in the outer-deeps of space-from the fuchsia which blooms in the green-house of to-day to the tree ferns of the geologic periods of a thousand ages gone, Science has pushed her investigations, everywhere recording, arranging, classifying, systematizing, until, to the thinking, intelligent man, the world of nature is now a different world from what it was to the man of like mind of a century ago-different in its rocks and plants, in its clouds and lightnings, and tempests and rainbows-different, in short, in everything, from the mystic dance of the atoms to the sublimer dance of the stars. Nor has this scientific spirit of the age confined itself exclusively to the physical world; it has overleaped all such bounds, and pushed its inquiries into the regions bordering upon this, in which work the forces which have to do with the increase of wealth and the progress of nations, and on into the province of the more subtile spiritual forces which appear in the human soul and in human history, until, in the works of its masters, political economy has almost taken place among the exact sciences; until, in the hands of such men as Hamilton, and McCosh, the graver questions of metaphysics and logic, even where not answered, have become as clearly defined in statement as problems in geometry; and until, in the hands of those whose coming we wait, a philosophy of history will no longer be among the impossibilities. As this work of the century in its more palpable forms approached completion, the same processes began to be applied to literature and art. Criticism began striving to take on the scientific form. Men were no longer satisfied with a few empirical rules, reverenced and applied simply because an Aristotle or a Blair, some giant or some pigmy, had pronounced them truth. The power which had accomplished so much in behalf of order in other departments, led men, in its workings in this sphere, to conclude, by an iron logic, that every art must have its basis of principles, which may, at least in measure, be ascertained and scientifically arranged, and by which one can judge correctly of its products. As a result, we have had a new class of writings, which the seventeenth century, or even the eighteenth, could not have produced; comprising, in the field of general literature, the works of such men as Goethe and Schiller, Hazlitt

and Coleridge, and the whole line of modern British essayists, and, in the field of special art, such elaborate criticisms as that of Dr. Hermann Ulrici on the plays of Shakespeare, and the "Modern Painters," and kindred works of John Ruskin.

To the man of intelligence and thought, the world of art is not the same as it was to one of like power of a century ago. Not that great art is at all different now from what it was then; not that we can teach a man now by rule to write a great poem, or paint a great picture, or improvise a sublime song, or extemporize a masterly oration, any more than we can teach a lark to flap its wings by instruction out of Whewell, or a nightingale to sing according to the musical grammar of Calcott; not, above everything else, that any other than God can make the great artist, and not that any other than a great artist can produce a grand poem, or painting, or song, or oration; but that, given the great artist, made of God, and clothed of him with his mission, we have all this knowledge to aid him in his work, and, given the man of common sense and culture with the discerning eye, he has all this knowledge at his command to enable him to study, and understand, and give intelligent judgment concerning the artist's great productions. The two men, of the past and of the present, brought side by side, look upon essentially the same thing, but he of the present with different and vastly clearer vision. This restless scientific activity thus reaches and employs itself in every department of thought. The educated, thinking men in every community are under its dominant influence, and though not with the masses the chief moulding force, it yet exerts more or less power of restraint and control far down among them. There is, consequently, everywhere a demand, within certain limits, for the philosophic and the artistic in the method and form of whatever aspires to be considered a literary production before it can gain the attention of men.

As a second feature of the times, one cannot but note the rage for novelty which so possesses the masses. As a fact, the world, in so far as our knowledge of its occurrences is concerned, is another world from what it was a century since. Then the news came from a region comparatively narrow, travelling at the slow pace of the stage-coach, the mounted

post, or the sailing vessel, and was narrowly diffused by a few weekly journals. It furnished but little of the novel to excite men. The progress of science and art has latterly brought the world in its vast regions into intimate communion and union of parts. With steam and electricity at his service, the professional man, the merchant or the mechanic, has for years been able to read in his daily paper, before breakfast, of the chief events of the past night over a region inhabited by fifty millions of people, while the recent successful completion of the Atlantic Telegraph now brings within the range of this, his morning glance, every startling event of the last evening occurring in christendom. Circumstances seem thus providentially arranged, if not to develop, at least to meet, the craving for the new and exciting. But however developed, the fact of such a tendency is beyond dispute. It is very marked in the reading of the masses of the present day. This may well be styled the era of novels, and of base and worthless novels at that. Solid literature does not furnish enough of excitement. All through the range of reading, in papers, magazines, and books, to meet the demands of multitudinous readers, we have the descending scale all the way to the bottom, from the weekly sheet of sensation tales, which, after its brazen manner, insists on pressing its way up into good society, to the despicable page which knows its friends too well to think of any such aim; from the pretentious magazine, which, while seeking to exalt itself to the chief literary seat, scarcely dares to tell the truth lest it should not be new, to the yellow-covered pamphlet, which is so irredeemably base as never to attempt anything better than a bald lie; from the portly volume which aspires to a place in the church library, to the unbound, ten cent sheet, which never comes to the light of day, and upon which the eyes of the man of virtue never fall. Public lectures and amusements have moved in the same direction, until in their downward reach there is scarcely anything, however offensive to sound sense, cultivated taste, correct morals, and right religious feeling, that fails to find a place to exhibit itself and an audience to witness the exhibition, provided only that it be novel. Nor has this tendency left the religion of the day untouched and uninfluenced. No thinking man has failed

