I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who once wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past, — figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life.

But we who are here know the Law even better in another aspect. We see her daily, not as anthropologists, not as students and philosophers, but as actors in a drama of which she is the providence and overruling power. When I think of the Law as we know her in the courthouse and the market, she seems to me a woman sitting by the wayside, beneath whose overshadowing hood every man shall see the countenance of his deserts or needs. The timid and overborne gain heart from her protecting smile. Fair combatants, manfully standing to their rights, see her keeping the lists with the stern and discriminating eye of even justice. The wretch who has defied her most sacred commands, and has thought to creep through ways where she was not, finds that his path ends with her, and beholds beneath her hood the inexorable face of death.

Gentlemen, I shall say no more. This is not the moment for disquisitions. But when for the first time I was called to speak on such an occasion as this, the only thought that could come into my mind, the only feeling that could fill my heart, the only words that could spring to my lips, were a hymn to her in whose name we are met here to-night, to our mistress, the Law.

THE PURITAN.

250TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST CHURCH IN CAMBRIDGE, FEBRUARY 12, 1886.

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:

SIX hundred years ago a knight went forth to fight for the cross in Palestine. He fought his battles, returned, died among his friends, and his effigy, cut in alabaster or cast in bronze, was set upon his tomb in the Temple or the Abbey. Already he was greater than he had been in life. While he lived, hundreds as good as he fell beneath the walls of Ascalon, or sank in the sands of the desert and were forgotten. But in his monument, the knight became the type of chivalry and the church militant. What was particular to him and individual had passed from sight, and the universal alone remained. Six hundred years have gone by, and his history, perhaps his very name, has been forgotten. His cause has ceased to move. The tumultuous tide in which he was an atom is still. And yet to-day he is greater than ever before. He is no longer a man, or even the type of a class of men, however great. He has become a symbol of the whole mysterious past, of all the dead passion of his race. His monument is the emblem of tradition, the text of national honor, the torch of all high aspiration through all time.

Two hundred and fifty years ago a few devout men founded the First Church of Cambridge. While they

lived, I doubt not, hundreds as good as they fell under
Fairfax at Marston Moor, or under Cromwell at Naseby,
or lived and died quietly in England and were forgotten.
Yet if the only monuments of those founders were mythic
bronzes, such as stand upon the Common and the Delta,-
if they were only the lichened slates in yonder church-
yard, how much greater are they now than they were
in life! Time, the purifier, has burned away what was
particular to them and individual, and has left only the
type of courage, constancy, devotion, the august figure
of the Puritan.

Time still burns. Perhaps the type of the Puritan must pass away, as that of the Crusader has done. But the founders of this parish are commemorated, not in bronze or alabaster, but in living monuments. One is Harvard College. The other is mightier still. These men and their fellows planted a congregational church, from which grew a democratic state. They planted something mightier even than institutions. Whether they knew it or not, they planted the democratic spirit in the heart of man. It is to them we owe the deepest cause we have to love our country, — that instinct, that spark that makes the American unable to meet his fellow man otherwise than simply as a man, eye to eye, hand to hand, and foot to foot, wrestling naked on the sand. When the citizens of Cambridge forget that they too tread a sacred soil, that Massachusetts also has its traditions, which grow more venerable and inspiring as they fade, when Harvard College is no longer dedicated to truth, and America to democratic freedom, — then perhaps, but not till then, will the blood of the martyrs be swallowed in the sand, and the Puritan have lived in vain. Until that time

he will grow greater, even after he has vanished from our view.

The political children of Thomas Shepard we surely are. We are not all his spiritual children. New England has welcomed and still welcomes to her harbors many who are not the Puritan's descendants, and his descendants have learned other ways and other thoughts than those in which he lived and for which he was ready to die. I confess that my own interest in those thoughts is chiefly filial; that it seems to me that the great currents of the world's life ran in other channels, and that the future lay in the heads of Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes, rather even than in that of John Milton. I think that the somewhat isolated thread of our intellectual and spiritual life is rejoining the main stream, and that hereafter all countries more and more will draw from common springs.

But even if we are not all of us the spiritual children of Thomas Shepard, even if our mode of expressing our wonder, our awful fear, our abiding trust in face of life and death and the unfathomable world has changed, yet at this day, even now, we New Englanders are still leavened with the Puritan ferment. Our doctrines may have changed, but the cold Puritan passion is still here. And of many a man who now hears me, whether a member of his church or not, it may be said, as it was said. of Thomas Shepard by Cotton Mather, "So the character of his daily conversation was a trembling walk with God."

NOTE. Thomas Shepard was the first minister of the First Church in Cambridge. My grandfather, Rev. Abiel Holmes, was minister of it in his day.

THE PROFESSION OF THE LAW.

CONCLUSION OF A LECTURE DELIVERED TO UN-
DERGRADUATES OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
ON FEBRUARY 17, 1886.

AND now, perhaps, I ought to have done. But I know that some spirit of fire will feel that his main question has not been answered. He will ask, What is all this to my soul? You do not bid me sell my birthright for a mess. of pottage; what have you said to show that I can reach my own spiritual possibilities through such a door as this? How can the laborious study of a dry and technical system, the greedy watch for clients and practice of shopkeepers' arts, the mannerless conflicts over often sordid interests, make out a life? Gentlemen, I admit at once that these questions are not futile, that they may prove unanswerable, that they have often seemed to me unanswerable. And yet I believe there is an answer. They are the same questions that meet you in any form of practical life. If a man has the soul of Sancho Panza, the world to him will be Sancho Panza's world; but if he has the soul of an idealist, he will make - I do not say findhis world ideal. Of course, the law is not the place for the artist or the poet. The law is the calling of thinkers. But to those who believe with me that not the least godlike of man's activities is the large survey of causes, that to know is not less than to feel, I say - and I say no