themes all the duties, and equities, and amenities of this earthly

career.

It is possible that a special reason for the decline of the Southern clergy may be found in that narrowness of Christian doctrine which made it necessary for them to be guilty of endless repetitions. With only a half score of ideas to present, in the neverending reappearance of these the audience yawned and slept, and at last disappeared; and, what was as bad as the gradual evaporation of the audience, there came the unwillingness of the clergyman to perform the labor necessary to the development of any new application of truth to society. It is the quality of all vain repetition that it kills not only the patience of the audience, but the mind of the performer. And, from some facts in the history of persuasion, it is to be believed that there is a quantity of affirmation which gradually brings infidelity to the very minds to which the innocent clergyman imagines he is bringing faith. Dr. Robert Hall tells of a preacher who proved so earnestly each Sunday the deity of Christ, that his audience became at last Unitarians from the mere reaction of too much argumentation. The convert from some pagan religion to Christianity accepted, after some logic and some entreaty from the missionary, the story of the whale and Jonah, and at the next Sunday lesson he advanced with some hesitation to the episode of Samson and the foxes; but on the third Sunday, when he was asked to believe in the narrative about the three children in the furnace, he failed, and said, " And I won't believe any longer that story about Jonah." His faith died of excessive argument. In part of such painful illness the Southern pulpit entered upon its last sickness; for, undoubtedly, there is a preaching of Christ crucified which leads to the wonder whether such a being as Jesus lived and died, and, if so, for what purpose? Under repetition the mind grows weary, and, being taught immersion for a thousand Sundays, it goes away and is baptized by sprinkling; or, being taught for a thousand Sundays that all moralists will be lost, the mind, from a strange form of sympathy, longs more and more to attach itself to such moral companionship and risk their destiny.

Let us assume that the doctrines of " orthodoxy" are true: they are not the whole of Christianity, but, on the contrary, they are only for the most part the divine side of theology, and in preaching them the Southern pulpit has generally omitted its own business to attend to that of the Almighty. The nature of Jesus Christ, and the details of any settlement made between him and the Father, are

known only in the courts of heaven; but that man must obey the laws of God, that he must care for his brother, that he must lift up his voice against all crime and injustice, are things known to man, and here is where his preaching must swell up into eloquence; and here, in this department of human welfare and duty, the pulpit in its most evangelical form has made itself felt in all the centuries which have come and gone since the times of Jesus. Here and there heroic servants of the Lord have appeared to espouse all the temporal good of the multitude, and, if need be, to fight the bloody battles of personal and civil liberty. The remote ancestors of the Southern pulpit, the Knoxes and that whole school, planted their feet firmly upon the earth, and made the banners of the cross and of human right wave from one staff. Indeed, it is the glory of all the evangelical sects, from Presbyterianism to the simplest group of Quakers, that in their histories the happiness and rights of man here were joined to his salvation hereafter, and were mingled together in hymn and sermon and prayer. The pulpit helped America discover her right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and helped her secure that right. The name of John Witherspoon alone will suffice to illustrate the right and the unspeakable power of this holy office to help the people when dark days have come. The sermons of that one man were one of the most powerful guns of the Revolution. He became at once a statesman and a preacher, and each office made the other more potent. In all the noble days of past epochs it will be seen that the orthodox clergy hastened to the front to lead their people, not to heaven, but to earthly happiness.

In the central and darkest part of the dark ages, persons of culture and piety were deemed too good for any mingling with human affairs, and places of solitude and meditation were built for these, that they might draw nearer and nearer to heaven. This withdrawing of the relatively learned and virtuous brought on the midnight of the period. Both parties, those in retirement and those in the world, were injured by the separation. The monks and nuns failed mentally and morally from want of noble occupation in the outer scenes; the courts and the aristocracy declined from the want of daily converse with what men and women there were of some information and some morality. The convents were full of preachers and lecturers and contemplative minds; the streets were full of kings and courtiers of low morals, and of loafers, criminals, and clowns. Thus mind, detached from the daily service of the

public, failed and withered as a plant cut off from light; and stupid ignorance and low vices filled the great lonely buildings in which learning and piety had sought a retreat. In abandoning the daily wants of the common people, learning and virtue had moved away from the sources of their own being. Not into any material convents hidden away in any mountain recess, or perched upon some inaccessible rock, has the Southern pulpit betaken itself, but into a small and dark corner of a badly named orthodoxy has it softly and slowly crept, until the suffering populace no longer sees its wisdom nor grasps the hand of its charity. Out of a few dogmas-the deity of Christ, a commercial atonement, election, immersion, the greatness of heaven and hell, the littleness of earth-the Gulf-coast clergymen have made the stones of a monastery gloomy and lonely upon a bold cliff, up the sides of which by means of a rope they draw up a basket of food daily, secured by pious beggars from the impoverished hamlets in the vale. Thus for a long period has that branch of mental industry been retiring its capital as though intending to retire from the Lord's business, and few will deny that in this effort it is meeting with abundant success.

