"Demetrius had withdrawn himself to Ephesus after the Battle of Ipsus [wherein he was routed] and thence embarked for Greece; his whole resources being trusted to the affection of the Athenians, with whom he had left his fleet, money, and wife Deidamia. But he was strangely surprised and offended when he was met on his way by ambassadors from the Athenians, who came to apprise him that he could not be admitted into their city, because the people had, by a decree, prohibited the reception of any of the kings; they also informed him that his consort, Deidamia, had been conducted to Megara with all the honours and attendance due to her dignity. Demetrius was then sensible of the value of honours and homages extorted by fear, and which did not proceed from the will. The posture of his affairs not permitting him to revenge the perfidy of that people, he contented himself with intimating his complaints to them in a moderate manner, and demanded his galleys; with which, as soon as he had received them, he sailed toward the Chersonesus.'"

"Not many months elapsed before, through one of those strange and sudden mutations which were frequent throughout his career, the fortunes of Demetrius were completely restored, and he was enabled to settle his running account with those who had proved so treacherous in his adver sity. I return here to the narration of Rollin :

"Athens, as we have already observed, had revolted from Demetrius, and shut her gates against him. But, when that prince thought he had sufficiently provided for the security of his territories in Asia, he moved against that rebellious and ungrateful city, with a resolution to punish her as she deserved. The first year was devoted to the conquest of the Messenians, and of some other cities which had quitted his party; but he returned the next season to Athens, which he closed, blocked up, and reduced to the last extremity, by cutting off all influx of provisions. A fleet of a hundred and fifty sail, sent by king Ptolemy to succour the Athenians, and which appeared off the coast of Egina, afforded them but a transient joy; for, when this naval force saw a strong fleet arrive from Peloponnesus to the assistance of Demetrius, besides a great number of other vessels from Cyprus, and that the whole amounted to three hundred, they weighed anchor and fled.

Although the Athenians had issued a decree by which they made it a capital offence for any person even to mention a peace with Demetrius, the extremity to which they were reduced obliged them to open their gates to him. When he entered the city, he commanded the inhabitants to assemble in the theatre, which he surrounded with armed troops, and posted his guards on either side of the stage where the dramatic pieces were wont to be performed; and then descending from the upper part of the theatre, in the manner usual with actors, he showed himself to the multitude, who seemed more dead than alive, and awaited the event in inexpressible terror, expecting it would prove their sentence to destruction; but he dissipated their apprehensions by the first words he uttered; for he did not raise his voice like a man enraged, nor deliver himself in any passionate or insulting terms; but softened the tones of his voice, and only addressed to them gentle complaints and amicable expostulatior. He pardoned their offence and restored them to his favour,-presenting them, at the same time, with 100,000 measures of corn [wheat], and reinstating such magistrates as were most agreeable to them. The joy of this people may be easily conceived from the terrors with which they were previously affected; and how glorious must that prince be who could always support so admirable a character!'"*

"Reflecting with admiration on this exhibition of a magnanimity too rare in human annals, I was moved to inquire if a spirit so nobly, so wisely, transcending the mean and savage impulse which man too often disguises as justice, when it is in essence revenge, might not be reverently termed Divine; and the firm conclusion to which I was finally led, imported that the old Greek's treatment of vanquished rebels or prostrate enemies

must forcibly image and body forth that of the King immortal, invisible, and only wise God.'

"When I reached this conclusion, I had never seen one who was called, or who called himself, a Universalist; and I neither saw one, nor read a page of any one's writings, for years thereafter. I had only heard that there were a few graceless reprobates and scurvy outcasts, who pretended to believe that all men would be saved, and to wrench the Scriptures into some sort of conformity to their mockery of a creed. I had read the Bible through, much of it repeatedly, but when quite too infantile to form any coherent, definite synopsis of the doctrines I presumed to be taught therein. But, soon after entering a printing-office, I procured exchanges with several Universalist periodicals, and was thenceforth familiar with their methods of interpretation and of argument, though I first heard a sermon preached by one of this school, while passing through Buffalo, about 1830; and I was acquainted with no society, and no preacher, of this faith, prior to my arrival in New-York in August, 1831; when I made my way, on the first Sunday morning of my sojourn, to the little chapel in Grand Street, near Pitt, about the size of an average country schoolhouse, where Rev. Thomas J. Sawyer, then quite young, ministered to a congregation of, perhaps, a hundred souls; to which congregation I soon afterwards attached myself: remaining a member of it until he left the city.

