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 indirection 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."

WT

SAMUEL SMILES.

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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 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 stonethese 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

water, and grow so drowsy with the song that it breaks at last into surprising articulations, and talks and laughs, and shouts and sings-ah! this, indeed, is enchantment! There are few men, I suppose, so fortu nate as to have enjoyed a country breeding, who do not recall scenes like this,-who do not remember a halfholiday, at least, spent in the bed of a summer stream, and at the feet of scanty cataracts, making fierce attacks on water snakes, watching lizards lying among the stones of an old raceway, creeping up, hat in hand, to a gauze-winged devil's needle that shivered on a sunny point of rock, and looked as if it might be the ghost of a humming-bird, starting to mark the sudden flight and hear the chattering cry of the king-fisher as he darted through the shadows and disappeared, and noting the slim-legged wagtail, racing backward and forward upon the border of the stream.

Among the objects of interest very often, if not always, to be found at the feet of dams and cataracts, are what people call "pot-holes." They are round holes worn in the solid rock by a single stone, kept in motion by the water. Some of them are very large and others are small. When the stream becomes dry, there they are, smooth as if turned out by machinery, and the hard, round pebbles at the bottom by which the curious work was done. Every year, as the dry season comes along, we find that the holes have grown

larger and the pebbles smaller, and that no freshet has been found powerful enough to dislodge the pebbles and release the rock from their attrition. Now if a man will turn from the contemplation of one of these pot-holes, and the means by which it is made, and seek for that result and that process in the world of mind which most resemble them, I am sure that he will find them in a man of one idea. In truth, these scenes that I have been painting were all recalled to me by looking upon one of these men, studying his character, and watching the effect of the single idea by which he was actuated. "There," said I, involuntarily, "is a moral pot-hole with a pebble in it; and the hole grows larger and the pebble smaller every year."

I suppose it is useless to undertake to reform men of one idea. The real trouble is that the pebble is in them; and whole freshets of truth are poured upon them, only with the effect to make it more lively in its grinding, and more certain in its process of wearing out itself and them. The little man who, when ordered by his physician to take a quart of medicine, informed him with a deprecatory whimper that he did not hold but a pint, illustrates the capacity of many of those who are subjects of a single idea. They do not hold but one, and it would be useless to prescribe a larger number. In a country like ours, in which every thing is new and everybody is free, there are multitudes of self-consti

tuted doctors, each of whom has a nostrum for curing all physical and moral disorders and diseases,-a patent process by which humanity may achieve its proudest progress and its everlasting happiness. The country is full of hobby-riders, booted and spurred, who imagine they are leading a grand race to a golden goal, forgetful of the truth that their steeds are tethered to a single idea, around which they are revolving only to tread down the grass and wind themselves up, where they may stand at last amid the world's ridicule, and starve to death.

Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, whether spoken through nature or revelation. There is no one idea in all God's universe so great and so nutritious that it can furnish food for an immortal soul. Variety of nutriment is absolutely essential, even to physical health. There are so many elements that enter into the structure of the human body, and such variety of stimuli requisite for the play of its vital forces, that it is necessary to lay under tribute a wide range of nature; and fruits and roots and grain, beasts of the field, fowls of the air, and fish of the sea, juices and spices. and flavors, all bring their contributions to the perfection of the human animal, and the harmony of its functions. The sailor, kept too long upon his hard biscuit and salt junk, degenerates into scurvy. The occupant