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blows. Go into a photographic gallery, examine the portraits of men there, and you will see that every one has put on as his finest expression a look of sternness, hauteur, defiance. They look like prize-fighters who have just flung down the glove as a challenge to all mankind. They meant to look their best, and they look their fiercest. But every picture of Jesus is a picture of resignation. Christian art in all its departments has caught from him a look of triumphant suffering, and lends its witness to the truth that a new ideal of humanity has seated itself on imagination's throne.

The type of character which Jesus represents deserves to be called human. The virtues that prevailed in the ancient world,and that prevail in the modern world, too,- are individual rather than social, private rather than humane. They tend more to keep men apart than to draw them together. Some of the radical evils of society are perpetuated by what is popularly regarded as virtue. Pride, for instance, even in its noble form of self-respect, is never quite free from a wounding and discouraging disdain. Honor, through its sensitiveness to offence, is ever provoking suspicion and quarrel. Justice has too rarely the quality of mercy, without which it is injustice. Bravery becomes a bully, and Fortitude becomes a bruiser; Truth pinches and Integrity badgers, Generosity squanders and Economy scrimps. People magnify a small sacrifice of comfort for a friend: here was one who spent all he had, and himself at last, for strangers and enemies. We hardly know how to yield knowing ourselves to be in the wrong: here was one who said, "Say what you will of me, only respect the Holy Ghost." It is thought much to preserve purity while associating only with the pure here was one who sat at meat with publicans and sinners, and maintained a spotlessness of life which was not only proof against contamination, but which made pollution itself ashamed to be unclean. They who are deemed the noblest have much to say about rights here was one who spoke only of duties. The world's good people make a point of shunning the vicious, abhorring the criminal, pursuing the guilty with vengeance, and exhibiting their excellence in strongest possible contrast with other folk's evil. The true Son of Man came to seek and save the lost; to call not the righteous, but the sinful, to repentance; and consequently we read of him as going about among those whom we should shun, ministering to those whom we should punish, inviting those whom we should repel, blessing those whom we should curse,

and promising the kingdom of heaven to those whom we in pride of sanctity should doom to perdition. Men speak of sympathy, meaning by it a common feeling on the ground of congenial tastes, dispositions or experiences: Jesus by sympathy meant a fellowship in suffering with the unfortunate and the unhappy. Jesus is virtually the father of those enterprises in behalf of the poor, the neg lected, the despised, the oppressed, the wicked, which forshadow the coming of a new era in civilization. He is the inspirer of the peace men, the anti-slavery men, the laborers in the cause of woman's emancipation from civil disabilities and social wrongs. Reformers, philanthropists and saints make appeal to him, and the resistance which is made to the movements of the new social ideas is the resistance of the first Adam against the second, is the angry amazement of a world long settled in ancient selfish ways at seeing this fresh ideal of man and his relations rise like a white spirit and dictate what is to be the order of things.

That the Christ of the Church is to a great extent a creature of the imagination, or, as we say, an ideal being, is frankly conceded. But as frankly it is conceded, on the other hand, that the Christ of the Church is no more than the Jesus of history rounded and developed, as the great sculptor, not flattering his subject, but more deeply comprehending it, not disguising, but unfolding it, presents you with a bust of your dear friend, almost too beautiful to be true, and yet only beautiful because of the truth which flashes out upon you from day to day.

We feel constrained to admit that Christ has introduced a new type of human character. The absolutely perfect and consummate specimen of the type may not have appeared, but the type is decided; the shape is inaugurated, the fashion is set, and the new type sums up and judges those which went before it in the order of development. Out of the vast dust-heap and wreck and pile of rubbish of the theologies, burying fanciful Christologies out of sight we hope forever, like the praying boy from the Tiber mud comes up erect and radiant this form of the new man, to become the standard of manly beauty henceforth. Each animal in the scale of nature seems perfect until a higher form of organized being appears. Before the advent of the human creature, the ape, the chimpanzee, the gorilla may well have considered themselves as crowning forms; but the coming of man with his perfect frame makes each inferior order look defective and deformed. So the

character of Jesus, proving itself perfect in kind, if not in degree, becomes the rule by which humanity is silently measured and judged.

CALM.

BY JOHN A. DORGAN.

ON a dreary eve of a winter day

A poet sate by his fire alone;

His brow was wrinkled, his hair was gray,
His heart of fire was a heart of stone.

