series of discussions, now summarized in the keen and timely volume entitled, "Half Truths and the Truth," he proved, as I think satisfactorily, that Mr. Emerson's earlier writings were pantheistic in tone and substance. No thorough-going pantheist believes in the personality of God, or in the conscious immortality of the soul. 2. I assert that no such course of lectures could now be delivered in Andover Theological Seminary, and command the general assent of scholars, as the first course did. The reasons why it would not now command that assent are, that Mr. Emerson's last two essays are pronouncedly theistic, and that Mr. Alcott has repeatedly of late called Mr. Emerson a Christian theist, and claimed that he has Mr. Emerson's authority for doing so. The two essays to which I refer are "The Sovereignty of Ethics," published in the North American Review, in 1878; and the "Preacher," in the Unitarian Review for January, 1880. Whoever examines these essays, will find almost nothing of the haughty pantheistic tone which runs through Mr. Emerson's earlier writings. Notice that I do not say that Mr. Emerson has changed his views. My two positions are, that Dr. Manning at Andover, twelve years ago, called Mr. Emerson pantheistic, and had the assent of scholars; and that Mr. Alcott at Andover, in 1879, called Mr. Emerson theistic, and had the assent of scholars. Mr. Alcott's testimony has great public interest, for he was the founder of the Concord School of Transcendentalism, a portion of which was pantheistic. Was Mr. Alcott himself ever a pantheist ? Channing wrote, in 1841: "I am happy to say that in my conversation with Transcendental ministers I have seen no Pantheism. Indeed, Mr. Alcott is the only man from whom I heard it."* Mr. Alcott is now undoubtedly not only a theist, but a Christian theist. He has founded at Concord a Summer School of Philosophy which is thoroughly theistic. The new note in the tone of Concord has come largely from Mr. Alcott, and whereas he once was a pantheist, he now delights to be called a Christian theist. He is to-day a most serious opponent of the Individualism, or Egotheism into which Transcendentalism sometimes degenerated, with grotesque and poisonous results. The change is significant, and I should be unfaithful to my charge as an observer of the signs of the times along the horizons of culture if I were not to tell the public what everybody in Boston knows, that we no longer hear pantheism from Concord. The revered founder of the Concord School of Philosophy has held * Channing's "Memoirs," Vol. II., p. 449. many of his celebrated conversations before gatherings in my rooms. In the very last symposium which he led, and when he knew that reporters were present, I asked him privately if he would tell the company what he had previously told the public elsewhere, and what has been already reported again and again, as to Mr. Emerson's theism. He said that he should be happy to perform that excellent service to religious truth. I said: "Correspondents of the press are here, and if you cannot revise what they write, you may be subjected to the annoyance of an incorrect report." "I will trust the facts," was his reply, "to take care of themselves." Mr. Alcott spoke to the company for half an hour with extraordinary impressiveness on "Immortality." He then read to us, in a tone like the sighing of the wind through the pine trees, that sweet and noble poem with which he has lately enriched our literature, and entitled "Love's Morrow." A great bereavement through which the Concord Plato has passed lately, and to which I have no right to refer more definitely, found partial utterance in that poem. I was reminded of Emerson's "Threnody," a production of his earlier period, and in which there is not a glimpse of a hope of immortality. When the reading was finished, Mr. Alcott was asked, "How do you justify your assertion that Emerson is a Christian theist ?" Mr. Alcott replied, "Professor Gulliver published in the New York Independent an account of my recent address at Andover. In that article the Andover Professor correctly asserted that I called Mr. Emerson a theist and a Christian theist. Before I went West, on my recent lecturing tour, I took that article to Mr. Emerson and read it to him, and asked him if I had misrepresented him. The reply was: 'I do not care to classify myself with any painstaking accuracy with this sect or with that, but if I am to have any appellation at all of a religious kind, I prefer to be called a Christian theist. You have not misrepresented me."" "On returning from the West," continued Mr. Alcott, "I found that I had been assailed by some rationalistic, anonymous correspondents of an irresponsible press. I went again to my friend and put again to him the same question, and he replied substantially as follows: 'My ancestry is made up of ministers. In my family the Bible is seen oftener than any other book in the hands of my wife and daughter. I think those facts tell my story. If you wish to call me a Christian theist, you have my authority to do so; and you must not leave out the word Christian, for to leave out that is to leave out everything." PROFESSOR CROOKES AND DR. CARPENTER ON THE PRELUDE.