and obedience. We know there is a God, and know his will, which is, that we should do all the good we can; and we are assured from his perfections that we shall find our own good in so doing.

And what would we have more? Are we, after such inquiry, and in an age full of liberty, children still? and can not we be quiet unless we have holy romances, sacred fables, and traditionary tales to amuse us in an idle hour, and to give rest to our souls when our follies and vices will not suffer us to rest?

You have been taught, indeed, that right belief, or orthodoxy, will, like charity, cover a multitude of sins; but be not deceived. Belief of or mere assent to the truth of propositions upon evidence is not a virtue, nor unbelief a vice. Faith is not a voluntary act, does not depend upon the will; every man must believe or disbelieve, whether he will or not, according as the evidence appears to him. If, therefore, men, however dignified or distinguished, command us to believe, they are guilty of the highest folly and absurdity, because it is out of our power; but if they command us to believe, and annex rewards to belief, and severe penalties to unbelief, then they are most wicked and immoral, because they annex rewards and punishments to what is involuntary, and therefore neither rewardable nor punishable. It appears, then, very plainly unreasonable and unjust to command us to believe any doctrine, good or bad, wise or unwise; but when men command us to believe opinions which have no tendency to promote virtue, but which are allowed to commute or atone for the want of it, then they are arrived at the utmost pitch of impiety,-then is their iniquity full; then have they finished the misery, and completed the destruction of poor mortal man; by betraying the interest of virtue, they have undermined and sapped the foundation of all human happiness : and how treacherously and dreadfully have they betrayed it! A gift well applied, the chattering of some unintelligible sounds called creeds; an unfeigned assent and consent to whatever the church enjoins, religious worship and consecrated feasts; repenting on a death-bed; pardons rightly sued out; and absolution authoritatively given,-have done more towards making and continuing men vicious than all the natural passions and infidelity put together; for infidelity can only take away the supernatural rewards of virtue, but these superstitious opinions and practices have not only turned the scene, and made men lose sight of the natural rewards of it,

but have induced them to think that, were there no hereafter, vice would be preferable to virtue, and that they increase in happiness as they increase in wickedness; and this they have been taught in several religious discourses and sermons delivered by men whose authority was never doubted, particularly by a late Rev. prelate, I mean Bishop Atterbury, in his sermon on these words, "If in this life only be hope, then we are of all men the most miserable," where vice and faith ride most lovingly and triumphantly together. But these doctrines of the natural excellency of vice, the efficacy of a right belief, the dignity of atonements and propitiations, have, beside depriving us of the native beauty and charms of honesty, and thus cruelly stabbing virtue to the heart, raised and diffused among men a certain unnatural passion, which we shall call a religious hatred a hatred constant, deep-rooted, and immortal. All other passions rise and fall, die and revive again, but this of religious and pious hatred rises and grows every day stronger upon the mind as we grow more religious, because we hate for God's sake, and for the sake of those poor souls, too, who have the misfortune not to believe as we do; and can we in so good a cause hate too much? The more thoroughly we hate, the better we are; and the more mischief we do to the bodies and states of these infidels and heretics, the more do we show our love to God. This is religious zeal, and this has been called divinity; but remember, the only true divinity is humanity. W. PITT.

THE SINGER.

MELCHAH stood looking on the corpse of his son, and spoke not. At length he broke the silence, and said: " He hath told his tale to the Immortals." Abdiel, the friend of him that was dead, asked him what he meant by the words. The old man, still regarding the dead body, spake as follows:

"Three years ago I fell asleep on the summit of the hill Yarib; and there I dreamed a dream. I thought I lay at the foot of a cliff, near the top of a great mountain; for beneath me were the clouds, and above me the heavens deep and dark. And I heard voices sweet and strong; and I lifted up my eyes, and, lo! over against me, on a rocky slope, some seated, each on his own crag, some

reclining between the fragments, I saw a hundred majestic forms, as of men who had striven and conquered. Then I heard one say: 'What wouldst thou sing unto us, young man?' A youthful voice replied, tremblingly: A song which I have made for my singing.' Come, then, and I will lead thee to the hole in the rock enter and sing.' From the assembly came forth one whose countenance was calm unto awfulness, but whose eyes looked in love, mingled with doubt, on the face of a youth whom he led by the hand towards the spot where I lay. The features of the youth I could not discern: either it was the indistinctness of a dream, or I was not permitted to behold them. And, lo! behind me was a great hole in the rock, narrow at the entrance, but deep and wide within; and when I looked into it, I shuddered, for I thought I saw, far down, the glimmer of a star. The youth entered and vanished. His guide strode back to his seat; and I lay in terror near the mouth of the vast cavern. When I looked up once more, I saw all the men leaning forward, with head aside, as if listening intently to a far off sound. I likewise listened; but, though much nearer than they, I heard nothing. But I could see their faces

