who would monopolize all high culture among a few luxurious favorites, and leave the great masses of industrious poor to ignorance, superstition, and loathsome vice. To do this, is to outstrip the heathen in obdurate cruelty, for they had household gods who were patrons of all the oppressed. Coriolanus, after having laid waste the country of the Volscians, felt himself free and secure by the hearth of Aufidius, under the protection of the penates, or household gods of his enemy; while here, in this Christian and republican land, unoffending children are born slaves, ignorance is plead as the only safety of tyrants, and persecution is the penalty which sympathizing benevolence is sure to meet. O, it is time this foul blot were removed, this most bigoted and disgraceful spirit become extinct. Until such improvement transpires, Christianity will continue to appear sadly obscured, like the sun when belts of clouds hide half his burning disk.

All moral truth, as

The needed reform will shortly come. well as scientific, is learning to work for the millions rather than for aristocratic cliques. Assuming numerous forms, both powerful and salutary, free thought will drive oppressive toil from the earth, and become the one grand laborer, the slave and drudge to mitigate the weariness of universal man. Science, guided by religion and subordinated to the highest ends, will create means of existence and enjoyment for myriads more than now breathe the air of true liberty; will people earth all over with MEN, instead of clods in the field, fops in the parlor, or machines in the factory; men, with industrious leisure, intelligent feeling, and holy hope, who will recognize the equality under which we are made to exist, and the heaven to which we should all aspire.

But, before this auspicious day arrives, it will be necessary for secular and religious tyrants to remove the splendid pinnacles falsely called the "pillars of the church; " hierarchies and arrogant aristocrats must take down the golden dome of special privilege, which has already become too ponderous, and begins to totter over their heads; they must take down the

gorgeous mass of hollow ceremony and priestly despotism which never belonged to the Christian order, if they would save any portion of the sacred edifice, which such deceptive corruptions have always endangered and never adorned, or an unexpected concussion will speedily lay the hypocritical time-servers and their desecrated altars together in ruins. The affluent, the powerful, and the proudly great by the accident of birth or ignominious adventure, must stand aside, that the honest though obscure peasant may come forward,

"His rights to scan,

And learn to venerate himself as man."

The voluntary association of a truly Christian brotherhood, where each one enters and retires freely, seeking individual enjoyment only in the general welfare, according to the simple conditions determined by one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, is the most efficacious alleviation, if not cure, of the three grand evils of this world-penury, bondage, and corruption. The church, from the morrow of Pentecost, has loudly proclaimed this; she founded among the first disciples a voluntary community of the blessings of life; and hypocrisy was struck dead, when it first attempted to corrupt the primitive law of benevolence. Since then, for eighteen centuries, Christianity has not failed to inculcate a tender regard for the happiness of all, and especial solicitude for the most obscure and needy. The union of all ranks and conditions, for the purpose of mutual protection and sanctification, has ever been her motto, as the world has taken for its motto to divide and subjugate.

The only force Jesus Christ employs to propagate equitable and saving doctrine is himself; that profound force, the sure possession of an immortal essence, which he brought with him from eternity to diffuse all through the diversified ranks of mankind. He knew that the truth he inculcated, all simple as it was in form and substance, was the way, the truth, and the life; and this he sowed profusely wherever he went, as the sower scatters wheat. The Christian husbandman has no need of worldly policy, force, recondite science, philosophical mys

tery, or cunning skill; he has the wheat of the word, earth and heaven, and he opens wide his hand to sow the seed of life. While human policy advances with her train and disappears, force antagonizes with force, science exhausts science, the philosophy of to-day supersedes the philosophy of yesterday, and subtle craftiness is captured in her own net; the wheat falls from the hand of God into the hand of man, and from the hand of man into the bosom of earth, whence the germs spring, grow, and ripen; humanity gathers the precious harvest with joy, partakes with rejoicing appetite, and soon attains strength to comprehend the most invigorating principles and defend the highest rights. Thus did Jesus Christ; and thus proceeds every one who sincerely holds to the truth as it is in God. He first comprehends the worth of truth by experiencing its power in his own soul, then diffuses it as widely as possible, and the world, which is the field, at length blooms with the fragrance and fruitfulness of heaven.

