been subjected that it has actually become necessary for its best friends to put forth "credos" to declare that in all its manifestations and promptings it is an "emanation of the divine." Goodness itself has been made such an outer shell of creeds and systems that many an energetic soul has a mad desire to steep itself in wickedness if only to get at the kernel of life in some way. "There are many vices which do not deprive us of our friends; there are many virtues which prevent our having any," said the great Talleyrand, and no man knew better than he the mistaking codes of life that made it so. Nevertheless, those codes were all aiming at the same thing—to hit upon the right law in the case, though to do that was but to repeat the club woman's exploit of clamoring for a law that already existed. In its last analysis, therefore, the whole thing resolves itself to about the position which John Jay Chapman adopts when he advises rulemakers and reformers that "idealism is the shortest road to their goal." It is in treating man as a selfish animal when he is normally unselfish that the mistakes in government and philanthropy or reform have been made, he tells us, and in this light it is difficult to see just where the whole cumbersome machinery of law and government comes in any way. For, if to legislate for man as a sinner is a mistake, and to legislate for him as a saint is unnecessary, the only legitimate end of human institutions would seem to be to enlighten and not govern, to lift up and not bind down--in short, to show man who and what he is and what are his true relations to those eternal laws of life which are written in the very nature of things, and let him control and reform himself. "In his will is our peace," was the one note of law the great lifeseer, Dante, bore to the very souls in hell, and out of that fundamental truth in the moral order of the universe he left them to climb to paradise. It is to know heaven's law, not multiply earths' laws, that humanity most needs, and one of the greatest strides that the race ever made was in recognizing that that law was everywhere, in the natural and the spiritual world, and everywhere for joy, and beauty, and good. When it came to pass that man could truly say with the poet, "I spoke as I saw, I report as a man may of God's work, yet all's law, all's love," his redemption drew nigh. Simply to put himself in the path of it was all required of him. "It is just a matter of mental attitude,” say the wise psychologists, and whether Christian faith or psychic science help you to the right attitude, the blind laws of men become ofttimes worse than superfluous in the light of it. It was Solon himself who said that they were like cobwebs where the weak or trifling were caught, but the great broke through and were off. Yet more and more as the great break through the flimsy nets of man's laws, they show us the shining bars of the eternal laws of life and love holding, guiding, protecting us in every path of beauty and holiness, until, as the gentle Whittier puts it, "All things sweet and good seem our natural habitude.” THE BOY AND THE MAN N all the anomalies of nature there is little more astonishing than the contrast between the boy and the man. Any one who can may believe that the child is father to the man, but until life shows a few more cherubic pilgrims along her grown-up highways, it is a proposition that child lovers will question the world over. Something comes into the cold and calculating spirit of the man that you will search for in vain in any child that was ever born into the world. Something inheres in the glad and trusting spirit of the poorest child that is lost totally in the grown-up man. What becomes of it, poets and philosophers have tried to tell us at different times, and in different forms and fashions, but it all amounts to little more than this-that At length the man perceives it die away, To the nurse or mother, however, the transformation in the growing boy is far less gradual. Whether the cherubic age of his enchantment depends upon angels or petticoats, he commonly abandons it with the latter, and springs fullarmed into that bumptious and destructive creature, known to past ages as the "enfant terrible" and to the present one as the heir presumptive to brilliant and unmeasured genius. Nevertheless, he gives no hint of machivelian deeps in his translucent nature and does all his deviltry so joyfully to be seen of men, that no one can connect the directly opposite type of grown-up scribe or pharisee with the small boy's fathering. "Delight and liberty" are, indeed, his "simple creed" of life and conduct, and to keep them free from the blind interdicts of grown-ups, a mere question of logic or ingenuity. "Mamma said we must not play in the park today," said nurse to 5-year-old Johnny, as he pulled her toward the gate where the crowds were gathering. “But mamma won't know it," said the young reasoner. "But what if she asks us if we went there when we go home?" inquired the nurse. "Us'll say no," replied the innocent without a thought of harm. Sin as sin is totally unknown to the small boy, and now that psychology has found that all the mischief and diablerie he has been held accountable for is not inbred sin, but vital energy fermenting within him, it is a matter of no slight interest to know when and how he strikes that awful line which turns the good to evil and leaves him to "mix identities" with the grown-up man and sinner. Out of such an innocent beginning to come to such a sad and sullied end is something that no theories or philosophies of the human soul have begun to account for or even recognize at its full meaning. The best man that ever lived stands confounded before one glimpse of his innocent boyhood and finds it hard to identify himself with the radiant youth, who touched hands with all good angels and genii, and saw heaven breaking through earth in every rose of morning. Could any good creator have designed this thing, or gentle mother nature have put up such a retrogressive horror upon her children? It is impossible to believe it. That is the ques Who told you that you were naked? tion that rings down the ages at the gates of a lost Eden, and as each child in his development repeats the story of the race it is no doubt when some serpent of darkness blights the blue sky of babyhood with some knowledge of evil that his fall begins. Not until the human intellect has reached a point where it can know good and evil along the eternal line of cause and effect, act and sequence, can conviction of sin be made a means of grace to it. Before that it would be the first impulse of the startled creature to run away and hide himself from any God who seemed responsible for such deadly issues. The wisest little Eve who ever grappled with the dark question was that niece of Phillips Brooks, who, when told that she had been naughty and must ask God to forgive her, replied cheerily, "Oh, I told him all about it. and he just said, 'Don't mention it, Miss Brooks.'" The lilliputian Adam, however, takes it more heavily, and that, perhaps, as much as the different conditions of his life, is the reason why he is caught more deeply in the toils and falls away more swiftly and perceptibly than the girl child from the divine innocence of his first years. In any case the change is woeful, and the indications are that the man himself goes mourning it to the end of his days. "Would I were a boy again" is the cry of his heart at every burst of spring or flurry of first snow in the December heavens. The charm of half his wooing is in the visions of the boy heaven, with all its angels that it calls up, and if he does not build the domestic fireside mainly to find a corner where he can play the boy again, he tries the ticklish game about it often enough. The scenes of his boyhood are ever the ones nearest his heart, and the close of life finds him babbling of the green fields of childhood or murmuring, with the dying schoolmaster, "It is growing dark, boys; we must go home." Hood sings I remember, I remember The fir trees dark and high. I used to think their slender tops |