quietly, satisfied that when he wakes everything will be as he left it. There is a sense of serene rest and calm, as if a man were removed from all the turmoil of the wicked world, when he can incline his head at a comfortable angle, and let the round and balanced sentences lull him to his rest.

"We entered once, awhile since, a church which shall be nameless. The pew backs were very high. They were wellcushioned. The preacher stood in a thing shaped like a giant's wine-glass. There were seventy-five heads before him, exclusive of our own, all gray or bald. These seventyfive heads just appeared above the backs of the pews, clothed in their venerable gray crowns of glory, or shining in their bareness, where sermons by the hundred had hit and glanced off to the next pew. The venerable heads were calmly reposing in that sweetest of all sleeps since infancy— a Sunday sleep in a well-stuffed pew-all except perhaps a half dozen whose consciences or ledgers kept them awake. It was only at rare intervals that a noise, as of one in an uneasy dream, disturbed the solemn cadences of the preacher.

"He was preaching on the duty of reading a chapter in the Bible every day. It was a thoroughly safe subject, and he handled it in a thoroughly safe way. The sentences were all round and well finished after the approved pattern, and they rolled out with a full and musical intonation, as if the speaker enjoyed the sound of his admirable voice. Evidently he was 'the right man in the right place,' a man of weight and influence, a thoroughly safe man, to whom those dignified gentlemen could intrust the preaching of the Gospel in their church, satisfied that all was well, while 'drowsy tinklings lulled the fold.' It was a touching sight to see the quiet confidence those world-weary men reposed in their chosen shepherd; with what infantile simplicity they dropped to rest, as if each one said, 'The doctor is preaching. It is all right. He will go through that manuscript in a way to command any man's confidence and respect. We can go to sleep like lambs while he guards the sheep-fold.'

"To be sure it is only fair to say that sometimes there come crises in social and political life which set all rules at

defiance, and your dull man looks on with a dazed and imbecile look in his glassy eyes which is really tragical and pitiful. There is need of something more than dulness then, or things go very badly. But as soon as the crisis is over, dulness assumes its ancient worship, and clothes itself in all its primeval dignity.

"In literature the influence of dulness is not given, we are sorry to say, its due consideration. Readers are getting into a bad habit of impatience with it. They have been known to condemn it, and speak bitterly and sarcastically about it-to resent it almost as a personal injury. This is the case in general literature, however. Religious literature has not thus cast off all regard for the past, and abandoned itself to new-fangled ways.

"The religious book, or the religions publication, being in some sort akin to the sermon, retains still due respect for dignified and solemn dulness. It is read as a duty, sometimes as a penance perhaps, and the reader resents any attempt to render his toil lighter or his penance less penetential. He wants to go in the old respectable and decorous path and the ponderous periods of a grave discussion, ponderously involved and elaborated, have a great weight with him. They sound very magnificent and learned, and, at all events, are thoroughly safe; and his religious book or religious newspaper must first of all be safe. Whatever is is right,' must be their motto. The same venerable straw must be threshed over again and again with the same regular and grave beat of the wooden flail. The writer must not disturb his reader with any subject on which there is a difference of opinion, or with any view or any question later than his venerable great-grandfather.

"We know religious papers, for instance, which owe their weight and consideration, and both are considerable, to the fact that they never had an opinion and never will have; that they never expressed themselves on any matter on which there is greater doubt than on the propositions that 'honesty is the best policy' and 'virtue is its own reward'; whose secret of influence is the owl-like gravity and highly

respectable dulness with which they repeat Mother Grundy's oracular utterances to an over-awed world. So, as we have taken the liberty to say, he is a very thoughtless man who underrates the high position which dulness holds in the minds of men, or the dangers and the failures of bright

ness.

"We cannot ourselves see why the pulpit should be dull, why religious books should be unreadable, why religious newspapers should be stupid. We do not see the connection between piety and owliness, nor understand why necessarily brightness should be condemned as hostile to religion.

