Having heard the following lecture and been much pleased and instructed by it, we have solicited from the writer, a copy for the press, and have been kindly allowed to place it in the earliest pages of this new periodical. It is known that popular courses of lectures are given every winter, many of them entirely free to the societies before which they are given and to the public. It is believed that much good is done in this way. Time is pleasantly and usefully employed, and is thus saved from an intercourse which would produce only evil. We shall, with great pleasure, publish in future numbers lectures of the kind referred to, and such notices of these truly benevolent societies as may interest our readers. The Mechanic Apprentices' Library Association is one of the most useful in our city. We have more than once had the pleasure of lecturing to its members.—ED.

MY OWN TIMES, OR 'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE."

BY WALTER CHANNING, M. D.

A Lecture delivered before the Mechanic Apprentices' Library Association, January, 1845.

WHOEVER has lived fifty years, with his eyes, ears, mind, and heart open, will probably have seen, heard, learnt, and felt something. We are told indeed of those who have eyes and see not -have ears and hear not-minds, but do not understand-hearts, but feel not. These have been made in vain. The universe has excited in them no emotion. They know not the sentiment of beauty, or grandeur, for they have apprehended neither. The discipline of life has brought no instruction. Poverty has been a tolerated dependence upon accident,-a willing slavery. Wealth has gathered like a frost-work about their hearts, yes, frozen the heart itself. These remind us of those mountains of ice which girt the barren coasts of Greenland, until by annual accumulation they are torn off by their own weight, and float off to be dissolved in the warm wide ocean. So do these men of unused, accumulated wealth, bear their heavy cold burden till death comes, and breaks away from them their frozen treasures, to be floated away, and be dissolved and lost in the great current of life. Such are the men who live solitary, alone in the bustle and jostle of the crowded city. They stand aloof from sympathy. They do not understand what the word means. Their wealth always seems either to be a part of themselves, and so cannot be touched without their suffering as if from violence, or in its amount and indistinctness, it is lost in the small sum reserved for immediate use, and this acquires a value so great that it cannot be used without a pang, and so they live starving their bodies or their souls, and dreading the almshouse or the jail. No matter how long such men live. They are made neither wiser, nor better, by living. They know neither true joy, nor

real sorrow. They contribute nothing to the amount of happiness which may be around them, and so it gives them no joy. And sorrow, how near to them personally may be its occasions, is never truly felt.

Now there are other men with whom life has an intense interest. Nothing is wasted upon them. The occurrences of the hour, the events of every day have a significance. The discipline of life in all its diversities is looked upon by them as having an appointment, a permission, a purpose, in supreme love, wisdom, and power. To such men accumulation of the permanent and of the true, is constantly made. They are in sympathy with truth, and are daily gainers by the relation. Such men grow. To them nothing that has been, or is, past or present, is in vain. But how do men grow? What are the sources, or causes, whence come character? Men are either made what they are by the times in which they live, or they make their own age. These form the two great divisions under which men naturally or generally fall. There are many subdivisions, but a description or analysis of these two makes it easy to understand all the rest. What is the character of that man who is made directly by the times in which he lives? As he begins by living in harmony with things as he may find them, so he will continue to do. He is, so to speak, the direct product, the creation of his age. As it impresses him in youth, and early manhood, and this deeply, the impression is not lost in his future years. He is wedded to what is, or what he calls his own, and he allows nothing new to replace it. Should a revolution happen, he leaves his native land, and flies to another, to find the old institutions, usages, customs, which have become to him as the only true forms, and means of social life. Suppose lesser changes in manners, or morals occur? He shrinks from the attempted reformation, and clings to the old. Such a man is controlled by that which is around him. His virtue is in the keeping of othershis whole conduct having its character in what first produced it, retains it to the last. In his time, the steam engine, the railroad, and steamer, were unknown. He looks with contempt or fear upon this new agent of locomotion, and travels six miles an hour in the stage coach, in the dead of winter, or scorching days of summer, and exclaims what a luxury it is! There are men who make a variety in this class, but still essentially belong to it. These are not without sympathy with what is going on around them. They are interested in their age, and in its doings. Reform often finds in them important aid. They have wealth and contribute it to good objects. They have good and well culti

vated minds, and are willing to use them in what they deem worthy. These are not inventors, discoverers. They apprehend what others do invent, do discover, whether it be in morals or in physics, and do not oppose themselves to it because it is new. They see, and they hear, and as far as they understand what is before them, they feel and express interest in it. Such men are made by their times, not only by what existed when they began life, and the earliest impressions of which were too deep to give place to any others in the succeeding years. They were made by the true power of whatever existed along with, or around them, whether in the time of their youth, or in their latest day. Without discovering it, they have gladly received every revelation of truth, and have cheerfully given to such their sanction.

