day? Some men do an immense amount of labor; and all men, however much they accomplish, are capable of doing immensely more. John complains bitterly of the length of his recitations, and actually supposes he is taxing his system extravagantly, but double these very lessons and the chances. are that he will come up to the standard quite as fairly as before. We knew a young man who was so ambitious to lead in the race for collegiate honors, that midnight frequently found him at his labors. His eyes, naturally weak, soon gave such unmistakeable indications of failure, that he consulted an eminent oculist, who told him what his common sense should long before have taught him, that he must desist entirely from study by artificial light, and be especially careful not to work by the last faint rays of the setting sun. Such imperfect light was worse than candle

light.

Six hours gone at one fell swoop! He was in despair. The prize lately almost in his grasp, seemed remote as the unsympathetic stars. Still he persevered, and became clearer than ever in his demonstrations, and more accurate in all his studies. His general health, too, was greatly improved. On what principle can this anomaly be explained? He had condensed into six hours the labor of twelve. Doubtless you have read Ivanhoe, Mohicans, Vanity Fair, or Dombey, and doubtless a brigade of organ-grinders and squadrons of monkeys would have failed to distract your attention for a single moment from the fortunes of your hero. You could hardly answer a civil question without a savage growl, and wondered why people could not let you alone, when they might see you were so busy. You seldom feel so irate when you are interrupted in the course of study. A little of the same zeal then would accomplish literal wonders. Resolutely close the eyes against beauty; shut the ears against melody; subdue rebellious passions; rigorously exclude irrelevant thoughts; bend all the energies of the mind to the lesson of the hour; and perplexing doubts will be resolved into certainties; knotty problems will work their own solutions; and cunning fallacies become transparent as air. This is genuine study, and all other methods are spurious and worthless imitations. Sixteen hours of reading, dozing, dreaming, and rambling from the topic, are spent in vain. Sixteen hours of diligent, but forced application yield as their legitimate fruits, stunted

intellects or shattered constitutions. Eight hours of genuine study will be sufficient time for the accomplishment of the severest mental tasks usually assigned in common schools and colleges, leaving ample leisure for social conversation, physical training, and necessary sleep. The observance of such judicious rules of study preserves the health, and stimulates mental activity in an extraordinary degree. His college life ended, the student would take his place in society, learned in the language of books, but not trusting implicitly to their guidance-keen-sighted, clear-headed, quick-witted, and strong enough to brave the wrath of the elements and the deadlier wrath of man.

The time is not far distant, let us hope, when the race of infant precocities shall have become extinct like the ichthyosaurus; and, boys and girls, brimful of life and vigor and promise of future usefulness, shall have taken their places; when school-houses shall have ceased to be slaughter-houses, and colleges, but beds of physical disease and moral pestilence; when listless apathy shall no longer wear the garb of study; and when the idea that a student can labor with his brain turned as many times as a workman with his hands, shall have been thoroughly exploded. Hygene, hasten the day!

L. L. D.

ART. XXVIII.

Ballou and Universalism.

EARLY in the year 1773, when these States in their colonial dependence were wrestling with the problem of Parliamentary authority, and were on the eve of that great revolution which made us a nation, by a journey of about three days, which would now require scarce as many hours, one might have reached the relatively unimportant town of Richmond on the southern border of New Hampshire. Till within less than fifteen years of that time, the forests of Richmond had been unbroken. And even then but few

huts we can scarcely say houses-planted in the woodlands, sent up their curling clouds of smoke into the blue heavens above.

Entering one of these huts, in no wise distinguished from the others, we make the genial acquaintance of a man upwards of fifty years of age,-for more than twenty years a Calvinistic Baptist clergyman,-poor, and deeming it wrong to be otherwise, at least by receiving reward for ministerial labor.

This good man is bending over the mortal remains of the partner of his youth and the mother of his eleven children. Playing at his feet, all unconscious of his loss, is the youngest of these children, a rosy boy about two years old, having been born April 30, 1771. This boy is Hosea Ballou, a child of the forest, and the subject of our sketch.

We need not dwell upon the influences under which his remarkable character was formed. He graduated for the ministry from the school into whose discipline he was born. Without teachers, without books save the Bible, he was shut up to the study of its sacred pages, to nature, to communion with himself, his family, and his God.

