They boast they come but to improve our state, enlarge our thoughts, and free us from the yoke of error! Yes, they will give enlightened freedom to our minds, who are themselves the slaves of passion, avarice, and pride. They offer us their protection. Yes, such protection as vultures give to lambs-covering and devouring them.

They call on us to barter all of good we have inherited and proved for the desperate chance of something better, which they promise. Be our plain answer this: The throne we honor is the people's choice; the laws we reverence are our brave fathers' legacy; the faith we follow teaches us to live in bonds of charity with all mankind, and die with hope of bliss beyond the grave. Tell your invaders this, and tell them, too, we seek no change; and, least of all, such change as they would bring us.

-Knowles.

GENTLEMEN, it is not because I would prevent religious instruction, but because I would prevent the union of church and state, that I oppose this bill. So far from wishing to proscribe religious instruction, I maintain that it is more essential at this day than ever. The more a man grows, the more he ought to believe. As he draws nearer to God, the better ought he to recognize His existence. It is the wretched tendency of our times to base all calculations, all efforts, on this life only,-to crowd every thing into this narrow span. In limiting man's end and aim to this terrestrial and material existence, we aggravate all his miseries by the terrible negation at its close. We add to the burthens of the unfortunate the insupportable weight of a hopeless hereafter. God's law of suffering we convert, by our unbelief, into hell's law of despair. Hence these deplorable social convulsions.

Our first duty, then, whether bishops or legislators, priests

That I am one of those who desire-I will not say with sincerity merely, but, with inexpressible ardor, and by all possible means-to ameliorate the material condition of the suffering classes in this life, no one in this Assembly will doubt. But the first and greatest of ameliorations is to impart hope. How do our finite miseries dwindle in the presence of an infinite hope! we be clergymen or laymen, or writers, is not merely to direct all our social energies to the abatement of physical misery, but, at the same time, to lift every drooping head towards heaven,-to fix the attention and the faith of every human soul on that ulterior life where justice shall preside, where justice shall be awarded! Let us proclaim it aloud to all, No one shall unjustly or needlessly suffer! Death is restitution. The law of the material world is gravitation; of the moral world, equity. At the end of all, re-appears God. Let us not forget-let us everywhere teach it-There would be no dignity in life, it would not be worth the holding, if in death we wholly perish. All that lightens labor and sanctifies toil, all that renders man brave, good, wise, patient, benevolent, just, humble, and, at the same time, great, worthy of intelligence, worthy of liberty,-is to have perpetually before him the vision of a better world darting its rays of celestial splendor through the dark shadows of this present life.

For myself, since Chance will have it that words of such gravity should at this time fall from lips of such little authority, let me be permitted here to say, and to proclaim from the elevation of this Tribune, that I believe, that I most profoundly and reverently believe in that better world. It is to me more real, more substantial, more positive in its effects, than this evanescence which we cling to and call life. It is unceasingly before my eyes. I believe in it with all the strength of my convictions; and, after many struggles, and much study and experience, it is the

supreme certainty of my reason, as it is the supreme consolation of my soul!

I desire, therefore, most sincerely, strenuously, and fervently that there should be religious instruction; but let it be the instruction of the gospel, and not of a party. Let it be sincere, not hypocritical. Let it have heaven, not earth, for its end. -Victor Hugo.

CXII. NATURE À HARD CREDITOR.

NATURE admits no lie. Most men profess to be aware of this, but few in any measure lay it to heart. Except in the departments of mere material manipulation, it seems to be taken practically as if this grand truth were merely a polite flourish of rhetoric. Nature keeps silently a most exact savings-bank and official register, correct to the most evanescent item, debtor and creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks down, creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism; debtor to such a loud, blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in consequence of that,-debtor, debtor, debtor, day after day, rigorously as fate (for this is fate that is writing); and at the end of the account you will have it all to pay, my friend;-there is the rub! Not the infinitesimalest fraction of a farthing but will be found marked there, for you and against you; and with the due rate of interest you will have to pay it, neatly, completely, as sure as you are alive. You will have to pay it even in money, if you live: and, poor slave, do you think there is no paymeat but in money? There is a payment which nature rigorously exacts of men, and also of nations, -and this I think when her wrath is sternest,-in the shape of dooming you to possess money:-to possess it; to have your bloated vanities fos

tered into monstrosity by it; your foul passions blown into explosion by it; your heart, and, perhaps, your very stomach, ruined with intoxication by it; your poor life, and all its manful activities, stunned into frenzy and comatose sleep by it;-in one word, as the old prophets said, your soul forever lost by it: your soul, so that through the eternities you shall have no soul, or manful trace of ever having had a soul; but only, for certain fleeting moments, shall have had a money-bag, and have given soul and heart, and (frightfuler still) stomach itself, in fatal exchange for the same. You wretched mortal, stumbling about in a God's temple, and thinking it a brutal cookery-shop! Nature, when her scorn of a slave is divinest, and blazes like the blinding lightning against his slavehood, often enough flings him a bag of money, silently saying: "That! Away; thy doom is that!" -Thomas Carlyle.

CXIII.-INDUSTRY AND ELOQUENCE.

IN the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, oratory was a necessary branch of a finished education. A much smaller proportion of the citizens were educated than among us; but of these a much larger number became orators. No man could hope for distinction or influence, and yet slight this art. The commanders of their armies were orators as well as soldiers, and ruled as well by their rhetorical as by their military skill. There was no trusting with them, as with us, to a natural facility, or the acquisition of an accidental fluency by occasional practice.

They served an apprenticeship to the art. They passed through a regular course of instruction in schools. They submitted to long and laborious discipline. They exercised themselves frequently, both before equals and in the presence of teachers, who criticised, reproved, rebuked, excited

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emulation, and left nothing undone which art and perseverance could accomplish.

The greatest orators of antiquity, so far from being favored by natural tendencies, except, indeed, in their high intellectual endowments, had to struggle against natural obstacles; and, instead of growing up spontaneously to their unrivaled eminence, they forced themselves forward by the most discouraging, artificial process.

Demosthenes combated an impediment in speech and an ungainliness of gesture, which, at first, drove him from the forum in disgrace. Cicero failed, at first, through weakness of lungs, and an excessive vehemence of manner, which wearied the hearers and defeated his own purpose. These defects were conquered by study and discipline. He exiled himself from home, and, during his absence, in various lands, passed not a day without a rhetorical exercise, seeking the masters who were most severe in criticism as the surest means of leading him to the perfection at which he aimed.

Such, too, was the education of their other great men. They were all, according to their ability and station, orators; orators, not by nature or accident, but by education, formed in a strict process of rhetorical training.

The inference to be drawn from these observations is that, if so many of those who received an accomplished education became accomplished orators, because to become so was one purpose of their study, then it is in the power of a much larger proportion among us to form ourselves into creditable and accurate speakers. The inference should not be denied until proved false by experiment.

Let this art be made an object of attention; let young men train themselves to it faithfully and long; and if any of competent talents and tolerable science be found, at last, incapable of expressing themselves in continued and connected discourse, so as to answer the ends of public speaking, then, and not till then, let it be said that a peculiar