them without reserve or exaggeration, the kind of life which they themselves knew. One of austerity and self-denial, limited and restrictive, but with a sense of inner purity and freedom for the higher spiritual nature. If you have once committed a wrong act, and are of a sensitive nature, you will long for penance and atonement, and feel as if undeserved enjoyment would be the harder to bear. By that phase of experience you will have gained some insight into the self-inflicted tortures of medieval saints, the severe art of some medieval designs. But on the other hand the reaction. of feeling represented heaven with all the color and glow denied to earth. All lovely and rich forms were used to adorn the religious thought. The ideal of the age was concentrated in the ecclesiastic form; and this phase of feeling you see depicted in the revivals of the French and German artists and monks, with their illuminated scrolls in gold, and brilliant color of crimson, azure and green, and their rare devices, childlike and joyous, of birds, beasts, flowers, and sporting butterflies. You read also in the human faces wrought in these pictures of saints with white lilies, lambs, or child angels by them as heavenly symbols, golden haired women, with quiet lips of peace, and level eyes, fronting the coming years with undisturbed serenity, the influence of the Catholic ideals of womanhood and holy infancy, and also the quiet current of the woman's and the true priest's lives. These countenances have nothing of the complex expression of modern forces, which are overcharged with a quivering electricity of expression, from the highly-wrought intellectual atmosphere of our modern life.

In seeing the pictures of the men and women of an age, giving so unconsciously the influences that were continually moulding the lineaments, and softening or quickening the play of expression, you gain the alphabet of the whole history of that land and era. Nor will you have to sift away prejudice and political theory and personal bias to reach it. To be a true historian, it is not only required not to tell a falsehood, nor even intellectually to apprehend the truth. You must also feel it, see it, live it in your own phase of experience, so that the whole sight, touch and grasp of the subject are full of its spirit.

So also in regard to biography, or the history of an individual.

It can only be written by the "next of kin" spiritually. But there is no difficulty about the veritable inside heraldry; it asserts itself. No one else has the insight and the power to write the history of a great mind, but his heir, on the soul side. Imagine how a practical, unimaginative pen would fail in telling of Palissy, who with the ideal of exquisite colors and delicate reliefs sought for the white enamel so many years in vain, until clothes, food and furniture were gone, and even the planks and boards were torn from his house to feed the fires of the furnace. There is a passage in the recent biographical sketch of "Edwin Landseer" by Miss Thackeray which very beautifully illustrates my meaning. She tells us that "in one of the notices upon his pictures it is said that as a boy and a youth Landseer haunted shows of wild beasts with his sketch-book, and the matches of ratkilling by terriers. Cannot one picture the scene, the cruel sport, the crowd looking on, stupid, or vulgarly excited, and there, among coarse and heavy glances and dull, scowling looks, shines the bright young face, not seeing the things that the dull eyes are watching, but discerning the something beyond, the world within the world, that life within common life that genius makes clear to us?" It is such a shortness of sight as must have existed in this common crowd which made one say in a very luminous paradox that "facts are often the veriest falsehoods," that is, outside facts, wrenched from their inner and spiritual connections.

But except by special sympathy of genius and character, and also close association, it is hard for one to understand these human lives and characters. For we cannot see the true "Finis" of the volume; no; nor the beginning, since each life is a sequel to another in rotation too infinite for us to follow. Very often it seems fragmentary and incomplete to our eyes. The lower forms of life, the sea-weed, and the flower seem, to our blinded sight, more joyous and symmetrical, for we see the whole of the rose's life, but so little of man's. Perhaps, after all, we have not read a single page of the veritable record, it is only the foot-notes of commentator, or preface of friends, or false interpretations of acquaintances that we have been scanning, with the outer titlepage and binding to assist. Evidently not much can be learned

so.

There is, indeed, a Day of Judgment to come among books. Only what one has seen or touched, or handled in the spirit, and concerning which one testifies from love, will be received. The true historian and poet are those to whom it is given to "hear a voice from heaven saying, Write." I do not mean by this that special illumination or seership will be needed as now understood, but I do mean that the heavenly dictates of earnest sympathy and genuine love and truth, by which insight into the soul or ideal of a theme alone can be gained, will be absolutely required of every teacher, whether he teach by sermon or history or poem.

