It was intended to have the little boys present our helpful Anna Gordon with bows and arrows, but as she did not accompany me, I took them from Vinta, a bright Cherokee lady, who is postmistress there, Mrs. Arnold, and she made | a nice little speech, telling them she "was glad they meant to make the Modoc blood respected, even as the Cherokees were proud of theirs, and had made it honorable." Then, to my entire surprise, four bright-eyed Modoc girls came forward, and holding a pretty bead basket trimmed with ribbon, they made, in perfect English and admirable concert, the following speech (written out for me by them):

DEAR MISS WILLARD-We feel thankful to our Heavenly Father that we have been permitted to look into your face and listen to the good words you have spoken, and hope that they will do us and our people good. We are poor little Indian children, and have nothing very nice that we can give you, but will you please accept this little basket as a token of our love, and when you look upon it remember the little Modoc girls. And now may the Lord bless thee and keep thee; the Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace."

Well, when those fresh young voices ceased, it was very -quiet in the little church, for I tried in vain to speak, and we all cried together. Somehow it was so blessed and so wonderful-the change in these "Modocs of the lava beds," and the dear gospel temperance cause which had brought us face to face, had renewed so many ruined lives of those who sat about me, that I wished in vain "that my tongue might utter the thoughts that arose in me."

After which I told them that I had been welcomed by noble people in many different States; by Governor St. John, of Kansas, and Colquett, of Georgia, in words most brotherly; I had also talked with the great chief at the White House, and sat down at his table, but never until these little Modocs spoke had my heart been so deeply touched by human words that I had vainly tried to make reply. In the afternoon we rode six miles across a lovely country, to the Wyandotte Mission, where Dr. Kirk, a Friend from Indiana, has a thriving school. Here we saw Chief Cotter, who went with Fremont on his expedition, a noble, kindly looking man, whose gray hairs and fair complexion contrast strongly with the unmixed blood of the Modocs, many of whom came to this meeting, and whose dark countenances and immensely tall heads tell of a will power greater than any "cast" can show in the famous phrenological collection of Fowler and Wells.

It was a day most memorable, and a fit crown to my long trip, with its circuit of all the Southern States save West Virginia, its priceless friendships and the forty new W. C. T. Unions, in which dear Georgia Hulse McLeod and I have so gratefully rejoiced.

Next day Colonel D. B. Dyer, Indian Agent, drove me twenty-five miles to take the cars at Baxter Springs, for the De Kalb convention. Colonel Dyer is a thorough temperance man, and keeps a police force of forty Indians on the alert, enforcing the prohibitory and other laws in his large agency, which includes two hundred thousand acres of land, with fifteen hundred Indians belonging to eight different tribes. The entire Territory includes eighty-seven thousand Indians, thirty-seven tribes and thirty-two languages.

I ought to have said that Mrs. Dyer, an Illinois lady, by the way, did the driving of the two spirited horses that careered with us across the bright and fragrant prairie, and I wish to add that she told me she had often taken that long drive alone and without weapons. We must revise our ignorant ideas of the Indian Territory by the fact that it is full of churches, school houses, and homes, and that it is minus tramps and saloons-two prevailing accompaniments of the white man's civilization.

Yours, for the day when all cities may be as reputable and as safe. FRANCES E. WILLARD.

A MISSING SCIENCE.

