of self-aggrandizement, must necessarily and by an ordination of Providence become weak as water when engaged in works of love and good will, looking for the coming of a better day for humanity, with faith in the promises of the gospel, and relying upon Him, who in calling man to the great task field of duty, has not mocked him with the mournful necessity of laboring in vain. We have been pained more than words can express to see young, generous hearts, yearning with strong desires to consecrate themselves to the cause of their fellow-men, checked and chilled by the ridicule of worldly-wise conservatism and the solemn rebukes of practical infidelity in the guise of a piety which professes to love the unseen Father while disregarding the claims of his visible children. Visionary! Were not the good St. Pierre, and Fenelon, and Howard, and Clarkson visionaries also?

What was John Woolman, to the wise and prudent of his day, but an amiable' enthusiast? What to those of our own is such an angel of mercy as Dorothea Dix? Who will not, in view of the labors of such philanthropists, adopt the language of Jonathan Edwards: "If these things be enthusiasms and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be evermore possessed with this happy distemper"?

It must, however, be confessed that there is a cant of philanthrophy too general and abstract for any practical

self with whining over real or imaginary present evil and predicting a better state somewhere in the future, but really doing nothing to remove the one or hasten the coming of the other. To its view the present condition of things is all wrong; no green hillock or twig rises over the waste deluge; the heaven above is utterly dark and starless: yet somehow out of this darkness which may be felt the light is to burst forth miraculously; wrong, sin, pain, and sorrow are to be banished from the renovated world, and earth become a vast epicurean garden or Mahometan heaven.

"The land, unploughed, shall yield her crop;

Pure honey from the oak shall drop;

The fountain shall run milk;

The thistle shall the lily bear;

And every bramble roses wear,

And every worm make silk."*

There are, in short, perfectionist reformers as well as religionists, who wait to see the salvation which it is the task of humanity itself to work out, and who look down from a region of ineffable self-complacence on their dusty and toiling brethren who are resolutely doing whatsoever their hands find to do for the removal of the evils around them.

* Ben Jonson's Golden Age Restored.

The emblem of practical Christianity is the Samaritan stooping over the wounded Jew. No fastidious hand can lift from the dust fallen humanity and bind up its unsightly gashes. Sentimental lamentation over evil and suffering may be indulged in until it becomes a sort of melancholy luxury, like the "weeping for Thammuz" by the apostate daughters of Jerusalem. Our faith in a better day for the race is strong; but we feel quite sure it will come in spite of such abstract reformers, and not by reason of them. The evils which possess humanity are of a kind which go not out by their delicate appliances.

The author of the address under consideration is not of this class. He has boldly, and at no small cost, grappled with the great social and political wrong of our country chattel slavery. Looking, as we have seen, hopefully to the future, he is nevertheless one of those who can respond to the words of a true poet and true man:—

"He is a coward who would borrow

A charm against the present sorrow
From the vague future's promise of delight:
As life's alarums nearer roll,
The ancestral buckler calls,
Self-clanging, from the walls

In the high temple of the soul! " *

*Russell Lowell.

FANATICISM.

THERE are occasionally deeds committed almost too horrible and revolting for publication. The tongue falters in giving them utterance; the pen trembles that records them. Such is the ghastly horror of a late tragedy in Edgecomb, in the State of Maine. A respectable and thriving citizen and his wife had been for some years very unprofitably engaged in brooding over the mysteries of the Apocalypse and in speculations upon the personal coming of Christ and the temporal reign of the saints on earth a sort of Mahometan paradise, which has as little warrant in Scripture as in reason. Their minds of necessity became unsettled; they meditated self-destruction; and, as it appears by a paper left behind in the handwriting of both, came to an agreement that the husband should first kill his wife and their four children and then put an end to his own existence. This was literally executed — the miserable man striking off the heads of his wife and children with his axe and then cutting his own throat.

Alas for man when he turns from the light of reason and from the simple and clearly defined duties of the present life and undertakes to pry into the mysteries of the future, bewildering himself with uncertain and vague prophecies, Oriental imagery and obscure Hebrew texts! Simple, cheerful faith in God as our great and good Father, and love of his children as our own brethren, acted out in all relations and duties, is certainly best for this world, and we believe also the best preparation for that to come. Once possessed by the falsity that God's design is that man should be wretched and gloomy here in order to obtain rest and happiness hereafter; that the mental agonies and bodily tortures of his creatures are pleasant to him; that, after bestowing upon us reason for our guidance, he makes it of no avail by interposing contradictory revelations and arbitrary commands, there is nothing to prevent one of a melancholic and excitable temperament from excesses so horrible as almost to justify the old belief in demoniac obsession.

Charles Brockden Brown- a writer whose merits have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged has given a powerful and philosophical analysis of this morbid state of mind this diseased conscientiousness, obeying the mad suggestions of a disordered brain as the injunctions of divinity—in his remarkable story of Wieland. The hero of this strange and solemn romance, inheriting a