change like waters in a windy and half-cloudy day. Sometimes, though I heard nought, it seemed to me as if one sighed and prayed beside me; and once I heard a clang of music triumphant in hope; but I looked up, and, lo! it was the listeners who stood on their feet and sang. They ceased, sat down, and listened as before. At last one approached me, and I ventured to question him. 'Sir,' I said, 'wilt thou tell me what it means?' And he answered me thus: The youth desired to sing to the Immortals. It is a law with us that no one shall sing a song who can not be the hero of his tale who can not live the song that he sings; for what right hath he else to devise great things, and to take holy deeds in his mouth. Therefore he enters the cavern where God weaveth the garments of souls; and there he lives in the forms of his own tale; for God giveth them being that he may be tried. The sighs which thou didst hear were his longings after his own Ideal; and thou didst hear him praying for the Truth he beheld, but could not reach. We sang, because, in his first great battle, he strove well and overcame. We await the next.' A deep sleep seemed to fall upon me; and when I awoke, I saw the Immortals standing with their eyes fixed on the mouth of the cavern. I arose and turned towards it likewise. The youth came forth. His face was worn

and pale, as that of the dead man before me; but his eyes were open, and tears trembled within them. Yet not the less was it the same face, the face of my son, I tell thee; and in joy and fear I gazed upon him. With a weary step he approached the Immortals. But he who had led him to the cave hastened to meet him, spread forth his arms and embraced him, and said unto him: Thou hast told a noble tale: sing to us now what songs thou wilt.' Therefore said I, as I gazed on my son, He hath told his tale to the Immortals.'"

DR. EINBOHRER AND HIS PUPILS.

CHAPTER V.- MEN AND MONKEYS.

WHEN the Doctor took his seat on the occasion of the next lecture, there was evolved from his pipe an unusually gigantic cloudy pillar for us to follow into the Canaan of Science. We knew that some Titanic subject was indicated, and each phiz was fixed into an expression mingled of awe and curiosity, such as one might have looking down the throat of Vesuvius about the period of its recurring eruption. At length he began solemnly:

Linnæus, in making out his catalogue, could find no place for the Ourang-utan except under the genus homo. And though later Naturalists have been restive under this until, in their efforts to rid themselves of this proximity to the ape, they have done scientifically what Sinbad is related to have done to the one which clung to his back, shaken it off and smashed its head with a stone, yet the calmer anatomical, not-smashing investigations of the present age tend to establish the ape as man undergraduate.

"It is a sure basis when we plant ourselves for probability upon the instinctive conclusions of men and who ever saw a monkey without human associations with it? In a simpler age these associations were frankly acknowledged, from the rudest to the most learned. Not only did the Malays give them the name of Ourangutan, which signifies wild man, but Aristotle confirms this by confessing among the three kinds of monkeys which he knew, that he could not find out where man ended and brute began. Purchas in his 'Pilgrims,' published in London, in 1625, gave the reverend

Dean Swift the ground for his story of Gulliver, by his account of how, in Java, the natives caught little apes, flayed them, leaving some hair and whiskers, and sold them to merchants to be carried over the world as the bodies of little men.

"Jacob Bontius in 1658 gave an account of a female Satyr who was so modest as to veil her face at the sight of strangers; she seemed to be a sentimental monkey, and would often sigh deeply, as much as to say, "There are chords, Jarby;" also she would weep insomuch that this very solid, unspeculative Dutchman exclaims, "Nothing human was wanting but speech." Which statements coincide with that of the African at the South, who, standing near an organ-grinder's exhibition of apes, soliloquized thus: Plenty o' sense - much as I'se got; kin talk, too, good as I kin,― would, too, only it's afeared white man have a hoe in his hand soon as he speak a word.'

"Doctor Tulpius, a Dutch traveler, was at first in doubt whether one he saw was a wild man or an African.

"The Chimpanzee is nearest man. It probably has more trials than ordinary men, since it has two additional ribs, and some have thought even one rib added ”. the rest of this sentence was lost in a cloud of mystic smoke. "These additional ribs, which have such solemn associations with sacred history, may bear mystically on the report made on the species Engeena by Dr. Wyman, in 1847. It says: "They live in bands, but are not so numerous as the Chimpanzees; the females generally exceed the other sex in number. My informants all agree that but one male is seen in a band; that when the young males grow up a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest by killing and driving out the others establishes himself at the head of the community.' One would say that the name Simia Engeena might be well replaced by Simia Mormona.

"The first account given with scientific authority was by Dr. Tyson, in 1751. The animal, which he called Pigmy, was a native of Angola; was twenty-six inches from top to toe; hair coal black; beard, imperial and moustache; could walk upright, which is more than Presidents can. Tyson writes: 'He was the most gentle and loving creature that could be. Those that he knew on shipboard he would come and embrace with the greatest tenderness; and though there were monkeys on board, he would never associate with them, and, as if nothing akin to them, would