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convince the young mind that virtue is more desirable, more precious than pleasure? How shall we demonstrate to the passion-fired, hot-blooded youth, that the act which would yield him present ecstacy, and yet may be shielded by secrecy from infamy or penalty, is to be shunned and avoided at all hazards because it is in its tendencies adverse to general purity and wellbeing? Such unvarying resistance to temptation is plainly beyond the power of skeptical morality. Not vainly is Joseph solicited if atheism possess his understanding, never fruitlessly does Satan proffer all the kingdoms of this world' to one who has no belief in any other. Archimedes must have a place whereon to stand' or he cannot move the world; and I see not how virtue can be implanted in the human soul so firmly as to defy the blandishments of seduction, the tempest-gusts of passion, the dazzling lures of ambition, if it be not rooted and grounded in that faith which entereth within the veil,' and undoubtingly realizes that every action is noted by Omniscience, and rewarded by Omnipotent Justice.

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Mere recognition of God as an Architect is not sufficient, still less is belief in him as a blind power, like the destiny of the Greek drama or the fatalism which challenges the Turk's submission. Worse still is the vulgar idea of him as an African Mumbo-Jumbo to be placated by flattery or won over by servile compliances in place of practical and hearty obedience. Whoever truly knows Him as He is, knows that no act nor thought, whether good or evil, can possibly fail of its due recompense, and that all attempts to evade this by finesse or formula are at once preposterous and audacious. That His mercy to the erring and the penitent never faileth, is a glorious, cheering truth; but vainly shall any hope for vice, penitent on its death-bed, the rewards of enduring virtue. Were He but known as He is, we should have more lives of active beneficence and fewer deathbeds of abject repentance when too late to be of any earthly use. No Louis XV. worn out with fifty years of debauchery and tyranny, would think of making the amende honorable to God' by mumbling a wafer and a prayer in his death-throes, but all would realize that 'whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap,' and that the virtue which holds its even way through life, realizing that God governs and judges here as well as elsewhere, is alone deserving of His favor or calculated to secure it; and that hardly to heaven itself is it possible to efface utterly from the soul the stains of a career of guilt and shame, save through the purifying fires of a righteous and fearful retribution.

I draw to the close of my hour; yet how shall I close without attempting to impress on your minds the great truth that education can never be what it ought until a vast and pervading improvement has been wrought in the social and physical con

dition of the destitute millions of mankind. In vain shall we provide capable teachers and comfortable school-rooms, and the most admirable school-books, apparatus, libraries, &c., for those children who come shivering and skulking in rags, who sit distorted by the gnawings of hunger or suffering from the effects of innutritious or unwholesome food, who must sleep huddled in cellars or garrets unfit even for dog-kennels, hard necessity overruling all distinctions of age or sex, and crowding modesty through the unglazed window to keep company with exiled decency outside. You may fill the hovels of the famishing with bibles and tracts, sufficient to replace the chairs and tables which famine and the landlord have sent to the pawnbroker, yet you cannot render those who grow up under such influences religious or moral; you may cram them with popularized science, and convert them into infant prodigies of intellect and culture, and they will yet be deplorably uneducated, untrained, undeveloped. No stimulation of one or two faculties ever yet produced a true or useful human character, nor ever will. The education which does not begin worthily in the cradle can rarely result in eminent worth or honor. Idly shall you labor to teach the child whose earliest recollections are of torturing hunger or of cloying surfeit, that Food is not an end of life but a means of sustaining it; vainly shall you moralize to him whose youth was rendered bitter and abject by want, that wealth is but an added responsibility and not necessarily a sovereign good. The actualization of grosser vice may be shunned from instinct, or fear, or habit; but the soul's native purity and delicacy cannot be preserved where a single garret is made to afford the sleeping accommodations of a numerous family, nor can monitorial precepts restore it while the influences which wrought its destruction are still present and potent. It will be idle to expect true, beneficent attainment in school from those who have not the means of decent and comfortable existence at home. You may sharpen their wits; you may awaken in them a dread of shame or pain and a resolution to avoid them. But to impress the solenin injunctions, thou shalt not steal,' 'thou shalt not covet,' on him who daily casts famine-sunken eyes on the fruit ripening and rotting in the rich man's orchards, and who feels that the fuel which would warm his benumbed limbs is mouldering to dust in the adjacent wood, unused and unwanted, this is the impossible task; yet who shall be deemed educated whose heart festers with rebellion against these essential commandments?

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Not until we shall have achieved the emancipation of the poor from the slavery of physical and absolute destitution, not till we shall have rendered possible to all obedience to the divine precept, "take no thought for the morrow,' not till we shall have relieved all who will work from the terror of constrained idleness

and consequent starvation, can I feel that a secure basis has been laid for universal Education. There will still remain obstacles in abundance, obstacles originating in perverted appetites, impetuous passions, narrow-minded parentage, false pride, mental incapacity, and the like; but before all these I place the impediments arising from extreme indigence, and the degradations and dangers which have thence their origin. Let this be removed, and we shall have better opportunity to appreciate and encounter the residue.

