If an orthodox day of judgment be necessary to keep DownEastern lumbermen from plundering each other's logs, (and so, it is said, even Boston liberalism has decided,) who shall show that it and its correllatives are not just as much needed to check our city-merchants from defrauding one another, and in bringing them to contrition and restitution for such sins?

We do not mean that topics of this character are to be continually exhibited in the instructions of the sanctuary. They are to be discreetly used in due season and proportion. They are adapted rather to the condition of the careless or the reckless transgressor, to those who "are at ease in Zion," than to the mind already awake to religious inquiry, or to the believer advancing upon the upward road. To these, love has other more befitting accents and appeals. But how shall the masses of ungodly men and women be made to feel the beauty of holiness, the attractiveness of Christ, the spiritual excellence of God?— how be arrested to turn an eye toward heaven, except by some lightning-flash, some thunder-peal from those azure depths of mingled light and gloom, splendor and terror? God, who made the mind, understands its wants, its workings. And men who preach his truth will not find a better guide to follow than his own method of dealing with those whom He would have to fear his displeasure that they may be brought to taste his grace. That method is "goodness and severity." It is simple, sensible, rational, biblical. "Of some have compassion, making a difference and others save with fear, [èv póßw, with anxious zeal and with solemn threatenings,] pulling them out of the fire;" feeling ourselves and making them feel that "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

ARTICLE VI.

IT WAS ALWAYS SO.

THE good old times! who has not heard of them? — the age when patriotism was unselfish and manners uncorrupt, when

cities were simple in their tastes and frugal in their habits, and the country was tilled by men who feared God and kept his commandments. The good old times! when youth treated age with respect, when doctrine was sound, and good men walked with God heavenward, instead of sailing with the adversary in gilded barges down the stream.

The very mention of such times is like a breath of mountainair to the invalid cooped up in the stifling lanes of the city. It is like the sight of his early home, bringing glad memories of childhood to the heart now old and sad and solitary.

It is not strange, then, that we find this admiration of the past in all ages. Even the heathen, amid corruption round about him, paints the picture of a golden age, and heathen poesy adorns it with all that is lovely and of good report.

The old man, long familiar with the hollowness of earthly good, turns regretfully to the time when all seemed real, and no troublesome suspicion of what might be beneath, marred the enjoyment of the gilded surface glittering in the sun. Even the Christian grappling with defiant sin, and watching unto prayer against the treacherous dealing of wily foes, sighs for the simplicity of primitive piety, when good men did not need to be armed with the whole armor of God, and stand forever on their guard.

So the past is commended as the age of piety and peace, while the present is worse than all that has gone before, and prepares for greater evil yet to come. This is a view natural to many minds. But all such comparisons are unprofitable, because it is difficult to compare the two correctly.

We cannot form an accurate estimate of the present. We see only a part of it; the rest we judge by hearsay; and while our information is deficient, our conclusions are still wider of the truth. That which we see assumes undue prominence. It becomes the standard whereby we judge the much larger part that is unseen. Our native land seems large, and distant countries small, though in fact much larger. There are few among us who are not surprised to find the empire of Brazil larger than the whole United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the little country of Switzerland nearly twice as large as Massachusetts, which last is scarcely larger than the

diminutive Duchy of Würtemberg. Now this onesidedness, so palpable in our geography, exists as really in other things. The men with whom we come in contact give character to our ideas of the rest of the community. Then, besides all this, many things are not what they seem to be. There is an apparent and a real world. The affliction, which we class among evils, may be such a manifestation of the love of God as ought to be classed among the highest blessings. The event that seemed to involve the ruin of the nation may prove to have been its salvation. So also to most men there is an outer and an inner character. We may count him a co-worker with Christ, who is really serving Satan; we may deem a flaming professor a veritable saint, when he is rotten at the core. On the other hand, we may assign one of God's hidden ones a place among the ungodly, whereas he is being made meet for an inheritance among the saints in light. Even inspiration does not always correct this false judgment. It was a Prophet of the Lord who complained that he was left alone, while seven thousand men had not bowed the knee to Baal. And it was an Apostle who wrote, "By Silvanus, a faithful brother unto you, as I suppose, I have written briefly.

If our judgment of the present is liable to such mistakes, how much more our judgment of the past, where so much more concurs to mislead us. Just as we insensibly make our abode the centre of the world, so do we make our own age the centre of history, and measure things not by an absolute standard, but in their relation to our stand-point.