to mark its presence in the work of the Sabbath-school; in changing the character of the instruction, until we hear too little of the solid portions of the Scripture, while pointless stories are often substituted for God's truth; in transforming the addresses, until, in some regions, one who is not equal to Gough as a mimic, to Blondin as a rope-walker, and to Punch as a punster, is hardly thought to be fitted to speak to an audience of children; in metamorphosing the library, until in many cases there is little left to be read but vapid, so-called religious novels, which, in spite of all their pretensions and of all the puffing of the religious press, are, in fact, in their own essential nature, at war with common sense, morality, and religion, and, in their necessary influence, irretrievably, we had almost said, infinitely bad. The same spirit has not hesitated to invade and desecrate even the pulpit with its unseemly ways. Tradition tells us that, at a certain stage in their progress, Dr. Archibald Alexander used to address his classes in Princeton Theological Seminary on the subject of popularity as preachers, somewhat on this wise: "Young gentlemen, you can be popular as preachers. It's the easiest thing in the world. It does not require any genius, or common sense, or study, or culture. Secure access to the columns of the newspaper and advertise, that on Sunday, at the usual hours of service, you will preach standing on your head, and your house will be crowded. It's easy to be popular in that way, if you want to be." In our day we could bring, from the Saturday dailies of many a city, advertisements, in which clergymen propose, in all soberness, to perform, for the public entertainment, feats quite as absurd as that suggested by the great educator of ministers. It would need no prophet to predict the results of all this, even were they yet in the far future; and, since they are here in the present, it takes no seer to discern what they are. This is not the place to demonstrate what must be the logical result of reading novels only, and only poor ones at that. The man who thinks and reasons for himself knows what it must be. We are coming, in fact, upon a public with one of its great elements having no mental muscle with which to lay hold of truth, caring nothing for our standard English literature, taking no interest in theology or the truth of God, and going

to church, if at all, to be entertained rather than instructed. We are training up a generation by the reading of books filled with pretended facts which are yet contrary to the nature of things, of men, and of God, with a morality not of God, a religion not of Christ, and a spirit infused of Mammon and Fashion, rather than of the Holy Ghost; and, in so training them, we are destroying all taste for that which is true and Christ-like, and almost barring the possibility of their becoming the powerful thinkers, and the earnest practical workers which the exigencies of the church demand for its mission. The day may not have come yet when the people of God are ready to enter their solemn protest, and to sweep all such trash out of church, Sabbath-school, and family, but it must come sooner or later, for God's government is so ordered that it never suffers a foolish, a base, or an evil thing to perpetuate its existence in his church for ever. But however that may be, there is no disputing the fact of this morbid tendency to novelty, and that is all that need be contended for, now and here. It manifests itself everywhere, reaching to some extent all classes. The cultivated and refined are not wholly free from it; with the masses it is the moulding, ruling tendency. We are almost repeating the character of the old Greek nation, in its decline, in the time of Paul, with whom the one question was-"What is there new?" It need hardly be said that, in consequence of this, the demand for the novel, the unusual, the startling, is brought to bear upon everything which aspires to the dignity of literature, and almost made a condition of gaining access to

men.

A third feature of the age, and the last we shall enumerate, is the prevalence of the utilitarian spirit, coexisting with the tendencies already noted. "Cui bono" is the universal cry. Men hurry-we shall not stop to inquire whether consistently or inconsistently-from their scientific investigations, from their art worshipping, and from their novel reading and sightseeing, to join in that common cry. This we believe an admitted fact. There is doubtless a true and right noble sense of the word "useful." As man's chief use is to be "the witness. of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness, whatever enables him.