great city. They did not underrate their advantages, nor the greatness of what they had already accomplished. Neither did they underrate the magnitude of the work before them, nor shrink from the task and the outlay which were needed in order to provide for the future well-being of their city. The most imposing buildings that we saw in all western towns and villages were the schoolhouses. In Chicago, more than anywhere else, the most liberal provision has been made for the education of the young. A great commercial city stood with one hand reaching out six hundred miles towards the west to gather in the harvests from fields of immeasurable fertility and extent, and with the other hand extended eastward to spread abroad among hungry millions the stores of food which she had gathered. She clenched her hand firmly. She gathered in of the abundance of the land earnestly and eagerly. She loved to gather in. But she has also dispensed liberally in every humane and generous enterprise. If she has sometimes been reproached with bragging a little too loudly of what she has done, we would say to those who thus reproach her, If you will do the deeds which she has done, we will forgive the brag.

No people felt more secure in their prosperity than the citizens of Chicago. We knew of one on a visit here at the east where he formerly lived, who spoke of his home and his comfortable circumstances, and added that he felt no uneasiness about his property, for the fire-department there was so admirably constituted that there could not be any serious loss by fire. And yet, almost before these words were spoken, his home and most of the earnings of a lifetime were laid in ashes. In words which James Freeman Clarke so aptly selected for his text the Sunday after the conflagration: "Alas, alas! that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to naught."

This great destruction of property furnishes a new and very striking illustration of the manner in which we are all united together. A hurricane in the Chinese seas, a war in

465 Turkey, or an earthquake on the coasts of Chili, causes mourning in New England, or destroys the fortunes of our friends in New York. A sad loss of property has fallen upon our brethren in Chicago; but it is a loss which they share with almost every rich city in the Northern States. Our neighbor in a small country town has lost several thousand dollars on articles of his manufucture, which were waiting for a sale in the burning city. Probably one-half the property consumed by the fire will directly or indirectly have to be paid for by persons living in other places. Wonderful the energy of these people who in so brief a time have built up a great city. Wonderful the capabilities and the fertility of resources which they have shown. But in order to accomplish their work they have levied their contributions everywhere, borrowing money wherever it could be drawn out by high rates of income and good securities. The gas-works, the water-works, great public improvements, churches, and railroads, costly warehouses, and schoolhouses, all got up and sustained primarily for the benefit of Chicago, were in no small measure owned, either directly or in the bonds and mortgages which were pledged in their behalf, by people living abroad. And so it is that the same conflagration which has made a hundred thousand people homeless there, is felt by a hundred thousand more in distant places, who are obliged to practice a closer economy, to do without their accustomed luxuries and comforts, or whose affluent homes will have to be given up, while some who a month ago were rich, or certainly well off, will through many a long year feel the pinch and pressure of their painfully altered condition.

But there is another and brighter side. As the whole community are obliged to suffer together and thus show that they are all one body, so in the spontaneous alacrity with which hundreds of thousands rush forward with hands and arms and hearts full to the relief of the suffering, we are made to feel that in a yet higher sense we are one in spirit. If railroads and telegraphs separate us from one another, tempting members of the same neighborhood or household to live hundreds or thousands of miles apart, they also bind

us all together, so that what touches one thrills with electric sympathy through the whole land or across the sea, and causes us all to realize that we are still members one of another.

In our strangely prosperous and sister city at the head of the great lakes, that which was a month ago a densely populated space as large as all of Boston north of Dover Street has, with the exception. of one wooden dwelling-house, been swept as bare of homes or places of business as the naked prairie. Tender women and children have been driven out, many with only their night clothing to shield them from the cold and rain. But warm hearts and helping hands have been extended towards them. All that can be done for them in so vast a desolation will be done, and we who do it will be all the richer because of what we do.

In the absorbing character of the loss at Chicago, we must not forget the wider loss of life and the more absolute destition and destress, caused by the terrible conflagrations in northern Michigan, and Wisconsin, and in eastern Minnesota. The poor people who yet survive there have lost everything which they need to sustain them through the winter, and they have no rich neighbors to help them bear their losses. In Chicago every one who can work will at once find remunerative employment. But these poor people have no means of support through the coming winter while they are building up some make-shift of a home in that inclement region. Houses and harvests and cattle have been swept away in one indiscriminate ruin. A hundredth part of what is needed to relieve Chicago will make these people rich compared with what they now are. It cannot restore friends and neighbors and the lost ones of their own households, but it can save them from hunger and cold and the weary, hopeless feeling that no one cares for them in all this wide world which God has so richly blessed with his bounty.

