civilized, and it is very certain that we are rich. But so long as there are arrangements, tolerated in commercial circles, by means of which fictitious values are placed upon the necessaries of life, and the price which a man receives for his toil places him at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, so long may we expect discontent and violence. So long as woman is driven into a life of shame by shivering hunger, because her employer will only give her fourteen cents a day for labor from which he realizes two hundred per cent; so long as children are dwarfed by physical and moral miasmas, in the alleys and tenement houses of the cities; so long as men are brutalizing themselves, and there is no arm powerful enough to stop it; so long as ignorance and immorality hang over so much of our life, dark and obstinate as an Arctic night, so long must we confess that we have not learned true wisdom, and so long must we apply our hearts to the great lesson of life. world, if it does not increase the morals of the world? Of what use is a railroad across the continent which can carry wheat, and cattle, and gold, from San Francisco to New York in seven or eight days, if truth has still to go on foot or around by Cape Horn, and takes six months to make the journey? The use of the telephone and the dispatches to the newspapers is to circulate truth a little faster. But if lies travel by electricity, and truth must go by mail, then we have not gained by taking electricity into our service. Speed is only valuable when the direction is right, and the errand worthy. The time be tween Liverpool and New York being reduced to nine or ten days is of no value, except to those who have a worthy motive in making the voyage. If a man were going to Europe merely to kill time that hung heavily on his hands, or to spend his excess of wealth in some foolish display, or to indulge in vices forbidden by associations at home, the old time of eight or nine weeks was better. A higher rate of increase is It would seem as if, from the opporonly valuable when the thing to be mul- tunities furnished, mankind at large tiplied is valuable. A thistle, if left might by this time have learned along alone, will soon cover a continent. But what path it must travel to find true the continent is no richer because of the success. Not only so; but it might rearapid increase. Hence, all this increase sonably be expected that having found of speed and acquisition, which makes the path man would always be seen a modern decade equal to an old cen- traveling in it. It is conceded, in theory, tury, must find its true value in an equal that there can be no permanent s uccess gain of all forms of goodness. If without honesty. And yet, in the year power has increased a hundred fold, just closed, many efforts have been then righteousness should increase a made to make success out of stolen hundred fold. If the body has grown money, out of violation of trust; and in great and rich, the soul should also be- every case the law is confirmed that the come equally great and rich. bad act reacts upon the actor sooner or later. We have all had time to learn that there can be no success without honor, and that we can all afford to be poor, but none of us can afford to be dishonest. If these mighty multitudes that are covering the continent, would only apply themselves to mastering the lesson, both as a theory and a practice, that an honorable failure, even to feeling the pinch of poverty, is a transcendent triumph compared with that which is called success, purchased at the expense of justice, then the years would not be passing in vain. If this strange, Here, in America, we have learned very many things; but as a nation we are not yet very wise. We have learned how to build great cities, but we have not learned how to keep them from burning down; or how to drain them; or how to govern them without fraud. The majority have learned to hate crime, but they have not learned to prevent it. It is almost universally believed that intemperance is a vice, and is the cause of much crime; but the way to remedy it effectually has not been discovered. We call ourselves and munificently endowed being, who has covered the earth with traces of his genius and power; who has discovered the geometry of the skies; who has built temples; who has written liturgies and bibles; and whose soul has grown great enough to think of God and immortality, if he would only lay close to his heart the noble wisdom which the years have evolved for human guidance, that happiness is the stream of which righteousness is the fountain, what a changed and magnificent spectacle would our earth soon present! Happy New Year indeed, could we all look upon that scene! The discoveries in science hasten to become something more than mere discoveries. They are applied to the affairs of life. The study of optics soon passed away from books and became telescopes to carry sight to får off worlds, and microscopes to reveal the secrets lurking in the inner chamber of life. The study of wheels and levers turned into wagons and machines for doing all kinds of work. Applied science has moved over the face of these modern nations and changed everything. The facts of these days excel, in wonder, the fables of the ancient days. There is nothing in the old stories of magic which can equal the telegraph, and the telephone, and the electric light. But our century seems to have come to a halt in its moral progress, because its morals are not applied to life. We do not know any more about mechanics than we do about righteousness; but the difference is that we make a much better use of the former than we do of the latter knowledge. When we discovered the laws of water, or of steam, we at once began to obey them and discarded all our foolish opinions concerning them. But having discovered the laws of virtue we still disobey them, and hold on to the ancient delusion that, in some way, the results of disobedience may be annulled. We are seniors in science; in morals we are only fresh men. We see that intemperance is an awful evil; but many thousands remain intemperate. It is known that honesty is best; but thousands remain dishon est. Happiness has as stern and unbending laws as gravitation; and yet, multitudes who know this take the fatal risk of insulting them. We know the rules of harmony; and yet with eyes shut we strike violently at random among the keys and expect to evoke