External life and nature are just what we make them. An eternal fitness, a beautiful correspondence, does bind the outer to the inner, the natural to the spiritual, but not for those who cannot see it. What, then, shall we make all things common and unclean? Shall we throw down all forms and symbols under our sensual shoes? Shall we break the light, the delicate, the merely spiritual bond of mental association which binds us to the reverence of certain places, garments, acts, attitudes, relations? Nay, nothing but the wildest insanity would suggest this. Why, our eternal salvation depends, in the beginning, upon our guarding these reverential states most carefully. By them alone we climb, at first, from the seeming to the actual, from the natural to the spiritual, from earth to heaven. Rather let us acquire the art of making all that is natural and visible minister spiritually to the soul. As far as possible everything natural should become suggestive of something spiritual. Nature should become to us a book of symbols more richly illuminated than mediæval parchments. The courtesies of home and society, the household, wayside, workshop, may become signs and hints of something heavenly.

About the habitual acts of daily life, our meetings with one another, our gifts, our kindnesses, our reading of books, our hearing of music, our looking at sunsets, our good-nights and good-mornings, may be thrown a something spiritual, a something significant, a kind of tender sanctity which shall lift our whole being up to a higher plane and bring us into the first faint sphere of life as lived in heaven. How poor is he who possesses nothing sacred; to whom certain objects or tones or hours bring not unwonted and better thoughts; who has no little anniversaries of white days which secretly he observes; who has no places that are hallowed, no books or pictures that are reverenced, no tokens from his past years embalmed in smiles and tears, no flock of sacred memories and associations which fly in the inmost heaven of his soul, and sometimes settle about some

No

You may sometimes see the utter buffoon, the wholesale desecrator, the rash and base iconoclast who seeks to grind everything under the dust of his sensual heel. All things are common and unclean to him. He tramps boldly over whatever ground others call holy, The sanctities of wedded and family life, the graceful courtesies of society,' reverence for any act or form, he brands as visionary, superstitious, or fanatical. He delights to quench the tear of honest sentiment in the sulphurous crackle of ridicule. He suffers no elevated mood, no high aspiration to exist in his presence, He crashes in upon them with rude mirth and what he calls practical sense. act of public worship, or sign of private reverence and devotion is safe from his sacrilegious, vandal hand. To him no man is noble, no woman pure. He would strip earth of the last vestige of heaven, satisfied to make of human kind, animals and nothing more. How vile, how horrible are the breathings of hell through such a medium. How they warn us to keep within severe and proper check that common, and growing commoner, disposition to make sport of all the acts and relations of life, to taint the bright mirror of truth with just the faintest breath of blasphemy, to burn all things in the crackling fire of shallow pleasantry, rudely to rush in where angels fear to tread.

This sensual scoffer, this dust-eating bearer of the serpent's mark, thinks nothing holy. What if everything be so, and certain forms be set apart only to save us from utter degradation? What if every physical sound and form and act be part of a God-made ritual to keep us in perpetual worship? What if no organ and no necessity of the body, no item of the processes required to secure even bare existence, no humblest office of food and clothes, no drudgery in kitchen or shop, no rest and no toil, look in the sight of God and his angels as other than a holy thing? What if celestial harmonies were meant to be woven out of every rough and coarse element in existence; heavenly intimations to play like a halo round every household object and wayside weed; skies and stars to palpitate with spiritual messages; mornings to shine with a flame flashed out of the other world; evenings to be fair with the reflected sheen of golden pavements? What if common daily life, lived carefully, thoughtfully, holily, be the best and sublimest worship, and

public Sabbath rituals only things lifted up and set apart to keep us from utter and continued degradation? Habitual desecrator of home's dai y sanctities! cold sneerer at public religious rites! be assured that you and I need these rites to lift us to the level of these sanctities.

Let me beg of you never to degrade in your own eyes, by thought or speech, any of the especial representatives of what is holy. Never carelessly handle or push aside a copy of the Holy Word. This is a little thing, but if ubserved, it will surely cultivate in your soul an added spiritual delicacy. More than this, never permit the words of the Bible to pass lightly over your lips; never use them to point or illustrate trifling conversation: above all, never suffer them to serve the purposes of mer riment. The power of mental association is fearfully strong, and we may carelessly destroy, forever, the influence which certain passages ought to have over us, by trailing them in the dust of our lower moods. The Scriptures are inexpressibly holy; the miraculous means of communication with heaven and the Lord. Let us be careful how we lessen their power by any depreciating habits of thought. Furthermore, we shall injure ourselves, and blunt our spiritual senses, in proportion as we divest places and forms of worship, times, formulas, and attitudes, of sanctity.

We may not always be able to make them holy to ourselves, or we may not desire to, being conscious of no need of them; but let us beware of setting them aside as naught in themselves and unable to prove holy to others. If we cannot put into them any high and useful meaning, which I must believe is something to be regretted, yet others can. Let us take care how we roughly break the delicate vase which holds spiritual wine. Some time we may suffer bitter thirst for the act. Or, if you yourself are abundantly supplied from other sources, you may, by your inconsiderate speech and conduct, crack or shatter the little cup out of which your child or your ignorant neighbor drinks of the water of life. Never break the crucifix before which any devout worshiper whosoever is kneeling, until you are sure you can show him the risen, living Lord. Never undermine reverence of any sort in one's mind, until you are sure you can replace it with something better.. Beware how you take away what you can never give again. Learn well a lesson from the Lord, who never breaks the bruised reed nor quenches the smoking flax.