ELLA MOSBY.

THE CATALOGUE OF THE LADIES' COMMISSION ON SUNDAY-SCHOOL BOOKS.

THIS Commission was organized for the express purpose of preparing a catalogue of books, which should contain such titles only as we could recommend for the libraries of Unitarian Sunday schools. Naturally, at the very beginning of our work, the question arose, What classes of books shall we include in this catalogue? It is easy to decide what volumes belong, or do not belong, in a law library, a scientific or a theological library. But what may we recommend to the children and young people in our Sunday schools.

Upon this point there was opportunity for great diversity of opinion. Some parents and teachers consider that any good book may have a place in a Sunday-school library, while others would limit our catalogue to books of distinctly marked religious tendency. But, again, what are the books of this latter class? Many who are interested in the religious culture and moral training of the young believe heartily in the good influence of books which present vivid pictures of child-life, - pure, simple, and guided by right motives, without an attempt to point a moral or

enforce a precept. And they value highly all books that make the material world interesting to children, and thus help them to new occupations and innocent amusements, while they excite love and reverence for its Creator.

While we were still without a basis and method for our work, some good book would be cited, a general favorite which we could not spare, yet which was not, in the strictest sense, a book of religious tone.

It therefore became early apparent that we must be very liberal in the scope of our catalogue. Yet, if liberal, we must also be discriminating; and we must make evident to those who were looking to it for direction the character of the books we could recommend.

It therefore became necessary to classify these books; and, after much discussion, we decided to arrange them upon three dif ferent lists. The first list should contain such as we could, without qualification, recommend to Unitarian parents and superintendents of Sunday schools. The second list should contain the books which we could not spare, though some objectionable phrase, or pages of religious teaching that Unitarians do not approve, must be indicated. The third list should contain all the books that we could recommend as "valuable and profitable, though not so fully adapted to the purpose of a Sunday-school library.'

This arrangement of our catalogue, made with deliberation, we regard as permanent; but we do not, even after our long experience, agree among ourselves as to the proper place for certain marked volumes. Some of us would place all books of healthful moral tone, though not of distinctly religious tendency, and also the books that introduce children to the beauty, order, and harmony of the universe,- God's universe,- or excite interest in and love for any of his creatures, upon our list of "books specially adapted for our purpose," while others prefer to assign them to the lot of "valuable and profitable" reading. In such cases the final assignment is the result of a majority vote.

The distinction between our first and third lists is, however, generally manifest; while the arrangement of the first and second lists is often misunderstood by those who fail to read the preface of our catalogue with care.

It would be a convenience if in this case the French expression "Les Deux Premiers" could be used, as, in the opinion of the members of the Commission, these lists are of equal value. In fact, they are but one list with a division run through it.

It is true that on one side of this division are found books that have a blemish in them, but these books would not be placed upon the list at all if their good qualities did not make amends for their defects. A book that is pervaded by doctrines considered objectionable, and is evidently written with the purpose of carrying out such doctrines, would be carefully excluded. Happily there are books, not of Unitarian origin, in which the author does not find it necessary to delay the children in the story with an account of the atonement before taking them in to their supper, or does not calmly place all their misdeeds upon Adam's fall or a personal devil. And there are also books that do allow children to remain as children, and which, though not written by one of our denomination, do enforce sound doctrine, by bringing religion into life, an active religion, that is not mere cant, and that does not consist in the repetition of creeds or doctrines.

Yet in the books written by authors who have been brought up in the use of creeds, words and phrases occur, often Biblical phrases, that have been quoted always in a certain doctrinal sense, and which, taken in the intention of the author, cannot be otherwise interpreted. They are puzzling to children who have not heard them so used, and they need often an explanation. Even Dr. Peabody has to explain to his Calvinistic critics that the exclamation of Thomas, " My Lord and my God," is not necessarily an address to Christ.

The appeal to Christ as to God occurs in many books, where all the purport of the story and the action of the characters show, on the other hand, a belief in one God only.

Such phrases are distinctly marked in our catalogue for books. of the second and third lists. But it is not sufficient for these marks to appear on the catalogue of the Commission alone. It is important that they should be used on the catalogue of each separate Sunday school. And superintendents and teachers are earnestly requested to make some note of these marks, either upon the books themselves, or upon their catalogues.