music. In science we are exact and harmonious; in morals we are reckless and discordant. The wild rose has been changed into many varieties of amazing beauty; the wild horse has been transformed into a perfect form for strength and speed, by following the hints which nature gives, and building upon the accumulating results of experience. But we have not thus far been able to form a condition of society in which justice is done to all classes; in which honesty becomes the rule for all; which forms perfect manhood; and which turns the wild rose of animal pleasure into the full leaved flower of spiritual happiness. Our reflections may take a brighter hue when it is remembered that the best things arrive latest. As in the story of the feast at Cana, nature reserves her best wine until the last. Long ago the Latins said, "All excellent things are difficult." The value of the diamond is in the difficulty of finding it. The dewdrop is just as beautiful; and if diamonds were as plentiful they would be as cheap. Nature hid her gold in mountain fastnesses away from the beaten track, and her pearls in the sea depths, that her child man might be compelled to hunt for them, and grow strong, and hardy, and self-reliant in gaining them. In the same way the most valuable ideas are the last to become a part of man's life. Weeds grow every where, and without assistance from man. But the harvests ask that the soil be prepared, and demand patience. So the ideas that are smallest swarm around the life of an individual, or a nation, and are soon adopted into life. Long ago man learned to house, and clothe, and warm himself. Perhaps he will sometime learn how to house his soul in liberty, how to clothe it with truth, how to warm it with love and piety. Thousands of years ago it was known how to make a war chariot; the steam engine had to wait for Watt and the eighteenth century. Alexander and Joshua could wage wars of conquest, and make slaves of those who were captured. But many hundreds of years must pass before it could be seen that Right must dictate terms to Might, and the nerves of the world were made to thrill with the proclamation that there must be no master, no slave, but by virtue of birthright all men are free. Liberty and justice have been long on the way. They come; but they come slowly. They are distant stars. And the reason that their rays have been so long reaching us is, not because they have lacked in brightness, but because of the infinite stretches of cold and darkness lying between. Laggard and halting, indeed, sometimes seem to us the methods of Providence. In our impatience we would measure the plan of the universe with a yard stick, and make it fit our petty projects. We feel as if we were emigrants, camping for a few years on earth, and we act as if the work of the universe depended upon us and we were afraid it would not be completed before the order comes for us to strike tent and move on. The years, moving along so silently, should teach us to adopt a different measurement, and take from us all fret and worry over the apparent slowness of things. God ought to have the credit for knowing his own mind in conducting the affairs of earth. It is not for nothing that so much time was taken to bring earth into its present form. We talk sometimes as if the history of man is very ancient; but geology tells us that man is a mere parvenu,- --an up. start of yesterday, and the paint on his escutcheon scarcely dry. As we read the history of the race and its exploits, Babylon and the cairns of the Druids seem very remote; but coming from a study of geology, the most venerable empires and temples seem to be mushrooms that sprang up only the night before last and perished yesterday. A few generations back we touch hands with the patriarchs, and a little beyond them with savage ancestors; but where is the arithmetic able to compute the time lying back of the savage? The mind breaks down in trying to make the Thus may we learn to fall in with the One gracious hint forever appears which forbids too great despondency: nature not only goes on unweariedly from coarse to finer forms, but the movement becomes an accelerated march. At first progress is by the ratio of arithmetic, where one number only serves as a basis for another-as the round in a ladder furnishes a point from which to After a time, mount to another like it. disdaining such slow method, the ratio of geometry is adopted; then the ladder is left; wings appear; and the weary climbing is changed to a flight. Who knows? The time may come, now that moral ideas have climbed thus far, when they will fly over the world. it may be as easy to raise justice and truth in the heart of the race, as it is to raise a crop of wheat in Dakota, and when acts of goodness will spring up as naturally and as plentifully as flowers in June. Sometime "Take heart! though sown in tears and blood, No seed that's quick with love hath perished; Though dropped in barren byways,-God Some glorious flower of life hath cherished." The beginning of a year cannot be of much importance to society in the mass, but to each soul it is a greater event. Since we have only seventy such events promised, as each one comes it should bring a deep thoughtfulness. We should all be making the discovery that there is something within us that is superior to the years. We should see that time is the surface of eternity; and that it is not long life but deep life that counts. We should see that these moments are as sacred as eternity; and should have care to abstain from thoughts and acts in these hours of earth which could not be repeated without shame or confusion in the heaven of heavens. The years are our servants. They can only take the rank that the soul allows them. Who loves is immortal, and may maintain an attitude of noble negligence toward all the mutation and catastrophes of the circling years. Every year I hear, with joy, the gray haired men and women saying that within they feel no older than when they were children. That which feels not the touch of time, will probably not feel the touch of death. Somber our thought might become if we permitted it to run over the past too long, or if it were permitted to linger amid the things that are mastered by the years. But we will not have it so. "Ah, my beloved! fill the cup that clears To-day of past regrets and future fears." The earth has been disturbed to receive the forms of many who started with us a year