cates, both in and out of parliament, might be led by party or interested views, we may safely infer that without this reasoning upon a general principle, so many individual dogmas, so many par ticulars of belief, would not have been blended into that omnipotent spirit which was as powerful in action as the measure was one of greatness. Thus the more we discover of all universal laws, the more they appear to us simplified, and the more visibly linked by one great harmony of causation: the more that the moral and social laws shall evolve themselves, the more easy shall we be able to demonstrate them with precision. Our grand agent then of this demonstration is education. Educate the masses, and you make each one a discoverer as well as actor of truth; but, whilst we bind this almost necessitated advance by dogma, we reason in the ignorance of all the essential laws of progress. Enforce this religious creed before you educate, says one; bind by these articles and limit error, says another; never heed the public mind so you make the public faith certain, cries a third; and in thus crying and saying, forgetting that it is in a worse spirit than ignorance, for it is with the cant of affected wisdom. Open the mind, enlarge the understanding, limit no view of nature, and you create a nation of worshippers; for the necessity towards a pure worship, is the comprehension of the greatness we adore. Now our opinion is, that we virtually create a religious public, in proportion as we educate it; and if religion means worshipping in spirit and truth, and in the earnest observance of moral laws, then religion has never yet been the glorious worship it has yet to be for how can we in fulness adore, when we set a worse than helot bond upon the comprehension of the benevolence and attributes of that we would worship. The universal mind will need no artificial enactments to enforce religion, when enlightenment reveals to it the limitless wonders of creation, and the limitless generosity of the Creator; for generosity, mercy, goodness, are apportioned to the perfected mind, and when these shall have become the natural sequences in the improved physical and improved mental condition of the masses, then will be rightly estimated these divine conditions of the Deity.

It was surmised of old, and the exact sciences of our own day teach, that a harmony of numbers pervade creation; the tendency towards logical induction proves this likewise a law of the mind; and in our opinion a necessity in the education of the masses, after the first one of scouting dogmatic particulars and teaching gene

ralising truth, is, that the simple principles of mathematics and geometry should form a large element of universal rudimental learning. The rigid processes of thought as they operate afterwards upon the great principles of social and political governance, can only be elicited from the masses by an inductive method of this kind; and education can as easily give precision to the great law of association of ideas, as it now blindly places truth and falsity in juxtaposition; casier too, for the laws of nature are kindred principles in the mighty organism of advance. We want a rigid principle of induction in all things, for that accuracy of form, that precision in mental ideas, which is the great necessity in manufacturing England, that necessity which still limits her artistic power, both as to creation of, and appreciation in, art and design, is one which equally affects the phenomenon of her historical and political phases, for she has yet to discover that it is not mere specific experience that will either promote her artistic or political advance: she must generalize the truths of progression, and form her progression thereby.

With this mighty spirit of advance in abeyance, virtually on the very surface of humanity, waiting but for the vivifying touch of knowledge, it behoves the government to give, and to set no dogmatic bonds upon this vital necessity of progress; and it behoves the great intellectual aristocracy of the people, to allow no coercive hand of ignorance to bind down mighty comprehension, by the narrowness of particular opinions. Let it be taken as an axiom, that man has no right to gauge the extent of human knowledge, or set down his puny thoughts for abstract truths, because he may have the art of clothing them in brilliant metaphor. Let us have truth if in homely guise; let us smile at small journalists, who solemnly show their profundity by calling this a barren age; an age that has produced a Bacon in John Mill, that has given an Auguste Le Comte and Humboldt, and clothed with all the grace of humouristic fiction, some of the divinest principles of the human heart. Educate this vital mind, and you paralyse the hypocrite and the bigot, who only fester and flourish whilst ignorance remains. Cultivate the appreciating mind and writers become fearless; cultivate the heart through the judgment, and Truth stoops to earth; as it were heaven; give life to thought and you sepulchre the hideous form of persecution; cultivate the harmonies of nature and we may elicit a combining intellect, and create from among ourselves the God spirit of a second Shakspeare.

Joy on earth at this moment, that man has made such advances! Masculine joy founded on truth and the "solidities of nature," not running forth in loud vociferation but filling the comprehending soul, as God does the universe with His own divine harmonies, and who may, in His high watch-tower of eternity, gladden that man that least comprehends the purposes of his creation.

Nor last, nor least, that the spirit of the English people waits but for its law-givers to invest it with the insignia of comprehending advance.

FEASTS AND FUNERALS.

A HOMILY FOR THE MIDDLE CLASSES.

BY PAUL BELL.

ONE of my boys, sir, who has made acquaintance with a German family, (much to my Mrs. Bell's discomfiture, who says "she is sure he will learn to smoke himself to death amongst them,") brought home the other day a number of their " Pictorial Times," to show me a grand wood-engraving of the burial procession of those who were burnt in the late fire at the Hotel de Pologne at Leipsig. I have not seen anything grander at any of the theatres, even when Mr. Grievens half-ruined himself to bring out his own tragedy of the "Sack of Troy." Cocked hats and splendid uniforms-mourners in knee breeches: and the bodies set at equal distances-singers and ringers. There was a great deal in the picture, I assure you, to constitute what the print-sellers would call a "richly-attractive page.'

