ONE UPWARD LOOK EACH DAY.

Sunday.

The Birds of Bethlehem.

I heard the bells of Bethlehem ring,-
Their voice was sweeter than the priests';
I heard the birds of Bethlehem sing

Unbidden in the churchly feasts.

They clung and sung on the swinging chain
High in the dim and incensed air;
The priests, with repetitions vain,
Chanted a never-ending prayer.

So bell and bird and priest I heard,
But voice of bird was most to me;
It had no ritual, no word,

And yet it sounded true and free.

I thought child Jesus, were he there,
Would like the singing birds the best,
And clutch his little hands in air
And smile upon his mother's breast.
-R. W. Gilder.

A grain of corn is very small,
'Tis scarcely anything at all;
But sow a handful of them wide,
And you will reap, at harvest-tide,
A plenteous heap of ripened gold,
More than your joyful arms can hold.
A trifling kindness here and there
Is but a simple, small affair;
Yet, if your life has sown them free,
Wide shall your happy harvest be,
Of friends, of love, of sweet good-will,
That still renews, and gladdens still.
-Priscilla Leonard.

Tuesday.

"All my Springs Are in Thee."

Unless 'tis fed from the Fountain,
The River will soon run dry.
And is that hid in the mountain?
Yes-no; 'tis hid in the sky!

Our life is a gift; and the Giver

Can withhold Himself from none; The Fount gives itself to the River,The Fount and the Stream are one. -Charles Gordon Ames.

Wednesday.

"Love thyself Last." Love thyself last. Look near, behold thy duty

To those who walk beside thee down life's road;

Make glad their days by little acts of beauty, And help them bear the burden of earth's load.

Love thyself last. stranger

Look far and find the

Who staggers 'neath his sin and his despair;

Go lend a hand, and lead him out of danger, To heights where he may see the world is fair.

Love thyself last; and thou shalt grow in spirit.

To see, to hear, to know, and understand. The message of the stars lo! thou shalt hear it,

And all God's joys shall be at thy command.

Love thyself last. The world shall be made better

By thee, if this brief motto forms thy creed.

Go follow it in spirit and in letter.

This is the true religion which men need. -Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

His Presence.

Saturday.

The Lord is come! In every heart
Where truth and mercy claim a part;
In every land where Right is Might,
And deeds of darkness shun the light;"
In every church where faith and love
Lift earthward thoughts to things above,
In every holy, happy home,-
We thank thee, Lord, that thou art come!
-A. P. Stanley.

SUNDAY-SCHOOLS.

A great help for Sunday-school workers has just been issued by the Unitarian Sunday School Society. This is a little manual prepared by Rev. John W. Chadwick, entitled, "Questions on the Old Testament Books in their right Order." There are 455 questions and answers relating to the original contents, literary form, and rank of the books of the Old Testament. This is compressed modern scholarship on the subject. Not only will this book be of value in the Sunday-schools, but it will prove also a handy reference resource, for ministers and others, who wish to have quickly available the accurate facts. Mr. Chadwick is not only qualified by study to do such a work, but the results have been indorsed by Prof. C. H. Toy, and the subject-matter has passed under his eye. Bound in paper covers. Price, 20 cents single copy; or $1.80 a dozen.

I am often asked to suggest inexpensive publications from which teachers can derive benefit; that is, books of advice and suggestions. Accordingly, I give the following titles. Of course, the great book, most comprehensive, is by Rev. H. Clay Trumbull, entitled, "Yale Lectures on the Sunday School." Price, $1.50. This is well known and most admirable. But these I now mention relate to particular topics, and are much cheaper: "Practical Hints for Sunday-school Teachers," by Henry Rawlins. This is a little book of 83 pages, bound in paper covers, a London publication. Price, 20 cents net, postage extra, which would be about 3 cents. Another book, especially adapted to the needs of the Primary teachers, is "The Point of Contact in Teaching," by Patterson Du Bois; a book bound in muslin, of 88 pages. Price, 60 cents. "The Teacher's Conscience" is a very small pamphlet of 8 pages, by President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard College, being an address delivered by him before some convention. This sells for 5 cents a copy. "The Sunday School," by Rev. James Vila Blake, is a careful study of the ways and means of developing the Sunday-school and raising it

to its best estate. Pages 62. Price, 15 cents. "Teachers' Meetings: Their Necessity and Methods," is a book by Rev. H. Clay Trumbull, issued in firm covers. Pages 60. Price, 30 cents. The Unitarian Sunday School Society besides furnishing the above at the prices named has 100 or 200 copies left of a little pamphlet entitled "Sunday School Teaching." This is made up of four lecture talks by Rev. S. H. Winkley, and was printed some years ago. Not being electrotyped, no more copies can be furnished. The edition was originally printed for free circulation, and the remaining copies can be had free in small quantities on application.

