it spurs and sword, and his own directing arm, to make its life victorious. He gave the victory to John Huss and all the old reformers, when he led them through the bitterness of persecution to the fiery crown of martyrdom.

He needs this full conception of his mission to give him unity of aim and character. Men often drift about the world of thought like the strange crew whose silent shadows man the phantom bark, sailing without a compass or a chart on unknown seas, while mystic currents of the deep are sweeping them through every zone, past every haven. In reveries of golden visions they wander unconscious of the spell, till every wished-for land is sunk beneath the waves and they glide noiselessly into the eternal darkness. We were all made to be in one sense men of one idea. One idea runs through the universe. One idea runs through every great man's life. The reformer must have his mind and aims a unity, or it were better for the world that he had none. This unity in diversity must include all powers, affections, will, until the man lives in the future of accomplishment, as well as in the present of toil. Such men are sometimes called enthusiasts, fanatics, men of one idea. It must be so. It is the nature of all true reform, that it be single before it can be universal. It is its nature, that it demand a sacrifice of all things, even self, that hardest sacrifice, to the great end of life,-that it concentrate about it and assimilate with it, every faculty and every aspiration, till it absorbs the man in his idea, breaking the bonds of self, and uniting him to the ideal and the infinite.

So a conscious mission brings sincerity. It prompts to self-examination, and that true self-knowledge which makes a man humble and truthful. He acts out himself, he puts behind him all that is false in accident, or obscures the clear expression of his soul. The man sincere with himself and with the world, must be in some sense a great man. To be a hater of all falsehood, is to be a king of men. He lives in one the lives of many, he is the myriad-minded,-for the false that writes innumerable cyphers in the lives and thoughts of men, is absent from his breast. He is a thousand times a man, for thought, for feeling, or for action. Carlyle makes truly a "believing nation," his ideal nation of heroes.

It brings, too, resolution. This sense of mission and of duty is the strongest motive that can be derived from a man's own nature. Old Socrates felt it amid the polished sneers and public ridicule of Athens. It made him strong to live, and living, do his earnest work-to die, and dying, show the lofty smile of a completed life as he drained the cup of hemlock to the health of coming times.

3. If we analyze yet deeper the subjective necessities of the true reformer, we find that they do not end with his own mental capabilities. There are higher wants still unsupplied, though his human nature is expanded to the full growth of the unaided soul. He needs above all, and beyond all earthly ends or ambitions, the light of an everlasting motive. That motive, to be effectual, must rest in eternity and in God. He needs, too, an Almighty power acting in his own, largely supplied in times of need, and given continually with graduating hand through the moments, and the hours, and the long years of life. In desolation and in loneliness, in defeat and shame, in toil and thick coming sorrow he clamors for it to support his fainting soul. He needs it, above all, to turn his efforts and his errors, his sufferings and his triumphs, into the broadening channel of a permanent success. "Man proposes, but God disposes." His own Spirit the reformer needs, to connect his life with the eternal purposes of Him who is himself the truth, its helper and its reward.

9

These intellectual and moral wants no man on earth can satisfy short of a complete renovation of his being. Men do not come all readymade either into life or into history. Their life is a development, a succession of continual changes. Some are mightier than the rest, and are the resultants of all changes past. Some are sudden and transforming. The circumstances of each separate soul decide the character and influence of the change within it; but whatever shape it may assume it must surely come to the reformer. It is a condition of his required development in intellect and heart, besides being a condition of success, objective and external. In his own soul we may consider the intellectual necessity as subordinate to the moral, for strength of heart gives sometimes strength to intellect, and God chooses sometimes to set at naught all human wisdom by the inworking of his almighty Spirit. But the sense of duty and the consciousness of an earthly mission, which awake the slumbering intellect to more than mortal energy, without which all intellect is forever useless to the world, this can come only from long toiling and struggling of the soul, through doubt and conscious weakness and bitter sorrow, till ambition longs only for a forgotten grave, and self has vanished, and the light of a great purpose "so much the more shines inward." This is the life and power of the true reformer, and its attainment or development is complete self-reformation and the great epoch of his life.

To begin and to fulfill this mission, he must be impelled by an eternal motive,-a motive as deep and changeless as his immortality. That

motive comes alone from God. Hence is the change,-the Almighty entering the human soul and making it his temple, chasing all evil from the heart, and taking full possession of the man. Thus God works in history, making the greatest men the prophets and interpreters and priests of the invisible.