"But though we cannot see the subtile bond of connec tion, we recognize the fact."

"And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent."

66

Now too oft, the priesthood wait at the threshold of the great,— Waiting for their beck and nod; servants of men, not of God. Fraud exults, while solemn words sanctify its stolen hoards; Slavery laughs, while ghostly lips bless his manacles and whips.

"Not on them the poor rely, not on them looks liberty, Who with fawning falsehood cower, to the wrong, when clothed with power.

O, to see them meanly cling, round the master, round the king, Sported with, and sold and bought,-pitifuller sight is not!

"Tell me not that this must be: God's true priest is always free; Free, the needed truth to speak, right the wronged and raise the weak.

Not to fawn on wealth and state, leaving Lazarus at the gate,Not to peddle creeds like wares,-not to mutter hireling prayers,

"Nor to paint the new life's bliss on the sable ground of this,—
Golden streets for idle knave, Sabbath rest for weary slave!
Not for words and works like these, priest of God, thy mission is;
But to make earth's desert glad, in its Eden greenness clad."

XLIX. PREFATORY EXPLANATIONS AND TOPICAL CONTENTS OF THE NEW EDITION OF ANCIENT SACRED SCRIPTURES OF THE WORLD.

The Prefatory Explanations and Topical Contents of the new edition of Ancient Sacred Scriptures of the World (which may be found in that volume) were prepared and inserted for two reasons: One, that they might furnish suggestions as to methods of Translation, of Expurgation, of Correcting, and of Compiling, to students in general, of Higher Criticism of the Bible and of Comparative Religion. The other, that by their very faults and defects-as initial and novel efforts-they might stimulate wiser and more effectual attempts on the part of others in the interests of Renascent Christianity. The author of these Prefaces and Contents claims no superior scholarship, and assumes the possession of no extraordinary intellectual or spiritual insight. He simply has felt that certain things in the interests of Higher Criticism and Comparative Religion Studies needed to be said and done; he has waited long for others to say and do them in both a reverent and a radical spiritwhich, in these enlightened times, is the only spirit in which they can be effectively said and done. After many years. of waiting-with scoffing Radicals on one hand turning the Bible and all Religions into ridicule, and orthodox Conservatives on the other making them still more ridiculous to all who are intelligently reverent or reverently intelligenthe could no longer resist the sense of duty that impelled him to open efforts for the renascence of Christianity and of its Holy Book, however bitter the criticism or severe the condemnation he might thereby draw upon himself.

"Let me perish, but let Truth survive." Whatever reproach or loss may result to himself, the Truth-lover irresistibly must be a Truth-speaker. "I cannot otherwise. God help me."

From the first this has been the Compelling Spirit of genuine Christianity. Its Divine Founder made it the closing and climax of his Beatitudes: "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."

He himself was Truth-compelled even to the Cross and the Sepulchre. "I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, He gave me a commandment what I should say, and what I should speak. I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done." And all his disciples, except Judes Iscariot who betrayed him, did as he had done.

"But that it spread no further among the people, let us straitly threaten them, that they speak henceforth to no man in this name.

"But Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye.

"For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.

"And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word."

L. A MODERN PROPHET-PRIEST-SKETCHED AS A

MODEL.

"He was despised and rejected of men."

He was friend and benefactor, though in less signal ways perhaps, to many other churches besides his own; indeed, he was a sort of Bishop in its best sense, a Shepherd in its genuine New Testament sense, of all Churches in America. Not one ever appealed to him for counsel or help in vain; his sympathy, his words, his efforts were with all; freely offered, nay gladly, eagerly offered. So heart and soul and head and life consecrated to his cause was he, that no Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us," ever fell unheeded upon his ear. For nearly half a century he came and *Chiefly from “ What is the Bible?" and "The Man Jesus," and "The Religion of Evolution."-By special permission.