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tion between crime and the home, offering to put the necessary statistical material in my hands for the purpose. But he has sorrowfully told me what I feared would be the case, that the material could not be had without original investigation. And yet I suspect that underneath most intemperance and most licentiousness, back of the far greater part of most crime and pauperism, lies the more fundamental and inclusive cause of defective family life. Lack of wise training in obedience, self-denial, regard for the interests of others, patient endurance in well-doing in the home, prepare both old and young for a career of vice and crime and increase poverty. A comprehensive and critical study of the causes of crime that shall pass beyond the narrow, one-sided efforts that have been annually put forth in the interests of a single philanthrophy is a most important work of the times. Social science has valuable suggestions for the professional reformer. The history of society will give interesting hints. Neither philanthropic effort or legislation reform will be fairly equipped for their work until provision is made for this better study of the causes and conditions of crime and the evils of divorce and vice. And the clergy can do much towards encouraging this work of giving breadth to statistical inquiry.

These are the chief hints for which I have room here. Another article will add to them and touch other phases of the subject.

VII.-LEAVES FROM A PREACHER'S NOTE-BOOK.

NO. IX.

BY ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D.D., PHILADELPHIA.

C. A great power is lodged in what may be called rhetorical sympathy. In an author, this consists first, in sympathy with the subject on which he writes, and the object for which he writes; secondly, in sympathy with the reader. In an orator, there must be sympathy with the theme and sympathy with the audience, in order to conviction and persuasion. For unless there be sympathy with the theme, the orator himself is not convinced; how, then, can he work that conviction and persuasion in others which is eloquence in exercise ?-the transfer of the speaker's intellectual and emotional life to the hearer. Among our platform orators, Rufus Choate possessed, to a remarkable degree, this sympathy with his theme; Henry Clay was equally remarkable for sympathy with his audience, but no man perhaps, in our country, possessed both more eminently than Daniel Webster. In the pulpit, Robert Hall was an example of sympathy with his subject; George Whitefield, especially, of sympathy with his hearers; in the combination of both elements Thomas Chalmers and John M. Mason doubtless surpassed them, as Spurgeon and Christlieb do now excel most other men.

CI. What is the ideal government? This was the question asked at the court of Periander of Corinth, and seven sages gave their respective answers. Bias said: "Where the law has no superior." Thales: "Where the citizens are neither too rich,nor too poor." Anacharsis replied: "Where virtue is honored, and vice detested." Cleobulus: "Where the subjects fear guilt more than punishment." Chilo replied: "Where the laws are more regarded than the orators." But Solon said: "Where an injury done to the meanest subject is an insult upon the whole constitu

tion." Combine all these tests, and behold them, more than met, in the government of God. That is an absolute monarchy, but infinite perfection is the power that guides the one will. The law has no superior, for He is law, represented and embodied. There is social equality, no caste, no invidious distinction, no aristocracy. There, holiness is loved and wickedness hated, and guilt is feared more than penalty. There, no appeals to passion, or impulse, or unworthy motive sway the holy mind either to obedience or rebellion. Supreme glory of all! the least and lowest of all the citizens is borne on the very bosom of Deity, and shielded by the very panoply of heaven! All the resources of the universe are marshaled in array to protect and shelter the rights and privileges of the most insignificant. Indeed, no obedient child of God is insignificant.

CII. Bernard de Palissy, a native of Agen, in France, and a maker of earthenware at Saintes, distinguished himself by his knowledge and talents. He was a Calvinist, and the French king, Henry III., said to him one day that he should be compelled to give him up to his enemies unless he changed his religion. "You have often said to me, sire," was the undaunted reply of De Palissy, "that you pitied me; but as for me, I pity you, who have given utterance to such words as I shall be compelled.' These are unkingly words, and I say to you, in royal phrase, that neither the Guises, nor all your people, nor yourself, are able to compel an humble manufacturer of earthenware to bend his knee before statues."

CIII. There is a kind of polyp that applies a suction valve to every pore, until its victim melts into the form of the destroyer. I have often thought that the world is such a polyp, when it gets hold of the nominal disciple.

CIV. The inscriptions on sun-dials, if collected, would make an interesting and suggestive book. Oxford: Pereunt et imputantur: the hours perish and are imputed. Abbotsford: Nv εpxɛrar: the night cometh. Another, we know not where: "Go about your business."

Another:

Another:

Quae lenta accedit, quam velox praeterit hora!

Ut capias, patiens esto, sedesto vigil!

"En peu d'heure Dieu Labeure."

CV. The importance of a decision, especially at the crises of life. A French nobleman says: "Every man goes down to Damascus once in his life." But how few, like Saul of Tarsus, immediately obey the heavenly vision! I insert the original as a very remarkable paragraph:

Un de plus.-Sous ce titre a paru une brochure du Marquis de Talleyrand-Périgord. Un de plus, c'est un républicain de plus. Voici d'ailleurs la courte préface de cet écrit, qui a causé dans le faubourg Saint-Germain quelque émotion :

Tout homme a son chemin de Damas. Bien peu imitent saint-Paul.

Comme bien d'autres, j'ai été sourd à la grande voix qui commande à l'homme d'être utile à ses semblables; mais après les malheurs qui ont accablé la France, en présence des efforts généreux et constants de la démocratie républicaine pour faire sortir le pays du gouffre dans lequel l'avait plongé l'empire, je ne me sens pas le droit de rester spectateur indifférent de la lutte.

Dans la grande armée humanitaire, je viens prendre mon rang de soldat, simplement, mais loy

alement.