There is another class of men who are entirely distinct from all these. They are always few in number, and perhaps too few to form a class. These men make the age in which they live. They mark it so deeply, that the wasting hand of time cannot obliterate the outstanding, bold record, they have left there. The coming minds, the gigantic powers in their successors, to which they have given development, make that record more enduring, by adding new authority to what they have done, and carrying into other and wider regions what they have given them. Such men stand out head and shoulders, nay the whole body, far above the dead social level around them. They remind you of the lofty and everlasting pyramid upon the barren deserts of Egypt. All else of human power has passed away, but there they stand for the wonder, the admiration of all succeeding ages. So endure forever in faithful memories, and loving reverence, the creators of their own age, the apostles to all coming time. Antiquity had such men, and their speech has gone out to the ends of the world. Few, it may be, are the words they have left us, but their power is beyond that of whole volumes and whole libraries. In later times such have lived. Luther was of them. He looked at what he felt to be wholly evil in the theological doctrine and rule of his age, and gave himself, soul and body too, if the sacrifice were demanded, to its entire reformation. He was a man of indomitable will, and herculean energy. He went to his greatest work with the "safe conduct" of an Emperor in his pocket, but in his great soul, his "heart of hearts," there was what was a surer talisman than any human instrument, the deep conviction that he was right, and that God was with him. He was the apostle of human liberty, the anointed messenger of moral freedom. Luther made his own age. He left his foot print, his mind print, for the guidance and for the reverence of all coming time.

Later men have in different ways lived and labored, and died for humanity. Howard was one of these. Disease and poverty, were, so to speak, the atmosphere in which he lived, and by which his great soul grew out and communicated itself to his own, and to all succeeding times. Wilberforce and Clarkson in the same great field of human freedom, and of human love, entered upon their work with an indomitable purpose of accomplishing it. They never shrunk from it for a moment, however fearful and threatening that moment might be. They knew before hand that their warfare was to be against large pecuniary interests, long established custom, deep rooted prejudice. But they met all these without misgiving and without fear. After a labor continued through nearly a quarter of a century, and which was opposed in every inch and moment of it, they succeeded, and the slave-trade by solemn act of Parliament was declared to be piracy and to be punished as such. I remember seeing and hearing Wilberforce in the House of Commons. I felt that I was in the presence of one who had contributed to his age and to his race,-of one who had impressed himself deeply on his own age, and who would be held in memory, and in reverence, by all coming times. It was my privilege to listen to another who began, or who labored so long in the cause of the religious and political liberty of his country, I mean Grattan. He was, when I heard him, an old man, but he spoke as from an intellect and a heart which felt not, and could not feel, the chilling hand and power of time. He spoke to England for his beloved Ireland, and he spoke not in vain. I have not time to continue this enumeration of men, who in the light and fulness of inspiration, and of solemn prophecy, have seen the future in the present, and have given themselves to the great work of reform. They have escaped from the tolerated slavery of the world as they found it, and have made clear revelations beforehand, of what the future would be. They are the makers of their own age, they are the creators of the future.

I propose to speak in this lecture of the times in which I have lived. In every body's view his own age is the most important period of time that has ever been. And it is so in reality. It is the complement of all the preceding times. It is the residuary lagatee of the whole past. Every thing thus centres in one's own times. What has been done in every moment before it, which in any sense had perpetuity in it, belongs to every man's present; and more worthy consideration still is the related truth, that what the present does with its great inheritance, its mighty legacy, and what it adds to it, not only is its own, but is in sure

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succession for the everlasting future. My own age has been singular and deeply interesting for the variety in its social aspectsfor its strong antagonisms, its great, I might say its tremendous results. It begins with the close of a civil war, which tore the colony from the mother country, the child from the arms of the parent. Every moment in that unnatural war, as some deemed it, was stern conflict. Men came from it with their garments rolled in blood, and that blood is not yet washed clean out of their skirts. Men have marked in great social changes, and I include political in them,--men have noted in such, three well defined stages:-The first of these is the destructive. In this that which has existed, it may be, a long time, is disturbed in its old rest,-it is pulled down, taken away. It is seen to have accomplished for society what it can do. It has performed its office. Its mission is ended. The second stage is one of rest. Men grow tired at length of that which they have had deeply at heart. The spirit of self-sacrifice gets weary. The evil may have been got rid of. Men rest. The third stage is construc tive. The new is sought for, and it may be, the better. Denial is replaced by affirmation,—the negative by the positive. New institutions gradually, or suddenly take the place of the old. their turn these will be laid aside. Social progress will demand this. Men do, and will feel, that they are wiser and better today than they were yesterday. The coming ages will settle the question. Now, without advocating these views of social change to the extent which has been claimed for them, I think we see some confirmation of them in human history; and in that of our own country. The pilgrim settlers of New England broke violently away from the theological tyranny of their age and country. The power of the national church as far as they were concerned was destroyed, was pulled down. Their truce, or stage of repose was very short, hardly longer than it took them to sail from Holland to Plymouth. As soon almost as they reached land, or took possession of it, they began to form a new social system, in which the divine law as they understood it had as near a relation with the human as had ever been the case since Judaism. The national political element continued. The pilgrims held territory under a royal charter. They were subjects. They acknowledged an earthly king as the representative of the Divine, of God. Their civil polity hence got its character. Their only, and does it not comprehend the highest liberty?—their only freedom was the felt, and used right to worship God agreeably to the dictates of their own consciences. This had been the destructive element in their noble movement,-for this they for