The current leaflet lessons in the one

topic, three-grade course, published by the Unitarian Sunday School Society, are now ready for February. The subjects are: "Review," "Our Oldest Hymn Book," "Songs of Trust," "Songs of Nature." The Primary grade, which is on a four-page leaflet (illustrated), is prepared by Rev. Albert Walkley. The Intermediate, by Rev. Edward A. Horton, and the Advanced, by Rev. W. Hanson Pulsford. The Intermediate and Advanced grades are printed together on a four-page leaflet. Price, 50 cents a hundred leaflets.

The Unitarian Sunday School Society will not issue a new Easter Service this year, but will offer the reprints of the popular services used before,—namely, 1891, 1893, and 1894. Price, 5 cents a copy; or $4.00 a hundred.

The Boston Sunday School Union is going forward this season with as great success as ever. The benefit derived from such an organization can hardly be overestimated. Its sessions, so largely attended, yield information and enthusiasm. Some of the subjects treated this winter have been: "Adults in the Sunday-school and Children in the Church"; "The Value of the Sunday-school Library in the Ethical Training of Children"; "Kindergarten Principles as Applied to Sunday-school Work"; "Paid Service in the Sunday-schools"; "How to Get Teachers"; "A Normal Class for Sunday school Teachers." As a help to other similar organizations it may be well to mention some of the topics used last season: "Ethical Instruction of Children"; "Essentials in Sunday-school Administration"; "Essentials in Sunday-school Instruction"; "New Features in Our Sundayschool Work" (this was treated by twelve speakers in five-minute talks each); "The Secret of Success in Sunday-school Work"; "The Mutual Relation of the Minister and the Sunday-school."

One of the largest Sunday-schools in our denomination, which is distinctly a parish Sunday-school, not a mission one, is in Hud

son, Mass. I have received a report of its annual meeting which took place recently. It contains 17 officers, 17 teachers, 362 scholars, a total of 396. Fifty sessions of the school were held last year. The treasurer's report is significant. Total receipts for the past year were $433.61; disbursements, $337.67, leaving a balance of $95.94. There is a very large Primary department at one end and a promising class for young people at the other end, so that the school is well balanced. The New Song and Service Book, issued by the Unitarian Sunday School Society, has been adopted and found to be of great help. Mr. Caleb L. Brigham, the superintendent, is an indefatigable worker. He, with Rev. J. M. Wilson, pastor of the parish and president of the Sunday-school, are inspiring sources for all the other officers. There are many other Unitarian Sunday-schools worthy of mention, but I have called attention to this particular one because I know that it is not only large but most excellent in its grade of work, and this total result of success has been attained by faithful labors long continued and unflagging. No doubt Mr. Brigham would be glad to answer any questions as to the methods employed in this school, which have been found satisfactory. It would be a good thing if our various Sunday-school workers corresponded with each other, to ascertain what has been most successful in others' experiences.

EDWARD A. HORTON.

YOUNG PEOPLE'S RELIGIOUS UNION.

[The president of the Y.P.R.U. is responsible for this column. All communications and matters relative to it should be sent to Miss E. R. Ross, Room 11, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.]

lying districts have been arranged with the young people's societies of the evangelical churches. Several unions are carrying on the Sunday morning service while their churches are without pastors.

An important rally is to be held in Boston at the Second Church, Rev. Thomas Van Ness, about the middle of February, when a new, brief collection of hymns with a few services, prepared for the Union, may be used. Every rally held thus far bas meant several new unions.

The central office has in preparation large display cards with the Cardinal Principles and mottoes of the Union, suitable to hang on chapel walls. These can be had for a few cents and are a fine object lesson. The office will send two forms of the principles with scriptural or poetical quotations on small cards, free, in quantity to applicants, also constitutions, suggestions for organizing, etc., and tracts on the national topics as announced each week in the Christian Register.

With so much of encouragement, the Union has still much to regret in that Rev. L. W. Sprague, its indefatigable agent, has found it necessary to resign that position, that he may devote his whole time to the work at the Church of the Unity. This resignation took effect at the beginning of the year. The directors at their last meeting passed the following: "Voted: that the thanks of the directors of the Young People's Religious Union be extended to Mr. Sprague, our retiring agent, for the energetic and efficient work he has accomplished while in the office."