The science in question is a science of human action. This, however, is a very ambiguous phrase: we require far stricter language. A science of human action, in some sense or other, has been often declared possible; but never, to my knowledge, in the sense I am about to attach to it. It has been declared possible in kindred senses; but never in the same sense: and though the likeness here implied is important, it is important mainly because it will help us to see the difference. I shall be best able, perhaps, to explain my own sense, by referring to the writer who has, I think, come most near to it. The writer is Buckle. Let us briefly reconsider his position, his aim, and methods. The science Buckle sought to establish, he called the Science of History; and that such a science was at least conceivably possible, must, he argued, be plain to every one who assented to the following propositions:-"That when we perform an action, we perform it in consequence of some motive or motives; that those motives are the resul of some antecedents; and that therefore if we are acquainted with the whole of the antecedents and with all the laws of their movements, we could, with unerring cer tainty, predict the whole of their immediate results." If we believe thus much, he urged, we must see that the science is possible conceivably: if we turn to the materials to our hand, we shall see that it is possible actually, and that we shall be able in the end-the following are his own words "to discover the principles which govern the character and the destiny of nations." The materials in question he discusses at great length; and they are many in kind and character: but there is one class on which he dwells especially; and which alone gives meaning to the others. This is the class of material supplied to us by statistics. Statistics, he points out, afford a new kind of evidence; and they put us in possession of a new order of facts. They have completely revolutionized our conception of human conduct. They have shown us what we might else have dreamt about, but could never have hoped to provethe sameness of human conduct, when under the same circumstances. This holds good apparently of even the smallest matters. Thus there is a startling regularity, every year, in the number of letters posted without any direction. Marriages and murders recur in the same way; so does the proportion between male and female births. There is another example more striking still. "Among public and registered crimes," writes Buckle, "there is none which seems so completely dependent on the individual as suicide. . . . It may therefore very naturally be thought impracticable to refer suicide to general principles, or to detect anything like regularity in an offence which is so eccentric, so solitary, so impossible to control by legislation, and which the most vigilant police can do nothing to diminish. These being the peculiarities of this singular crime, it is surely an astonishing fact that all the evidence we possess respecting it, points to one great conclusion . . that suicide is merely the product of the general condition of society. . . In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law; and the special question as to who shall commit the crime, depends, of course, upon special laws; which, however, in their total action, must obey the larger social law to which they are all subordinate "

Such was the method of observation, and such was the first great inference, on which Buckle sought to base the study of the science of history. Statistics of human actions were, of course, not to be our only materials. We were to study them in connection with numerous other conditions, such as climate, culture, and politics. That, however, we

may take for granted: it is not to the point here. What is to the point is his treatment of the actions themselves, and his celebrated contention as to the scientific way of observing them. This, as we have seen, amounts to the following doctrine: that nothing is to be done by observing individual cases, whether of events or of a mental process. Such a method he calls the "metaphysical," and hardly any conclusion, he says, has ever been arrived at by it, that is not either trivial, or else uncertain. Nor is the reason of this, he thinks, far to seek. "Everything," he writes, "we at present know, has been ascertained by studying phenomena, from which all casual disturbances having been removed, the law remains as a conspicuous residue. And this can only be done by observations so numerous as to eliminate the disturbances, or else by experiments so delicate as to isolate the phenomena. One of these conditions is essential to all inductive science; but neither of them does the metaphysician obey: so that while he, on the one hand, is unable to isolate his observations from disturbances, he; on the other hand, refuses to adopt the only remaining precaution-he refuses so to enlarge his survey as to eliminate the disturbances by which his observations are troubled."

Buckle applies these words, in the place from which I quote them, to metaphysical studies commonly so called; but he uses such studies as a passing illustration only: he is really aiming at the study of action and of history. What he urges comes to this: just as the philosopher makes no solid discoveries by merely studying a single mind, so the student of history makes no solid discoveries by merely studying single lives, single events, or even single periods. Such is the outline of the argument in Buckle's opening chapters; and I venture here to remind the reader of it, not that I may criticize the method which it advocates, but that I may point out a want in the materials, and, above all, in the subject matter, to which that method is to be applied. The science of history, Buckle says, is based upon many other sciences; they alone make it possible. What I shall try to make clear is, that of those other sciences, there is one that has been completely missed by him. He has grazed it, he has touched it, but he has never laid his hands upon it. It is still to the world as much a missing science, as was political economy at the beginning of the last century. The best name I can give to this science is, I think, the science of human character.

