cendent holiness, justice, and purity of God; and so tends to produce conviction, to lead to repentence, to bring men to God, and to awe and restrain sinners. Still all these are not the primary and essential aim and objects of the atonement, but only its secondary, resultant, and conservative designs and effects. It is found that men may hold all these, and still fatally depreciate and diminish the doctrine itself. Indeed, by substituting these in the place of the one great object, that of satisfying divine justice, the atonement itself may be wholly rejected and set aside, and thus the whole gospel system be corrupted, and its saving power destroyed. A sovereign remedy, eliminated of its primary, characteristic elements, becomes a subtle poison, or a worthless potion, making the destruction of him who trusts to it only the more certain.

ARTICLE II.

THE ENGLISH WOMAN AT HOME.

OUR portraiture of the English woman would be most imperfect and unsatisfactory if nothing was said on so important a matter as love and marriage. All that is uniformly managed in accordance with conventional laws as well defined and authoritative as the statute which regulates the sale of an estate. While the young people are at school, the two sexes are kept entirely apart, as we have seen; and in all good families the greatest care is exercised in regulating their intercourse afterward. But when the fit time arrives, of which the parents usually take upon themselves to be judges, everything connected with a matrimonial alliance is conducted in a perfectly open, matter-of-fact sort of way, precisely like any other affair of business. The courting' is done, not by stealth, or under cover of the night, but in the daylight, and at the home of the maiden. The parents are principal agents in the case to an extent which some would deem not especially romantic, to say the least. It is an affair in which parental authority appears in its full dignity and strength. Neither does filial reverence

suffer the loss of a single particle of its wonted submission and gracefulness. There are few fathers in the better class of English society who would hesitate to issue the most positive and absolute prohibition in relation to the engagement and marriage of a daughter; and few daughters would refuse implicit compliance, though in direct opposition to their own decided inclinations. A gentleman desirous of paying his addresses to a young lady, esteems it a point of honor to secure the assent of her parents before making love to the young lady herself. That it is equally a matter of expediency, and almost of necessity, is quite certain. The decision of the father, we are sorry to have to say, is too often ruled by purely commercial considerations. If he is able to give his daughter ten thousand pounds, he demands that the man who weds her shall be possessed of at least an equal amount. This point is usually settled before the young lady has been consulted at all. There is only one earthly thing which a rich English father considers an equivalent for wealth in an alliance for his daughter, and that is aristocratic rank. A penny less lord-brainless and worthless, too— may marry a merchant-prince's daughter, and not unfrequently does. But genius, learning, reputation, popular influence, are all wood, hay, stubble in the estimation of your English man of money. The daughter may be intelligent, appreciating, noble-hearted, and affectionate; but what can she do in such a case? She has, also, strong common-sense. This seems like a hereditary attribute of the English woman; it is certainly an important part of her daily home training. She knows that her father is as inexorable, and can be as tyrannical, as he is prudent. Very likely she has in remembrance some instances of the ill-speeding of filial disobedience, in similar circumstances, which are not greatly fitted to encourage her in the repetition of such an experiment. We have seen a merchant of great wealth, and living in a splendid mansion, the leading member of a Christian church, introducing his own pastor, a popular young preacher, to his house as a frequent and familiar guest; and when a mutual attachment sprung up between the handsome and accomplished clergyman and the merchant's beautiful and motherless daughter, and even the stern threat to disinherit her did not prevail to prevent their union, he would not suffer the wedding

to take place from his house, and not until that daughter was the mother of several children did he once visit her at the home of her husband, or bestow on her a single shilling of his vast fortune, although she was compelled to practise an economy of which she little dreamed amid the affluence of her early home. Perhaps most English fathers would have relented sooner than he did toward such an orphan child; but very few would have acted differently in the main. The peculiarity of the case was the daughter's daring to brave the will of her father. But why did he permit, and even deliberately install the acquaintance, at such a susceptible age of the parties, and with circumstances so favoring the tender passion? Because to that sublime Englishman such an amazing piece of presumption on the part of a clergyman could never have been imagined as within the most distant bounds of possibility.