It is easier thus to mark the simple facts of current history than it would be to determine the quantity of guilt or reproach which should rest upon the Christian ministry of the South who live amid the facts. As men who live upon the high mountain-ranges do not perceive at each respiration the rarity of the air, so those minds, however gifted by nature, who have long lived amid a certain condition of opinion and feeling, do not detect easily the new demand of the hour, but permit easily the morrow to be as the yesterday. We admire Watt and Fulton, and congratulate them on their power to contravene the old implements and machines, but we do not rebuke the men who before Watt and Fulton failed to see the engine and the steamboat. In the moral world the heart, acting as spectatator, admires those who saw that their hour had come for moving against the old and sluggish tide, but it has no rebuke for those who lived and died without having wakened once from the widespread lethargy. We admire the heroism of Orange and Knox and Wesley, but we can not grow angry over those who stood in the deserts of Egypt and Syria to permit starvation and thirst and the torrid sun to expel sin from their flesh. Toward the men who have revealed great prophetic vision all look with reverence and gratitude, but toward the common masses that see and feel no new impulse all look with either compassion or silence. This is very evi

dent, that the Southern Sates are now offering to the ministers of the gospel within their boundaries an arena of usefulness and honor seldom offered to the calm thought of age or to the ambition of youth. The religion of Jesus being an infinite sympathy, being a perfect development of the moral resources of this world, it longs to build up the schoolhouse and to care tenderly for the education of all the children; it longs to help the African become an educated and moral and free citizen; it stands ready to persuade the men of murder and violence to put aside the weapon and touch the handle of the plow; it waits and longs for lips to become bold enough to declare that industry is one of the saving graces of God's sanctuary; indeed, it mourns the long absence of an eloquence which shall declare that a good nation is a good church, and that education and industry are steps in the path of salvation. If there be any genius and intellectual fire that have survived the calamities of the past and which remain to-day in something of freshness and hope, there remains for this residue of pulpit force a great success if it shall cast aside its hazy discourses on the nature of the atonement and the exact nature of Christ; shall consider as dross its arguments to prove that a man is saved by faith alone, or to show that no human morals will avail anything in a remote judgment; and shall fill a heart thus made empty of folly with arguments for the schoolhouse, and for equality and righteousness, and for a general imitation of Jesus Christ. A half score of such Southern preachers could make the South rise more rapidly than the wild-headed politicians have dragged her down. Germany had only one Luther, England began with one John Knox. The pulpit stands near to all hearts. Youth and age, even childhood, wait upon its words; and those words sink deepest which, spoken by men of kind and pure lives, are made holy by the invocation of God and by grand or awful relations to a land beyond.

DAVID SWING.

GENERAL GRANT AND A THIRD TERM.

IN politics, morals, and law there is a field for presumption. The field is a limited one, usually, but within it the conclusions drawn are as trustworthy as are those which, in the broader field of testimony, rest upon positive proof.

In politics, and in the light of this day, no presumption can be more just and reasonable than the presumption that every Democrat is opposed to the election of General Grant to the Presidency for a third time. And this opposition by Democrats is not on account of the example of Washington, or of the tradition of a century, or of the resolution of the House of Representatives of 1875; for they were quite as fiercely opposed to his first election in 1868, to his second election in 1872, when the example of Washington was inapplicable, when the tradition of the fathers could not be cited, when the resolution of the House of Representatives did not exist.

Among Democrats the most conspicuous Democrat in this opposition to General Grant was Judge Black, of Pennsylvania; and, in the March number of the "North American Review," he gives his friends the benefit of his argument against the third election of General Grant, and inflicts upon his enemies the full force of his passions. He has seen nothing good or even hopeful in the events of the last twenty years; and he has read of nothing bad in the annals of Rome, where chiefly his studies appear to have been, whether as republic or empire, which he does not apprehend for America in case of the election of General Grant for a third term. His argument against the election of any person to the Presidency a third time is based upon the example of Washington and the declarations of Jefferson. The authorities are good, and, when there was no trustworthy history, either for example or warning, except that of ancient Rome and the histories of the medieval and feudal states of Europe, the argument itself was not bad.