in a movement which shall lead it towards a higher and grander truth. We war against the abuses and corruptions of the church. We war against the mechanical rules and superstitious rites and monstrous doctrines which have taken the place of the religion of Jesus, and which claim to speak in his name and by his authority. The best way in which to drive the usurper from the throne is to restore the rightful monarch to his place. The low and halting morality, the perverse maxims of faith and life, the monstrous assumptions of authority made by ambitious men or bodies of men in the name of Christ, will disappear when we recognize him in his rightful place at the head of all human progress. He alone can drive the money-changers from the temple. He alone can silence Sadducees and Pharisees, the unbelievers and the superstitious alike. He alone can cast out the evil spirits which defile the strongholds of society and the secret chambers of imagery in individual minds.

We are not careful to answer the question which our neighbor puts to us as to the imputation of infidelity which may rest on us as well as him. We call him by no bad name. And unless we deserve it we shall not be troubled by any bad name that may be put upon us. It will not stick unless it belongs to us; and if it does belong to us the name will not hurt us half so much as the reality which it expresses. Our neighbor is seeking, we doubt not honestly, to free men from superstition and to make them wiser and better. This is what we also are striving to do. But where has there ever been such freedom from every superstitious fear as in Jesus, where such freedom of thought and life, such freedom and joy in the love and the goodness of God, such a fountain of truth and life flowing into the souls of men to free them from all ignorance and sin, to lead them up into a larger field of goodness and wisdom, and to remove every evil that is now weighing upon the heart? Will he not help us in our work? Let him turn from the church with its corruptions to the beneficent and majestic life portrayed by the Evangelists, a life which for eighteen centuries has gone in advance of every prosperous movement in the upward progress of our race.

RANDOM READINGS.

BY E. H. SEARS.

He had, I

MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. Awhile since as I was out in the field, a robin came and alighted upon a tree near by and began to pipe one of her pleasant notes. Then followed the crack of a gun, and down dropped the sweet songster, gasping and with the blood flowing from her mouth. I turned round to look at the fellow who had done the deed. He was a young man of pleasant manners, not savage nor brutal in appearance or disposition. believe, a good mother, but that mother had neglected wofully one department of his education. Cruelty towards these creatures that confide in us—not "dumb" animals, but creatures that come with their sweet serenades to pour music on our path - tends to harden the heart towards all suffering. At another time I saw three fullgrown men, each with a gun in his hand, skulking along beside a wall, one of them about taking aim at something which proved to be a red squirrel — and old acquaintance of mine who had paid me visits occasionally. I rode up towards the villians-savagelooking fellows-and denounced them for their murderous intent. How the squirrel bounded from tree to tree and from one fence to another! a perfect picture of agility and grace and superabounding life perfectly exhilarating to look upon. The poor little fellow did not know of the horrible fate I had saved him from, for evidently he had no conception of the meanness, bloodthirstiness, and depravity which get icarnated in two-legged animals, so much more subtle and devilish than we ever find in those which walk on all fours. The three fellows with guns went off over the fields to other scenes of murder. I believe there is a law against them; there certainly ought to be. And there ought to be a committee of vigilance in every country town to protect the innocent creatures of the air and of the groves, which come out every spring and try to make us rejoice with them in the all-pervading goodness of Him who fashioned them, and inspires their gambols and songs.

DR. RYDER did not write the review of Rev. Mr. Barrett's "New View of Hell" which we extracted in the March number of the Magazine. It was editorial, and we ought to have known that the editor, Rev. J. W. Hanson, wrote it. But we were fresh from read

ing Dr. Ryder's capital sermon suggested by the case of Mr. Hepworth, and we thought there were traces of the same pen; and we imagined that he was mixed up editorially somehow with "The New Covenant." But no matter. Whoever writes the editorials of "The New Covenant," it is plain that somebody is behind them who has very strong convictions, and that he holds them and sets them forth with unfaltering fealty to Christ, and in a spirit of liberality and charity. Whoever reads them will see that "liberal Christianity" can have breadth and comprehension, without the least compromise of faith or the least questioning of the divine authority of Revelation.

CARLYLE AND "THE COMMONWEALTH." In the March number of the Magazine, we gave a very brief synopsis of Dr. Manning's critique on Carlyle contained in "Half-truths and the Truth." In that critique Dr. Manning having given the outlines of Carlyle's political doctrines and pantheistic morality, showing how they lead to perpetual revolution, then shows how a man living in such chaos is to arm himself with courage and get the victory over his fears. In this connection, Dr. Manning cites a famous passage from "Sartor Resartus." He does not cite it as if Carlyle had applied it in this connection, but as showing what resource a man is to have with Carlyle for his moral teacher in meeting the conflicts in the whirls of revolution. We copied it, perhaps, in our too brief synopsis, leaving the impression that it is "torn from its connection." So says the critic in "The Commonwealth." If so, let the reader turn to Dr. Manning's lecture, to call attention to which was the object of our brief notice, and he will see that it is neither misquoted nor misapplied there; and, moreover, he will find a review of Carlyle's political and moral system, so far as he has any system, which, in our judgment, does ample justice to his inhuman and godless theories.

