IT may well be true, in the profoundest sense, that the

heedless world has never lost one accent of the Holy Ghost. But if Emerson's well-known lines be taken to mean, as they sometimes are taken, that all the great lessons of experience which the Spirit addresses to the world are permanently imprinted on the consciousness either of nations or of individuals, then I am afraid the lines are not true. The aptitude of the world for forgetting the accents of the Holy Ghost is precisely what justifies the epithet "heedless."

If the world continuously remembered the accents of the Holy Ghost, a large proportion of the "new ideas" which are to revolutionize our thought, our character, and our practice would be dismissed as soon as they were announced. Many of these "new ideas" invite us to make experiments which have been tried over and over again, often at some primitive stage of human history, and condemned in accents of the Holy Ghost as impracticable or disastrous. Some of