I will explain my meaning further. Let us return to the passage just quoted, in which Buckle speaks of suicide. There is no act, he says, "which seems so completely dependent on the individual." That, however, is only seeming: what it is really dependent on, is "the general condition of society;" and, consequently, what the man of science must study, is not the private history of any individual suicide, but the number of such men in recurring periods, and the relation of this number to general social conditions. Now here, it seems to me, we have a piece of slovenly thinking, which underlies and vitiates the whole of Buckle's system. It may be quite true, or at least we may suppose it to be, that between the particular act, and the general social conditions, there does exist the strict relation that he says there does. But if this be so, why is it? The relation exists in virtue of a chain of events or facts, the last link in which is the private character of the individual; and were this character different, the act would be different also. Given a bold man instead of a timid one, a sanguine man instead of a phlegmatic one, we might see resulting from the very same external causes, not suicide, but a fresh start in life. Indeed, Buckle himself has pointed out at length what a complex internal process, on the part of the agent, is involved in the commission of the actwhat a nice balancing of motion, what a conflict of thoughts

and passions: and the same is the case with any act whatever. Surely then one would think that this internal process-this process in the consciousness of the individual, was a thing requiring study. It may be wholly dependent on external causes, certainly: but still, in producing their result, the external causes depend equally upon it. Buckle, however, has failed to note this. He has overlooked a truth, whilst busy in exposing fallacy. We shall never, he says, understand an act by the most careful study possible of the character of the man committing it. And in this he is quite right; but he leaps from this truth to a most strangely illogical conclusion. Because we shall never understand an act by studying only its immediate antecedents or conditions, therefore, he says, these antecedents or conditions are not to be studied at all. His contention, as we have seen, is, that when dealing with biographical details, such as a man's own conscious emotions on any given occasion, we can not, as he says, "isolate the phenomena,” or rise from our observations to any scientific generalization. And of course this is true; there can be no science of any single character, just as there can be no science of any single mind. But it is surely strange that Buckle, with all his materials before him, did not rise from this truth to another, which is next door to it:-that though there can be no science of any character in particular there can be a science of human character in general.

Let us take, for instance, the case of a vast mob of enthusiasts, inspired like one man, with a single purpose, such as the destruction of the Bastile, we will say, or the condemning the arrest of Mr. Parnell. Now, it is plain that no member of either of the mobs in question, could completely explain his presence in it, by any pers nal confessions of his own. The Bastile fell from causes which its direct destroyers were unconscious of. Mr. Gladstone is cheered or hissed under exactly the same conditions. Events and circumstances are involved in each case, which may perhaps be traced out by the scientific historian, but which are utterly invisible and unknown to the actors. Indeed, these last, in their joint action, may be exemplifying a recondite law, whose very existence is yet undreamed of. But though in looking at such events in a broad scientific light, the confession of a single mobsman would be of very little use to us, there are two points to remember.

A mob collects and acts, we say, owing to certain remote causes, and in obedience to a certain law. Let us admit that. But in the first place, be the law never so general, and the causes never so minute, the law exists, and the effect follows the causes, only in virtue of each mobsman being a man of certain character. In a mob of twenty thousand men, there are twenty thousand characters, twenty thousand sets of motives working; and the conduct of the mob is the exact resultant of these. We are accustomed, it is true, to ignore this fact in language. We speak of a mob as though it were really a single animal. We say that it got excited, that it was appeased, or that it did this or that. But we speak thus for the sake of convenience only. What we mean is, that twenty thousand men got excited at the same moment, that they were appeased at the same moment, or that they did this or that in concert; and they acted in such a way because they were severally of such and such characters, and because each man, owing to certain causes, was glad or angry, or hopeful or despairing.

Now, here comes the grand point to remember: no two men have the same history; no two men have the same moral character, and the character is therefore different of each of our twenty thousand mobsmen. In spite, however, of such differences in character, we have a complete unanimity of action. Now, to what can this be due? It must be due to the fact that our supposed twenty thousand characters have, in spite of their differences, certain points

on which they all agree; indeed, it is only in virtue of such agreement that their joint action is possible. Let us consider the point further. Of all these thousands of men each man has his own separate temperament, his own separate interests. The passions that direct him as a mobsman may be quite dormant in private life: and any two out of the number, under ordinary circumstances, might seem contrasted rather than similar characters; they might indeed be so. But when they all act together for one common purpose, all other countless differences disappear for the time being; they cancel out, as it were, leaving nothing but points of agreement; and the mob becomes virtually a single organism, whose strength or weakness is as some multiple of its parts.