It was found impossible to choose a successor without further deliberation, and for the present, Mr. Reccord, the treasurer, will take charge of the rally meetings, Mr. Van Ness of the publications, Mr. Horton act as counsellor, and Miss Ross be retained in the office.

WOMEN.

So far as known, Chelsea, Mass., is the first place to form a Junior Young People's Union. This will be in charge of a committee of the regular union, but the work is to be done by the children themselves, whose ages range from eight to fifteen. This is a very important step and the unions may well regard this as the best work at hand in many cases. In several cases union meetings at hospitals or out

THE NEW YORK LEAGUE.-A meeting was held Friday, January 8, at All Soul's Church, New York, with an attendance of nearly two hundred, Mrs. Emma C. Low presiding. After the reports of the secretary and treasurer were read and accepted, a letter from the Passaic Alliance thanking the League for its gift to their building fund was presented, $51 having been raised by collection for them at the last League meeting.

Mrs. Smallwood, in behalf of the Religious News Committee, gave a most interesting summary of our denominational news.

The subject for the day was "Child Study, -Modern Methods and Results." Mrs. Franklin W. Hooper gave the first paper on the Modern Methods,-and in fact she claimed there were no other. Only since men have been willing to apply the patient methods of scientific investigation to the development of a child's mind have we had any real child study.

Mrs. Felix Adler was then introduced. She deprecated the fact that women have allowed men to do most of the investigation in child study, when they could have done it, surely, in a more sympathetic and satisfactory manner. At Clarke University, to her, the child is treated like a pathological study in a clinic. There is lacking tender mother nature. The work done by specialists and teachers could not equal in real value that done by an intelligent mother in the home.

Children are imitative, and also painfully conservative: they hate to differ from their fellows. Hence the schools quickly assimilate our little foreigners, and they carry the civilization to their homes. During the period of adolescence, when a child is born again, he particularly needs the care and watchfulness of his parents, who should ever. be his confidants, and keep high ideals before him. All of this watchfulness is full of difficulty, but surely it has its reward.

Mrs. Charles N. Chadwick followed with a third paper, in which she dwelt particularly on the moral training of the child. She felt the mental and moral atmosphere which surround a child to be as potent a factor in his development as the physical. air is to his bodily welfare. What can one expect of children in a home where all is restlessness and excitement? Even educational circles are filled with this feverish unrest. We want to pull our children up to our plane, instead of allowing them to push themselves and take their own time.

This restlessness is not to be condemned; but we must seek to steady ourselves so that our own force shall not be dissipated. If parents only realized how the mentality of their children is interfered with by this restlessness!

"Give the higher life the higher place. Believe in your highest self at your best. Nourish this as an altar fire, this something in you that is not satisfied with anything short of your best,-all this for your children's sake; for we influence our children, not by what we say or do, but by what we are.'

After the hymn and the Lord's Prayer the meeting adjourned, and a social hour was spent over the coffee cups before we returned to our homes to put into practice the high principles our hearts had already accepted. ALICE P. JACKSON, Rec. Sec'y.

TEMPERANCE WORK.

"The bill prohibiting the sale of alcoholic liquors in the Capitol and on the Capitol grounds went through the House by such an overwhelming majority that it was quite evident that the members had made progress in recent years in their judgment of the propriety of combining the liquor traffic and legislation in the same building. Before the war such a proposition would not only have been defeated, but it would have been regarded as an attempted outrage upon the rights and comforts of statesmen. In those free and easy days the liquor exchange in the National Capitol was, perhaps, the most popular resort in the whole edifice, and the results of this state of things were much more in evidence than they have been in recent years.

New York is greatly interested in the enforcement of the Raines Liquor Law, from which so much has been expected.

At present, the law is working poorly, on account of the interpretation put upon certain of its provisions by the courts and the grand jury.

The courts are permitting "an indefinitely small amount of food to be considered a meal, and an indefinitely large amount of liquor to be sold with it. They have permitted every one who slipped in from the street and ordered one of these meals to be considered a guest, and they have permitted every saloon which anywhere had ten spaces for beds partitioned off to be considered a hotel."

The grand jury has also been very liberal in its interpretation of the law, so that Sunday selling at the so-called "hotels" goes on very freely. The Outlook doubts whether, under existing public opinion, it is possible to oblige the courts to give just and rational interpretations of such laws, no matter how wisely and carefully they may be framed.

It says, "The real difficulty

is a public sentiment which corrupts judges and juries and prosecuting attorneys, who seem, in many cases, more anxious to set the law aside than to enforce it."

