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 A 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 payment 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

talent or natural aptitude is requisite, the want of which must render effort vain; then, and not till then, let us acquiesce in this indolent and timorous notion which contradicts the whole testimony of antiquity and all the experience of the world. - Wirt.

CXIV. ELOQUENCE AND LOGIC.

OUR popular institutions demand a talent for speaking, and create a taste for it.

Where the

Liberty and eloquence are united in all ages. sovereign power is found in the public mind and the public heart, eloquence is the obvious approach to it. Power and honor, and all that can attract ardent and aspiring natures attend it. The noblest instinct is to propagate the spirit, "to make our mind the mind of other men," and wield the scepter in the realms of passion. In the art of speaking, as in all other arts, a just combination of those qualities necessary to the end proposed is the true rule of taste. Excess is always wrong. Too much ornament is an evil,-too little, also. The one may impede the progress of the argument, or divert attention from it by the introduction of extraneous matter; the other may exhaust attention or weary by monotony. Elegance is in a just medium. The safer side to err on is that of abundance, as profusion is better than poverty; as it is better to be detained by the beauties of a landscape than by the weariness of the desert.

It is commonly, but mistakenly, supposed that the enforcing of truth is most successfully effected by a cold and formal logic; but the subtleties of dialectics, and the forms of logic, may play as fantastic tricks with truth as the most potent magic of Fancy. The attempt to apply mathematical precision to moral truths is always a failure, and generally a dangerous one. If man, and especially masses of men, were purely intellectual, then cold reason would alone be

influential to convince; but our nature is most complex, and many of the great truths which it most concerns us to know are taught us by our instincts, our sentiments, our impulses, and our passions. Even in regard to the highest and holiest of all truth, to know which concerns us here and hereafter, we are not permitted to approach its investigation in the confidence of proud and erring reason, but are taught to become as little children before we are worthy to receive it. It is to this complex nature that the speaker addresses himself, and the degree of power with which all the elements are evoked is the criterion of the orator. His business, to be sure, is to convince, but more to persuade; and, most of all, to inspire with noble and generous passions. It is the cant of criticism, in all ages, to make a distinction between logic and eloquence, and to stigmatize the latter as declamation. Logic ascertains the weight of an argument, eloquence gives it momentum. The difference is that between the vis inertia of a mass of metal, and the same ball hurled from the cannon's mouth. Eloquence is an argument alive and in motion,-the statue of Pygmalion inspired with vitality. -Wm. C. Preston.

CXV.-LIBERTY THE MEED OF INTELLIGENCE.

SOCIETY can no more exist without government, in one form or another, than man without society. It is the political, then, which includes the social, that is his natural state. It is the one for which his Creator formed him, into which he is impelled irresistibly, and in which only his race can exist, and all his faculties be fully developed. Such being the case, it follows that any, the worst form of government, is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty or freedom must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction from without; for the safety and well-being of