Now, here are the exact conditions required for scientific observation. What is before us is the action, not of any special characters, but of average human character, when formed and excited by certain antecedents and circumstances. As Buckle says, "all casual disturbances have been eliminated," and "the law remained a conspicuous residue;" or at least the facts remain out of which a law may be formulated.

I have mentioned the case of a mob merely because it is a familiar example, and may help to introduce the conception that I wish to make familiar, the conception of a science of character; but I have got to state explicitly the first broad fact which such a conception presupposes, namely, that just as in a mob, men for the time being are influenced by the same motives, and have virtually the same character, so in all human society a similar thing holds good. In other words, despite the infinite idiosyncrasies of men, there is a character common to all of them. Under every difference there is a residue of entire sameness; there is such a thing, in short, as the common human character, which is as proper a subject for scientific study as are the mental processes which are the subject-matter of logic. Just as logic is the science of the laws of thought, so is the science I speak of the science of the laws of action. Of course this common character is an abstraction, in a way in which the common mind is not. We all think alike; we do not all act alike. We shall all add up with the same result the figures in a tailor's bill; we shall not all add up with the same result the inducements to incur or pay it. And for this there is an obvious reason. The action of the mind is entirely independent of circumstances, while the action of character is, within limits, entirely at their mercy. This fact, however, does not in the least make against what I am urging, for all the numberless varieties in question come from quantitative varieties of the same collection of elements.

Let us pause here for a moment; and for the sake of complete clearness, let us consider what we mean by character. We may express this in either of two ways: we may say that we mean by it susceptibility to motive, or we may say that we mean by it the development and the organization of impulse. We mean by a man's character, the proportion of force exerted on him by indolence or activity, by ambition or pride or envy, by selfishness or by sympathy, and so on; and what I am now insisting on is, that though this proportion is different in each man, yet it varies according to certain laws and only within certain limits; that is so far as the events of history are like each other, the same forces of character have gone to causing them; and that the connection between the two can be established on a scientific basis. For instance, whenever a nation has emerged from barbarism into civilization, when wealth has been accumulated or distributed, when aristocracies have gained power, or when the masses have tried to deprive them of it, all these events are the product of the action of human character; in so far as they repeat themselves, they are the product of the same action, and the laws of this action are

ascertainable. Let us take the following proposition, for instance: All progress is due to the ambition or the covetousness of a minority. Now, this proposition, or something very like it, has been often proposed and often quarreled over already. But the way in which it has been thus dealt with has been essentially an unscientific way. It has been dealt with as a matter of opinion-as a subject for sagacity, or shrewdness, or general wisdom; not as a question for strict scientific inquiry, which conceivably, at least, is capable of being decided absolutely. I am not here discussing whether the above proposition be true. I am merely insisting that, supposing it to be true, it can be established as a truth of science, and that all the larger phenomena of human progress can be connected with character in an equally rigid way.

If any inference is to be drawn from the facts brought before us by statisticians-by such facts as those that Buckle dwells upon-surely the above inference is inevitable; or rather we may say that it is not an inference from such facts at all, but only the reverse side of them. Character repeats itself in the same way, and in the same degree, that acts repeat themselves. The former is implied by the latter.

