"What once I dreamt not, now is true,
More lovely sights around me rise." *

Lo! in the fields the yellow grain, the ripening fruit, the full-blown rose, how full of life! how perfect how beautiful! And shall man, the crowning piece of God's workmanship, walk with aimless feet? Shall he be

"Weighed upon with heaviness,

And utterly consumed with sharp distress,

While all things else have rest from weariness? "+

No; man has a destiny, and, to corrupt, to enfeeble, or to abandon those instincts, faculties, and activities, which God has given to him whereby to reach his destiny, this is the soul's suicide; this, and this alone, is sin.

Man has a destiny, and his only evil is to deviate from it; and not to be able to act in accordance with his destiny, is the greatest of all miseries; this is, in every sense of the word, to be damned; this is the greatest torment of hell. Man has a destiny, and man's highest

good, his life, his happiness, and true being's bliss, is in nothing else than in the fulfilment of his destiny; it is in this, that his beatitude and heaven consist.

Man has a destiny, what is it?

II.

What is Man's Destiny.

"Oh thou great Movement of the Universe,
Or Change, or flight of Time, for ye are one!
That bearest, silently, this visible scene
Into night's shadow and the streaming rays
Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me?
I feel the mighty current sweep me on,
Yet know not whither."

BRYANT.

S it not high time that an answer to the

question of Man's Destiny should be given, or attempted, when we see our sanitary institutions and asylums filled with victims whose minds have been overwrought with false excitement, or who have become dupes of a diabolical mysticism? and the youths of our land balancing, like Hamlet or Werther, upon the chances

of suicide to lift up the veil, and discover to them the meaning and mystery of life! But who will tell us

"The fate of the man child,
The meaning of man?"*

Perhaps the many-sided Goethe, he, from whom "the students of our country are to learn," so says his translator, "how to realize their lofty aspirations.' Listen to his "Song of Life," which is after all, in its main features, but his own Curriculum Vitæ :

"I've set my heart upon nothing you see;
Hurrah!

And so the world goes well with me.

And who has the mind to be fellow of mine,
Why, let him take hold and help me drain
These mouldy lees of wine.

"I set my heart first upon wealth,
Hurrah!

And bartered away my peace and health,
But, ah!

The slippery change went about like air,

And when I had clutched me a handful here

Away it went there.

* Emerson.

"I set my heart upon woman next,

Hurrah!

For her sweet sake was oft perplexed,
But, ah!

The False one looked for a daintier lot,

The Constant one wearied me out and out,
The Best was not easily got.

"I set my heart upon travels grand,

Hurrah!

And spurned our plain, old Fatherland;
But, ah!

Naught seemed to be just the thing it should,
Most comfortless bed, and indifferent food,
My tastes misunderstood.

"I set my heart upon sounding fame;

Hurrah!

And, lo! I'm eclipsed by some upstart's name;
But, ah!

When in public life I loomed quite high,
The folks that passed me would look awry;
Their very worst friend was I.

"And then I set my heart upon war, Hurrah!

We gained some battles with éclat,

Hurrah!

We troubled the foe with sword and flame,

(And some of our friends fared quite the same,) I lost a leg for fame.