The first and most important office of education is to give the pupil the right position-till he attain this, all his development is but entanglement and confusion. He must see the unity and harmony of science. But where is its unity except in Christ? in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Only He who made the world, is the Revealer of its mysteries. The eternal WORD must be first heard. Where is the harmony of science, but in the spirit of Christianity, which makes all things one, by subordinating all to Christ, who is the true head of all things to the Church, and to whom the smallest wonders of science, the worm, the blade, the rock, even as the cherub nearest the throne-must ascribe all wisdom and glory, forever.

It would be an easy thing to show that the principle of faith enters into all science as its ultimate basis. Philosophy, natural science, astronomy, even the exact science of mathematics-all must at last assume their first and deepest principles. With nothing does the teacher find it more necessary to make his pupil better acquainted than with axioms and postulates. This is the hard-pan which lies at last under all our tilling; and the teacher who would proudly spurn the idea that Christian faith must underlie knowl edge, must at last quiet the Why? the How? and the What? of his earnest pupil, by the answer "So it is-an axiom, a postulate-self-evident truth-to be believed, not understood. Believe this and you shall understand the rest." How little we know! and what we do know, we know because we have believed something else first. Thus science, when we have followed it to its ultimate principles directs us to faith as its own last ground-points to faith as the highest reason, and to Christianity as the mother and nurse of all true knowledge.

Have we fairly shown, by various modes of argumentation and illustration, that Christianity cannot be sundered from the interests of mental development-then, what God has joined together let not man put asunder.

In calling attention to this subject we have not been beating the air. The popular idea of education at present rests

on the theory that mind alone can be properly treated in the matter of education. The secular element predominates in our schools; and the intellectual development of man, it is professed, will usher in the golden age of national and social advancement. This theory with its manifest tendencies, gives us no such hope, but on the contrary fills us with inexpressible fear! We fear power, any kind of power, even the divine power, when we see not behind it, and in it, grace mercy, and love. Education is power; and we dread it when it is unsanctified by religion, and wielded by spirits unrenewed in grace, and unconsecrated by the spirit of our holy Christianity. The iron horse, with bowels of fire, ribs of steel, and neck of thunder, is a pride and a glory on the track-but a ruinous demon beside it. Knowledge when it bows to Jesus Christ, and walks in His ways is an angel of light; when it rejects Him, and walks in its own ways, it is a rebel, like any other angel that stands not in its true estate, whose home and doom is the pit.

Dark are the shadows, which still lie and move on the earth, of "clouds without water carried about of winds." Many still are the "trees whose fruit withereth." But history will yet justify herself to her children, and evermore call back the earnest inquirer to principles which in his first essay he has overlooked, and passed by. The human mind, and those who have its development in charge, will yet discover the true steady beacon amid the "raging waves" and the "wandering stars" which toss about and mislead the pilots of human thought. Jesus Christ is still in the schools, "in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions." Teachers will sooner or later yield suitable reverence to the words of the Word, and to the truths of the Truth. They will yet learn to believe that they may know; and approaching the great and solemn problems of science with an ear open to His words, and a heart in sympathy with His Spirit, they will be both delighted and "astonished at His understanding and

answers.'

Lancaster, Pa.

H. H.

ART. V.-TRE IDYLS OF THEOCRITUS.

THE pastoral poetry of the ancient Greeks, we confess, is of a humble order. To the high ideal in art it makes no pretentions. It does not often, as does the grander Epos and tragedy, from the far back heroic times of legend and fable, draw its imaginary scenes, but takes them generally from nature as seen abroad in daily life. To almost superhuman beauty or grandeur, fashioned forth from the poet's imagination, it does not seek to give "a local habitation and a name," but rather, like the new comedy, tries to hold the mirror up to nature and "catch the manners living as they rise." Indeed even than comedy it is less artistic and ideal. Not being intended for representation on the stage, it has less plot and fewer incidents. In truth its whole scenes are generally nothing more than a set of simple dialogues between shepherds vying with each other in their musical abilities, having now and then a short narrative thrown in between as explanatory, and sometimes placed before them, as a prologue, some descriptive verses. In this way these pastorals, more than does any other species of poetry to be met with in Grecian literature, come to resemble in some places that kind of modern poetry called the Descriptive. Indeed what Theocritus intended his to be, and what they really are, can be seen from the title which he has placed before them. He has called them Idyls, meaning thereby pictures or images. They are graphic descriptions of life and manners, the scenes of which are not always laid among the mountains of his native Sicily, nor are they confined wholly to his own times. Of city life besides he has given us some vivid and amusing representations, as it was to be met with among the middling classes of his day, especially at their great festivals, and once or twice has he thrown his scenes far back into the old heroic times of adventure and glory, thus investing them with an ancient charm which makes us feel while