That the truth of this has not been realized hitherto is due partly to its being such a very obvious truth. That some sort of sameness exists in human character, is one of the first assumptions on which all conduct is based. We assume it whenever we offer a cabman some extra payment in order that he may drive us quicker; and we could at any moment multiply such instances indefinitely. The instance of the cabman, however, is enough here; let us glance for a moment at that. Out of the mass of city cabmen, we might, of course, find individuals who would not drive us quicker for any extra payment. Ill-temper, or drunkenness, might stand in the way; or the horse might be so lame that it could do no more than hobble; or so fresh that it would naturally go its quickest. But, taking the cabmen as a body, and eliminating all casual disturbances, the following law "remains as a conspicuous residue," that their speed, beyond a certain limit, is proportionate to their expectation of payment. Now, common sense and common experience tell us this; and we reach the conclusion so readily, that we overlook the fact that it is a genuine scientific generalization. Such, however, it undoubtedly is, though to understand it fully, it must be taken with many others; and in the same way, in our more trivial thoughts and actions, we are arguing from generalizations of an equally scientific nature. In other words, the science of human character is, to some extent, unconsciously mastered by all of us; we unconsciously ascribe to its truths a general and scientific validity. If this be so, it may be asked, "Why go through the ceremony of studying it? Has not common sense instructed us in it already?" And to this comes the old answer, that science is common sense organized, and Our common sense on these matters has to be organized still. We know much about human conduct; but there is much about which we are still ignorant; and our ignorance is daily betraying itself in the most momentous questions that are before us. ample, the question of moral conduct. ber of theories rival schools are maintaining! The theologian takes one view of the matter, the positivist takes another; and each of these views implies, in its last analysis, certain conflicting generalizations as to the action of human character. In the domain of politics, this is still more apparent. The socialist and the defender of property, the advocate of equality and the advocate of inequality, all rest their views on certain implied propositions as to the action of human impulses, and the degree to which they are capable of being modified. But these propositions, so far from having been verified, have never even been formu

Take, for exWhat a num

lated and placed together. They remain hidden in the fog of semi-conscious implication. Buckle himself remarks this in a note, though he never follows up the train of thought suggested by it. "A man," he says, "after reading everything that has been written on moral conduct and philosophy, will find himself nearly as much in the dark as when his studies first began. The most accurate investigators of the human mind have hitherto been the poets, particularly Homer and Shakspere; but these extraordinary observers mainly occupied themselves with the concrete phenomena of life; and if they analyzed, as they probably did, they have concealed the steps of the process, so that now we can only verify their conclusions empirically." And it will be found, I think, that the ignorance here mentioned is one of the chief causes of the present social ferment. To a very great extent all parties are fighting in the dark-radical and conservative equally, Neither can account scientifically for whatever faith is in them. The radical attacks the conservative, assuming that equality is desirable. The conservative attacks the socialist, assuming that property is sacred. But each side assumes the very thing that it ought to prove. It assumes certain propositions with regard to human character and human capability; and it never seeks to verify these propositions by any method that has ever been known to science. Such an initial study is of equal importance to every side. On this common ground, not of opinion, but of fact and evidence, every side might meet, and go together for at least a part of their journey. Numberless differences, by which politicians and social reformers are now divided, would then be impossible. They would be laid to rest by the compelling power of demonstration; and a change would be produced in the world of practical politics, analogous to that produced by the study of political economy. It would be the same in kind, and far greater in degree.

One of the causes why the science of character has been overlooked, has been the fact, as I have said already, that many of its truths are so obvious. But there is another cause also, which I shall now proceed to mention. Law, it is said, arises because of transgression. A crime is not prohibited until it has been committed by some one. The same thing is true in theology. The church does not define its truths till some heretic definitely denies them. In the same way, too, the science of character has been hitherto neglected, because, in so far as its general truths are concerned, nearly all the civilized world has, till lately, been in agreement. It has been needless to formulate what was never doubted. But during the present century all this has been changing. The conception of human progress has been growing more vivid, if not distincter; and countless schemes for improving the structure of society have been exciting and dividing men throughout the whole of Europe. Social phenomena, which are as old as the oldest civilization, which have always reproduced themselves wherever men rose from savagery, and which were once, though not hailed as blessings, at all events accepted as necessities, are now in some quarters declared to be quite removable, and the blind passions of the ignorant are being industriously excited against them. This statement does not apply only to the extreme section of Nihilists, or German Socialists. The same unsettled views as to the possibilities of human nature, are to be found in a less degree amongst our English radicals; nor when we recollect that the chief of the phenomena in question is inequality, will the remark be unintelligible. The question, therefore, now is being daily brought before us, how far are certain things removable, which a certain set of men are clamoring to have removed? How far, for instance, can we remove social inequality? and, if we remove it, what else must we remove with it? Now, to a man like Buckle, these were not practical ques