Universal Education! grand, inspiring idea! And shall there come a time when the delver in the mine and the rice-swamp, the orphans of the prodigal and the felon, the very offspring of shame, shall be truly, systematically educated? Glorious consummation! morning twilight of the Millennium! who will not joyfully labor and court sacrifices, and suffer reproach, if he may hasten, by even so much as a day, its blessed coming? Who will not take courage from a contemplation of what the last century has seen accomplished, if not in absolute results, yet in preparing the approaches, in removing impediments, in correcting and expanding the popular comprehension of the work to be done, and the feasibility of doing it? Whatever of evil and of suffering the future may have in store for us, though the earth be destined yet to be plowed by the sword, and fertilized by human gore until rank growths of the deadliest weeds shall overshadow it, stifling into premature decay every plant most conducive to health or fragrance, the time shall surely come when universal and true Education shall dispel the dense night of ignorance and perverseness that now enshrouds the vast majority of the human race, shall banish evil and wretchedness almost wholly from earth by removing or unmasking the multiform temptations to wrong-doing, shall put an end to robbery, hatred, oppression and war, by diffusing widely and thoroughly a living consciousness of the brotherhood of mankind, and the sure blessedness as well as righteousness of doing ever as we would have others do to us. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,' such is the promise which enables us to see to the end of the dizzy whirl of wrong and misery in which our race has long sinned and suffered. On wise and systematic training, based on the widest knowledge, the truest morality, and tending ever to universal good as the only assurance of special or personal well-being, rests the great hope of the terrestrial renovation and elevation of man.

Not the warrior, then, nor the statesman, nor yet the masterworker, as such, but the teacher, in our day leads the vanguard of humanity. Whether in the seminary or by the wayside, by uttered word or printed page, our true king is not he who best directs the siege or sets his squadrons in the field, or heads the

charge, but he who can and will instruct and enlighten his fellows, so that at least some few of the generation of whom he is shall be wiser, purer, nobler for his living among them, and prepared to carry forward the work of which he was a humble instrument to its far grander and loftier consummation. O far above the conqueror of kingdoms, the destroyer of hosts by the sword and the bayonet, is he whose tearless victories redden no river and whiten no plain, but who leads the understanding a willing captive and builds his empire not of the wrenched and bleeding fragments of subjugated nations, but on the realms of intellect which he has discovered and planted and peopled with beneficent activity and enduring joy! The mathematician who in his humble study, undisturbed as yet by the footsteps of monarchs and their ministers, demonstrates the existence of a planet before unsuspected by astronomy, unobserved by the telescope; the author who from his dim garret sends forth the scroll which shall constrain thousands on thousands to laugh or weep at his will, who topples down a venerable fraud by an allegory or crushes a dynasty by an epigram, he shall live and reign over a still expanding dominion, when the pasteboard kings whose steps are counted in court circulars and timed by stupid huzzas shall have long since mouldered and been forgotten. To build out into chaos and drear vacuity, to render some corner of the primal darkness radiant with the presence of an idea, to supplant ignorance by knowledge and sin by virtue, such is the mission of our age, worthy to enkindle the ambition of the loftiest, yet proffering opportunity and reward to the most lowly. To the work of universal enlightenment be our lives henceforth consecrated, until the black clouds of impending evil are irradiated and dispersed by the full effulgence of the divinely predicted day, when "All shall know the LORD from the least unto the greatest," and when wrong and woe shall vanish forever from the presence of universal knowledge, purity and bliss!

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650

TO AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE.

BY GEORGE W. DEWEY.

Oн say, does the cottage yet peer from the shadow
Of ancestral elms on the side of the hill ?—
Its doorway of woodbine, that looked to the meadow,
And welcomed the sun as a guest on the sill;
The April-winged martin, with garrulous laughter,

Is he there where the mosses were thatching the eave?
And the dear little wren that crept under the rafter ?—
The earliest to come, and the latest to leave!

Oh say, is the hawthorn the hedgerow perfuming
Adown the old lane? are the willows still there?
Where briery thickets in spring-time were blooming,
And breathing their life on the odorous air;
And runs yet the brook where violets were weeping ?—
Where the white lily sat like a swan on the stream,—
While under the laurel, the shepherd boy sleeping,
Saw only the glory of life in his dream.

Hath the Reaper been there, with his sickle relentless?—
The stern reaper Death in the harvest of Life!

Hath his foot crushed the blossoms, 'till withered and scentless
They lay ere the frosts of the Autumn were rife?

Ah yes, I can hear the sad villagers hymning,
A requiem that swells from my heart on my ear;
And a gathering shadow of sorrow is dimming
Those scenes that must ever arise with a tear.

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