of Watt or Fulton, of Morse or Stephenson or Elias Howe, they are romances of single-heartedness and denial. Our simplest tool and most familiar instrument of service cost the precious life-blood of one or more men, the latchet of whose shoes we are unworthy to unloose. Every improvement in labor-saving machinery, every plan of social organization, every effort at the rearrangement of civil or political conditions, every attempt at a re-adjustment of interests, every endeavor to reform an abuse, remove an obstruction, correct a mistake, mend a law, alter a custom, remedy an evil, has cost the very best life there is in humanity; experiment on experiment, failure on failure, discouragement on discouragement, sorrow on sorrow, the bruising, bleeding, breaking of the sweetest hearts that beat. There have been hundreds of Gethsemanes, scores of Calvarys. You may make your heart burn any day by dipping into the experiences of the men and women who have done but a small share in the work of overcoming the obstacles that lie in the way of reconciliation. The legend is not written in the New Testament, it is written in numberless books and pamphlets, reports, magazines, newspapers, that every one can read; the air is warm with touching appeals which, if they could be heard, would soften the hardest heart. If the day-laborer could recognize and feel the beneficence of the minds that invented the laborsaving machinery that he dreads and destroys as an enemy, his bitterness of hate would subside, and he would cease to fly in the face of his best friend. If the artisan, forgetting the apparent discord between himself and the man who employs him, could be made to appreciate the accumulated treasure of patient heroism expressed by that hated word" Capital;" if the unlettered could be brought to understand the ineffable tenderness involved in the sciences and literatures which wear such an awful aspect to them; if the vicious could have their eyes opened to the benignity of the virtue they are daily outraging and crucifying; if the criminals could be induced to regard the law that watches, restrains, punishes them, as the redeeming thing it is; if the sinful could have it borne in upon them that the social order they regard as their persecutor, their tyrant, their tormentor, is in truth their best friend-that the very tenderness of heaven is in it, that their turpitude and baseness is that of a child that should strike its mother, the tough old heart would begin to throb and bleed again. The observation of life shows that people are still much more governed by their feelings than by their interests, and surely the materials for working on the feelings are here abundant enough. If one tenth part of the pains were taken to use them -- properly that have been taken to make effectual the sufferings of Jesus, the power of consecrated life would be felt on an immense scale, and conversions would increase in sincerity as well as in number. Every good man does something after his kind to abolish hate, mitigate suffering, assuage sorrow, confirm nobleness. Every useful man is a reconciler; every true, honest and pure man is a minister of peace; all sacrifice is atoning sacrifice, for it helps to draw together the alienated. All atonement, says the church, is by blood. "Without blood is no remission." The Redeemer shed his blood on the cross, and the followers of the Redeemer have in all ages borne their crosses, leaving bloody foot-tracks on the soil of history. And blood answers to blood; the god dies in order to effect his junction with the wicked world; wickedness dies in order to effect its junction with the god. The blood-offering, voluntarily or involuntarily, is the law. Judas expiates his sin by self-murder; the criminal pays his forfeit on the gallows; the man of violence meets with violent death by accident, poison or the dagger; the apostate people perish by war; the nation that has shed innocent blood of Coolies or Africans must pour out the blood of its own children at Antietam and Gettysburg. This is the church doctrine. What shall we say of it? This: atonement is by blood, but not by the shedding of it; rather by its saving and purification. Phlebotomy is no more to be applauded in theology than in medicine. Infusion, not effusion, is the word. Blood means life; it is the symbol of love, exuberance, joy. But life and love and joy are all augmented by sharing. The more you spend them the richer you are. The sacrifice of Jesus was simply the voluntary, glad outpouring of his fullness, and all sacrifice is of the same quality. The crucifixion of Jesus in history was an untoward interruption of his lifebestowing career, a cessation of his loving influence, the stoppage of his regenerating heartbeats. Judas would have better expiated his fault by living to mend it. The murderer would make more complete atonement by useful labor. Reconciliation is effected by co-operation of service. Set the blood flying in this way; make all people feel that they are of "one blood," and the true at-one-ment will be finished. Let the cross mean, not the painful surrender of life, but its glad overflow; wipe from the altar the spots of gore, wash white the priest's bloody robes, purify the halls of divinity with disinfectants to remove the cadaverous smell, revise the theological death-code, purge the vocabulary of its ghastly words, disenchant the emblems, lay stress on the sympathy not the suffering, and the old problem will receive a new solution. VL POWER OF MORAL INSPIRATION. MR R. LECYK, at the close of his powerful and eloquent book on Rationalism in Europe, in which he traces with conscious superiority and hardly concealed triumph the progress that reason has made in the fields of practical and speculative thought, and celebrates with pride the successive victories of intelligence over ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, falls into a strain of sadness as he reflects on the moral tendency of the very principle whose power he has so successfully vindicated. He regrets the decay of the old heroic ethics, the decline of the spirit of enthusiasm, the departure of the grand virtues of disinterestedness, magnanimity, sacrifice which distinguished the otherwise barren periods of history, and declares that in the course of our intellectual progress we have lost spiritual qualities of priceless worth. He deplores the mercenary, venal, prosaic character of our modern utilitarian |