tions at all; and the way he touches on them is very significant. Thus the following passage is a case in point. "In every country," he says, "as soon as the accumulation of wealth has reached a certain point, the produce of each man's labor becomes more than sufficient for his own sup-port: it is therefore no longer necessary that all should work, and there is formed a separate class, the members of which pass their lives for the most part in the pursuit of pleasure; a very few, however, in the acquisition and diffusion of knowledge." Now this passage-and there are several, though not more than several like it-is introduced by him as though it were almost a parenthesis. It is introduced as a connecting link between his discussions of twosubjects, and he aims in it, not at informing the reader of doubtful matter, but merely as reminding him of something that was not only well known, but completely understood already. Why a "separate class is formed, the members of which pass their lives for the most part in the pursuit of pleasure," or why such a class, though always a small minority, has always existed in every civilized community, this Buckle never inquires-it never even seems to have occurred to him that it was a possible subject for inquiry; and thus it is that he has overlooked the necessity for a science of character. Had he lived in the present day he would have seen things differently. He would have seen that a mass of propositions, which to him seemed so undoubted that there was no need even to analyze them, were being unconsciously ignored in many places, and being openly denied in others; and the promise or the danger implied in these views would have forced him to apply himself to a scientific study of them. Instead of accepting the patent historical fact that all civilizations hitherto have been based on social inequality, he would have inquired carefully into the exact causes of it, and have tried to ascertain how far these causes could be modified.

Had it occured to him to do this, the materials he has already collected would have brought him, not to the scienceof character, but at all events to the threshold of it; they would have brought him, that is, to the first general proposition which the believer in the science is required to assent to, and which at once explains its scope, and shows its possibility. That proposition is this: the structure of society is the outcome of the structure of human character. Let a society be what it will, let wealth and power be distributed in it as they may, its structure at any given period is dependent on, or is rather the expression of, the character of the men comprising it. Let this fact once be fully realized, and a significant rebuke is conveyed to a number of modern theorists. Let us take the celebrated saying, for instance, "that inequality is the source of all social misery, and that our aim must be, therefore, to do away with inequality." Now, this doctrine may be true, or it may not be true; but the men who begin with maintaining it, begin at the wrong place. The scientific way of beginning is as follows:— whatever exists in society, or whatever has existed, has been the outcome, has been the expression of human character. Whatever features in society have been most permanent, or have most constantly reproduced themselves, have expressed the most permanent features in human character. Of such social features one of the most permanent has been inequality; therefore inequality is the effect, or the expres-sion of something that has been most permanent in human character itself; and thus the complete statement of the great radical thesis would be, not that the source of all social misery is inequality, but that the source of all social misery is the human character, or at least certain elements in it. And the full statement of this radical programme of progress is, not that inequality must be done away with, but that human character must be altered.

The value or the fatuity of any great scheme of progress

will never be understood until it is clearly recognized that this, in the long run, is what is involved in all of them. They all depend on our powers of altering the human character of eliminating or reducing some motives, and of strengthening others; of creating a new balance of impulse within the average man.

Now in supposing such a change possible, there is no primâ-facie absurdity. Although the first thing that we assume in action is the uniformity of human character, the first thing that strikes us in observation is its diversity. We see it not only diverse in different people, but in different nations, and at different epochs. We see changes in the average character, in which whole nations and epochs share. One of the best-marked examples of this is the change that has been either caused or expressed by Christianity, and which has been co-extensive with the entire civilized world. This of itself will be quite enough to remind us how greatly human nature is capable of being modified, and how naturally the hope may suggest itself that it may be modified yet further. The scientific thinker, however, should not be content with natural hopes. He must know that many things are impossible that at first sight seem almost inevitable, and that some plausible expectations are often the most misleading. This is especially the case in a question like the present, where the point at issue is, not whether a certain thing can be done or not done, but whether it can be done or not done to a certain or given extent. Human nature can be modified; we all know that. What we want to know is how far can the process be carried; and this is a point which none of the philosophers of progress has ever yet investigated in any scientific way. The whole inquiry, let me once again repeat it, is still a missing science, and the more clearly we realize the questions that the science will deal with, the more clearly shall we realize that they have never been dealt with hitherto.-The Contemporary Review.

