Against old evils, flooding the earth and wielding the arm of every man, Reform steps forth a youth, alone. Reforms spring always from a single mind. Trace back the history of all conquering, transforming truths, and they center at last in the fervid thought of a single earnest spirit. Pallas sprung full-armed from the teeming brain of Jove, queen of all human knowledge and mistress of the arts. And so is born every great and true idea. It fills the brain of some toiling thinker, scorning the false and breathing forth the true, sick and angry as he looks upon the actual, resolute and humble as he looks into his own soul, but glowing with the far hope of the possible until he lives in it and for it, careless of all things till he triumph with it. Such a man stands in a minority of one. All men are against him; but standing as he does, he

is the man whom God Almighty sends to lead a great idea through the world.

The times call often for men of great and true ideas to stem the rising tide of ills, but they sometimes call in vain. Have we not examples in our own history? Yet is it not as sure that when the true reformer comes, he comes all weaponed for the fight, that he goes through his life-work calmly and resolutely, yet trusting in other strength-that he finds heavenly armor to begin, and heavenly hands outstretched in battle to assist his own? Nay, is it not sure that every such man enters the lists prepared to last his time and do his work, not only by an original strength of mind and heart and will, but moulded in a mysterious way into the mental and moral fashion of the true reformer? Yes, there is a change comes over the soul or works within it, that sublimes his powers, makes every motive pure and clear, and gives a gravitation of every faculty to each, and of all to the grand aim of life, spontaneous, concentering, resistless. It may come from conflict with the powers of earth or the powers of darkness, from a great shock or a great sorrow, from the contemplation of a lost humanity in haunts of death or in the haunted brain, from inward stirring of the soul, or from the voice of God in low inevitable whispers to the heart, but come whence it may, it comes to all reformers as they start from slumber, and rise to the level of their time all along the course of history. It tells one story through the ages. No man has changed the world, who has not first been changed himself.

A man for the times arose in Germany at the heels of Napoleon to denounce his ambition and save the Fatherland. The dismemberment and destruction of Germanic nationality hung upon the struggle. He was a Hamburg bookseller. They drove him from his home, seques

trated his property, and set a price upon his head. A ruined exile, great thoughts came in upon him. He came to believe that the voice of an honest man is a mighty power. He came to act as in presence of God. He felt "the fierce freedom of his old forefathers" streaming through his veins. He felt himself great that he had been born in evil times. He wrote and spoke and acted for German independence till he died, and his words are written now in the solid German mind. Another man appeared in Scotland three centuries ago. He was a schoolmaster. He was leading an even and scholastic life. The rising reformation saw him, and claimed him as its leader. In open church a preacher called on his flock to summon the modest teacher from his school to the responsibility and peril of a sacred ministry. He burst into tears and fled speechless to his chamber. There he shut himself for days, and when at last men saw him in the pulpit breaking the bread of life, they saw that the old mirth had vanished, that the working features showed the grief and trouble of his heart all calmed, and that the modest, tender-hearted schoolmaster was changed to John Knox, the stern reformer and the Iconoclast of Scotland.

This change, mysterious and mighty, has its deep necessities. The reformer finds the need of a prior self-development in both the objective and subjective-in the false and its relations to himself, and in the character and habit of his own mind. The impulse to reform comes to him first from without and after from within. In considering then the change which makes the man of great ideas a reformer, we find its first necessity in his relations to the evil he comes to overthrow.

1. It is the servitude of the mind that constitutes the essence and the power of despotism. False ideas and great evils impose that servitude. There is such a thing as a tyranny of false opinion that finds not in its realms one dissenting voice or one free uplifted arm. How many falsehoods that have cursed the world have lived for centuries without one daring denial! Such are they all before there comes the spirit of reform, and its first work on earth is the reformation of a single soul. When a gilded, consecrated lie "crooks the pregnant hinges of men's knees," that man is free and has the truth within him who has dethroned in his own mind the lie. Under outrageous laws, though whipped to obedience, his soul is free as Alpine breezes. Such a man there must be at the outset of every great reform. He must have broken those fetters for which the hate of Samson turned in upon himself :—

Thou art become, O worst imprisonment!

The dungeon of thyself.

O servile mind,

Rewarded well with servile punishment!

The base degree to which I now am fallen,

These rags, this grinding, is not yet so base
As was my former servitude, ignoble,
Unmanly, ignominious, infamous,—

True slavery and that blindness worse than this
That saw not how degenerately I served!

Until there rises such a man there can be no reform. And to the level
of a true reformer he must rise by this same inward change.
We say
not that this alone will constitute a benefactor of the race. God has not
sent all enfranchised men to be reformers. They need much more than
great ideas. But this we say, that every man who has changed the
world's ideas, has first of all this change within. He must be in him-
self the embodiment of his reform.