It would follow from our reasoning that only men transformed by a religious faith are true reformers. We assert it, and in history all men can read it. The religious element in the character of all great reformers and reforms has been too much neglected. It was something more than mere philanthropy, which led on Howard after that rayless sorrow and that solemn consecration, through dank and stifling maniaccells, through hunger and through cold, through the peril of applause, through bitter anguish of the soul, to his sad grave in the old Tauric Chersonese. It was a higher love than the love of suffering men, that transformed Wilberforce from the brilliant wit and fascinating idler, to the lofty Christian statesman, and the patient, toiling, and triumphant pleader for the slave. Where will you find the perfect type of the reformer? Will you find it in Bacon, the sad moral of whose life can never borrow brightness from the light of his resplendent intellect,―who served first his vanity, next his king, and last his God? Will you find it in La Place, who saw in the secular vibrations of the universe, those grand pendulum-beats of eternity, no evidence of the great hand that poised and set them swinging? Will you find it in Rosseau, who preached the revolution that had swollen his vain and impious soul, till France, catching the sickly passion of his eye, and his wild cries for a lying liberty, made that Revolution not a truth clad in consuming and purifying justice, but a "truth clad in hell-fire"? These men had

never felt the full change that moulds the man of great ideas into the true reformer. They had not purged their intellectual vision with the true euphrasy and rue. They never felt the sublime conception of a sacred duty. They never saw a motive in the eternal and invisible, nor heard the voice of God speak inly to their souls.

The phases of this change are multiform as human nature. No two minds ever passed through the same process of development. The change sometimes precedes the consciousness of a particular mission. The man waits for God and his time to call him. Plato imagined long ago that every human soul was but a moiety of the perfect creature, wandering over the wide and barren earth to find its other half. So the reformer, incomplete without his work, seeks long and earnestly for that which shall perfect his being and answer its true end.

Thus he waits like Howard, yet is no idler. He lives out every hour the noble maxim of John Bunyan, that "he who would live well, must make his last hour his company-keeper."

The life of Luther seems to show this change and its effects, proceeding gradually and together, to the reform of the reformer and the founding of a new Germanic faith. From the first light that dawned on his ascetic life, his mind began to unwind the musty cerements of the past, and as he grew in knowledge and in faith, he gave the world his thoughts. Not till his spirit grew settled and calm and free, did he realize that his mission was against the strongest power of Christendom, the splendor of whose aerial turrets made men forgetful of the damp, infernal dungeons far below. Then only did he speak out those words that Richter calls "half-battles ;"-then only did he defy pope, and devils, and death itself.

The true reformer leads on reform not as an end but as a means. His hatred burns against the wrong because it is the wrong. He lives in hope as well as in brave action. His fervid soul pierces the thick night of battle to the eternal day beyond. Change in itself he scorns. It is the high praise of Lord Bacon's biographer, that his desire was to proceed not "in aliud," but "in melius." The true reformer gives a deeper meaning to the phrase than Bacon ever dreamed of. He strives for a perfection that outlasts the dynasty of evil, for a perfection which is broadening and deepening forever. He chants the grand old words of Spenser :

Then gin I thinke on that which nature sayd,

Of that same time when no more change shall be:
But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd

Upon the pillours of Eternity,

That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;

For all that moveth doth in change delight:

But thenceforth all shall rest eternally

With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:

O, thou great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabbath's sight!

Quinnipiac.*

I CLIMB'D the summit of East Rock,
As the daylight waned away,
And looked beneath me on the town,
And down upon the Bay;
And further to the ocean-ward

The Sound lay wide and free,
To where Long Island in the haze
Hung cloud-like on the sea.

No sound was on the water,
No voice was on the land,

And the little waves crept noiselessly

Along the pebbled sand:

While down the masts of gallant ships
The sails hung side by side,

As rocked they slowly to and fro
With the pulses of the tide.

The world was then so beautiful,

So lovely and serene,

That all things seemed to pause awhile

To gaze upon the scene:

The sea forgot to murmur,
And the winds forgot to blow,
They saw the sky so bright above,
And the earth so bright below.

And then the city bells sent forth
Their evening call to prayer,
And harshly smote each iron tongue
Upon that evening air:

But to the mountain-top the tones

Rose up in wave-like swells,

And seemed like silver notes that came From far-off silver bells.

I saw the darkness ereeping o'er

The city and the Bay,

Till one by one each tower and spire

Had faded quite away,

And naught was left to mark the town

Which slumbered at my feet,

*The Indian name for New Havan.