may we not reply in the words of Scripture-"We have no such custom, neither the Churches of God"? We will not fear to walk in our Lord's footsteps and to follow those ancient confessors and martyrs, who, in the earliest, purest days of our faith, amidst sufferings and trials won their way to Heaven. 'Did they lack spirituality, or find their devotion cramped and narrowed down by the words of a Liturgy? Has the whole Christian Church been in a grievous error on this subject, until within the last three hundred years? No, brethren: and the best we can do in our feebleness is, to tread in the old paths, and "hold fast to the form of sound words" which was used "in our fathers' days, and in the old time before them." Our venerable Liturgy speaks to us in the language of God's own word. Let us strive to imbibe its holy spirit, and we shall need no better preparation for death.

IT

PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF OUR LORD.

[The Unnoticed Things of Scripture. 1868.]

T is strange, how many of our religious notions, unconsciously to ourselves, are derived from other sources than the Bible. For instance, how many views of the fall and the atonement which persons entertain, if scrutinized, would be found to have their origin in Milton's " Paradise Lost." They come to us in the flowing dignity of his verse, and insensibly we adopt, as a part of our theological creed, his picture of the revolt in heaven and the crushing of the fallen angels.

So it is with the personal appearance of our Lord. When we think of Him, there rises to our view the portrait of the oval face, soft in expression, yet grave and even melancholy, the sad eyes, the brown wavy beard, and the hair parted on the forehead and falling in long masses on the shoulders. This is the invariable picture we summon up, when we imagine the scenes in our Lord's life.

Whence do we derive this? It is a portrait to which we have always been accustomed-we have never imagined any other-and yet, we scarcely think that, if we were to analyze the impression in our own minds, we should find it was from Scripture. There is not a word to warrant it in the New Testament, nor can we find a solitary sentence in the four Evangelists on which to found any description of our Lord's personal appearance.

Does not this seem strange? The disciples give us the fullest portrait of their Master's moral lineaments.

We believe the only reference with regard to His outward manner is

that given by St. John-"These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven." But why not have told us of His appearance, His features, His voice or actions! How would it have gratified the longings of all future ages! There is not a scene in our Lord's life but has been seized on by the painter and sculptor as a subject for their art, yet not one of the Evangelists has given a single idea which could be embodied in marble or transferred to the canvas. The laborers in the field of "Sacred Art" were obliged to draw entirely upon the imagination. The features which are so familiar to us were the conception of the Eastern Church and from it received and adopted by the Church of the West.

It is a case unparalleled in history. Wherever there have existed those who were the leaders of the human race, if their lives are written, we are furnished with the most minute descriptions of their appearance. We turn to the pages of Plato, and as he writes of his great master Socrates, we feel as if he stood before us, distinct in every lineament, not only of his intellectual, but of his physical form. His pupil has portrayed his conversations, his sayings and arguments, and also his face and features. We behold his bald head, his flat nose, his thick lips and prominent eyes, his round and robust figure, his homely dress and bare feet. From the minuteness of these details it is easy for art to construct his portrait, as, twenty-four centuries ago, he disputed in the Agora or walked the streets of Athens.

But it is not so with the four Evangelists. On all these points they are entirely silent. And yet they were men, and we see not how, humanly speaking, they could have abstained from these descriptions. Their object was to set Him forth so that all coming generations should know and love Him. Why, then, do they confine themselves only to the moral and spiritual traits of his character?

Perhaps one reason was, the overpowering awe with which they looked back to Him. To them, the divinity absorbed all thoughts of the humanity. They could not worthily describe the ideal in their minds, and therefore shrank from the attempt. Human language, they realized, could give no idea of the outward form, when the God-like and the human were mingled in one, and therefore they gave nothing which could appeal to the senses. They felt, perhaps, as did one of the most celebrated sculptors of our day. When Thorwaldsen had executed what the world now looks upon as an exquisite statue of our Lord, he thus sorrowfully commented on it to a friend: "My genius is decaying." "What do you mean?" said his friend. "Here," said the sculptor, "is my statue of Christ. It is the first of my works with which I have ever felt satisfied. Until now, my idea has always been beyond what I could execute. It is no longer so. I shall never have a great idea again."

Perhaps there was a deeper meaning in their silence. They were sur

rounded by nations who could not conceive of a religion where the Deity was not pictured before their eyes. The whole Jewish dispensation had been one long protest, for two thousand years, against this spirit. There must be no "graven image" of Him whom they worshipped. Particularly with the Greeks, with whom the early Christians were brought so much in contact, the favorite subjects for the chisel were the gods of their radiant mythology. To these subjects the artistic genius of the people was specially devoted. We must conclude, then, that the sacred writers observed this marked silence because they were "moved thereto by the Holy Ghost." It was to prevent, what later ages actually saw, the rise of a sensuous religion whose spirituality vanished amid the gorgeousness of its outward appearance. Looking at the past, they saw that the shekinah, the visible manifestation of the Divinity, was concealed behind the veil of the temple, and they felt not authorized to withdraw the covering.

The oldest extant painting of our Lord is one found in the catacombs of St. Calistus at Rome, while there is another similar to it in the cemetery of St. Peter. The earlier Christian sarcophagi, which are supposed to date in the time of Julian, have also representations of His countenance. All these give what is to us the familiar type of face and expression.

