the organic whole which is to be reached, if the evil is to be remedied; and social science must teach us where that head and heart are located.

Of course the placing of the responsibility where it properly belongs, on the church as a whole, leaves each individual responsible for his own influence on the whole; and some individuals have more than that to answer for. Great is the sin of one who is himself indifferent to the welfare of his fellowmen. Woe to the individual scribe or pharisee who, realizing the absence from church of the classes uncongenial to him, is contented, even complacent, in view of the fact. If the severest denunciations of Christ, directed in his own time, not against sinners out of the church, but against complacent hypocrites in it, have any application to-day, it is against the church-member who reclines in his comfortable pew and partakes of his elegant spiritual meal rejoicing in the fact that everything is made so extremely congenial through the absence of the poor. Such cases are doubtless rare; the usual attitude is one of helpless regret with unconsciousness of responsibil ity. The poor are supposed to be out of the church because they wish to be so, and the good man regrets it, though know ing in his heart that his own position is made a little pleas anter by the fact. Thus, every week assemblies of saintly men and women take sweet counsel together concerning the Lord their God, and the land of Canaan whither they are going, while the great world without has neither part nor lot in the The atmosphere of such meetings would be stifling to them if they thought of the causes which have crowded out the multitude, and realized where the responsibility for their absence rests.

matter.

In an economic view, the religious phenomena of the past have been the increasing cost of the spiritual table, the loss of religious appetite on the part of those excluded, the growth of social rather than religious relations between church members, and the ultimate differentiation of taste, which threatens to make the church forevermore a world by itself, with limits increasingly narrow and exclusive.

What is the remedy? It would take a volume to discuss it, and this essay aims to be a diagnosis rather than a prescrip

tion; yet the general character of the remedy is indicated by the nature and cause of the evil; it is economic and it is general. The conditions of successful coöperative house-keeping, of ordinary communal living, are the conditions of successful church life among men differing in wealth and culture. One plan, indifferent, but better than nothing, is to vary the meal to accord with differing tastes and purses; to provide first and second-class tables. Let the ship that aims to carry all humanity have its French cooking for the cabin, and its plain bread and meat for the steerage. This means, of course, the differentiating of churches on the basis of wealth, a process already beginning, spontaneously, to take place. It means costly churches, choice music and brilliant preaching for the wealthy, and plain buildings, voluntary singing and unadorned preaching for the poor. At best this is unrepublican, and hostile to the spirit of Christ's teaching; but it is less odious than to turn the poor out altogether. Considering how many of them are at present excluded by the general causes which we have indicated, no practical work is nobler than the establishing of inexpensive churches for the spiritually destitute. It is to be noticed also, that, at the spiritual as at the literal table, the plainer provision is the healthier. The adornments of the costly service are delicacies for the palate, rather than nourishment; and sometimes, like wines and desserts, they are slow poisons. For the real health of the people and of the preacher, and for the development of the Christian spirit in the church, let us have the second table rather than the first.

There is another way more republican and more Christianthe establishment of a single table which all can attend. The food provided should be simpler, cheaper, and more nourishing than what is now provided, and the buildings larger and less luxurious. Men should attend church for sustenance, not for society. The tie that binds should be Christian love, not friendship based on similarity of taste and station. The Roman Catholic church fulfils the last of these conditions; having little social life, and holding its members together by a purely religious tie, it is able to unite rich and poor in its membership as few Protestant churches can do. To allege that the Roman Catholic religion is a poor one, is to strengthen the argument:

more.

if so much is accomplished by a poor religion, a better one, under equally favorable conditions, ought to accomplish still “Xalɛna va xala," said Plato; the beautiful things are the hard things. This plan is better than the former, and therefore more difficult; for that very reason its adoption is ultimately probable.

