lawful pursuits, encouraging them in thrift and industry, making them feel and know that we are their friends, not their enemies, that their good is our aim, that their welfare is our welfare, but that neither their aspirations nor ours can be realized until our authority is acknowledged and unquestioned.

That the inhabitants of the Philippines will be benefited by this Republic is my unshaken belief. That they will have a kindlier government under our guidance, and that they will be aided in every possible way to be a self-respecting and self-governing people is as true as that the American people love liberty and have an abiding faith in their own government and in their own institutions.

No imperial designs lurk in the American mind. They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical They go with the flag. They are wrought in every one of its sacred folds, and are indistinguishable as its shining stars.

sun.

"Why read ye not the changeless truth,

The free can conquer but to save?"

If we can benefit these remote peoples, who will object? If in the years of the future they are established in government under law and liberty, who will regret our perils and sacrifices? Who will not rejoice in our heroism and humanity? Always perils, and always after them safety; always darkness and clouds, but always shining through them the light and the sunshine; always cost and sacrifice, but always after them the fruition of liberty, education, and civilization.

I have no light or knowledge not common to my countrymen. I do not prophesy. The present is all-absorbing to me, but I cannot bound my vision by the blood-stained trenches around Manila, where every red drop, whether from the veins of an American soldier or a misguided Filipino, is

anguish to my heart; but by the broad range of future years, when that group of islands, under the impulse of the year just past, shall have become the gems and glories of those tropical seas; a land of plenty and of increasing possibilities; a people redeemed from savage indolence and habits, devoted to the arts of peace, in touch with the commerce and trade of all nations, enjoying the blessings of freedom, of civil and religious liberty, of education and of homes, and whose children and children's children shall for ages hence bless the American Republic because it emancipated and redeemed their fatherland and set them in the pathway of the world's best civilization.

THE STORMING OF MISSION RIDGE

By BENJAMIN FRANKLIN TAYLOR, Journalist, Author, Poet. Born at Lowville, N. Y., 1819; died at Cleveland, Ohio, 1887.

Reprinted, by permission of the publishers, from "Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain," copyright, 1871, by D. Appleton & Co., New York.

Imagine a chain of Federal forts, built in between with walls of living men, the line flung northward out of sight and southward beyond Lookout. Imagine a chain of mountains crowned with batteries and manned with hostile troops through a six-mile sweep, set over against us in plain sight, and you have the two fronts, -the blue, the gray. Imagine the center of our line pushed out a mile and a half towards Mission Ridge, and you have the situation as it was on the morning before Thanksgiving. And what a work was to be done! One and a half miles to traverse, with narrow fringes of woods, rough valleys, sweeps of open fields, rocky acclivities, to the base of the Ridge, and no foot in all the breadth withdrawn from rebel sight. The base attained, what then? A hill struggling up out of the valley four hundred feet, rained on by bullets, swept by shot and shell; another line of works, and then, up like a Gothic roof, rough with rocks, a-wreck with fallen trees, four

hundred more; another ring of fire and iron, and then the crest, and then the enemy.

To dream of such a journey would be madness; to devise it, a thing incredible; to do it, a deed impossible. But Grant was guilty of them all, and was equal to the work.

to advance.

66

The bugle swung idly at the bugler's side. The warbling fife and rumbling drum were unheard. There was to be louder talk. Six guns at intervals of two seconds, the signal Strong and steady a voice rang out: "Number one, fire! Number two, fire! Number three, fire!" It seemed to me the tolling of the clock of destiny. And when at Number six, fire!" the roar throbbed out with a flash, you should have seen the dead-line that had been lying behind the works all day, all night, all day again, come to resurrection in the twinkling of an eye, leap like a blade from its scabbard, and sweep with a two-mile stroke toward the Ridge. From divisions to brigades, from brigades to regiments, the order ran. A minute, and the skirmishers deploy. A minute, and the first great drops begin to patter along the line. A minute, and the musketry is in full play, like the crackling whips of a hemlock fire. Men go down here and there before your eyes.