-GENERAL GRANT AND A THIRD TERM. NAPOLEON I. sneered at the military operations of our Revolutionary era as Liliputian. Lafayette replied to the proud Emperor that by the skirmishes of sentinels and outposts in America, the greatest cause known to modern history had been carried through to triumph against the most powerful nation of recent times. However small Washington's armies may look, the military operations. of our Civil War are not easily dazzled when confronted with anything in Napoleon's career, or in Frederick's, or in Cæsar's, or in Alexander's. There are six reasons for pronouncing General Grant's military career the most brilliant. in history. 1. He successfully commanded a million of soldiers for more than a year. No other general known to history, not excepting even Xerxes and Napoleon, ever successfully commanded a million of armed men for an equal period. Xerxes. failed in his expedition against Greece; and Napoleon, who marched out of Paris against Russia with 528,000 troops, returned from Moscow with but a wretched remnant of his forces. 2. General Grant opposed his equals in intelligence and military skill; while Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon, for the most part, opposed their inferiors in these particulars. Once the sword of Cæsar was drawn directly against Pompey, and when Roman met Roman, at Pharsalia, and in the final battles of the Triumvirate, Cæsar's skill was put to a severe test; and even when Cæsar met the poorly-armed Germans, they drove him back from the Rhine, on one occasion, in spite of their inferior equipment. 3. General Grant commanded an army extended over wider spaces than were ever covered before his day, by any active armed force known to history. At one and the same time he conducted military operations reaching from Galveston to. Richmond. He had, indeed, the modern railways and telegraphs to aid him, but so had his enemy. 4. He acted on his own judgment, without advice from any superior, and in many important cases, against the judgment of his subordinates of the highest rank. 5. His soldiers were, more than three-fourths of them, taken into the army as. raw recruits. 6. He never failed. Wellington was driven out of Spain by Napoleon, and Napoleon was driven from Waterloo by Wellington. The army of Frederick the Great was often cut to pieces. General Grant, at Cold Harbour, did not carry the point he attacked; but, at the end of the fight, he was left where he was at the beginning, and his enemy, and not he, ultimately retreated.* The numbers, the wealth, the intelligence of the Northern States, were the support of General Grant in a righteous cause; but, after making all deductions, history, taking into view the combination of these six extraordinary conditions, is likely to find his military career absolutely unsurpassed. Except in a great political or military emergency, why is a third term unadvisable for General Grant, or any other possible presidential candidate ? 1. Plotting for spoils by party managers and placemen, would be immensely stimulated by the opportunity a third term would offer, for the continuance in office of the 100,000 or 200,000 appointed subordinates of the renominated President. 2. A third term would thus intensify party spirit, the chief danger of republics. 3. By enlarging the size of partisan spoils, it would enlarge the temptation to partisan fraud and violence. 4. In fanning the flame of party spirit, and tempting to partisan greed and fraud, a third term would be an impediment in the way of Civil Service reform. When, in 1832, the spoils system began to come into large practice, on account of a law Congress passed in 1820, Daniel Webster used this language, in a speech at Worcester: "Mr. President, so far as I know, there is no civilized community on earth in which, on a change of rulers, there is such an inquisition for spoils as we have witnessed in this free Republic. When, sir, did any British minister, Whig or Tory, ever make such an inquest? When did he ever take away the daily bread of weighers and gaugers and measurers? Sir, a British minister who should do this, and should afterward show his head in the British House of Com. mons, would be received by a universal hiss." We are told that some of the cantons in Switzerland continue their chief officers in place indefinitely, and that, therefore, it is not dangerous to representative institutions to give a president a third term. On that lake of Switzerland, where the cantons of Uri and Schwyz come down from the stupendous mountains to the holy water, I have sailed to and fro. Meditating on Swiss independence, I have lingered in Tell's Chapel, on Lake Lucerne, and walked through the Axen Strasse, with the pages of Schiller's "William Tell" open before me. But the public officers in one of the Swiss cantons do not equal in number those in the counties which contain the City of New York or that of Boston. It is utterly futile to compare our immense territory