"I am not, therefore, to be classed with those who claim to have been converted from one creed to another by studying the Bible alone. Certainly, upon re-reading that book in the light of my new convictions, I found therein abundant proof of their correctness in the averments of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and of the Messiah himself. But not so much in particular passages, however pertinent and decisive, as in the spirit and general scope of the Gospel, so happily blending inexorable punishment for every offence with unfailing pity and ultimate forgiveness for the chastened transgressor,- thus saving sinners from sin by leading them, through suffering, to loathe and forsake it; and in laying down its Golden Rule, which, if of universal application (and why not?), must be utterly inconsistent with the infliction of infinite and unending torture as the penalty of transient, and often ignorant, offending, did I find ample warrant for my hope and trust that all suffering is disciplinary and transitional, and shall ultimately result in universal holiness and consequent happiness.

'In the light of this faith, the dark problem of Evil is irradiated, and virtually solved. 'Perfect through suffering' was the way traced out for the great Captain of our salvation: then why not for all the children of Adam? To say that temporary affliction is as difficult to reconcile with divine goodness as eternal agony is to defy reason and insult common sense. The history of Joseph's perfidious sale into slavery by his brethren, and the Divine overruling of that crime into a means of vast and permanent blessings to the entire family of Jacob, is directly in point. Once conceive that an Omniscient Beneficence presides over and directs

the entire course of human affairs, leading ever onward and upward to universal purity and bliss, and all evil becomes phenomenal and preparative, ‚—a mere curtain or passing cloud, which hides for a moment the light of the celestial and eternal day.

"I am not wise enough, even in my own conceit, to assume to say where and when the deliverance of our race from evil and suffering shall be consummated. Perceiving that many leave this stage of being depraved and impenitent, I cannot believe that they will be transformed into angels of purity by the intervention of a circumstance so purely physical and involuntary as death. Holding that the government of God is everywhere and always perfect (however inadequate may be our comprehension of it) I infer that, alike in all worlds, men will be chastised whenever they shall need to be, and that neither by suicide, nor any other device, can a single individual escape the penalty of his evil-doing. If man is punished because he needs to be, because that is best for him, why should such discipline be restricted to this span of life? While I know that the words translated hell, eternal, etc., in our version of the Bible, bear various meanings which the translators have befogged, giving hell, the grave, the pit, etc., as equivalents of the one Hebrew term that signifies the unseen home of departed souls, — and while I am sure that the luxuriant metaphors whereby a state of anguish and suffering are depicted were not meant to be taken literally, -I yet realize that human iniquity is often so flagrant and enormous that its punishment, to be just and efficient, must be severe and protracted. How or where it will be inflicted are matters of incident and circumstance, not of principle nor of primary consequence. Enough that it will be administered by One who 'doth not willingly (that is, wantonly) afflict nor grieve the children of men,' but because their own highest good demands it, and would be prejudiced by his withholding it. But I do not dogmatize nor speculate. I rest in a more assured conviction of what Tennyson timidly, yet impressively, warbles, in mourning the death of his beloved friend:

"O, yet we trust that, somehow, good
Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

"That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
"That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth, with vain desire,
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain!
"Behold! We know not anything:

I can but trust that good shall fall
At last, far off, at last, to all,
And every Winter change to Spring.'

"Twenty years earlier Mrs. Hemans, when on the brink of the angelic life, was blest with a gleam from within the celestial gates, and, in almost her last sonnet, faintly refracted it as follows:

ON RECORDS OF IMMATURE GENIUS.