The poet sate by the fire alone,

And silently gazed on the flickering flame,-
And calmly he thought of the days agone,

As the light on his forehead went and came.

Quenched in his heart was the fever-thirst

For fame: he had labored; the world was proud -
Praised alike his best and worst

With noisy clamor and homage loud;

But his haughty spirit their praise denied:
All he had done he held as naught -
Wan as the moon by the day descried
In the light of his great afterthought.

For he knew that the works they held so great
Were the shards and shells his soul had rent
And cast behind, as from state to state,

Stronger and brighter, it onward went.

Through the night of time, which he knew was near,
His name like a star might onward roll;

It mattered not; in pain and fear

He had built, not fame, but a god-like soul.

FATE.

THESE withered hands are weak,

But they shall do my bidding though so frail;
These lips are thin and white, but shall not fail
The appointed words to speak.

Thy sneer I can forgive,

Because I know the strength of destiny;
Until my task is done I cannot die,—
And then I would not live.

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DOES a fermentescible body itself contain ovules? They have not yet been demonstrated.

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It is proper to state that there are two sorts of fermentescible bodies one of which has belonged to a living body, which is now separated, and the decomposition of which gives birth to infusories; the other which still belongs to a living body, and serves as blastema to parasites. There are consequently two sorts of heterogeny one fermentescible putrid for the infusoria; the other fermentescible morbid for the parasites.

The question, Does the fermentescible body contain ovules? is then stated for both cases, and there is a probability that, resolved for the one, it will equally be so for the other.

Now we must recognize this well, that in no case has the preëxistence of ovules been ascertained. If we suppose them, however, to have existed, although they have not been seen, we find ourselves drawn into the extraordinary and unacceptable hypothesis of their transmission in germ by hereditary descent, in passing by the sperm or by the egg. Never has any thing been seen in either to confirm this view. Indeed, a germ would have to contain at once the material ovules of all the parasites that will arise from the living body which is about to be developed, and the material ovules of all the infusoria which will arise from this same body after death.

There remains another hypothesis that the infusories and parasites developed in the fermentescible body come from metamorphoses. It was formerly supposed that the germs of lumbrici and of other insects penetrate the system and there develop themselves in changing their nature and their form. But this supposition itself contains two hypotheses not demonstrated: the first that the external germs penetrate, without our knowing why, or by what means, and the second that the parasitic species are but metamorphoses of insects, which no one has been able to demonstrate. The most serious motive which this opinion has adduced is no other than the analogy, very distant in truth, existing between intestinal lumbrici and terrestrial lumbrici. As to the transformation of one species into the other, it has never been seriously pretended.

Much noise, however, has been made of late years about the transformations of the tænia into the cysticerque; and reciprocally, according to the experiments of MM. Kucheinmeister, Leukart, and Van Beneden. The last has even recalled it to the Institute in regard to spontaneous generation. But, in reality, what do these facts prove? Supposing them perfectly exact, have they the value which has been accorded to them in this question? Animals have been fed with pieces of tænias; and cysticerques have been produced in several parts of the bodies of these animals, even under the skin; then others have been nourished with cysticerques, and tænias have been developed in their bodies; the experiment has even been made, and has succeeded, upon a man condemned to death.

Here are facts known to every one. Do they really prove a transformation? In fact, there has been here a certain vitiated nourishment, which has occasioned worms. Any food that disorders the nutrition may be a cause of morbid developments. But we ask how tænias, crushed and digested, could still have eggs intact; and how these eggs could have passed in absorption, traversed the torrent of the circulation, and be deposited here and there in the economy, to develop themselves as cysticerques. This is a mechanism too extraordinary, and too different from what is known, for it to be accepted without incontestable proofs. Were this as constant as is pretended, we should observe, among persons affected with tænia, production of cysticerques, especially when this worm having been in part destroyed and broken, its eggs float freely in the intestinal canal; then they ought to be absorbed, and we should see them give rise to cysticerques in several points of the system, in the same manner as in the experiments in question. This has never yet been ascertained.

Even in the absence of all proof, suppose these metamorphoses admitted; suppose it true that a few parasitic species may be transformed into each other; or even proceed to the extreme exaggeration of admitting that all the parasitic species constitute but so many metamorphoses of one and the same: the origin of this unique species would still remain in question. And since we find no eggs preexisting in the fermentescible body; since we discern none with the aid of the microscope; and since these eggs can not come from the air or the water, which we have shown to contain none, it must indeed be admitted that a mode of generation exists

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