plained of Bartolozzi that in engraving portraits he was "most unfaithful to his archetype," and so inflexible and unsympathetic in his selfhood that, whatever the original, his engraving exhibited more his own characteristics than the features and spirit of the face he was copying.

To melt self into Christ so that the new man shall be more marked by the Christly spirit than by our peculiar native individual traits is not easy; but Paul must have arrived at it when he could say, "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."

We have seen deeply stained glass in a window shone through by the sun more noticeable for the conspicuousness of its own strong bright color than for the amount of sunlight it transmitted. Our life should rather transmit Christ-light than exhibit self-color.

A second possible fault in a portrait artist is to make more of accessories than of the principal, more of the drapery than of the person, or more of the surface than of the soul. It is far easier to copy incidentals and furnishings than to capture and render that subtle, complex, evasive something which we call the expression— the face with its spirit-meaning..

The engraving of Jerome Bonaparte, by the Müller brothers, is most famous for the skill with which the fur and lace of the Westphalian king's attire are rendered. Longhi's copy of Josephine's son, Eugene Beauharnais, is remarkable chiefly for the surpassing finish of the plume in the cap of the Viceroy of Italy; and in his picture of Washington this artist felicitated himself especially upon the hair. Wille's graver showed its highest mastership in representing satin and metal, and he sought for portraits which had rich surroundings.

Being set to copy Christ, we may give more attention to moralities and humanities, observances and respectabilities, than to spirituality and Christ-likeness of heart. The reason why the hem of the robe was healing to the sick woman was because Christ was inside of the robe. The virtue of externals is in their relation to Jesus. Ceremonies, observances, ritual and conduct are impotent and expressionless unless they drape, depend from and set forth the living Christ.

Of the arts, sculpture and painting are imitations of visible external objects; music and architecture are not. Bible prefigurations of heaven give us songs of the blessed, and the Holy City coming down from God. Building and melody are thus put into our celestial

expectations, but there is no hint of statues or pictures. The imitative arts are represented only in "We shall be like him." The halls of the King's palace, the paths and slopes of its gardens shall be populated and adorned not by the motionless marbles of niche and pedestal but by moving, animated copies of our Lord. Purified human beings renewed in the Divine image are to be the fair, white, living statues of heaven. To this end we work, while God works in us his own good pleasure, which is that we be conformed to the image of his Son. To shape us thus must be the purpose of life's smiting discipline and reduction.

One day the great sculptor, Michael Angelo, caught a holy thought from the block of marble he was chiseling toward its desired form, and laying down his implements and taking up his pen he wrote a sonnet which has this line: "The more the marble wastes the more the statue grows." A block of marble feeling itself broken and chipped away under incessant blow on blow might think, "This is destruction; this fierce man means to make an end of me; shortly there will be nothing left of me and mine." But there is that that diminishes bulk, yet enhances value. If "the Captain of our salvation" was made "perfect through suffering," shall not we also submit to be brought toward perfection by the process of reduction?

To make us Christlike is the greatest Sculptor's purpose; let him smite!

The imitation of Christ is our business and endeavor; let us set the Lord continually before us!

MY PARISH

FROM pastoral life to editorial duties is a change likely to make certain faculties feel lost through being deprived of the particular exercise to which they were habituated. The unemployed pastoral instincts feel out for an object, and go around seeking a job like a man out of work. For three years Providence mercifully met this exigency by providing one editor with a small parish sufficient to give play to certain ministering impulses which find little scope in an editorial office. A good woman of high character, godly, wise, and sensible, widow of Rev. William Torrey, a missionary in South America who died in 1858, herself nearly fourscore and ten years old, was in Brooklyn without a pastor. She adopted the editor, and became his parish. So Sunday afternoons were provided with a

chance for pastoral visiting, without trespass, three miles away. Her membership rested in the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Albany, New York, whence she removed five years before her death. She left her name there for two reasons: because she was too aged and infirm to make acquaintance in or to attend any church here; and because two officers in the Albany church, her friends and admirers, always remembered her in their prayer-meeting petitions, so that whenever prayer service night came round she had the dear feeling of being prayed for, by those who knew and loved her, one hundred and fifty miles away. Between her church in Albany and her adopted pastor here she had the benefit of prayers on both the Calvinistic and the Arminian basis; if one failed because of basal error, autcess might the more reasonably be hoped for the other. Practically and in effect Calvinism and Arminianism mix pretty well. A pastor of considerable experience records here his observation that Presbyterians make excellent Methodists; sometimes they ripen to it simply by the progress of the seasons. In one of this pastor's churches were two eminently successful class leaders, one of young women and the other of young men, and both were thoroughbred Presbyterian women married to Methodist husbands. It is a good thing to be well grounded in definite doctrines and thoroughly drilled in the Catechism, even if it be the Westminster, and then to have the whole sweetened and sundrenched and mellowed with Methodism. A hard-headed, warmhearted leather dealer, in business many years in "The Swamp" in New York city, long president of the Board of Stewards in a prominent city church, but later retired to his ancestral farm, fed himself regularly on the Christian Advocate, the METHODIST REVIEW, and the New York Observer-a nutritious and sufficiently varied diet.