In the development of a rare character, God prepares for himself an especial instrumentality. In selecting co-workers with Christ, he did not call the rich, the noble, the cultured -men with whom pride of position and party ties would exercise a commanding sway; but humble, and, in the main, unlettered fishermen-men whose unsophisticated hearts readily received the divine impress; and whose sympathies with the great world opened to them the widest door of opportunity.

The work given to Mr. Ballou was the simplest possible. It was to rend from the human heart the veil that had excluded from it the light of divine love. It was to quicken that heart into consciousness of its filial relations to God. It was to restore the Father to a lost world, and a lost world to its Father.

Discipline for so central and vital a work as this, could be gained, not amid the subtleties of the schoolmen, not in the fields of abstruser science, not in the fathomless depths of ancient lore-all useful to other ends; but through the closest sympathy with nature, the keenest appreciation of human needs, and the profoundest experience of God's love.

Thus formed, the mind of Mr. Ballou was free from party ties, superior to fear of the world, transparent in its simplicity, and in spontaneous rapport with heavenly truth. When we would welcome to our dwellings the pure white light of heaven, we do not fill our windows with gorgeous and many-colored glass, but with the purest transparencies, made from the most perfect material. So when God would pour his divinest rays into the human soul, he selects as his instrument an understanding relatively uncolored by human errors, and a heart readily responsive to the spirit

of truth.

God has set his seal of approbation upon Mr. Ballou's ministry in the large measure of success he granted him. The very antipodes of a rhetorician, he employed the most apposite illustrations, embodying the principles he would enforce in the most palpable form; cleaving asunder the very heart of error; and, like the teachings of the Master himself, carrying conviction to the most unwilling minds.

How far the social and political troubles of his youth, and the agitations of our revolutionary period, served to develope and strengthen his remarkable powers of discrimination and to exalt the decisions of his moral sense, He who knoweth all secrets alone can tell. Certain it is that, while he employed few of the arts of the schoolmen, he surpassed them all in the unerring aim with which he sent conviction home to the heart.

Before he was nineteen years of age, Mr. Ballou shared, with a large number of others in his native town, the influences of a religious quickening; and, in pursuance of what he believed to be his duty, united with his father's church. Constrained thereby to a more careful study of the problems of faith, the doctrine of future ceaseless punishment soon came to appall his soul.

A more cheerful hope had already dawned upon many hearts around him. Elder Caleb Rich had visited many of the towns in that region; and Universalism, as he promul gated it, could not have been wholly unknown to Mr. Ballou. Spending the summer of his twentieth year in the State of New York, he gave himself to an habitual study of the Bible, and ere the autumn he rejoiced in hope of the salvation of the world. He returned home to find that his brother David, a dozen years his senior, had not only em

*braced the same faith, but had already entered upon a public proclamation thereof. In the family of this brother he spent most of the following year; and in the autumn before he was twenty-one, he entered upon the duties of the Christian ministry, believing and preaching the doctrine of universal salvation, as the ultimate purpose of Almighty God.

This doctrine had now been proclaimed in this country during a period of about twenty years, and numbered less than a score of public defenders. Among these, the most conspicuous were the Rev. John Murray, its first preacher here, who had settled at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the Rev. Elhanan Winchester, a distinguished Baptist preacher of Philadelphia, who, embracing this great hope, organized a society there; ministered to it for a few years; and, previous to Mr. Ballou's entrance into the ministry, departed for England.

It ought to be mentioned, however, that Dr. Mayhew, pastor of the West church, Boston, on at least one occasion, from five to ten years before Mr. Murray's arrival in this country, proclaimed the Universalist's hope. And, before the commencement of Mr. Ballou's ministry, Dr. Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Congregational church, Chauncy street, Boston, had published two anonymous works defending Universalism; the one a pamphlet issued in Boston, and the other a volume published in England. The same doctrine was uefended, also, by some of the Tunkers, a sect of the Baptists prevailing in Pennsylvania. But it does not appear that these facts had become in any wise known to Mr. Ballou.

It must not, however, be inferred that we have here indicated the origin of the doctrine in which we rejoice. Some of the brightest names on the pages of history have derived their glory from its consecrating power. Widely embraced among other sects in Europe in successive periods since the Reformation, it has also gathered churches in various countries, and especially in England and Scotland, by its own attractive power. It has been received by some of the best minds in Italy; it found a place among the forerunners of the Reformation; it was defended by the Anabaptists of Germany, and it now prevails not only among the so-called Evangelical churches of Germany, but among the Unitarians of England and France.