Christ smote the popular heart with the concentrated influence of infinite attributes, melted it into penitence, transformed it into adoring love, and filled it with expanding joys. He taught the multitudes that they had a God and Father in heaven; and thenceforth humanity, however abased and sorrowful, raised its joined hands to the skies, and, in beseeching God to relieve present miseries, felt the dignity and consolation which thence descend. The people have a God, not only in heaven, but nearer to themselves; a God who was made more tal and poor, born in a stable, cradled on straw, and who suffered more in all his life than any man. The people have a God, not only in heaven, not only in kindred flesh and poverty, but there is a God upon the very cross the great masses are compelled to bear, a living and triumphant God, to teach, defend, save, and console them.

Christianity, in its primary lessons, inculcates the principle of equality among men in the presence of God, which principle necessarily generates another, which is but the development or application of this, namely, the equality of men among

themselves, or social equality; for, if there exists, under this relation, an inequality essential and radical relative to justice, this inequality will render them primarily unequal before God. Religious equality tends, then, to produce, as its consequence and ultimate result, political and civil inequality. Now, civil equality has liberty for its form, for it excludes originally all power of man over man, and obliges him thenceforth to conceive temporal society under the idea of unconstrained association, which has for its end to guaranty the rights of each of its members, that is to say again, his freedom and native independence. Thus the freest and most salutary culture is secured by that religion which Christ came to establish, and which every way works a beneficial influence on the mind and destiny of even the obscurest of mankind. Says Hieremias, "In youth, in health, and prosperity, it awakens feelings of gratitude and sublime love, and purifies at the same time that it exalts; but it is in misfortune, in sickness, in age, that its effects are most truly and beneficially felt, when submission in faith, and humble trust in the divine will, from duties become pleasures, undecaying sources of consolation; then it creates powers which were believed to be extinct, and gives a freshness to the mind which was supposed to have passed away forever, but which is now renovated as an immortal hope." These mercies Christ bought for the poor, deserted, and disconsolate every where. Let us appreciate the blessings conferred on ourselves, and deprive no one, not the weakest and most obscure, of the slightest mercy designed for all. Like Christ, let us seek with tender solicitude to pour solace upon the obscurest children of mankind; and, to do this effectually,

"O, pray for those who in the world's dark womb
Are bound, who know not yet their Father, God."

CHAPTER II.

CHRISTIANITY THE PATRON OF THE
ASPIRING.

THE following positions mark the outline of the present discussion. Christianity was proudly contemned, when most pure; is adapted to encourage the deserving, when most depressed; and patronize all aspirations that are both free and grand.

In the first place, Christianity, in the immaculate purity of its unoffending youth, was treated by worldly greatness with chilling indifference and overbearing contempt. It was almost impossible for the insolent cliques of the day to suppose that any good thing could come out of Nazareth -a country town —a rural hamlet, away from the pollutions of their own bigoted and degraded metropolis. They were too dull to perceive, or too supercilious to confess, that in all ages of the world not one strong intellect, brilliant genius, generous redeemer, in a hundred, is ever born in a great city, garnished with ostentatious wealth and enervated with effeminate ease. Pride and intolerance were the mighty passions Christ first encountered, and towards which he ever remained the most unyielding foe. He gave no quarter to the mental oppression of the Scribes and Pharisees, and looked down with pity upon the great buildings, the palaces of affluence and power, amidst which deserving merit wanders unnoticed, and innocent genius too often goes weeping and bleeding from the humblest cradle to the most ignominious death.

All true greatness is invariably born in the sphere of industrious seclusion, and is there nourished from the beginning with that chastity of heart which loves God supremely. It