"O, judge in thoughtful tenderness of those

Who, richly dowered for life, are called to die
Ere the soul's flame, through storms, hath won repose
In truth's divinest ether, still and high!

Let their mind's riches claim a trustful sigh;
Deem them but sad, sweet fragments of a strain,
First notes of some yet struggling harmony

By the strong rush, the crowding joy and pain

Of many inspirations met and held

From its true sphere. O soon it might have swelled

Majestically forth! Nor doubt that He

Whose touch mysterious may on earth dissolve

Those links of music, elsewhere will evolve

Their grand, consummate hymn, from passion-gusts made free!'

"If I pronounce timid and tentative these and many kindred utterances of modern poets, I mean only that the great truth, so obscurely hinted by one, and so doubtingly asserted by the other, had long before been more firmly grasped, and more boldly proclaimed, by seers like Milton and Pope, and has in our age been affirmed and systematically elucidated by the calm, cogent reasoning of Ballou, the critical research of Balfour, the fervid eloquence of Chapin, and hundreds beside them, until it is no longer a feeble hope, a trembling aspiration, a pleasing hypothesis, but an assured and joyful conviction. In its clear daylight, the hideous Inquisition, and all kindred devices for torturing heretics, under a libellous pretence of zeal for God, shrink and cower in shame and terror; the revolting gallows hides itself from public view, preliminary to its utter and final disappearance; and man, growing ashamed of all cruelty and revenge, deals humanely with the outcast, the pauper, the criminal, and the vanquished foe. The overthrow of a rebellion is no longer the signal for sweeping spoliation and massacre; the downfall of an ancient tyranny like that of Naples is followed by no butchery of its pertinacious upholders; and our earth begins to body forth and mirror- but so slowly, so faintly! the merciful doctrines of the meek and loving Prince of Peace. "Perhaps I ought to add, that, with the great body of the Universalists of our day (who herein differ from the earlier pioneers in America of our faith), I believe that our God is one Lord,' — that' though there be that are called gods, as there be gods many and lords many, to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things;' and I find the relation between the Father and the Saviour of mankind most fully and clearly set forth in that majestic first chapter of Hebrews, which I cannot see how any Trinitarian can ever have intently read, without perceiving that its whole tenour and burden are directly at war with his conception of 'three persons in one God.' Nor can I see how Paul's express assertion, that when all things shall be

subdued unto him, then shall the Son himself also be subject to Him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all,' is to be reconciled with the more popular creed. However, I war not upon others' convic tions, but rest satisfied with a simple statement of my own."

Most American citizens of the rural districts are active politicians. They have a good deal of spare time on their hands, which, as a rule, they spend in political discussion; whereas the residents of cities occupy similar hours, in which they are not actively engaged in business, at the theatre, social gatherings, the lecture room, the meeting for this, that, or the other benevolent object, etc., etc. It is probably true that nine-tenths of the talk among the male citizens of the country, and small towns and cities of the United States, would be found to embrace political subjects only: the conduct of national, State, and local government; the partizan issues of the day; the characters of representative men, and cognate topics. Horace Greeley was an eager reader of everything he could get to read, especially newspapers, from early childhood; and he frankly admits that the result was, he was an ardent politician before he was half old enough to vote.

It is a noteworthy fact that the first political struggle in which his sympathies were earnestly enlisted was upon the subject of slavery. It may appear singular to many persons that a boy only eight or nine years old should take hearty interest in a topic of so grave a nature; but the occasion which brought forth a national agitation of the subject at this time was the proposed admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave State, a measure which was very generally regarded, perhaps, throughout the North as politically wrongful, and as foreboding danger to the republic. It was discussed at every fireside; by every journal; by every public speaker. The pulpit thundered against the measure as involving national immorality and a turpitude so palpable that it might justly call forth the indignation of Heaven. When, therefore, we consider the nature of the question, of American rural communities then and now, and that they were unusually agitated, it will not be considered strange, after all, that a boy so singularly observant, intelligent, and thoughtful beyond his