Then there is much that we can see in our contemporaries that is not to be seen in the men of a past age. When we look on a living Christian we see a strange mixture of good and evil. The actings of grace and depravity succeed each other in such strange combinations that we are bewildered, we seem to look at the changes of a kaleidoscope rather than at a finished painting. But in the biographies of the sainted dead, grace is brought into the foreground, and depravity is thrown into the shade; then the good things scattered through long years of actual life are crowded into a few pages of the memoir; and as the eye glances over them we forget the long intervals that separated the actual occurrences, or the protracted process that produced the excellencies we admire.

Again, when we look at a good man, living out his goodness, our eye rests at the same moment on many who are anything but good. As the man writing in a crowd finds many strange words disturbing the unity of his thoughts, so we, while listening to the good words of living men, are compelled at the same time to overhear many bad words from every side. But it is not so when we look into the past. There we can make a selection, we can shut out the ungodly and admit only the spiritually minded to our field of view. The Christian never opens the ribald poetry of the past, its infidel writings, its immoral works of fiction. In his mind a past age is associated exclusively with the writings of its spiritually minded men. He judges the 17th and 18th centuries, not by the pages of Hobbes or Hume, Smollet or Fielding, Dryden, or his compeers equally indelicate, but less brilliant; but by the heavenly thoughts of Robert Leighton, or Richard Baxter, John Owen, or George Herbert; and in the delighted perusal of their pages he forgets that they were surrounded by just such a world as rages round us to-day. The writer of "The Saint's Rest" did not give himself to those heavenly contemplations soothed by surrounding stillness, and borne along by influences on all sides that drew him up to heaven; but he was driven to it by the direness of his distress, by pain and persecution, under such monarchs as Charles the Second, and his Popish successor, and at the bar of such a judge as the infamous George Jeffries.

That good man calls himself, on the title-page of one of his works, "An earnest desirer of the love, peace, and unity of true Christians, for endeavoring which he expecteth with resolved patience still to undergo the censures, slanders and cruelties of ignorance, pride, and malice, from all that are possessed by the wisdom and zeal which are from beneath."

It is one of the highest achievements of genius to delineate the past as it actually was. We have records enough of the great occurrences that tower up conspicuous along the line of events; but the ordinary things of every-day life, out of which rose up those events, these we have not; and, to fill the vacancy, men insert ideas of their own which are anything but true. Actual life is rugged, uneven, involved and full of incongruities. It presents unpleasant aspects. It abounds in discomforts. The snow at a distance is beautiful in its rounded outline of spotless

white; but near by, it chills you. It is fatiguing to wade through it. It involves suffering and exposure. There is something exceedingly bright and glorious in a Syrian sun. Read it described on the glowing page, and you long to behold it. But then it is intensely hot. It dries up the streams. It parches you with thirst, so that while you look you are distressed, and your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth. Now, in looking at the past, we reconstruct the landscape to our own liking. The unpleasant features that would not disappear in the original, we motion out of sight in our ideal picture. The hard things that refused to bend at our bidding in the one case, are perfectly obedient in the other. They range themselves here or there, this way or that, as best suits our fancy. They hide this aspect, and reveal that, at our option. Everything is plastic as the potter's clay. But is it wise to create an ideal unlike to all that has been under the sun, and, calling that the past, straightway contrast it unfavorably with the present?

This comparison of the past with the present is unwise because human nature is very much the same in all ages. The pendulum swings now this way and now that, but it is ever the same disk vibrating between the same extremes. The particular position may vary, but the movement is uniform, and can be calculated. The particular developments of depravity may vary, but the root is the same. The particular form of wickedness may depend on the time and place of its manifestation, but it must exist in some shape, while things are as they are. You may anticipate an era of dreadful crime as the result of causes now at work in society, but will it be more dreadful than antediluvian violence? Here wickedness is more gross, there it is disguised; now it speaks plainly, and again in daintier phrase; but ever it is the same world whose friendship is enmity with God.

The same is true when this enmity assumes the form of opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus. It attacks, now this doctrine and now that. Here it is the outspoken infidelity of Voltaire; there it is the covert attack of a self-styled Christian teacher. Sometimes it assumes the guise of a scripture commentary, professing to rid the truth of scholastic accretions and render it more popular. Sometimes it is an avowed onset on fundamental truths. These Christians are under the ban of