Ah! now we touch the true characteristies of New England, lying in the deep ocean of her history, unmoved by the lighter traits sparkling upon the surface.

That is a true boast of Jonathan to John:

"We aint so weak and poor, John,

With twenty million people,
And close to every door, John,

A school-house and a steeple."

And this is but the outgrowth of that short formula of the brave founders of school and church: "Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work;" so that New England's present traits are directly traceable to Puritan influence.

Our educational institutions had substantial foundation-stones of self-sacrifice and far-seeing purpose, nobly laid by that score of sturdy men, dedicating, for the first academy, a peck of corn, or a shilling in cash, or a few treasured volumes.

The Sabbath has been called the "poem of New England," and it is that always, whether rung out by the city's chiming bells or whispered in the sacred repose of the country church. But it was never so truly a poem as on that first New England Sabbath, when the church was a weather-beaten ship, its support the lashing waves, and the worshippers "a handful of sad, stern men and women kneeling in their spray-stiffened garments to thank God for freedom to worship him."

New England's best traits, then, are but her rightful inheritance; traits "lineally descended" from her founders, softened and purified in the transmitting many times, as in the case of their sectional loyalty. "They seemed to shrink from trying to get to heaven by any other road than that which their fathers travelled, lest they should miss them at their journey's end."

And in these days, thank God! religious toleration is creeping over the forbidding rock of New England theology, much as the delicate vines of the May-flower crept over and beautified the hard, unyielding soil.

Thus New England stands, in her freedom, love of education, and all those homely domestic traits which make her the comfortable, clever, strong, and tender mother she is, while under and nrough and over all her traits runs, like a strain of restful music, her great, all powerful, far-reaching faith.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

A GREAT stride of advancement has been taken in the cultivation of that rarest of supernal graces, Christian charity, since the ancient patriarchs of New England fell asleep. Occasionally opportunity is given us of measuring "with the eye" the distance which has been travelled. More than a hundred and fifty years ago Dr. Cotton Mather spoke of Rhode Island as "the Gerizzim of New England, the common receptacle of the convicts of Jerusalem and the outcasts of the land." The island itself, as a portion of God's creation, he was willing to think worthy of all praise. He seems to have felt regarding it as Bishop Heber felt about India when he wrote his immortal missionary hymn:

"And every prospect pleases,

And only man is vile."

"The island is, indeed, for the fertility of its soil, the temperateness of its air, etc., the best garden of all the colony, and were it free from serpents I would call it the Paradise of New England." As things were, however, the good old man could only say regretfully, "Bona terra, mala gens." He evidently fancied that the serpent was not a native of the original home of human innocence, or else his special affection for the people of Rhode Island led him to wish for them an exemption from exposures which God had not thought necessary to the safety and happiness of Adam. The serpent was an honorable member of the animal community in Paradise before Ithuriel's "spear of heaven-tempered steel" discovered Satan, in the shape of a toad, breathing into the ear of the sleeping "Mother of Mankind" deadly insinuations of disobedience and rebellion, just as freedom in religion

the serpent so unworthily abhorred by New England Puritanism was a divinely chartered and precious privilege of mankind long before the founding of Rhode Island colonies or the birth of Roger Williams. The vagaries and fantasies of freedom, its excesses, outrages, and crimes, are something fearful to contemplate, but freedom is, has been, and must ever continue to be, the essential condition of human power and excellence. It has ever been the madness of men and madness that could not claim the poor excuse of method to think of cutting down the tree of liberty, and stil hope to retain the benefits and blessings of its shade.

THE statistics of marriages, as compared with those of population, would seem to indicate that there is an increasing unwillingness on the part of men or women, or both, to take upon themselves the responsibilities of wedded life. Whether because of the increased expense of living due to the development of luxurious tastes, and the selfishness which results; or the difficulties in the way of securing remunerative and constant employment; or because of other reasons, the sly god seems to have lost something of his former power. Perhaps the chief cause lies with the young men, who dare neither to face the cares of matrimony themselves, nor to ask others to do so. Whatever there is of cowardice in this matter, we do not believe that it can, as a rule, be charged upon the women of America, without regard to their station in life. It is claimed that in Massachusetts, of every 1,000 inhabitants in 1850-1860, 21 married, now only 17; that in Connecticut, while the population has increased 56 per cent during the last decade, marriages have increased but 34 per cent; that in Providence, R.I., while the number capable of marrying was in the last decade 115 per cent greater than in the decade preceding the war, the number who married was only 77 per cent greater; and that in Ohio, while, in 1850-1880, the inhabitants had increased 37 per cent, the number of marriages had advanced only 26 per cent.