A

One of the principle causes for the defeat of the woman's suffrage amendment in California, recently before the people, was the active opposition of the liquor interest. correspondent of the Outlook points out that the two counties, Los Angeles and San Diego, where are situated the two largest cities next to San Francisco, gave majori ties of 3,596 and 2,717 respectively, for the amendment. The amendment would have been carried, had it not been for the large adverse majority in San Francisco and Oakland, where the liquor influence is exceedingly strong.

CHRISTOPHER R. ELIOT.

BOOKS.

Autobiography of Adin Ballou This is a remarkable book of a remarkable

man. A farmer's boy of Cumberland, R.I., born in the beginning of this century in a town where there were no public schools at that time, he had but the scantiest opportunities of an education, and his whole school life probably did not occupy more than two full years. But he had an intense desire for knowledge; he read with eagerness whatever books chanced to fall in his way, and was known as a bright, intelligent lad in the neighborhood.

He belonged to a deeply religious family, both parents being members of a church of the Christian connection of which the father was a deacon and with which the son united when but twelve years of age. Working on his father's farm or in the factory, a constant attendant on the Sunday worship in "the old Ballou meeting-house," with a term at some private school now and then when he could be spared, and always hungering and thirsting for a better education, such were the years of his youth,-a hard, cramped, humble life, yet animated by a high ambition for moral worth and useful

ness.

When about seventeen years of age, in a vision of the night, he saw the form of an elder brother, who had died five years before, and heard his voice commanding him in God's name to preach the gospel. He was deeply impressed by what he had seen and heard, and, believing it a veritable call from God, much against his previous inclination and choice, he began preparing for the work of the ministry. He had no other helps than those of a patient, tireless study of the Bible and the few books within his reach, and occasional intercourse with the migratory clergy of that period, among whom was the eccentric Lorenzo Dow who counselled him "always to take plenty of elbow room." In the old ancestral meetinghouse of the neighborhood, built in 1751 and still standing unchanged, he preached his first sermon to a crowd of admiring friends, then barely eighteen years of age. It was the beginning of an active ministry that extended over a period of nearly seventy years, and up to within a few months of his death.

His last sermon was preached on Nov. 3, 1889, at Hopedale in his old church where he had ministered for forty-seven years. What a record we have here of unceasing toil in writing, lecturing, attending funerals (of which he records above twenty-six hundred, and of weddings twelve hundred), editing a weekly newspaper for thirty

years, publishing great numbers of sermons, holding many public discussions with opponents upon questions of theology and moral reform, pursuing historical and genealogical researches that required vast time and patience, holding two preaching services on Sunday and often a third that involved a ride of many miles to some lonely neighborhood gathered in a schoolhouse! Such was his untiring devotion to his work through all these years, seldom or never taking a vacation or denying any call for ministerial service however distant or exacting.

On a salary, at first, of $350 or $400, pieced out by teaching a district school in winter or a private school in his own house, he supported his family, published his paper, books, and sermons, maintained a generous hospitality, and aided many a worthy cause.

Mr. Ballou early left the Christian connection, and entered the fellowship of the Universalist denomination, from which he was soon ejected on account of his forming and leading a party in that Church who called themselves Restorationists, believing in the final salvation of all only through future discipline and purification. He was soon invited to the Unitarian Church at Mendon, where he had a fruitful ministry of eleven years. Here he was foremost in leading the temperance reform, lecturing in the schoolhouses, and organizing temperance societies. Here, also, he espoused the anti-slavery cause, and rendered grand service in its behalf in that portion of the State, alienating many of his parishioners, but drawing to his support new and steadfast friends.

In 1842 he left Mendon to found a community at Hopedale on principles of Christian socialism, which to him were simply the ideas and the spirit of Jesus as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. To reconstruct society on the basis of a pure, practical Christianity, applying it strictly to social, business, political, and church life, was the dearest hope of his heart. For this he labored and prayed to the end, and for this he gave in his will a great part of all the savings of his life. It has been appropriated by his noble daughters to founding the Adin Ballou lectureship on Christian Sociology in the Meadville Theological School,- -a gift of $16,000.

The community organization, after twenty years of fairly prosperous existence, was declared a failure, and dissolved, a bitter disappointment to him; but it never shook his faith in its principles as the only sound basis for society, the State, and the Church.

We have in this book the story of a truly noble life. It is edited by his son-in-law, Rev. W. S. Heywood, whose work has been done with loving care. It is on sale at the Unitarian rooms, 25 Beacon Street.