But I may tell you they did not storm that mountain as you would think. They dash out a little way, and then slacken; they creep up, hand over hand, loading and firing, and wavering and halting, from the first line of works toward the second; they burst into a charge with a cheer and go over it. Sheets of flame baptize them; plunging shot tear away comrades on left and right. It is no longer shoulder to shoulder; it is God for us all. Ten-fifteen-twenty minutes go by like a reluctant century. The batteries roll like a drum. The hill sways up like a wall before them at an angle of forty-five degrees; but our brave mountaineers are clambering steadily on-up-upward still! And what do these men follow? Your heart gives a great bound when you think what it is, -the regimental flag,—and, glancing

along the front, count fifteen of those colors that were borne at Pea Ridge, waved at Shiloh, glorified at Stone River, riddled at Chickamauga. Three times the flag of the 27th Illinois goes down. And you know why. Three dead color sergeants lie just there; but the flag is immortalthank God!—and up it comes again, and the men in a row of inverted V's move on.

I give a look at the sun behind me; it is not more than a hand-breadth from the edge of the mountain. Oh, for the voice that could bid that sun stand still! I turn to the battle again. Those three flags have taken flight. They are upward bound! The race of the flags is growing every moment more terrible. The iron sledge beats on. Hearts, loyal and brave, are on the anvil all the way from base to summit of Mission Ridge, but those dreadful hammers never intermit. Things are growing desperate up aloft; the enemy tumble rocks upon the rising line; they light the fuses and roll shells down the steep; they load the guns with handfuls of cartridges in their haste; and, as if there were powder in the word, they shout "Chickamauga!" down upon the mountaineers.

But all would not do, and just as the sun, weary of the scene, was sinking out of sight, with magnificent bursts all along the line, exactly as you have seen the crested seas leap up at the breakwater, the advance surged over the crest, and in a minute those flags fluttered along the fringe where fifty guns were kenneled. The scene on that narrow plateau can never be painted. As the bluecoats surged over its edge, cheer on cheer rang like bells through the valley of the Chickamauga. Men flung themselves exhausted upon the ground. They laughed and wept, shook hands, embraced, turned round, and did all four over again. It was wild as a carnival. The general was received with a shout. "Soldiers," he said, "you ought to be court-martialed, every man of you. I ordered you to take the rifle-pits, and you scaled the mountain!"'

THE BIBLE

By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS, Preacher, Author; Pastor of Central Church, Chicago, 1894-99; of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, 1899— . Born in Magnolia, Ia., 1858.

From a sermon delivered in Chicago, April 11, 1897. See Chicago Inter-Ocean, April 12, 1897. By permission of the author.

The Bible is a handbook for right living. In all literature it is the one book that unveils the great scheme and schedule along which each man may lay out the lines of his life. It is a book that blazes forth against brutalism, but flames with light for him who seeks knowledge and integrity. Not once has it flattered the oppressor's hand, nor gilded with hope the future of him who loved selfishness and sin. No youth who riots through life, draining away the nerve forces that make for happiness, can, when the hour of weakness and disaster takes him, complain that he was not warned. And there is no hero who has stood for patriotism and liberty, and won immortal renown, who can fail to recognize his indebtedness to this book that taught him self-sacrifice and sweetness and law.

This is the one book also that has stood for the home and commanded parents to rise up early and sit up late to teach their children the laws of industry and thrift and obedience. And having been the book for workingmen, the book for slaves, the book for the oppressed and the defeated, the book of hope, the book that in a midnight hour has lifted a star into the sky, this book finally became for man the book of mercy and redeeming love. Having rolled the thunder of its penalties along the horizon of time, at last it sent forth a voice to every wrongdoer urging him to forsake his iniquity and to love integrity. It unveiled the divine form of Jesus Christ, who exhibited God as a God of love. . .

...

Never before has the Bible been so vigorously assailed. Every instrument that wit and learning can devise or invent has been turned against this book. For full thirty years the