscience, the philanthropist's heart, the reformer's zeal, the saint's believing patience, the poet's vision and the orator's tongue.

The wondrous and impressive music which one. hears in the European cathedrals, known as the mass, which embodies the phases and voices the experiences of a devout, soul standing face to face with God and eternity; now penitent and jubilant; at one moment crying faintly from the depths of grief and shame and fear as though it felt at the same instant the terror of a child lost in the forest at night and the desperation of Peter sinking amid the waves of Gennesaret; then rising in the gladness of a great hope newly-born, and a swelling adoration that hardly knows whether to bend and worship or soar and sing; this wondrous Romish mass is made up of fragments of ballads sung by peasant girls, and national airs that have beguiled the march or cheered the bivouac, and pastoral songs chanted on the hill - side, and cradle lullabies rising in the homes of the lowly, and threnodies that ascended from the chambers of sickness, and hallelujahs that trembled on the lips of saints who went to immortality from the dungeon and the scaffold; from all these musi

cal dialects in which human life has sung its varying emotion into the air of centuries, it has gathered some item of its power and glory. So public opinion has been, and still is, and yet more and more shall be, the compound thought and the many threaded tone into which individual ideas and utterances combine with unity and emphasis.

What we give is determined by what we are. The mountaineer had no thought that the notes he was singing as he sat on his Alpine cliff would one day throb, a mighty pulse of harmony, through the aisles and amid the arches of St. Peter's; but, though he only swelled his strain for his own delight, it was caught up and poured into the ear of Christendom, as the voice of a great hierarchy calling the nations to its altars.

We recognize readily enough the influence of a few great names on the public opinion of to-day. We know that the statutes of Moses, and the jurisprudence of the Roman statesman, and the feudalism of Europe, and Magna Charta wrested by the English barons from king John, have all had their influence in fashioning the civil legislation of our own land. We do not find it hard to believe that Homer's music modified the accent with which we speak our fancies; that we are prompted to think in one way rather than another by Plato's metaphysics and Aristotle's logic; that Cicero's orations affect our public speech; that an analytical ear would detect the tones of Horace and Dante in our singing; we know that the voices of Constantine and Charle

magne still inspire the projects which are framed at the Vatican; that the ideals of Angelo to- day are blossoming in our architecture, and the divine beauty which Raphael put into the face of his transfigured Christ struggles for expression in every modern painter's studio. Calvin is yet teaching us theology; Cromwell's Puritanism walks yet with reverent feet in the stillness of New England Sabbaths; Milton's plea for liberty and a free press bears fruit in our polyglot literature which has helped to smite our dark despotism into powder ; and the Norman baron's egotistic obstinacy is to day contending against equal rights in Richmond. We can believe all that without difficulty.

But it is equally true that the lives which are lived in humbler spheres, and on lower social planes, and the voices that fail to get distinct attention, still have their influence in fashioning public opinion and giving emphasis to its utterance. The young

mechanic who puts down the temptation to which his genteelly dressed acquaintances have yielded, to turn fashionable swindler; the merchant who sells goods, but will not bargain away his integrity; the mother who rules her little domestic empire as Christ's vicegerent, and serves gladly as priestess in the temple of home; the faithful teacher, opening daily the doors into the halls of knowledge; the invalid in her chamber, interpreting trust and patience in the smile that hides her pain; the white haired man, whose years of fidelity to his trusts rest on him like a benediction, and whose Christian hope

makes the brightness of the other world mingle with the shadows of this; all these are so many sources out of which the elements shall come that pass into the public opinion of the future. The feeblest tone in which any true soul, however humble, may speak, will surely enter into and af fect that majestic and imperial voice with which the united convictions of the people shall one day utter themselves, when public opinion has become the mightiest earthly law giver, and its word of blessing or of blight comes sounding down from the Gerizim or the Ebal of the future, as the infinite justice of God framed into the common speech of

men.

VI.

CRUSADES AND CRUSADERS.

There are certain great epochs and movements in history that stand for almost everything important in the record of the human race. However great and frequent may be the changes about us, it is still true that: "History is forever repeating itself," or as another, long before, put it: "There is nothing new under the sun."

We find that that movement in Europe during the middle ages, known as the Crusades, in its under

lying ideas and principles, keeps on through centuries, and is felt to-day in the life of America; and that the spirit which impelled those old actors lives and works in the stern, stirring souls about us, whose words, like Luther's, are "half-battles," and whose deeds are making history.

Let us go back to the latter part of the eleventh century. The kings, not caring just then to fight, are plotting in their palaces; the princes are nursing their ambition; nobles and barons quarrel with each other for more territory, and plunder and cheat their vassals; the Pope carries himself with a lordly air; the priests here fawn and there tyrannize; the monasteries keep some learning, but more vices; dead ecclesiastics seem fast changing to saints, while the living tell a truth too obvious to be questioned when they call themselves "miserable sinners;" the great, mass of the people are poor, ignorant, superstitious, with weak consciences and fiery passions, whose hopes for this world are as small as their hopes for the other are extravagant. There is no general war; the popular fury gathers strength, and is ready to flame out and smite wherever a skillful hand shall come to stir and direct it. There is a pause as if the world were waiting for something; and it comes. The day of the Crusades dawns, whose history becomes marked by wild fanaticism, frightful loss of human life, deeds of romance and valor ; — fraught with great political and moral changes.

Peter the Hermit, after inflaming the zeal of the