Passing from the places, times, and forms of public worship, I wish to remind you that

there is elsewhere holy ground upon which we are not to tread with sensual sandals. Holier than any temple of wood or stone, consecrated with diviner rites and for diviner purposes, is the human body. Reverence for that, as possessed by ourselves or others, is better than reverence for chancel and altar. Its cleanliness, health, and entire well-being, may properly be one of our chief concerns. It is the exquisitely constructed and perfectly adapted medium of the human spirit; it is the best and highest earthly receptacle of the Holy Spirit. Rev

erence for it leads to reverence for all other holy things. Care for it is care for the spirit that dwells within it. Our sense of its worth and dignity ought never to be dulled by its neglect or abuse. He who is careless of his physical interests, except at times and in cases where spiritual interests for the hour entirely and rightfully override and annihilate them, will be likely to disregard the bodies of others; to witness their disease, deformity, or uncleanness without concern; to treat them with disrespect, and, by consequence, the souls that are in them. The human form, wherever seen, ought always to be to our eyes the shrine which incarnates and protects the holiest mysteries, which holds the sacred fire of heaven, the indestructible tokens of God, the pledges of immortality. It is more plastic to spiritual forces than anything else. It is the Word of God written in flesh and blood. Whenever it shall be understood and treated rightly, "the tabernacle of God will be with men, and He will dwell with them."

It is also possible for love and marriage to be very holy things. A true love and true marriage is possible only in exact proportion as souls are regenerated; and since with most of us this is illy accomplished, perfect love and marriage is extremely rare on earth. But yet they are the eternal symbols of that state of mind and relation of life which make heaven what it is. We may talk of them lightly, but never basely. None of the subjects which engage our common thoughts have more of the infinite about them, and therefore they may be viewed in many moods and lights, and from many sides. But just so fast as we grow wise and grow holy, will they be elevated in our conception and regard, be set higher and higher above the desecrating bed of sensuality, and more and more separated from worldly and temporal considerations. Since the world has gone so widely wrong, and all the spiritual affairs of men are so out of joint, these things which were meant to produce heaven on earth, for the most part furnish only hints and training for the heaven that exists beyond and above

us. They are like ruins choked with rubbish, which once were, and will be again, palacetemples, beautiful with all glories, sanctities, and delights, but at present the scene of transient and innumerable illusions, the home of bats that mingle with birds and serpents that hiss among flowers; demon laughter echoes quickly after the voices of angels, darkness struggles with light, and confusion of good and evil reigns. Let us pray that the Lord may quickly come to this one of his temples also, drive out its desecrators, and rebuild its walls. But whether or not it be within our spiritual attainments to love truly and marry wisely, let us in our thoughts surround these things with the tenderest sanctity. Let the young be taught that there is such a thing as pure love, such an image of heaven on earth as that which the perfect union of two wedded souls consti

tutes.

Let the old remember that their broken hopes and disappointed dreams were the heavensent signs of what does exist and can be realized when men are fit for it. There is no experience and no hour of youth more penetrated with the atmosphere and presence of heaven than "love's young dream." Angels lend their presence and their help to no more holy sacrament than a befitting bridal. Woe to him who puts not off his sandals upon this holy ground.

We might here treat of the protecting sanctity which ought to surround family, home, and state. The temptations to desecrate them are many, and we do much harm to our better natures, that inner and higher part of us which is able to see things in the light of heaven, by making of home and family nothing but selfish conveniences, and of the state an instrument of personal welfare alone. Deep reverence for rightful national authority, unhesitating and complete obedience to just governmental laws, was meant to teach us obedience to principles which are spiritual and eternal. The dangerous and wide-spread tendency in American. politics and society to put the foot wherever one likes, to trample on whatever does not seem good to the individual, to pit individual likings against the congregated wisdom of our elders and betters, must soon receive, nay, already has received a check. However necessary this tendency has been in the past to release us from hoary falsities and European conservatism, with no modifications and counterchecks it would speedily bring us into an intellectual and moral chaos.

The inevitable reaction from it is already to be seen in every thoughtful and cultivated mind. Contempt of order and authority, of form and venerable custom, merely for the

sake of contempt, is no longer applauded. Having struggled into freedom of thought and action, we are beginning voluntarily to upon ourselves the bonds of propriety in speech and action, and of reverence in feeling and thought, because we see their use and great necessity to the soul's true growth and elevation. Temples which could never be made sacred to us by compulsion, become so now from choice. Rev. C. D. Noble.

IN SCHOOL-DAYS.

Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow,

And blackberry vines are running. Within, the master's desk is seen,

Deep scarred by raps official; The warping floor, the battered seats, The jack-knife's carved initial;

The charcoal frescoes on the wall;

Its door's worn still betraying The feet that, creeping slow to school, Went storming out to playing.

Long years ago a winter sun

Shone over it at setting; Lit up its western window panes, And low eaves' icy fretting.

It touched the tangled golden curls, And brown eyes full of grieving, Of one who still her steps delayed, While all the steps were leaving.

For near her stond the little boy,

Her childish favor singled; His cap pulled down upon a face

Where pride and shame were mingled.

Pushing with restless feet the snow

To right and left, he lingered ;As restlessly her tiny hands

The blue-checked apron fingered.

He saw her lift her eyes; he felt

The soft hand's light caressing, And heard the tremble of her voice, As if a fault confessing.

"I'm sorry that I spelt the word; I hate to go above you Because" the brown eyes lower fell-"Because, you see, I love you."

Still memory to a gray-hair'd man

That sweet child-face is showing.
Dear girl! The grasses on her grave
Have forty years been growing!

He lives to learn, in life's hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and their loss,
Like her, because they love him.
J. G. WHITTIER.