DEATH'S FINAL CONQUEST.-James Shirley. Born, 1594; died. 1686. Are shadows, not substantial things; Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. Some men with swords may reap the field, They stoop to Fate, And must give up their conquering breath, The garlands wither on your brow! — See where the victor-victim bleeds! To the cold tomb: Only the actions of the just Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust. 26. RELIGION OF REVOLUTIONARY MEN.-Original Adaptation from Lamar{ine. I KNOW I sigh when I think of it that hitherto the French People have been the least religious of all the Nations of Europe. The great men of other countries live and die on the scene of history, looking up to Heaven. Our great men live and die looking at the spectator; or, at most, at posterity. Open the history of America, the history of England, and the history of France. Washington and Franklin fought, spoke and suffered, always in the name of God, for whom they acted; and the liberator of America died confiding to God the liberty of the People and his own soul. Sidney, the young martyr of a patriotism guilty of nothing but impatience. and who died to expiate his country's dream of liberty, said to his jailer, "I rejoice that I die innocent toward the king, but a victim, resigned to the King on High, to whom all life is due." The Republicans of Cromwell sought only the way of God, even in the blood of battles. But look at Mirabeau on the bed of death. "Crown me with flow. ers 'said he; "intoxicate me with perfumes. Let me die to the sound of delicious music." Not a word was there of God or of his own soul! Sensual philosopher, supreme sensualism was his last desire in his agony! Contemplate Madame Roland, the strong-hearted woman of the Revolution, on the cart that conveyed her to death. Not a glance toward Heaven! Only one word for the earth she was quitting: "O Liberty, what crimes in thy name are committed!" Approach the dungeon door of the Girondins. Their last night is a banquet, their only hymn the Marseillaise! Hear Danton on the platform of the scaffold: "I have had a good time of it; let me go to sleep." Then, to the executioner: "You will show my head to the People; it is worth the trouble!" His faith, annihilation; his last sigh, vanity! Behold the Frenchman of this latter age! What must one think of the religious sentiment of a free People, whose great figures seem thus to inarch in procession to annihilation, and to whom death itself recalls neither the threatenings nor the promises of God! The Republic of these men without a God was quickly stranded. The liberty, won by so much heroism and so much genius, did not find in France a conscience to shelter it, a God to avenge it, a People to defend it, against that Atheism which was called glory. All ended in a soldier, and some apostate republicans travestied into courtiers. An atheistic Republicanism cannot be heroic. When you terrify it, it yields. When you would buy it, it becomes venal. It would be very foolish to immolate itself. Who would give it credit for the sacrifice, the People ungrateful, and God non-existent? So finish atheistic Rev. olutions' 27 THE SAVIOUR'S REPLY TO THE TEMPTER.—John Milton. Born, 1608; died, 1874 THOU neither dost persuade me to seek wealth Extol not riches, then, the toil of fools, The wise man's cumbrance, if not snare; more apt To slacken Virtue, and abate her edge, Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise What if, with like aversion, I reject Riches and realms? Yet not, for that a Crown, To know, and, knowing, worship God aright, Is yet more kingly: this attracts the sout, They err who count it glorious to subdue Shall I seek glory, then, as vain men seek, Oft not deserved? I seek not mine, but His Who sent me; and thereby witness whence I am! 28. NOBILITY OF LABOR.- Rev. Orville Dewey. Let It is I CALL upon those whom I address to stand up for the nobility of lacor. It is Heaven's great ordinance for human improvement. not that great ordinance be broken down. What do I say? broken down; and it has been broken down, for ages. Let it, then, be built up again; here, if anywhere, on these shores of a new world, of a new civilization. But how, I may be asked, is it broken down? Do not men toil? it may be said. They do, indeed, teil; but they too generally do it because they must. Many submit to it as, in some sort, a degrading necessity; and they desire nothing so much on earth as escape from it. They fulfil the great law of labor in the letter, but break it in the spirit; fulfil it with the muscle, but break it with the mind. To some field of labor, mental or manual, every idler should fasten, as a chosen and coveted theatre of inprovement. But so is he not impelled to do, under the teachings of our imperfect civilization. On the contrary, he sits down, folds his Lands. and blesses himself in his idleness. This way of thinking is the heritage of the absurd and unjust feudal system, under which serfs labored, and gentlemen spent their lives in fighting and feasting. It is time that this opprobrium of toil were done away. Ashamed to toil, art thou? Ashamed of thy dingy work-shop and dusty laborfield; of thy hard hand, scarred with service more honorable than that of war; of thy soiled and weather-stained garments, on which mother Nature has embroidered, midst sun and rain, midst fire and steam, her own heraldic honors? Ashamed of these tokens and titles, and envious of the flaunting robes of imbecile idleness and vanity? It is treason to Nature, it is impiety to Heaven, it is breaking Heaven's great ordinance. TOIL, I repeat― TOIL, either of the brain, of the heart, or of the hand, is the only true manhood, the only true nobility! 29 LABOR IS WORSHIP.-Frances S. Osgood. Born, 1812; died, 1850. PAUSE not to dream of the future before us; Pause not to weep the wild cares that come o'er us; Unintermitting, goes up into Heaven! "Labor is worship!" the robin is singing; Speaks to thy soul from out Nature's great heart. Only man, in the plan, shrinks from his part. Keep the watch wound, for the dark rust assaileth; Play the sweet keys, wouldst thou keep them in tune! Lie not down wearied 'neath Woe's weeping-willow! Droop not, though shame, sin and anguish, are round thee' Rest not content in thy darkness -a clod! Work for some good, be it ever so slowly; Labor! all labor is noble and holy; Let thy great deeds be thy prayer to thy God' 30. MRAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE FRIENDLY TO FREEDOM.—Rev. E. H. Chapin. No cause is so bound up with religion as the cause of political liberty and the rights of man. Unless I have read history backward, unless Magna Charta is a mistake, and the Bill of Rights a sham, and the Declaration of Independence a contumacious falsehood, unless the sages, and heroes, and martyrs, who have fought and bled, were impostors, unless the sublimest transactions in modern history, on Tower Hill, in the Parliaments of London, on the sea-tossed Mayflower, unless these are all deceitful, there is no cause so linked with religion as the cause of Democratic liberty. And, Sir, not only are all the moral principles, which we can summon up, on the side of this great cause, but the physical movements of the age attend it and advance it. Nature is Republican. The discoveries of Science are Republican. Sir, what are these new forces, steam and electricity, but powers that are levelling all factitious dis tinctions, and forcing the world on to a noble destiny? Have they not already propelled the nineteenth century a thousand years ahead? What are they but the servitors of the People, and not of a class? Does not the poor man of to-day ride in a car dragged by forces such is never waited on Kings, or drove the wheels of triumphal chariots? Does he not yoke the lightning, and touch the magnetic nerves of the world? The steam-engine is a Democrat. It is the popular heart hat throbs in its iron pulses. And the electric telegraph writes upon she walls of Despotism, Mene, mené, tekel upharsin! There is a process going on in the moral and political world, —like that in the physical world, crumbling the old Saurian forms of past ages, |