duce to human well-being. If there is any absolute or transcendent reason for doing one thing and not doing another, we can never know it. We have no absolute knowledge of anything. And to say that a thing is transcendent is to say that it transcends knowledge. There may be a transcendent reason for the action of gravitation or electricity, but it does not concern us in any practical way. We can only study them in their effects.- Christian Register, June 23, 1881.

The comment as to the nun reminds us of R. Brinsley Sheridan's witticism, "I never scruple to tell a lie to help a friend, but it hurts my conscience awfully to be found out." It did not hurt Sheridan's principles much, forsooth, whenever the friend he fibbed for was himself. When picked up intoxicated, he answered the police officer's demand for his name, "Wilberforce!"

The dilemma of Hugo's nun, Uncle Tom, Jeanie Deans, etc., recalls Fichte's argument :—

The well-known illustration of the schools may make our thoughts clearer: A man pursued by his enemy with a drawn dagger hides himself in your presence. His enemy comes up, and asks you where he is. If you tell the truth, an innocent man is murdered: therefore, so some conclude, you must tell a lie. But how is it that these hasty reasoners rush so quickly to the crooked way, when so many possíbilities are open to them on the straight path? In the first place, why should you tell the questioner either the truth or a lie? Why not some third alternative? e.g., that you are not bound to give him any answer; that he seems to have a very evil purpose in his question; that you advise him in all kindness to give it up; that, besides this, you will take the part of the pursued and defend him at the risk of your own life, which, moreover, it is your absolute duty to do. But in that case, you urge, his rage would be turned against you. And how, I pray, does it happen that you calculate only upon this one result? Since a second one is certainly among the possibilities,—namely, that your adversary, struck with the justice and the boldness of your resistance, may withdraw from the pursuit of his enemy, allow his feelings to grow cooler, and be willing to come to terms with him. But suppose that he should attack you. Why will you at all events avoid that ? For it is your unquestionable duty to protect the fugitive with your own body, since, whenever human life is.in danger, you no longer have any right to think of the security of your own. And now it plainly appears that the immediate object of your lie was not to save your neighbor's life, but only to come out of this affair with a whole skin; and, moreover, yours was no actual danger, but only one of two possible cases. It seems, then, that you were willing to lie merely to avoid the remote possibility of coming to harm!

Suppose, however, that he attacks you, does it necessarily follow that you are overpowered by the attack, and that no other alternative is possible? According to the supposition, the fugitive has hidden

himself in your immediate vicinity: you are now in danger, and he is obliged by gratitude, as well as by general sense of duty, to hasten to your assistance. What right have you to assume decidedly that he will not do this? Or suppose he does not come to your help, yet you have gained time by your resistance, and it may chance that others will come to support you. If, after all, nothing of the kind happens, and you must fight alone, why, then, are you so sure of being defeated? You do not allow for the strength which even your body may receive from the firm resolution to tolerate absolutely nothing that is wrong, as well as from the enthusiasm of a righteous cause; nor do you take into account the weakness which may come over your adversary, through his confusion and a consciousness that his cause is unjust. In the worst case, you can only die; and death releases you from all further obligation to the assailed man, while at the same time it saves you from the danger of a lie.-Johann G. Fichte.

Legislators, however, are agreed that you always have a “right to think of the security of your own life."

Mr. Savage's replication recalls the words of a devout veteran thinker:

Tyndall's deistical work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Law of Nature, admits in its title the strongest ground, nay, the only ground, on which we can believe or defend Christianity. To suppose it a divine after-thought, a supplementary creation, an excrescence upon nature, is to dishonor it under shelter of pretended advocacy,— nay, more, it is to impugn the divine immutableness, the integrity of those attributes which underlie all religion. The highest view of Christianity is that which regards it as the religion of nature, as the constitutional law of the spiritual universe, as corresponding to the mathematical laws which are embodied in the material universe, absolute, necessary, eternal truth, that which always was and ever will be. Revelation did not create it any more than Newton created the law of universal gravitation, or Kepler the laws of planetary motion.- Dr. A. P. Peabody.

Last, though not least, may be cited two counsellors on the supremacy of "the Inner Light."