2. Whoever works upon the universal mind, changes it into the form and fashion of his own. The time has gone by when men talked of hypocrites and impostors rising to the head of conquering nations, and transmitting to after ages ideas which they knew in their hearts were lies. Who thinks now that Mahomet was an impostor, not an enthusiast? Mahomet moulded Arabia into the likeness of himself. The genius of his life, its mystery, its faith, inspired his followers, and with his spirit they gave the Koran or the sword to every land from Delhi to Granada. And those sects of fanatics which sprung up in the troublous times that followed in the wake of the Reformation, did they not assume the very stamp of the men that led them? Did not the brief and bloody years of Anabaptist license impersonate a thousand times the spirit of the prophet of Zwickau All men who influence the world, appear in every mental feature as they are, when their characters are reproduced in those who follow them. The irrepressible desire to change all other men, to win men's reasons and their will to an alliance with one's own, is the very essence and foundation of reform. That little village under the shadow of the Vosges, changed from a haunt of misery and sin to a magic circle of happy homes, which the demons want and crime could never cross, a place where the very air breathed of pure affection and angels seemed to dwell, was it not a transcript of the mind of Oberlin, fulfilling in humility and lowliness his heavenly work on earth! By their fruits indeed shall ye know them.

As the reformer then, so the reform. The change in men will be proportioned in completeness, in sincerity, in fervor, and in truth to the change wrought in his own soul. To a man filled with a new idea all men look up. If they see that the irresistible power of truth has conquered and absorbed his whole collective being, till he speaks what he believes and sees and knows, with the fervor and the power which falsehood

cannot counterfeit and an inward change alone can plant within him, they will listen and believe as men did of old on the sea-shore or the plains of Palestine.

3. We find a third necessity in the inherent strength of his antagonist. The spirit of reform first moving upon the troubled waters finds the false not only common to all men, but assimilated into their mental constitu tion, woven into the rough texture of their lives. Missionaries tell us that heathenism is so inwrought into the popular character and habits of those shadowy lands, that it seems an original and ineradicable belief. Something like this is the hold of an old evil on the world. A true reformer must needs be as great as his antagonist. The system he would substitute must be as grand and towering to the purged eyesight as the old. Men need to be convinced that the right is true expediency. The maxim "magna veritas " needs a demonstration to their souls. Old ties will bind them down with clasps of iron till they see heavenly light bursting through dungeon walls and the prison doors unbarred as did the old apostles. How often might men see, if they but would, in the conflicts of the centuries a single soul arrayed against ten thousand, "in the unresistible might of weakness shaking the powers of darkness," and putting them every one to flight. Such moral greatness no man has given to him by nature. It comes from a reformation, and as it were a reconstitution of his being, which sublimes his motives and makes him grandly equal to the evil and the time.

He finds in his own soul subjective necessities yet stronger than all these. In the mind of the earnest thinker they follow up the former with a startling power. The man who sees the need of change as he looks upon the false external, despairs as he looks within. The false sits there as well. With it all intellectual processes are tinged, suggesting always minor premises which vitiate results. Cramped and confined by old ideas he wanders in a labyrinth to which he has no clue. For the reformer, like the eldest poets, having an impulse to the hidden truth of nature, has yet no guide save intuition to lead his wandering. Old Homer might see clearly the purity and beauty which no poet's voice had sung, might perceive in "the rich Titan-youth of man" his everlasting dignity, and in all human ties the symbols of divinity, but his grand and simple soul was unfettered by the past. The reformer has to fight this past, and put his foot upon its neck before he can press forward to a true belief. He must have, first of all, an intellectual freedom, a freedom from the tyranny of old ideas, yet scorning not the truth which mingles with them all, and gives them all their

power. Let him be tossed by doubt and care, be dashed by waves of hopeless sorrow upon the firm unshaken shore, or let a hand divine remove the scales from his dim eyes and pour in supernatural light, till he beholds things as they are. He uses freedom, then, to gather power. No man thinks for him. He builds up his ideas from the deep necessities of human nature. He takes up falsehood as a fulcrum for the truth. From every conquered fortress he sallies out to new achievement, yet planting no garrison until his position is impregnable. He wages, too, a defensive as well as an aggressive war. He has to fight against the arch-enemy of the reformer, the tendency to carry conclusion further than the bounds of fact, to bridge the chasm between demonstrated truth and a desired conclusion by a fine-spun theory. How often has imagination ruined a just reform! The reformer, then, has two battles to fight in his own soul, the one with its old ideas, the other with its new ardor. If, in the one, he needs a will invincible and strong, in the other he needs the modesty of a true philosopher; if he would fight with all the world for a conclusion built up from evidence, he would fight a plausibility or a truth half-demonstrated, though all the world side with it. In the mind of Newton, we see this freedom, this power, and this restraint of intellect. He believed the truths of inspiration as he believed the gravitation of the universe. This freedom, this power and this restraint of intellect, came to him as they come to all, from a deep change within. He that ruleth his own spirit has taken a step to the ruling of others. Only he that has set free himself, can set free the world. In Newton's soul the combination of these two, this strength made perfect in weakness, shone out into his life and his philosophy, making the one all simple and the other all sublime.

2. Besides this clearing and preparation of the intellect, this general power of grasping and throttling falsehood, this general conviction of the mind, there needs in every reformer a special conviction of the heart, the sense of a mission and a duty. All intellectual strength and power without it, are like phantom marish-gleams to the clear burning of the polar star. Reform, come down from heaven, needs living preachers. God glorifies the human soul by making it his helper, and no man ever served him save from the heart. There is no reformer anywhere without the sense of duty. There is no such thing as the blazing out of a buried thought, illumining the ages, the careless offshoot of a careless mind. Every reformer has a mission in the world, and knows it. His work may lie buried, but it will one day blossom. God never bade a human intellect rise up a knight of truth, but he gave