On the general optimistic principle that the world is improv ing, and that the ideal of the present will be the reality of the future, we are willing to believe that the church will one day possess something of the devotional spirit which led the disciples at Jerusalem not only to forget differences of wealth, but to annihilate them, and which is said to have led the refugees of the Roman Catacombs to organize a commune beneath the ground above which a despotism was established. There will be social intercourse indeed, but founded on religion. Struggling attempts at sociables may cease, but prayer-meetings will flourish; elements uncongenial in a drawing-room, will become congenial in a house of worship. The church will lose not only in the elegance of its furnishings, but also in the average refinement of its members; but for every step which it shall take downward, according to the standard of the world, it will take a step upward, according to the standard of its founder, till, attaining again the ideal which it realized, for a brief season in the past, it shall gather the few rich, and the many poor, into a company in which the flippant ties of polite society will be utterly impossible, but in which the deep bond of spiritual brotherhood will be forever assured.

ARTICLE II.-PROF. ERNST CURTIUS ON WORK AND

LEISURE.

Translation of an Oration delivered on the birthday of the Emperor William, in the Aula of the University of Berlin, March 22, 1875, by Prof. ERNST CURTIUS, of the University of Berlin, author of History of Greece, etc., etc.

WORK and rest form an antithesis which rules human life. Not an antithesis established by physical law, like the ebb and flow of the tides, and the inspiration and expiration of the breath, but one connected with the human will. Upon this rests its importance in the field of morals; it is on this account that we estimate the culture of a man by the way in which he spends his leisure, and the proper division of one's time, between employment and repose, remains one of the most important problems in the art of living. As we are assembled here to-day, after the winter's labors, to celebrate, in a delightful calm, an occasion to which we desire to give, by a scholarly consideration, the appropriate festal tone, I beg leave to turn your attention to the place which Rest or Leisure takes in the life of man, and also how, in their conception of it, various races and periods differ and agree.

In general, it may be said that races and countries are distinguished by this: whether they allow labor to present itself at the expense of leisure, or whether leisure takes rank of labor. Any one who regards for a moment the winter of a northern city will admit that even social recreation is conducted with such an expenditure of force that leisure becomes labor. When a southerner returns from us to his native climate, he is accustomed to complain that he cannot long continue there the concentrated mental activity to which he had here become inured, and labor with him gradually transforms itself into the habit of filling up, as caprice may dictate, his unoccupied hours.

It is true this difference does not rest absolutely upon the latitude and average thermometer of a country; even in the hot zones there have been intense thought and action as long

as the national stamina was unbroken. This is proven by the heroic traditions of India. In these, work and rest are fully developed, and have attained a most fruitful reciprocal influence, the one preparing for and enlarging the other. For wherever poetry flourishes it is the fruit of dignified rest, and heroic song is inconceivable without heroic deeds. In the historical period, however, the antithesis which is indispensable to every healthy national life vanishes, and we see how the goal of endeavor is no longer set in the accomplishment of definite, practical aims, but in a self-surrender annihilating the personal will, and deadening all individual energy, to the contemplation of the super-sensual, in the ever completer return of the individual existence into the Deity.

But how completely this conception is interwoven into the texture of the national character is seen by this, that the protest against Brahmanism, the new representation of God and Nature, which Buddhism brought forward, in this respect reaches the same result, for its ideal is also an extinction of individuality, a dying to this world, an eradication of all desires, of all motives to action, and the cessation of action itself. And although among more energetic primitive races to whom this ideal was not attractive, in its place there came a more general notion of happiness and joy, yet in India itself this notion has always maintained its oriental character, according to which entire apathy is the necessary presupposition of a happy existence, and consequently the alternation of labor and rest is done away with.

Very different was the state of things among the mountaintribes of Iran, the Medes and Persians, as long as their national spirit was unbroken. To these a down-hearted despondency, a dull indifference was impossible. Here every individual was drawn into the antagonism which divided the spiritual world as well as nationalities into two opposed camps. Religion demanded partisanship and conflict; she demanded unrepining labor in field, forest, and garden; she interdicted only sordid, avaricious toil, and that contemplative devotion which made up the life of the inhabitants of India, was relegated to holidays.

Thus, there was established a simple and rational system of living, a regulation, a reduction to order of the manifold acts