ago, but who grew tired of the earth journey and lay down to the long rest. The sky seems to arch less grandly since it no more looks down upon some whom we have known and loved, and earth seems poorer since they left it. But we trust that some other world is enriched by their presence, and some other sky is sheltering them beneath its friendly roof. Happy New Year, if we are learning from manysided experience that the moral outranks all things else, and that power is only worthy when it is the servant of truth and virtue! Happy, if the years are teaching us patience with the perverseness of things, and trust in the method of Providence! Happy, if we are growing superior to time and its vicissitudes! Happy New Year, if we can treasure great thoughts of life eternal, when all that we hoped or dreamed shall be realized; and even our pain, and sorrow, and passion,--all the minor chords of earth,-shall blend with the music of the skies. GOD AND MAN. It would be hard, if not impossible, to overestimate the value of the contribution the old Hebrew Prophets were enabled to make to the world's religious thought and life. God was to them not a cold abstraction, not a loveless force, but a Being warm with a tenderness to which the finest human tenderness did but furnish a faint and far-off type. Their peculiar greatness, I think, was just here, that they felt this so vividly and presented it to other men so boldly and so clearly. Nor does the fact that their writings have about them so much of mere local coloring, or the further fact that their writings are tinged so often with the ruder thinkings and ruder imaginings of their time, detract from this, their peculiar greatness. They knew and they felt that there was a living God and Redeemer who pitied his children with more than the pity of the noblest human fatherhood; and who comforted them in their sorrows with more than the comforting of the tenderest human motherhood. The This, I fancy, is just what men need to know and feel to-day. The universe, to our instructed thought, is greater than it was to the Hebrew prophets. We no longer look, as they were apt to look, on the rare, the terrible, and the wonderful, as peculiarly fraught with divine meaning. bursting into flower of any common spring bud is, to us, as full of eloquent instruction as any thunderings could be, even though those thunderings came from Sinai. We have conceptions which the best of the prophets could not reach, of how God ceaselessly operates through undeviating law. We have imaginings ofstarry spaces and of starry sublimities which their thought could not compass. We have glimpses of the measureless sublimities and mysteries. belonging to every "flower in the crannied wall". which they could not discern. And yet, for all that we know so much more, imagine so much more, guess so much more, than they could know,imagine or guess, they are teachers of the deepest verities; and at their feet it becomes the wisest of us reverently and humbly to sit. Why? Not because they had a grandly intellectual conception of Deity as the omnipotent ruler of a vast universe; but because they knew God, and felt God, as the ruler of each individual in the universe, -as the searcher of each single heart, as the lord of each single conscience, as the One Being whom it was natural for man to adore, to think of with affectionate trust, and to speak to ever as to a Father. We need to sit at the feet of these old teachers to-day, that we may learn of them the lessons they can teach. There is, I fancy, dauger that, dwelling overmuch on the intellectual conceptions of Deity we have been able to form or to fancy we have been able to form-we may, by thrusting them too much into the background of our experience, lose sight of those conceptions of him-if the word in such a connection be allowable-which are affectional and emotional. There is danger that, thinking of Deity in his relation to the vast and limitless universe, we may forget his personal relationship to ourselves. Yet on the vivid and strong retention by us of this sense of personal relationship to God, the depth and force, the purity and usefulness, of our religion depends. If held on the intellectual tenure I have indicated, religion may be a very beautiful theory; but it is hard to see that it can ever become a spirituality, inspiring men with better and higher aims, without the strong reten tion by us of a sense of God's personal relationship towards each individual of our race. If religion is ever to elevate life, by transfiguring the duties of life into so many spiritual heroisms, it is not enough that we should think of Deity as that omnipresent force which rules the solar system; but we must think of him as the ruler no less of our own individual lives. It is not enough that we should think of him as the unerring guide of those vast bodies in space, the paths of which human thought is not adequate to trace out; but we must think of him as the guide of ourselves in all the strange paths our own souls may follow, as that loving power filling us with all the delight we feel when we do justly and love mercy, and as that power, no less loving, filling us with a sense of discomfort in all our conscious wrongdoing, and so causing our sense of sin to be always for us a sense of shame. It does seem to me that if we were compelled to make a choice between these two things, -a narrow intellectual conception of Deity combined with a vivid sense of his personal relationship to us; and a broadly and grandly beautiful intellectual conception of him, combined with no sense of personal relationship at all, the devout soul would not long hesitate as to the choice he should make. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was correct in writing, We had far better believe as the old Hebrews seem to have believed, that this earth of ours is the grand center of the universe, with the sun, moon and stars hung up above it as lanterns to give it light; and that our nation, or tribe, or church is the center of our earth, on which the loving care of God is exclusively bestowed, and over which the love of God is exclusively shed;we had far better believe this, than believe in the illimitable vastness of the universe-in the millions upon millions of worlds that throng it-and also believe that the God who rules the universe in its entirety, sustains no personal relationship to us, and is therefore a Being whom we need not desire |