must be the simple utterance of the heart. Cotton Mather says of Mitchell, "He dipped his pen in his very soul." Words are but wind. But when the heart speaks in them, when its tenderness trembles on the lips and mellows in the tones, when its firm resolve clangs in the brazen throat, when its passions flash in the eye and hiss in the accents, then are words mighty. Webster compares eloquence to the eruption of a volcano or of a fountain. It is a fitting comparison; for it is an eruption of soul, whether terrible as Vesuvius or genial as a fountain.

The same is the source of effective action. The most effective beneficence is the simple, spontaneous outflowing of the heart in action. When the results of any life are measured, it may be found that the greater portion of good effected by a good man is not that to which he schooled himself as a task. deliberately imposed and toilsomely executed, but that which was the unconscious expression of his goodness in spontaneous words and acts in the simplicity of duty and love;

"That best portion of a good man's life,

His little nameless unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love."

And this is as true of the greatest as of the least works of beneficence. A reformation cannot be manufactured to order. Its moving impulse is not outward but inward. It is great souls living out their inmost life. The Puritans found not room to live out their own hearts into action in England; therefore they came to America-not with the purpose aforethought to found an empire, but simply to find room and scope for their souls to live. All history teaches that men achieve great things for mankind only as their own souls are full of spiritual life, which they act out in noble deeds. For such a man to live and act, is to live and act nobly.

Hence the great want of the world is men-men whose souls are so informed with truth and goodness that their lives shall be simply the unfolding in action of wisdom, righteousness and benevolence. This is the great want of every good cause; not of men to take up the cause-they abound-but of men whom the cause takes up, men into whose spiritual life

the principles of the cause are wrought. The watchword of the times should not be, "Principles, not men"—a maxim of fatal tendency-but it should be, "Men with principles."

This, then, is the one method of a noble life, Development, Evolution. In the stern discipline of life unfold your soul to the fullness of its strength and beauty; in simplicity and sincerity, like a little child, act out what you are.

Dismiss, then, your poor anxiety to be rich, to be famous, to occupy grand positions-the rust that ignobly consumes the soul. A noble life ennobles any condition. Plymouth was a poor place, the last that worldly ambition would have chosen for its pigmy exaltation. The catacombs of Rome were a poor place for ambition, underground caves where poverty and weakness took refuge from persecution, where men and wo- . men found scope to live out the grand lives of faith and love, which they could not live in imperial Rome. The cottage of the Dairyman's Daughter was a poor place for ambition, where humble piety ennobled the life and illuminated the death of a peasant girl. But these are sacred places now.

"Such spots as these are pilgrim shrines,

Shrines to no creed or code confined;
The Delphic vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind."

They who gained the eminences coveted by ambition are forgotten; these, who sacrificed position and sunk into obscurity and poverty under the necessity felt to live true lives, are immortal.

Equally a noble life ennobles the employment. Dr. Kane's life was noble even when he was carrying slops. Dismiss your contemptihle whinings about your situation, and live. Wherever God puts you, whatever he gives you to do, be a Remember the quaint words of Vaughan :

man.

"If a star were confined into a tomb,

The captive flame must needs burn there;

But when the hand that locked it up gives room,

"Twill shine through all the sphere."