Another case we remember, which occurred in London, and was the subject of no little remark at the time. A gentleman of magnificent appearance and high personal character — pure as Abdiel, of brilliant intellect and commanding oratory, enjoying an enviable reputation in every section of the kingdom having lost his first wife, became enamored of the accomplished daughter of a proud millionnaire whose mother was dead, and her brother the gentleman's particular friend. As the damsel was some forty years of age, he did not think it necessary to ask the father's consent to his suit, but went directly to the lady herself, and was successful, so far at least, as she felt at liberty to decide for herself in a matter which so much concerned her. She, however, asked papa's permission, now eighty years old, to be married, and not only did the old papa refuse to grant permission, but positively forbid the thing, and that with all the solemnity of his paternal authority. And the purse-proud and arrogant brother of the lady, her suitor's very particular friend, insolently flung in his teeth the threat of his own displeasure if the matter was not given up! The maiden submitted, her suitor- gentleman, scholar, orator, magnanimous, proud, and well poised in his own self-respect — retired and found a wife elsewhere. It was not long after that the old man of money died, and left an immense fortune to the son, and the paltry sum of ten thousand pounds, only for her life

time-in other words the interest of ten thousand pounds, about fifteen hundred dollars to the daughter; as if to punish her as long as she lived, and when he should be lying in his grave, for having so much as once thought of so unworthy an alliance!

It is not, however, alone on the part of rich English fathers that money is regarded as a ruling consideration in so delicate a negotiation. A man without property himself, who manifested no anxiety about the fortune of the woman whom he proposed to wed, would be looked upon, not as high-minded and magnanimous, but as imprudent and reckless, if not even as unprincipled. And not without reason. If you are married it is absolutely indispensable that you maintain a domestic establishment fully equal to that which is customary in the class of society to which you belong. As a rule, a professional man could not do this if he married a woman without property. There are many fathers in England who hold on to their social position and respectability by expending every shilling of their income, and who give their daughters a finished education, even sending them to Paris, it may be, but who cannot bestow upon them anything at all in the shape of a marriage-portion. To marry such a girl, and introduce her to a style of living decidedly below that to which she has been accustomed under her father's roof, is generally thought to be a step not very full of promise as regards domestic happiness. This is, without doubt, the true view of the case. An English woman is more helpless than an American woman. The expenses of housekeeping, even with the strictest economy, are very great. Boarding after marriage is a thing heard of as common in our country, but is regarded with utter abhorrence. A married English woman would never feel as if she had found her own place if she were not the queen of a household. The tyranny of public opinion which requires you to keep up a style of living equal to that of the society in which you move, is fearful. The absolute and immutable condition of your being numbered with the guests at a fashionable dinner-party, if you are a married man, is that you give an equally sumptuous dinner in turn. Is it reasonable to expect that a woman, however magnanimous and affectionate, will continue to be satisfied with having sacri

ficed so much of social position for the sake of high personal qualities in her husband, in a country where social position is an object of universal and boundless idolatry?

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There is small disposition of wealth, as we have said, to wed with worth. Fortune allies itself to fortune, like two bubbles mutually attracted on a smooth surface of water not infrequent consequence being the alliance of beauty with deformity, and intelligence with stupidity, and, worst of all, angelic virtue with moral bankruptcy and ruin. It is simply a thing, of course, under all these circumstances, that many a man of intelligence, and high character, and every personal accomplishment, continues unmarried; because he dares not wed a woman who is poor, like himself, and cannot find one with property and other requisite qualifications who is willing to become is wife. Hence, too, many a beautiful and accomplished girl remains under her father's roof till her charms fade, and she is classed with the elders and forgotten. Side by side, with just such things as this, we have seen a woman of great intelligence and elegant manners, bestowing herself with her fortune of ten thousand pounds, on a man of whom it was the sole recommendation that he had ten thousand more; and in the space of six years we saw that elegant woman and her little children reduced from affluence to poverty, all through her husband's pitiful weakness and stupidity, and glad to find a humble home in the far distant wilds of Australia.

If any are disposed to censure the prudence of which we have spoken, and to stigmatize it as cold and ignoble, such may be informed, for their especial consolation, that the prudence is not always exercised in the circumstances. There is now and then a maiden, as we have seen, with courage enough to say, "But what talk we of fathers, when there is such a man as Orlando?" It is no very uncommon case to see marriage taking place where, on both sides, there is every personal quality to make the union desirable, and to give large promise of happiness intelligence, taste, exquisite beauty, warm affection. And what is the result? The result is, in a great multitude of instances, that, with a respectable profession diligently followed, a home which was blessed with no abundance at the outset, becomes more and more straitened in its comforts, as its