66

MISTAKES go in pairs. It was a mistake for a body of Protestant ministers to meddle in the matter of the succession to a generalship in the army, and it is a mistake for the Catholic Standard to make this the occasion for invidious statements in reference to the service of Catholics in the late war. "Never," it says, was any company or any regiment or brigade that entwined on its colors emblems of the Catholic faith, and on the eve of a battle knelt to receive absolution from a Catholic priest, recorded but as first to advance and last to retreat. And since then, whether in barracks or in camp, you look in vain for any disgraceful record of Catholic privates and officers." We submit that neither caste nor class nor sect has any place in determining the relative merits of the brave soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In camp, and upon the field of battle, they stood side by side, not as New Yorkers, Vermonters, Germans, Irishmen, Catholics, or Protestants, but as patriotic Americans. Some of these, perhaps, were better soldiers because they were devout Catholics, and others because they were earnest Presbyterians or Methodists, and this for the reason that those who fear God are the readier to face duty, brave danger, and die for country. No: our army is not an army of Catholics, Baptists, etc., but an army of Americans.

Is it true that "a very large part of our free education system is devoted to teaching the principles of Nihilism, the absurdities of evolution, the crudities of the nineteenth-century philosophy, weakest and most watery of all the philosophies of the ages"? Dr. William C. Prime makes this claim in the New-York Journal of Commerce, and then says, "Of what use it is to read the Bible in the morning, and teach in the afternoon that the Bible is a poor fiction, perhaps some one can explain. That this is precisely what many common schools and free educational institutions are doing, may be discovered with little difficulty." With due deference to the opinion of our genial confrère, we cannot accept his conclusions. We have yet to learn of any public school in which flouting at the Bible or religion enters into the matter of instruction, and we apprehend that the number of teachers who thus misuse their office really constitutes so small a fraction of the teaching community as to be hardly worthy the learned doctor's attention. As a matter of fact, by far the greater number of American teachers in public schools and private schools, whatever their faults otherwise, are men and women who are either Christians, or filled with a reverent regard for the Bible and its teachings.

When Daniel Webster was a youth of eighteen, in college, he wrote to a friend these suggestive words: "I am fully persuaded that our happiness is much at our regulation, and that the Know thyself' of the Greek philosopher meant no more than rightly to attune and soften our appetites and passions till they should symphonize like the harp of David."

Perhaps no one ever paid a finer tribute to conscience than John Adams, when, after advising his son John Quincy to preserve above all things his innocence, he said, "Your conscience is the minister plenipotentiary of God Almighty in your heart. See to it that this minister never negotiates in vain."

EDUCATION.

WHEN in any of the chief activities of human life it becomes necessary to adopt new methods, or to make some new application of old and well-tried principles, it is always best that change should be discriminating, gradual, and slow; and perhaps nowhere does this maxim demand recognition and respect more imperatively than in educational reform. We are not disposed to find fault with those who contend for the authority and sway of the progressive spirit of the present as against the spirit of the past. In science, art, literature, education; in religion, morals, philosophy, theology, every genuine gain in depth, breadth, and fulness is to be hailed with a thousand welcomes. It would be a pity if an unenlightened veneration for the traditions and principles of a superannuated conservatism were allowed to rob the world even of the smallest portion of the benefit of a single new and useful idea.

The needs and duties of each age require that intelligence should steadily advance, and in the field of truth there is always something valuable left for the latest gleaner. No one is fitted for the duties of to-day who dreads the spirit of free inquiry that breathes around him, and fearlessly addresses its questions in every direction. Especially should new and better hints be welcomed as to the true science and method of instructing the youthful mind. Patience, delicacy, intelligence, and skill are nowhere required more than in this.

But while it is true that each generation must have liberty to do its work in its own way, no generation can afford to despise or disparage the wisdom and experience of previous ages, or to institute reforms which revolutionize the methods and the principles of the past. The intellectual triumphs and achievements which are the goal of one age are indeed no more than the starting-point of the next; but the links of connection must be preserved unbroken. The conditions of a successful and symmetrical development of the mental powers are substantially the same in every land and time, and there are great principles which, however variously we may apply them, can never in themselves be violated or discarded with impunity. So far as the new education so strenuously advocated in our day honors and observes the eternal laws of the mind, we can afford to contemplate the new ventures with equanimity, if not with hope; but there is reason to fear that the almost unlimited freedom of individual choice as to subjects of study accorded to young and inexperienced minds in colleges where new departures have been taken is scarcely compatible with the compliance those laws rigidly require.