Life has its mechanism and its spirit, the wheels and the

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spirit in the wheels. To eat and drink and sleep, to pass the monotonous succession of days and years, to tread the routine of habit, to toil for the material of existence-these are not life, but only the mechanism of life. They who live for thisweary slaves of slow endeavor," toiling for life's outward acquisition are like a prisoner in a treadmill, the slave and drudge of the mechanism which he ought to rule. There is a spirit-exalting life above this. The smile on the baby's face, the first gleaming of soul which asserts the difference between the child and its kitten; the laugh in which the heart's joy rings; tears that moisten and refresh life's wastes; affections that bind us to our kind; hopes, fears, and joys; doubts, faith, knowledge; aspirations and resolves; the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom; humility, penitence, universal love; the prayer that lifts to communion with God; patient toil and self-sacrifice for lofty ends; all the network of sympa thy with earth and heaven; these are life. And so even eating and drinking amid the amenities of domestic life and the grateful acknowledgment of the divine giver; the toil of handicraft for loved ones at home, for the welfare of man and the glory of God; all that allies us by sense to the brutes, all that is mechanical, all that is drudgery in the routine of business, become etherialized with love, ennobled with lofty purpose, hallowed by consecration to God and the reception of his blessing, and made helps in unfolding the soul to its highest strength and joy. The spirit in the wheels lifts the wheels themselves from the earth, and makes them flash with its heavenly glory, move with its divine impulse, and bear up, as on a firinament, all that is divine in the life and destiny of man. This is life, this its sublime quality, dignity, and aim.

"Like as a star

That maketh not haste,

That taketh not rest,
Be each one fulfilling
His God-given hest."

ARTICLE IV.-DR. TAYLOR ON MORAL GOVERNMENT.

Lectures on the Moral Government of God. By NATHANIEL
W. TAYLOR, D. D., late Dwight Professor of Didactic
Theology in Yale College. Two Volumes, 8vo.
New York: Clark & Austin.

1859.

Few works in the range of our American Theology come before the public either with higher claims to attention, or with a more assured welcome, than these "Lectures," by the late eminent Professor of Didactic Theology in Yale College, "on the moral government of God." The author was remarkable in the earlier years of his professional life, for a boldness of thought, a vividness of imagination, and an earnestness of appeal, which gave to his preaching of the gospel a startling power with all who listened to it, and which made his ministration an era in the life of many a quickened soul. But remarkable as these qualities were, and great as was the usefulness which they promised in his original career as a Christian minister, they were yet subordinate in him to others which pointed to a somewhat different work as his appropriate sphere. They were combined with a rare keenness of intuition, an exactness of statement seldom surpassed in the history of philosophy, a vigor of reasoning which it was difficult to evade, and a comprehensiveness of view which left no important aspect of a subject unnoticed. These qualities early marked him a divinely constituted teacher among men, and pointed him out as a leader in the discussions by which that generation, like every other, has been constrained to adjust and to defend the fundamentals of its religious belief. When, therefore, he was transferred from the regular labors of the pulpit to a professorship of theology, very high expectations of the influence and useful

ness of his labors were formed among the friends who had learned to appreciate him. These expectations were not destined to wait long for a signal fulfillment. The thoroughness and depth of his investigations gave to theological instruction. in his hands a character of completeness which it had nowhere else attained. He speedily drew around him a body of students, who listened with profoundest interest to his comprehensive and exact instructions. Through the medium of many enthusiastic pupils, as well as through the theological controversies in which he was engaged, his reputation spread widely through the land, till his influence had affected more or less the theology and the thinking of all Christian denominations among us. After some thirty-five years of study and instruction, than which none could be more conscientious or more profound, he rests from his labors; and we are now called to estimate, in these volumes, what is perhaps the chief effort of his genius and his piety.

The religious thinking of Dr. Taylor was molded, in a great degree, as must be the case with every independent thinker, by the original and constitutional tendencies of his own mind. His keenness of philosophical discrimination was such as might have made him as a less degree of it has made many another man-a skeptic; but from every such result as this, God graciously preserved him by the intense earnestness of his moral nature. Probably no one of his contemporaries was distinguished by greater fervor of conviction, by a more profound and cordial acceptance of the Word of God. No one who heard him preach, could question the reality of his faith in Christ. Not only was there in him an evident sincerity of belief, there was moreover an evident command of all the distinctions pertaining to the subject, which vindicated his right to the views that he uttered with such solemn fervor, and commended with such confidence to the acceptance of others. The joint influence of such qualities as these determined his peculiar theological career. Too earnest to be an unbeliever, too much alive to the importance of the infinite