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A great deal, too, which set me a-thinking of matters at home as well as abroad. We did not, it is true, then indulge ourselves in thus decking out the last scene of a similar frightful tragedy, which startled all London some two seasons ago: but I cannot help fancying we are too apt to flounce and to furbelow the serious transactions of life, not asking ourselves the while how far it is or it is not, in accordance with a barbarous custom. I should like to sce the fashions with regard to these matters closely, wisely, and kindly looked into; and till some better and wiser observer of manners shall do so, perhaps, sir, you and your friends won't object to use my old tortoise-shell spectacles.

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say kindly," because I am aware that there are many excellent persons to whom the slightest comment or recommendation on matters so exclusively-as they think-pertaining to "feeling," will appear the heart-hardness of the nether-millstone. And I meant what I said. Thank God; I can still go far for a holiday; I can still love a merry-making as well as when I was a boy, and longing for my Mrs. Bell. No scheme of life can be right, methinks, which does not include enjoyment for enjoyment's sake. No good man (if complete) will discourage luxury and comfort and the excitements of innocent pleasure, where proper. Those who shut out the gratifications of sense, I have heard it said, and believe it, are apt to "take it out" in temper. But I know of very few transactions in which example is more fatally and painfully cogent than such as these, and therefore I would have all people, while they are in their sound minds, underanged by immediate affliction, attempt to separate what is accidental from what is essential,-to distinguish affection from ostentation, and the fear of their neighbours from the indulgence of every dearest and tenderest human feeling.

Old-fashioned people, observing the increasing simplicity of our manners, make a very honest and very common mistake, but which has much solace for themselves included therein. They complain that love is wearing out of the world have a sort of delicately-self-tormenting pleasure in imagining that "no one will mourn them as they mourned their departed friends, when they were young;" and to make up for this shortcoming, keep up a sort of perpetual keen, of which their own undervalued virtue is the theme. What a strange selfish error, what a wilful determination to misinterpret love in its highest form-self-sacrifice! I have watched households where the loss of one of the family put the rest under the tyranny of a gloom maintained for an extravagant period, the escape from which must be a hypocrisy,-of all hypocrisies the most detestable; where a cheerful word or allusion to aught save the hearse and the vault and the agonising last sufferings of one "well out of pain," were sternly checked as wicked levity-until the appointed time had passed when black might shade into gray, and gray put on "a little colour" in its ribands-and this from a sincere idea that only by such regulation-distress were God's dispensations duly honoured! I have scen cases of spectre done, where a stern widow or a weeping sister has destroyed (the word is not too strong) a whole living

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family of relatives; the instances principally among women; for men must go out into the field, or to sea, as Saunders Mucklebackit put it, though their hearts are beating like paving hammers," while they may dress the bier at home, and sit beside it uninterrupted. How was it with the dead? Could the most imaginative mourn him, if he had not cared for the happiness of others besides himself? Who loves him the most then,—he who shall press with the weight of his sorrows upon the living, or he who shall try to walk in his steps, and without undue violence to nature endeavour to avoid those stern and severe outward manifestations which become the hardest of cruelty in disposition as appeal against them is impossible? I am not, like a benevolent and venerable friend of mine, for a pattern-regulation of distress; but as little on the side of display as of suppression and display (let those who will, think me an old brute for saying so) was the old-fashioned mode! belonging to days when there was in everything as compared with the present time-more of tyranny and less of consideration. Better or worse it is hardly my business to decide-mercly to put forth the plain truth, that the Heroism of the Strong Hand has given way to the Heroism of the Strong Mind-but that neither in point of manifestation attests the reality or the non-existence of warm genuine feeling.

Well, I may, some day or other, especially if Miss Martha Le Grand does not frequent our house less, give you a chapter on what a quaint old friend of mine used to call the Oh!" and "Ah!" people but what I meant for the present to illustrate is this, that it belonged to the period when sorrow was the most rigid in its observances of precise time and outward show, to be the most elaborate in all the sad ceremonials, from the sight and the sound of which we try now-a-days increasingly to escape. An old-fashioned English house was turned as much upside down, very nearly, on the occasion of a burial as it is now, that dancers go hot-supperless to their pillows on the occasion of a ball. Beds were not taken down, it is true: but they were set up for far-away kin, "who would be affronted if they were left out." Aram was whipped for the inconsolable trifles cooked for broken hearts,-and partridge pies made very rich for critical relations who could not dine off a joint. Oppressive as this seems to us, I appeal to all old-fashioned housekeepers whether it is not a true picture. I remember a kind-hearted creature as ever went to Heaven, who had been renowned all her life for her princely hospitality and her