GEORGE PUTNAM, D.D.

On Sunday, Oct. 1, Dr. Putnam, after an absence from his pulpit of six or seven months, preached again. We select a few passages from his sermon which we find in "The Bos

ton Evening Traveler" of Oct. 2. Amid the general mania for traveling, they may give a little comfort to those whose duties or necessities keep them at home. He has been speaking of the almost universal homesickness which he found among our countrymen abroad, and goes on to say,—

"For my part, I have visited many fine churches, grand old cathedrals in London and Westminster, in Exeter and Salisbury, in Hereford, Ripon, Chester, and York, and I know not how many more, and I trust I was fitly impressed and elevated by the grandeur and the beauty of them, and none the less from the fact that not one of them was so beautiful to my eyes, nor so truly for my heart the gate of heaven or the temple of the living God, shining with the beauty of his holiness, as this homely old Puritan meetinghouse, where friends and kindred dwell. Do not smile at this unclassic preference. Why, what would you have? Do you sup

pose that any mere genius of architecture, any amount or arrangement of carved stone or colored glass, can go so far to make a structure beautiful and impressive, as the forty years' fond associations and tender memories, and deep heart-experiences of a living soul? No: neither in me nor in you, nor in any but the shallowest and most frivolous of all that host of sight-seeing travelers. We will admire and enjoy whatever beautiful things we may see, in whatever far lands we may visit, and none the less because each heart knows for itself of a beauty that excelleth and a charm that neither the artist's skill nor nature's bounty can impart or invent. The soul of man is a greater power than any of the works of hnman hands; aye, than any of the material works of Almighty God. The soul, through its affections, is the great artist and wonder-worker in this world. It can put colors in its pictures of scenes and persons that a Titian new not of, cause the humblest dwelling to outshine the palaces of kings, and make the wilderness blossom as the rose. . . . So true it is that the father we go and the more we see of men and their works, and of nature and her varied scenery, the more desirable does the society to which we belong by the bonds of affection and habit seem to us, and the fairer the scenes we have left behind. We learn, what perhaps we sometimes forget or doubt here on the spot, that the place to which we belong, where we have taken root, where our appointed work and our natural ties are and our purest affections centre, is for us the best and the happiest place in all the world. We learn that the true con

tentment and enjoyment of life for us all are here, and that the farther we go to seek them the farther we go from them.

"Oh happiness! how far we flee

Thine own sweet face in search of thee!""

"After we have seen the world's most famous places and fairest scenes we become more convinced than ever that nature is nowhere grander in its workmanship, or more beautiful in its manifestation, or more melodious in its voices, than here over our heads and about our path. We find that the word of all truth, in science, in history, in religion and philosophy, comes to us here, if we will receive it, with all of the distinctness and power it can have anywhere. The old world has no oracles that can give new revelations of it. The world of moral wisdom and of upright, pure and noble living has as holy voices, as kindling inspirations, as splendid exemplifications close by as far away. The green graves of our own beloved here are as sacred as those we bend over in cloistered abbey or beneath cathedral domes, and whisper forth as hallowing words upon the listening heart. Here breathe the gentle voices of consolation for our griefs, the music of the satisfying affections, the songs of contentment, and the anthems of religious peace and immortal hope.

"If absence and distance impress this truth upon us anew and more deeply, and by the yearnings for home that attend them give a new warmth to the affections which they shall not wholly lose again, and add some strength to our vows of fidelity and duty which shall abide, then they have given us their highest benefits. Other benefits of travel are pleasant and good, this the supremest."

THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION IN BALTIMORE.

The Protestant Episcopal Church of this country is now holding its Triennial Convention in Baltimore. It is a grave and able body of men, with grave and solemn interests to attend to. Its influence for good is one which we gratefully recognize. It was never so much alive to its duties or accomplishing so much as it now is. But it has its dangers. With the hankering on one side for the ritualistic forms, the prestige, and the authority of Rome, and the revulsion in the other extreme from doctrines which reason and the Scriptures alike repudiate, the Church itself has no easy task to mediate between the two. At the time of this writing, no