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noble endeavor which lead to a brightness beyond. Here is a business man, alive to the musical chimes of silver and gold, keen to detect the means of pecuniary gain. In his eager, untiring labor for wealth, he has forgotten the wealth of affection, the world of intellectual enjoyment which lies around him. The heart is dead, but a portion of his intellect is sharpened into unnatural life. Here is the ignorant daylaborer. He knows nothing of the wealth of science, the lore of history, or the charms of poetry. His mind is all uncultured and inert. But he is not wholly dead. His heart is alive. He loves his wife. and joys in the sweet presence of his children, and labors cheerfully for their support. Here is another whose course in life is fitful and changing as April skies. He has no fixed purpose. He goes on like a sail-vessel driven here and there by every wind, and often becalmed—instead of moving steadily onward like a steamer breasting every opposing wave, and dashing aside obstacles as the steamer at every pulsebeat of its fiery heart dashes aside the spray. Some part of his manhood is dead. He has no faith in the omnipotence of work, no just conception of his dignity as man, no worthy goal in view, and so his course is vacillating and uncertain.

The loafer has suffered the triple death of heart, mind and purpose. He cannot love any one worthily, for love makes us self-distrustful, it awakens desire for nobler life, it inspires to work. He cannot even be a good friend, for his nature is too sluggish to perceive and meet the delicate requirements of

friendship. His mind is dead, except that baser part which gives expression to passion and appetite. The dignity of man, the divinity of knowledge, the desirableness of self-culture, the unmeasured worth of the soul—all these inspiring thoughts are lost to him. O loafer! thou art a miserable being. Thy life is aimless as the beast's. Thou wilt gaze on life with an eye as dull as that of the ox who looks on a beautiful landscape.

Young man, would you be a loafer? It is a small task. "Facilis descensus Averni est." "The way to hell (or loaferism, about the same thing,) is easy." You have only to hate to work, to neglect to cultivate your mind, to acquire a passion for playing all kinds of games and telling all kinds of stories, to allow yourself to hang around public places, and the thing is done. You are defunct, dead and worthless, and you bear about your own epitaph, written unmistakably plain-Loafer!

A FEW days ago, just as the sun was rising, in the stillness of the beautiful morning we heard the rumble and roar of a great train leaving the depot. Turning our eyes that way, we found the train itself concealed from view, but its progress was marked by the great bursts of smoke which constantly rose from the engine, marking the changing position and progress of the train. Never before have we seen such a trailing banner, full a mile in length, as that engine bore through the clear thin air of that wintry morn. Rolling out in great black billows, it would widen

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and whiten, unroll and spread, and pile up in fantastic shapes, only to unroll again and take on other shapes more fantastic still, still rising higher and growing more impalpable and clear, until at last it melted imperceptibly away, swallowed up by the surrounding air.

Looking at this wonderful, ever-shifting and everwhitening panorama, we thought how like it was to the memory which a good man leaves behind him. Seen in the present, his life, at best, is full of imperfections, veined with black lines of selfishness, ambition or greed—but, as the years pass away, these fade out in the mellow light of time; we think and speak of them no more, and so at last his memory comes to be purified of all stain, and is ever after an inspiration for goodness and truth to all who think upon it; and the man himself, according to his position and influence, is enshrined in the love of friends and relatives, or taken into the world's wide heart, is canonized as a saint and made a potent power forevermore. Happy they, be they humble or famous, who leave such memories behind!

FANCY is merely Fact coquetting a little with Falsehood.

TRAIN AND CHRISTIANITY.

[From an editorial reviewing a lecture by George Francis Train, so far as it alluded to the Christian religion.]

The Christian religion, as the abiding faith and the last enduring hope of all civilized mankind, is in no danger from Mr. Train. What the deep and reverent skepticism of Spinoza, the monumental learning of Hobbes, the wit of Voltaire, the bitterness and malignity of Paine and the logic of Taylor have vainly assailed, will receive no detriment from the assaults of a man whose highest claims to public attention are found in the fact that his impudence and egotism render his ignorance amusing.

We do not mean to deny to Mr. Train the possession of an incisive wit, a vivacious and brilliant intelligence, and what has been aptly called "vast and varied misinformation," but his attempts to explain the origin of Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster and Mahomet disclosed such utter ignorance of the subject as to create amazement even in the minds of his warmest admirers.

As already intimated, there was nothing original in Mr. Train's onslaught upon Christianity. It was a sickly revival of old stock quotations and Joe Millerisms on the subject, which civilization has lived down-which the intelligence of the age, in harmony with its spiritual needs and resentments, has long since banished among the obscenities.

But while there is no danger to the body of Christian theology and the Christian institutions of the land, from such puny efforts as these, there is danger that thoughtless persons, like some who applauded the other evening, beguiled into hero-worship by the wit and "smartness" of the speaker, may have their faith unsettled. For a man who has been reared in the shadow of the church, who has found in its teachings alone the answer to his questionings of the hereafter-for such a man to be brought to ask that awful question, “Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?"—and to go away doubting and unsatisfied, is the mournfullest thing that can befall a soul upon earth.

A religion-a belief in the fixed relations of all men to a universal divine government, and in a future state where imperishable souls will fulfill a destiny determined by their conduct in this-is as much a natural constituent of the human mind as will, memory or understanding, and the want of such belief as monstrous and abnormal as a condition of idiocy. Nothing proves this more clearly than the avidity with which men in all ages have embraced the impostures brought to them in the name of religion. Many of these impostures, like Mahometanism, have sustained polities and systems of government and forms of partial civilization for centuries. But in every case where they have not been discarded by the intelligence of the peoples holding them they have been discredited by the manifest superiority of other systems rising above them.

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