with the little republics of Greece or Switzerland. South America at this moment is full of republics more than half wrecked by a scramble for spoils every time partisan greed and fraud change their hold on the central governments. What Webster said in 1832 would, no doubt, be emphasized by him to-day, were he face to face with our 110,000 appointive officers. If you had already carried out Civil Service Reform, and reduced your appointive officers to a thousand or five hundred, I am not sure but that then you might elect a President for a third term. Some of you think that the election of a President causes a new scramble for place, and that, therefore, a third term is of value in keeping the peace between parties. Yes; but we must remember that the peace is kept only when the spoils go to the victors, and that the outs will use all measures known to law, and some which are not thus known, to become the ins when two hundred thousand offices are the spoils. If you can carry through the Civil Service Reform, which has been inaugurated in the last twenty-five *See Bishop Gilbert Haven's very suggestive address at Woodstock, Conn., July 4th, 1879, in The Independent, for July 10th. 265 VOL. V. U years, and not take the daily bread away from caulkers and gaugers and small officers, in order to give that food to partisan spoilsmen as a reward for purely partisan service, then, possibly, you may talk with some emphasis about a third term, and not frighten those who see, in a scramble for spoils, the chief difficulty in our crowded and hazardous future. Civil Service Reform has not gone far enough yet to make a third term advisable. For one, I hold the opinion that, even if we were to change only a thousand or five hundred men in the Civil Service with the incoming of every new President, it would yet be dangerous to introduce into the history of the Republic the precedent of a third term. Not that we are governed by men, rather than by laws; not that our Constitution, after all, does not represent our general custom in politics; but my objection would be that, little by little, there would be gathered about the effort to induct a man into a third term all the political corruption of the Republic. A third presidential term would be a twig cast into a salt sea; and, as in Utah, when a bough hangs over and dips into the great alkaline lake there, it soon gathers out of the apparently crystalline water a massive wrapping of heavy salt, so, if you dip a third term into the sweet and holy sea of our American politics, you will very soon find it laden by alkali so bitter, that you cannot dissolve it and drink it, without death in every drop. 5. A third term, even after the candidate has been out of office one term, is open to grave objections, if the intervening term has been occupied by a presidency of the same political party with that of the candidate; for his placemen will be most of them continued in office by the intervening Administration, and have selfish reasons for supporting his third candidacy. In my native State of New York, for example, most of the placemen in office to-day were appointed by General Grant, and a great part of the clamour for a third term for him, is from placemen who obtained office through his nomination. 6. The judgment of the fathers of the Republic was against a third term, except in great emergencies. 7. The uniform practice of the Republic for a century has been opposed to a third term, and thus our unwritten law is against it. Go back to the morning of the Republic, and what bugle-sound do we hear lifted up against a third term, and making all the air of those great heights of our national revolutionary era resound with the vibrations of patriotism? Here is language uttered by a man greatly revered by one of the political parties of the United States, and not lacking respect from the other party: "That I should lay down my charge at a proper period is as much a duty as to have borne it faithfully. If some termination to the services of the Chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution or supplied by practice, his office, nominally, for years, will, in fact, become for life; and history shows how easily that degenerates into an inheritance. Believing that a representative Government, responsible at short periods of election, is that which produces the greatest sum of happiness to mankind, I feel it a duty to do no act which shall essentially impair that principle; and I should unwillingly be the person who, disregarding the sound precedent set by an illustrious predecessor, should furnish the first example of prolongation beyond the second term of office." So sounds the bugle at the lips of Thomas Jefferson. I know that partisans now affirm that Jefferson did not write this until he found that he could not be elected to a third term. On the contrary, I have more than a little faith that Jefferson was not speaking here as a politician; but as a man who, in the serene and illumined years of the close of his great life had risen out of the region of partisan clamour into that of statesmanship, and |