ordination of mercy; because it is an education; because it is the road alike to health and temperate pleasure; because it is the parent of wealth; because by it the cheerful laborer builds his house, rears his children, gives to them the means of knowledge. By labor the north has subdued nature, changed a parsimonious soil to fertility, built dwellings for almost her whole population, raised the school-house, established the church, encircled the globe with her ships, and made her books and her papers to be as blades of grass and as leaves of summer for number. But in the South, as if unredeemed from the primal curse, labor, a badge of shame, is the father of misery. The slave labors, but with no cheer-it is not the road to respectability-it will honor him with no citizen's trust-it brings no bread to his family—no grain to his garner-no leisure in after days-no books or papers to his children. It opens no schoolhouse door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat, and toil, and ignorance, he consumes his life to pour the earnings into channels from which he does not drink-into hands that never honor him, but perpetually rob, and often torment. "This vast abomination, which seethes and smokes in our midst, which is enervating and demoralizing the white by the oppression of the black-in which adultery, fornication and a concubinage so awful exist, that, in comparison with it a Turkish harem is a cradle of virgin purity-which every hour does violence to nature, to the sentiment of justice, and to the embodiment of that sentiment into national law—a system which makes a home impossible, and the word family as much a misnomer as it would be to a stable or a sheep-fold—which sub sists only by keeping the subject ignorant-which is obliged to rank and treat the qualities which our community most esteems-independence, ambition, self-reliance, thirst for knowledge, self-respect, as most punishable crimes in the slave-a system whose practice requires what its laws recognize, that man must be subverted-that the slave must be intelligent only for work, and religious only to the extent of obedience— a system which, taking away all inducements to labor natural to man, is obliged to enforce it by suffering, or the fear of suffering; which, denying to the facultics of the soul a natural expression, forces the miserable wretch to cunning and craft, to lying and subterfuge-whose whole natural tendency it is to produce labor upon compulsion and laziness by choice, lying and thieving under a sense of justice, and truth and honesty with a feeling of their injustice—and which, at length, as its worst and most damnable result, so subverts that instinct of liberty which belongs to man the world over, that the slave agrees to his condition, grows fat, and laughs and sings, preferring slavery, with indulgence to eat and drink enough, to liberty, if he must pay the price of that liberty by sustained exertion;—this huge, infernal system for the destruction of men, soul and body, must not be mentioned in the pulpit, lest the Sabbath be desecrated and the peace of the congregation be disturbed. "We now re-affirm our doctrine of the pulpit. "The gospel is a system of truths designed to be this world's medicine. It has no intrinsic value as a system. Its end and value are in its power to stimulate the soul, to develop its faculties, to purify its emotions, to cleanse its evils, and to lead forth the whole man into a virtuous and holy life. J "The pulpit is therefore the dispensatory of society. The minister, a physician. Preaching, a prescription of medicinal truth for heart evils. There is not an evil which afflicts life, nor a temptation proceeding from any course of life, which the pulpit should not study. The sources of right conduct, the hindrances, the seductions of business, the lures of pleasure, the influences of public life, the maxims of society, its customs, its domestic, commercial and public institutions; in short, whatever directly or indirectly moulds the human character, is to be studied by the minister, and its benefit or its danger made known from the pulpit. "In this work it is to deal first and most faithfully with the evils of its own age, its own country, its own city, its own congregation. Wherever men go, the pulpit is to follow them with its true light. Whatever invades its province-that province is Right, Humanity, Purity-be it Fashion, Commerce, Politics, they are fearlessly to be met, grasped and measured by the word of God. Not only may the pulpit thus explore Life, but it must, or else prove bankrupt to Fidelity. It is not to follow the camp; but in spiritual things to lead the people. It is not to wait till foes are slain before it raise its spear; nor go asking of political cabals what it may say, nor cringe to supercilious men of commerce; but occupy itself with only this twin thought, how best to please God and benefit man. 66 "Therefore, against every line of the Coward's Ethics of the Journal of Commerce we solemnly protest, and declare a minister made to its pattern fitter to be sent to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt, to preach to old-world mummies, than to be a living man of God among living men, loving them but never fearing them! God be thanked! that in every age hitherto, such pulpits have been found the ally of suffering virtue, the champion of the oppressed. And if in this day, after the notable examples of heroic men in heroic ages, when life itself often paid for fidelity, the pulpit is to be mined and sapped by insincere friends and insidious enemies, and learn to mix the sordid prudence of business with the sonorous and thrice heroic counsels of Christ, then, O my soul, be not thou found conspiring with this league of iniquity! that so, when in that august day of retribution, God shall deal punishment in flaming measure to all hireling and coward ministers, thou shalt not go down, under double-bolted thunders, lower than miscreant Sodom, or thrice-polluted Gomorrah!" Here is one more sketch in Mr. Beecher's best humorous vein, which we cannot forbear to quote: BOOK-AUCTIONS, BOOK-STORES, BOOKS. We have examined the catalogue of books to be sold in ten days, beginning May 24th, by Bangs, Brothers & Co. We have also examined the books themselves, and with sore temptation. This is no ordinary sale. It is not the refuse stock of a bankrupt bookseller; nor a private library, drugged by large infusions of unsaleable books; nor a trade sale of staple books. It is a literary curiosity of itself. The catalogue is a book of no mean literary interest. Mr. Welford, long familiar with rare and curious books, spends many months in England, collecting with good taste, not merely standard editions of standard works, but literary treasures of every sort. Here are works which a man would not have an opportunity of purchasing once in his lifetime, in the ordinary course of affairs. The books are in excellent condition, and in fine bindings. Nothing marks the growth of the public mind, and the increasing wealth of our times, more than the demand for books. Within ten years the sale of common books has increased probably two hundred per cent., and is daily increasing. But the sale of expensive works, and library editions in costly binding, is yet more noticeable. Ten years ago, and such a display of magnificent works as is to be found at the Appletons' would have been a precursor of bankruptcy. There was no demand for them. A few dozen, in one little show-case, was the prudent whole. Now, one whole side of an immense store is not only filled with most admirably bound library-books, but from some inexhaustible source the void continually made in the shelves is at once re-filled. A reserve of heroic books supply the places of those that fall. Alas! Where is human nature How easily one may distinguish a genuine lover of books from the worldly man! With what subdued and yet glowing enthusiasm does he gaze upon the costly front of a thousand embattled volumes! How gently he draws down the volumes, as if they were little children; how tenderly he handles them! He peers at the title-page, at the text, or the notes, with the nicety of a bird examining a flower. He studies the |