went into the streets and into the market-places, into the workshops and the dens of sin, misery, and crime, and made the world listen to them. It heard them gladly as it heard their Master, and for the same reason. It could not help it. They laid their finger on its sore; they touched the seat of all its weakness and pain. Though they spake of invisible heavenly things, men felt somehow that they were things with which every man's life had very directly to do, and which lay as near to the wise conduct of this world's business as vital air and daily bread. And they spake with authority, with the ring of Divine truth in their tones, and with the momentum of a Divine force in their words. And so the world listened to them. It was stirred to the depths of its nature; there was such movement, such pressure, such budding and swelling as had never been known upon earth since the Spirit of the living God moved upon the face of the primeval Chaos, and Cosmos began to bloom under his quickening breath. They had not long been preaching before their enemies, those who dreaded the light, the liberty, and the life of their gospel, charged them with having "turned the world upside down," which, as it had been wrong side up since sin entered into it and marred its divine order, precisely expressed its need. But that is not the point here. The important matter is that it was not an esoteric and inoperative doctrine. It was for the great world, and it wrought on and in the great world mightily. But there was no revolution, or any approach to revolution. Despots tyrannized and subjects submitted;. masters commanded and slaves obeyed; women still lived under the yoke, workmen still toiled in the workshops, and peasants in the fields, for a beggar's subsistence; war raged as of old, and classes struggled for mastery, as in the ages before the gospel of liberty and brotherhood was preached unto men. Whatever this "turning the world upside down" might mean, and it meant something very real indeed, it manifestly did not mean the subversion of the visible order and the dissolution of the organic structure of

LAR CALLING.

One of the most wonderful phenomena in the history of civilization is the conservative and constructive power which Christianity exerted from the time of its first proclamation, while it contained revolutionary matter enough to burst in pieces the social structure of the world. It came as a doctrine of liberty into a world which slavery was steadily destroying; it came as a doctrine of equality into a world in which the classes were sundered by an impassable chasm, and cursed each other with the most furious hate; it came as a doctrine of fraternity into a world in which the nations regarded each other as natural enemies, and in which war was magnified as the noblest activity of mankind. And it preached its doctrines with no uncertain emphasis or trembling tone. Boldly, clearly, persistently, as men who knew that the authority of heaven was behind them to sustain their words, its preachers proclaimed, in face of bonds and wounds, and death itself, that in Christ "there is neither Greek nor Jew, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for we are all one in Christ Jesus." "One is your Master, even Christ; and all

ye are brethren."

This was their message, and they rang it out with heavenborn energy in the ears of an enslaved, envenomed, and wrangling world. And the word wrought mightily. It was no formula of a philosopher, or vision of a poet; the world had these in abundance, and was fairly weary of them; and it was content to leave them to the sophists or the dreamers, the easy, cultured, luxurious children of fortune, who seemed born "to lie reclined, on the hills as gods together, careless of mankind." No! these preachers of the gospel

on the surface. No universal revolt of slaves, no demand for the emancipation of women, no strike of the oppressed and afflicted children of toil, signalized the advent of the Redeemer, who came to the world with this promise on his lips, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath appointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."

And the reason of this is plain. The gospel came purely as a spiritual force to work on and in the spiritual nature of men. It aimed at, and would have, no mere reconstruction of society; it cared much more for its renewing. Its one instrument of regeneration was the influence which Christ could establish and the power which he could wield over individual consciences and hearts. All remained the same to the eye in the visible order of society. But to those who could pierce through the veil to the inner springs and processes of life, a wonderful transforming power was seen to be at work. Men were learning in their innermost souls lessons of truth, justice, and charity, which, first reaching their own hearts and homes, would work outwards and regenerate society. But, like all purely spiritual forces, it wrought inwardly and silently, and guarded and saved while it restored. If the first message of the gospel had run thus: "The constitution of society is wrong from the foundations; God's commandment is-level all thrones, break all yokes, abolish all class distinctions, and all will go well," then, with the enormous force which the powers of the invisible world which the gospel unveiled could bring to bear on men, it would have torn society in pieces.