reading them, in each case, as if we had really fallen all unexpectedly upon some hallowed fragment of a lost epic. But, though bucolic poetry of any description, as we have just said, belongs not properly to the high ideal in art, yet the pastoral life of ancient Sicily, on account of its charming scenery and classical associations, so far surpassed that of any country in modern times, that in comparison it seems almost of itself to rise into a poetic sphere approaching very nearly the high ideal, at any rate in rural life. Of the fertile soil and varied climate of that island, who has never heard? To say nothing of Hybla, full of bees, and other celebrated mountains in it, who has not been charmed with what travelers tell us about mount Aetna? Around its base and up its sides for some twelve or fifteen miles, they say, are ever blooming the trees of the tropics, the palms and aloes, the grape vines and olive and orange trees. Here are ever heard the buzzing of bees, the cooing of doves and the serenades of nightingales. Ascending from these, the adventurer comes into a more temperate clime, and feels cooler breezes, as upwards, for some seven or eight miles further, he wends his way beneath venerable oaks, and chesnuts, and beeches, and lastly under the firs and pines. Here often is the squirrel seen peeping out from the branches above, and the rabbit and partridge scudding away beneath. In both these regions, the tropical and temperate, are extended the richest pastures and most magnificent park-like scenery. Above these to its bleak summit, a thousand feet, rises sublimely the snowy region.

Beside the fine natural scenery, however, showing itself every where throughout the whole island, in olden times were also many consecrated spots, scenes of stories and legends told by the ancient poets, which could still be pointed out, and with which the Sicilian shepherds were as familiar as with household words. Out from Aetna in the sea, were still conspicuously to be seen the famous rocks. which Polyphemus had hurled after the retreating ships

of Ulysses. Near Syracuse was still gushing up the renowned fountain augmented by the enamored flood of

"Divine Alpheus, who by secret sluice,

Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse;"

and in the vale of Enna, were still blooming the distinguished meads beside the yellow fields beloved and frequented by Demeter, where her daughter Persephone,

"gathering flowers,

Herself, a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis,

Was gathered."

Then had the shepherds legends of their own, not as yet to be met with in any of the books. They knew, for instance, all about the unfortunate love affair of Polyphemus and the coquettish treatment he had received from Galatea, the fairest of the naiads; they had often heard repeated the melancholy complaints of the coy herdsman Menalaus, and they were familiar too with all the touching circumstances connected with the deplorable death of Daphnis, that prince of herdsmen. We make no mention of the destructive. monsters said to have been always watching for ships outside of their island, the barking Scylla and fell Charybdis, the treacherous sirens with their seductive voices, and moreover beneath the island itself pressed down by the weight of Actua, that awfully great, extended giant, Typhoeus with his hundred heads. These mythical beings entered not much into the mythology of the shepherds, and whenever thought of by them they caused them no great uneasiness, but, like the lashing billows along their coast, or the deceitful calm of the ocean abroad, or the sleeping terrors of Aetna underneath, they only threw around their comfortable island a terrific grandeur and imparted to their quiet homes an additional charm by way of happy contrast.

Dwelling amid such scenery with the spirit of antiquity thus looking out of it and giving to it, as does the soul to a beautiful countenance, new life and expression, how could the shepherds keep sometimes from feeling a little poetical?

Watching their flocks and herds on those romantic