At length this awed silence was broken, and the Fathers of the Church began their open speculations on our Lord's appearance. Yet at first it only furnished a topic of discussion and dispute. While some contended for the physical beauty of our Lord, others took the ground that His "bodily presence was weak."

Thus, for two centuries, the Fathers were divided on this subject, which was necessarily only one of speculation. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria speak of His "want of form and comeliness," while Tertullian, in his usual impulsive style, declares, "the person of Christ wanted not merely divine majesty, but even human beauty." So, too, wrote Origen; and when, in his argument with Celsus, the latter denied "that the Deity could dwell in a mean form," Origen found himself obliged to soften the literal interpretation of Isaiah, and declared that "it referred not to the lowliness of stature or meant more than the absence of noble form or preëminent beauty." And then he refers triumphantly to a verse of the forty-fifth Psalm (in the rendering of the Septuagint)" Ride on in thy loveliness and in thy beauty."

But the progress of time swept away all these inglorious ideas, and insensibly there was awakened in the Christian mind those conceptions of grace and beauty to which so many had been accustomed in the crea tions of Grecian art.

And so this image of symmetry and beauty was permanently em

bodied in Christian art, and became the one unvarying type of our Lord's appearance with which we are all familiar, recognizing it alike in the miserable engraving which ornaments the cottage of the poor, and in the glorious conception of Raphael's Transfiguration, on the walls of the Vatican.

We accede to it and willingly adopt it as it is. We cannot imagine our Lord otherwise than as the highest efforts of art have represented Him-the old Eastern idea, where the artist has striven to embody the type of superhuman beauty-the Divinity irradiating a form where gentleness and majesty are mingled together. Yet we cannot but realize that for none of this are we indebted to the words of Scripture.

THE

Andrew Preston Peabody.

BORN in Beverly, Mass., 1811.

FAIR HARVARD SIXTY YEARS AGO.

[Harvard Reminiscences. 1888.]

HE last sixty years can hardly have wrought greater changes, whether superficial or radical, anywhere else than in Harvard College. In my time a student's room was remarkable chiefly for what it did not have, for the absence of all appliances of elegance and comfort, I might almost say, of all tokens of civilization. The feather-bed—mattresses not having come into general use-was regarded as a valuable chattel; but ten dollars would have been a fair auction-price for all the other contents of an average room, which were a pine bedstead, washstand, table, and desk, a cheap rocking-chair, and from two to four other chairs of the plainest fashion, the bed furnishing seats when more were needed. I doubt whether any fellow-student of mine owned a carpet. A second-hand-furniture dealer had a few defaced and threadbare carpets, which he leased at an extravagant price to certain Southern members of the senior class; but even Southerners, though reputed to be fabulously rich, did not aspire to this luxury till the senior year. Coal was just coming into use, and had hardly found its way into college. The students' rooms-several of the recitation-rooms as well-were heated by open wood-fires. Almost every room had, too, among its transmittenda, a cannon-ball supposed to have been derived from the arsenal, which on very cold days was heated to a red heat, and placed as a calorific radiant on a skillet, or on some extemporized metallic stand;

while at other seasons it was often utilized by being rolled down-stairs at such time as might most nearly bisect a proctor's night-sleep. Friction-matches-according to Faraday the most useful invention of our age were not yet. Coals were carefully buried in ashes over night to start the morning fire; while in summer, as I have elsewhere said, the evening lamp could be lighted only by the awkward, and often baffling, process of "striking fire" with flint, steel, and tinder-box.

The student's life was hard. Morning prayers were in summer at six; in winter, about half an hour before sunrise, in a bitterly cold chapel. Thence half of each class passed into the several recitation-rooms in the same building (University Hall), and three-quarters of an hour later the bell rang for a second set of recitations, including the remaining half of the students. Then came breakfast, which in the college commons consisted solely of coffee, hot rolls, and butter, except when the members of a mess had succeeded in pinning to the nether surface of the table, by a two-pronged fork, some slices of meat from the previous day's dinner. Between ten and twelve every student attended another recitation or a lecture. Dinner was at half-past twelve,-a meal not deficient in quantity, but by no means appetizing to those who had come from neat homes and well-ordered tables. There was another recitation in the afternoon, except on Saturday; then evening prayers at six, or in winter at early twilight; then the evening meal, plain as the breakfast, with tea instead of coffee, and cold bread, of the consistency of wool, for the hot rolls. After tea the dormitories rang with song and merriment till the study-bell, at eight in winter, at nine in summer, sounded the curfew for fun and frolic, proclaiming dead silence throughout the college premises, under penalty of a domiciliary visit from the officer of the entry, and, in case of a serious offence, of private or public admonition.

This was the life for five days of the week. On Sundays all the students were required to be in residence here, not excepting even those whose homes were in Boston; and all were required to attend worship twice each day at the college chapel. On Saturday alone was there permission to leave Cambridge, absence from town at any other time being a punishable offence. This weekly liberty was taken by almost every member of college, Boston being the universal resort; though seldom otherwise than on foot, the only public conveyance then being a twohorse stage-coach, which ran twice a day. But the holiday could not be indefinitely prolonged. The students who were not present at evening prayers were obliged by law to register their names with the regent before nine o'clock, under a heavy penalty, which was seldom or never incurred; for the regent's book was kept by his freshman, who could generally be coaxed or bribed to "take no note of time."

The price of board in commons was a dollar and three-quarters, or, as

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