Whether "My Parish" was most Presbyterian or most Methodist I could not tell. In that respect it was like heaven. But it was foreordained to have, at the last, a pastor who did not believe in foreordination. Possibly Mrs. Elizabeth Sutton Torrey had been suffused, if not saturated, with the essential spirit of Methodism through an intimate and loving friendship of over seventy years with Richard Sutton Rust. The two were cousins, on his mother's and her father's side, and lived together as little children under the same New England roof, in her father's house. For her ninetieth birthday, which fell on October 3, 1895, that life-long friend sent her a characteristically genial and tender letter, to cheer her in her "age and feebleness extreme." In it he wrote: "Dear cousin, you are too near home

to be sad or sorrowful. Be happy! Were you a Methodist, I would say, Shout 'Glory! Get used to it, cousin, before you go. It is the common language up there. May the hour of your departure be the great coronation time to you! I wish I might be with you then; but I could only commend you to Jesus. My sister died as I was aiding her to quote the lines:

'Jesus, the vision of thy face

Hath overpowering charms;

Scarce shall I feel death's cold embrace

If thou be in my arms.

And while you hear my heart-strings break,

How sweet my moments roll

A mortal paleness on my cheek,

But glory in my soul!'

No matter whether we go now or a little later, God will take good care of you. Dear cousin, I wish you a happy New Year on earth or in heaven! God knows best." She went home on Monday morning at seven o'clock, November 25, 1895. Having lived ninety years in this world of mortality without ever seeing anybody die, she knew not what death might be like, and perplexed herself much with wondering what mien the messenger would wear. But heaven stole a march on her. The angels took her when she was asleep, and she found herself with the Lord in paradise without knowing how she got there. She experienced immortality without seeing death.

Some interesting things were learned from "My Parish"-how early sometimes in beneficent lives, as well as in others, the currents of the soul select a course to which they keep life-long, like the Gulf Stream, unfenced but steady, flowing where most needed, warming the ocean and its borders against the chill of arctic tides. Very early the sympathies of Richard Sutton Rust seem to have chosen the channel in which to this day they continue their humane and benignant flow. From the house in which he was a lad the family wash went regularly to the home of a poor colored woman. Her small son was often sent to bring and return it. When the wash was heavy little Richard Rust would take hold of the basket on one side and help the little colored boy carry it. (He never let go of that basket, but kept on helping the Negro with his load.) Once, when he went to her poor dwelling, the black laundress told him about slavery as she had known it, and how cruelly slaves were sometimes treated. The story was more than he could bear, and he came home sobbing as if his heart was broken. On that long-ago day a chief champion of

the cause of the oppressed and a steadfast friend of the African set his face toward the presidency of Wilberforce University, and the secretaryship of the Freedmen's Aid Society, and all the noble service of many years. This was learned in visiting "My Parish."

Another story impressing the same lesson was recently told. One Sunday afternoon more than sixty years ago a minister talked with his four little boys, explaining to them as simply as possible what it is to give one's heart to God and be a Christian. He asked if they understood, and they answered: "Yes." Then he said: "If any one of you wants to give his heart to the Lord now, let him come and kiss me." The boys sat silent, thinking, for a while. Then one by one, with intervals between-the youngest, five years old, first; and the oldest, twelve, last-they came and kissed their father's face; kissing also, in that sacred act, the Son of God, in token of reconciliation with the heavenly Father. One of those boys, retired at seventy from long and faithful service in the Congregational ministry, says: "If I ever gave my heart to the Lord, that was the time when I did it." He was six years old when that happened. Bishop Wiley did the same thing when he was ten. The lesson is so plain that he who runs may read.

The pastor of "My Parish" has on one end of his mantel a photograph of the Adirondack Lake Placid, tranquil and beautiful, with old Whiteface sloping steeply up from its shore into the crystalline sky. On the opposite end is another charming picture of equal serenity and peace, a photograph of "My Parish," taken in her room the day before she was ninety. She sits in her chair, knitting. On the table at her left her spectacles lie on her well-worn Spanish Testament, between which and her arm stands a framed cabinet photograph of her fondly cherished cousin, Dr. Rust, dear to her heart for almost eighty years. What is the lovely old saint in this picture knitting? Her father was a sea captain, and the men of the sea have always seemed like her own. She knows the perils and hardships of their life, and is interested in every effort for their welfare. Every fall she knits several dozen pairs of woolen wristlets, which are sent to the men of the Life-saving Service on the coasts of New Jersey and Maine; the men whose swinging lanterns twinkle like fireflies along the surf through the long, wild, bitter nights, as they patrol the beaches on the lookout for vessels in distress, ready to risk their own lives for the saving of others.

The heart of a woman who would have mothered the whole world,