Right and duty in the hearts of men have for a long time been the same in their essence under all systems, or under no system. The fatalist Zeno scourged the doctrine of moral responsibility into his thievish slave, and Spinoza, the pantheist, at whose doctrine the Christian teachers shudder, exhibited in his life the Christian virtues in their full effulgence. Legislators do not inquire into the grounds of "liberty and necessity." Laws are made and administered according to the needs of society, as viewed by the most enlightened in their day. The ethical teaching changes from age to age, because morals is a progressive science. We should hang Drakes and Cabots to-day as pirates; but the Christian Queen Elizabeth fêted them and went

shares with them in the loot of Philip's treasure-ships. Negro slavery was not odious to Whitfield. As time goes on, many things we now endure will surely pass into the category of crimes.-"U" (Boston Daily Advertiser, Aug. 12, 1881).

Man is more than constitutions.- John G. Whittier.

All must be false that thwart this one great end,

And all of God that bless mankind or mend. Alexander Pope.

(3) The kindness of systematic charities. Dr. Stephen H. Tyng's idea and plan of operations, as exemplified in the church whereof he is pastor in New York, is delineated in his pamphlet report thereof under three heads,— Ingathering, Training, and Work:

The ingathering goes on through popular Sunday services, with evangelistic services during the week, prayer-meetings, meetings for inquirers, etc. There is a temperance organization among the young men that gives six o'clock Sunday-evening teas. Each member has a ticket for a friend, and becomes responsible for him; and in this way last winter a very low and degraded class of men, a hundred and fifty or more, were drawn in, so that at first it was necessary to station detectives in different parts of the room. After the tea, a prayermeeting is held.

The basement of the church has a regular kitchen and dining-room, and all the appliances for entertainments. Among the women there is a society composed of shop-girls, servants, etc., that meets one evening in the week for social and religious intercourse. Some of the members of the church bake bread regularly, and there is a stated distribution of it to the poor from the basement of the church. The church dispensary furnishes medicines gratis, and there are six physicians who visit at stated times and seasons. Legal questions are settled for the poor without charge, and a burial society provides for their interment. My idea is to have an agency adapted to every department of need. Like the prophet, we desire to stretch ourselves on the man, eye to eye, hand to hand, feet to feet, to reach him in his want, whatever that may be.

This recalls the "Associated Charities" of Boston and other cities, wherein by personal visits of local voluntary agents cases of want are remedied, employment furnished, and imposition prevented.* Each a little-a little well alive presents a telling aggregate.

In thirty years, the Children's Aid Society has taken out of New York City 67,000 children, many of whom have become farmers, lawyers, merchants, physicians, judges, teachers, and

*See suggestions by Abby W. May, Bella C. Barrows, Eliza T. Sunderland, and others, in the report of the Women's Auxiliary Conference, Christian Register of Oct. 12, 1882.

good men's wives. In the newsboys' lodging-houses, such attention is paid to health that, out of 187,000 who have been in them, only one death has occurred. In the girls' lodginghouses, 100,000 girls have been lodged and taught. The result has been that, while New York has grown from 800,000 to 1,200,000 inhabitants, youthful crime has decreased. The records of the courts show that, between 1859 and 1881, the annual commitments of female vagrants have diminished from 5,700 to 1,800; the commitments of girls for petty larceny, from about 1,000 annually to about 300. Organized crime has been met by organized Christian influence. The only hope of the community is in the co-operation of its individuals for the true and the right.

CHAPTER XXIX.

SUPPLICATION.

What Three Views of Christ's Precepts on Prayer?

(1) THE supplicational, which looks mainly to an objective blessing from prayer; (2) the aspirational, which aims chiefly at a subjective benefit; and (3) the intermediate, which takes for model the combination of the two found in the Lord's Prayer.

The Lord's Prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals.— Duke of Wellington.

In its seven petitions, it expresses the whole course of religious experience in the first three, the unhindered flight of the spirit to God; in the next three, the hindrances opposed to this aspiration by the sense of dependence on earthly circumstances, and by the conflict with sin; while the last petition expresses the solution which harmonizes this conflict. W. M. De Wette.

I desire no other evidence of the truth of Christianity than the Lord's Prayer.- Baronne de Staël-Holstein.

Only in the mouth of the Christian does the Lord's Prayer obtain its full meaning, since only the Christian can call God Father in the full sense of the word, only he can pray with right intelligence for the coming of God's kingdom, and only he can say, Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.-F. A. G. Tholuck.

Tholuck says the Greek word [epiousion] translated “daily" (in the N. R. margin "for the coming day") occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, nor in any of the twelve hundred works of Greek literature that remain to us. Some say it means "necessary," and that the expression is a figurative petition for whatever we need - whether of temporal or spiritual things to make us strong for the day's occasions.

Solicitude is the audience chamber of God.- Walter S. Landor.