companionship of soul. They are not helpmeets in any real sense. It is the marriage of the cedar and thistle. And the only cure for this evil is such a real love as shall bring their aims together, as shall enable one to enter into the convictions and objects of the other, till they grow at last into one spirit

and purpose.

But there are other misalliances as inconsistent as the marriage of the cedar and thistle. There are moral misalliances which we may consider.

One of these is the compromise between right and wrong; the attempt to marry justice and injustice, humanity and cruelty, truths and lies. We have had a great deal of it in this country, and have suffered in consequence. Now a compromise itself is not wrong, when no principle is involved. It is, in fact, the element of all practice. We could not do anything without compromises. In common life we always have to split the difference, to give up something we want in order to get something else. Two persons could not live together a day without mutual compromises. So in politics, compromises are necessary. If you want to carry an election, you must unite a multitude holding a great variety of opinions, and each must give up something he would like to have; each must be willing to wait, and postpone his wish, and realize only a part of it now, hoping to have more hereafter. The most impracticable radical, who has denounced compromises all his life, the moment he begins to act begins to

make compromises; and it is right and proper to do so. There is nothing wrong in it when he only gives up his own interests. The evil is in giving up principle, giving up justice, giving up honor and truth. That we did formerly, in the old compromises between freedom and slavery; for in those we did not surrender our own interests merely, but the rights of others.

Everything which men seek after in this world has its price marked upon it. If you wish it, pay the just price for it, but do not expect to acquire it without. Many of the failures, defalcations, and disasters of the business world to-day, which discourage enterprise and leave labor unemployed, come from the habits of speculation which always attend and follow a great war. A few years since half the world was trying to become rich, not by industry and economy in one's own regular business, but by speculation. But the man who speculates is a gambler, and a gambler is one who wishes to make money without paying the price; to accumulate by luck, not by industry. To marry commerce to speculation is a misalliance which leads to no good. It has plunged the nation into untold suffering and disaster.

Another misalliance is that of inconsistent expectations. In the outward world we do not hope to gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles, but in social life we perpetually make this mistake. In selecting the agent of a corporation, a town

treasurer, the cashier of a bank, or in filling other offices requiring ability and involving responsibility, we often select a man because he is smart, not because he is honest. After a while, if he yields to temptation and runs away with the funds, we are much surprised. We had been hoping evidently to gather grapes from thorns. A Massachusetts district sends a man to Congress whom all men know to have very little pretence to high principle; one, perhaps, who ridicules conscience as though it were cant. He is sent because he can say sharp things against the opposite party. Then the voters are amazed when for some personal reason he votes against their interests. They wanted a thistle, but they expected it to be a thistle for their enemies and a fig-tree for themselves.

There are few persons who like to be bad; who deliberately propose to themselves a life of dishonesty, meanness, falsehood, selfishness, and sin. No, most men mean to be generous, noble, and true, but they are not ready to pay the price. They wish for the satisfactions which come from wrong-doing and those of right-doing at the same time, or else to get enough out of selfishness to-day to be able to be generous to-morrow. They will be mean now and noble by and by. They will be idle, careless, selfindulgent now, and become industrious and temperate hereafter. But no such alliance is possible. You cannot go in opposite directions. Each step in wrong takes you so much farther from right, makes

You are

it just so much more difficult to return. forming habits which become stronger every day and every hour. If you wish to be wise, pure, generous, when you are old, you must begin to be so when you are young.

Men who enter public life should understand that they will often be obliged to choose between their interest and their duty, between the public service. and their private advancement. The union of the two is a misalliance; the attempt to unite them will be a failure. If they will devote themselves to the public good, leaving their own fame, fortune, success, to take care of itself, if they only seek to do what is right and wise, then they will have an easy and a straightforward path. Their work will simplify itself wonderfully. But if they are keeping an eye also to their own position and fortune, and are seeking to advance these, they will become like so many of our public men, narrowing their minds to little local questions of party success; voting for anything they think is popular, whether it is right or wrong; seeking to win the suffrage of the ignorant by pandering to their prejudices; advocating inflation to-day and contraction to-morrow, as one or the other seems likely to prevail; putting grand principles into their platform, and bitterly denouncing those who honestly try to carry them out. These are thy gods, O Israel! mere weathercocks, turned about by the last breath of the crowd!

There are other alliances, however, which are

thought to be misalliances, and are not so; princíples which are supposed to be at war, but which really make the strongest union.

Reason and religion form a noble alliance with each other. Religion is trust in God, obedience to God springing out of love for God. Reason is the exercise of the noblest power he has given us in the search for his truth. When these are united, what a grand union! The marriage of truth and love. is the symbol of the highest alliance of all, from which are born the fairest blessings of earth. The children of this marriage are knowledge, beauty, goodness, use. Religion divorced from reason becomes superstition. Reason divorced from religion. gives us only doctrines of despair. Together they create a new heaven and earth of peace, love, and progress.

In these days we hear much of the war between science and religion. There can be no war between true science and true religion. Science is knowledge; religion, as defined by Jesus, is love. Knowledge and love cannot be at war with each other, for both are powers planted in the soul by the Almighty.

The division of labor, made necessary by the abundance of work to be done in modern life, has placed men of science in one department and men of religion in another. Scientific men have little time to devote to religion; religious men little time to study science. But this is unfortunate, since