highest charm of purity, of righteousness, of elevated sentiments, of love to God and man.

It is not in the frigid philosophy of the Porch and the Academy that we are to seek these; not in the marvelous teachings of Socrates, as they come mended by the mellifluous words of Plato; not in the resounding line of Homer, on whose inspiring tale of blood Alexander pillowed his head; not in the animated strain of Pindar, where virtue is pictured in the successful strife of an athlete at the Isthmian games; not in the torrent of Demosthenes, dark with self-love and the spirit of vengeance; not in the fitful philosophy and intemperate eloquence of Tully, not in the genial libertinism of Horace, or the stately atheism of Lucretius. No: these must not be our masters; in none of these are we to seek the way of life.

For eighteen hundred years the spirit of these writers has been engaged in weaponless contest with the Sermon on the mount, and those two sublime commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets. The strife is still pending. Heathenism, which has possessed itself of such siren forms, is not yet exorcised. It still tempts the young, controls the affairs of active life, and haunts the meditations of age.

Our own productions, though they may yield to those of the ancients in the arrangement of ideas, in method, in beauty of form, and in freshness of illustration, are immeasurably superior in the truth, delicacy, and elevation of their sentiments: above all, in the benign recognition of that great Christian revelation, the brotherhood of man. How vain are eloquence and poetry, compared with this heaven-descended truth! Put in one scale that simple utterance, and in the other the lore of antiquity, with its accumulating glosses and

commentaries, and the last will be light and trivial in the balance. Greek poetry has been likened to the song of the nightingale, sitting in the rich, symmetrical crown of the palm-tree, trilling her thick-warbled notes; but even this is less sweet and tender than the music of the human heart.

COMPOSITION.

Change adjectives and common nouns in third paragraph, leaving balance as written.

Write the following sentence in three ways:

Heathenism still tempts the young, controls the affairs of active life, and haunts the meditations of age.

THE bird that soars on highest wing
Builds on the ground her lowly nest;

And she that doth most sweetly sing,
Sings in the shade when all things rest.
The saint that wears Heaven's brightest crown,

In deepest adoration bends;

The weight of glory bows him down,

Then most when most his soul ascends;

Nearest the Throne itself must be

The footstool of Humility.

THE FELLOWSHIP OF CATHOLICITY.

"My spirit yearns to bring

The lost ones back - yearns with desire intense
And struggles hard to wring

Tho bolts apart, and pluck thy captives thence."

BRYANT.

MAN possesses powers which extend far beyond the

visible world, into the realms of the unseen, for he is essentially a spiritual being. One of the deepest yearnings of his soul is to communicate with those of the spirit world.

“That the dead are seen no more," says Dr. Johnson, "I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent testimony of all ages and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those who never heard of one another, would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers, can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues, confess it by their fears."*

"Let us then not imagine," says the celebrated Dr. Channing, "that the usefulness of the good is finished at death. Then rather does it begin. Let us not judge of their state by associations drawn from the stillness and silence of the grave. They have gone to the abodes of life, of warmth and action. They have gone to fill a larger place in the system of God. Death has expanded their powers. The clogs and fetters of the perishable body have fallen off, that they may act more freely and with more delight in the grand system of creation.

* Rasselas.

It would be grateful to believe that their influence reaches to the present state, and we certainly are not forbidden to indulge the hope.”*

It is not only consoling to believe thus, but so deeply rooted is the conviction, that there are moments when it asserts its vitality, in spite of our creeds or ourselves.

In Dr. Johnson's journal of March 28, 1753, we find: "I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty's death, with prayers and tears in the morning. In the evening, I prayed for her conditionally, if it were lawful."+t And in a prayer which he wrote, he supplicates that he may 'enjoy the good effects of the attention and ministration of his departed wife."+

Here is a true expression of a secret and spontaneous instinct of the human heart; for who believes, when kneeling by the grave of the loved and lost, that the sacred ties of friendship and affection, eternal as the laws of his being, are wholly severed? Does he not rather, at that hour, become aware, for the first time, how close were the bonds that bound him to the departed, and exclaim, in grateful relief: The living and the dead indeed make one communion!

Dr. Channing, in writing to a friend on the death of his child, says: "Our child is lost to our sight, but not to our faith and hope, perhaps not to our beneficent influences. Is there no means of gratifying our desire of promoting his happiness? The living and dead make one communion."&

The religions of all nations, with each individual consciousness, witness to the belief of mankind in a communion between the soul and spirits, between the living and the departed. The ancient religions of Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, the Britons, Australians and * Memoirs, p. 276. Boswell's Life. ‡ibid. § Memoirs, p. 228.

American Indians, give the same testimony. Also the belief in magis, soothsaying, necromancy, and other superstitious practices which place us, as is supposed, in secret relations with the inhabitants of another world.

The demon of Socrates, the spectre of Brutus, the guardian of Cæsar, give the same confirmation. The histories of Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Rousseau, Fourrier, and the works of all the celebrated poets, both ancient and modern, are stamped with strong evidence of the working of this instinct in the soul; and they owe much of their genius and popularity to its strange workings and fascinations.

One of the highest purposes of Religion, if it means anything, is to reveal to man the invisible world, and bring him into closer communion with its inhabitants, by teaching him to live more completely under its spiritual influences, because he is destined to move in its sphere, and there, amidst its glorious spirits, enjoy perfect bliss. Religion must do this, for, if she fails, men seek the gratification of this instinct elsewhere.

COMPOSITION.

Write the last paragraph in two different ways, and give a list of substitute words for: purposes, invisible, communion, inhabitants, teaching, completely, glorious, bliss.

Lacordaire, Jean Baptiste, the most famous French pulpit orator of this century, was born in 1802; died in 1861. He studied law with most brilliant prospects, but suddenly abandoned it to enter the