OLD LATIMER lived in corrupt times, and preached before Lords and Privy Councillors, among whom were defaulters to the King's treasury. This was his style of touching the conscience: "Alack, alack! make restitution. For God's sake, make restitution! You will cough in hell else so all the devils there will laugh at your coughing. There is no remedy but restitution, or else hell." After one of these sermons Latimer said a man brought him privately five hundred pounds to be refunded to the King's treasury. Pity we had not a few Latimers to act as chaplains in the custom-houses and in some of our legislatures and courts of justice.

BOSTON has just completed fifty years under its city charter. Fifty years ago it had a population of forty-five thousand. Curious it is to go back to its beginnings and compare things then, with things now with its two hundred and forty thousand inhabitants. In 1634, Wood gives this description of Boston:

"Its situation is very pleasant, being a peninsula hemmed in on the South side with the bay of Roxberry, on the North side with Charles River, the marshes on the back side being not half of a quarter of a mile over, so that a little fencing will secure the cattle from wolves. It being a neck and bare of wood, they are not troubled with three great annoyances, of wolves, of rattlesnakes and mosquitoes."

Four years later it is described as "rather a village than a town, consisting of no more than twenty or thirty houses." Boston continues undisturbed by wolves and rattlesnakes; how about the "mosquitoes"?

THE FIRST PRINTING-PRESS IN AMERICA was set up at Cambridge "as an appendage of Harvard College." It was deemed too important an enginery for good or for mischief to go at large, so it was placed under the special control of the President of the College (See Chaplin's Life of Dunster). Among the good things which it sent forth was a version of the Psalms for public worship made under the supervision of President Dunster himself, because he was 66 one of the greatest masters of the Oriental languages that hath been known in these ends of the earth." A Mr. Richard Lyon, however, assisted in revising and polishing. How finely he polished a specimen will show. The following is from the seventeenth edition of the Dunster Psalm-book: :

"O blessed man that walks not in
Th' advice of wicked men,
Nor standeth in the sinner's way
Nor scorners seat sits in.

"But he upon Jehovah's law

Doth set his whole delight,
And in his law doth meditate
Both in the day and night.

"He shall be like a planted tree
By water brooks which shall
In his due season yield his fruit
Whose leaf shall never fail.

"And all he doth shall prosper well;

The wicked are not so ;

But they are like unto the chaff
Which wind drives to and fro.

"Therefore shall not ungodly men
In judgment stand upright,
Nor in th' assembly of the just
Shall stand the simple wight.

MR. WHIPPLE'S EXPOSITION OF EMERSON. We by no means meant to take anybody to task, but to show in the best-natured way possible that the stanza from Emerson did not cover the whole field of Unitarian preaching. That it covers, as expounded below, an important field of Unitarian theology must be admitted. It should be said, however, that man's free agency is held, not only by Unitarians, but by the Arminians in all sects, Methodist, Episcopalian and New-School Calvinist; for the New-School Orthodox, as represented by Beecher, believe, they say, as Calvin ought to believe if he lived in the middle of the nineteenth century. That is their Calvinism. But let the writer of the article on Emerson explain the text for himself. We take it from "The Daily Globe" of April 8, a new daily, as the reader ought to know, which takes an independent position, and furnishes a great variety of news, local and political, and valuable literary criticism:

"In his 'Random Readings,' Dr. Sears takes somebody to task for saying that the following verse, by Mr. Emerson, contains the 'pith' o all the Unitarian sermons ever preached:

'So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When duty whispers low, "Thou must,"

The youth replies, "I can."'

"Dr. Sears asks: 'Has this writer heard the fifteen thousand Unitarian sermons which have been preached?' God forbid! The word 'pith' has a force which Dr. Sears does not appear to feel. In the first line we have the noblest of all statements of the Unitarian doctrine of 'the dignity of human nature;' in the second, a repudiation of the orthodox theory that man is by nature hostile to his Maker; in the third and fourth lines, an emphatic affirmation of the freedom of the will, and of man's capacity to do his duty. But suppose, says Dr. Sears, the youth replies, I can't.' Well, the remedy for this weakness has been supplied by other sects. The Unitarians try to kindle his moral energies up to the point of saying, 'I can ;' if they do not succeed, the orthodox churches then step in, and put him into one of their numerous moral