A la démocratie contemporaine, je viens dire :
Comptez sur un républicain de plus.

CH.-M., MARQUIS DE TALLEYRAND-PERIGORD.

CVI. The test of a sermon is, after all, its effectiveness. Judged by the standards of homiletics or hermeneutics, many a discourse is very defective, which is nevertheless very effective. The beauty of the fishing tackle is one thing-the catching of fish is the test of the fisherman.

CVII. Self-indulgence tends to a monstrous self-absorption. It is a bad thing to get into the habit of thinking and of studying to gratify self. It finds us sickening or wearying of one gratification after another, yet constantly seeking something new, till like Xerxes we are ready to offer a reward to any one who will invent a new form of pleasure. The habit of self-indulgence is fatal to symmetry of character. The purest gratifications comes to us unsought. As Arthur Harwick says,

pleasure, like our shadows, flees when pursued, but follows when we seem to forsake it.

CVIII. Separation is the Law of Holy Living. When Israel entered Canaan they were forbidden to entangle themselves with alliances with Egypt, Assyria and Canaanites. For 400 years they kept aloof. Then Solomon renewed intercourse with Egypt, married Pharaoh's daughter and flagrantly violated the law in Deut. xvii: 16, by bringing vast numbers of Egyptian horses into Judea. Disasters rapidly followed. He lived to see his worst foes, Jeroboam and Hadad, guests at Pharaoh's court; and in the next generation an Egyptian king captured Jerusalem and despoiled palaces and even the Temple. Still worse, the Egyptian Idol, Apis, or the sacred bull, was worshiped at Dan and Bethel and swayed the whole northern kingdom.

CIX. Stoddard, the Missionary to Persia, "whose astronomy ended in the star of Bethlehem."

CX. Dr. Gordon says our modern inventions are little more than the enlarging or elongating of our own faculties and organs. The telegraph is the extension of the arm as by nerves of wire, so that we write at the distance of a thousand miles; the telephone is the extension of our voice and of our neighbor's ear; the bicycle the lengthening of our legs so that we reach ten feet instead of two; the telescope and microscope enlarge our vision so that we see 5,000,000 miles intead of five, etc., etc. CXI. The Grace of Continuance. Jno. viii: 31, 32. There is a preparatory stage of discipleship: the mind and heart and will moved, but the soul not yet made new in Christ. It is the vestibule of salvation; all depends on holding on, going on, continuing. The seed is in the soil, but needs to get root and grow. Satan then brings all his power to bear to prevent continuance in well doing. Here the results of continuance are indicated: 1. Confirmation of Discipleship. 2. Revelation of Truth. 3. Emancipation from Sin. Our Lord puts before his followers something to do, to prove, to know, to become.

CXII. The Nature of Liberty. Cicero says: Libertas est potestas faciendi id quod jure liceat. Lawlessness, license, is not liberty. True freedom is found only in obedience to proper restraint. A river finds liberty to flow, only between banks; without these it would only spread out into a slimy, stagnant pool. Planets, uncontrolled by law, would only bring wreck to themselves and the universe. The same law which fences us in, fences others out; the restraints which regulate our liberty also insure and protect it. It is not control, but the right kind of control, and a cheerful obedience which make the freeman. Psalm xl: 8. CXIII. Christ in the Word The main value of the Scripture is that it is a casket enshrining one priceless jewel, the Lord Jesus Christ. The pearl is found in the pearl shell. The shell is beautiful, but it is only a fainter image of the beauty which is gathered into one symmetrical sphere, in the gem which it contains. That same beauty, secreted by the mantle of the pearl oyster and diffused over the interior surface. constitutes the mother of pearl.

SERMONIC

THE DRINKING USAGE.

BY THEODORE L. CUYLER, D.D., IN THE LAFAYETTE AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, BROOKLYN, N. Y.

Judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way.-Rom. xiv: 13.

DURING the last week, the rash and reckless act of a single individual startled this whole community, when he sought notoriety and found death. Probably the universal epitaph of him who thus flung himself away from yonder bridge would be, Died as the fool dieth." Yet, while the whole community is startled by the sudden, and what proved to be the suicidal, act of a fellow-creature, God's eye is continually seeing the slower, but equally sure flinging away of precious lives, and too often of immortal souls. That Omniscient Eye which sees the whole community every hour in its inmost life, is seeing, I fear, strange, sad things, slow tragedies, but certain. He has seen thousands of people round about us sorely tempted, prompted to do that which they must have recognized was fearfully dangerous, and might be fatally hurtful, and which yet they have done. God has seen hundreds of young men balancing the question whether to yield to allurements of sinful fashion and custom, or to preserve cleanliness and purity of body and of mind; seen many a one turning in, at the close of a hard day's work, to a rendezvous where there was only hilarity for the moment, but at last an empty purse, an empty character, and a desolated home. He has seen written in invisible letters over the door-ways of many of these splendidly upholstered haunts of temptation: "He that entereth here is not wise: rich men here made poor, thrifty men idle, honest men deceptive and worthless, sound men sick, moral men vicious, parents

SECTION.

made childless, children made orphans, wives made widows, and immortal souls by a slow torture put to a death that never, never dies." God has seen thousands of young men debating the question whether to go on or halt, whether to take the leap or hold back. Yet the drinker has gone on and drank, the vender has gone on and sold death by measure; and God has seen, sometimes, a mere boy drawn into that maelstrom of temptation, and, on the other hand, an aged hand trembling as it grasped the glass which was to be the cup of death. He has seen sometimes a father -strange sight!—a father putting that very glass of temptation on his own table, and religious people offering (thoughtlessly, I trow) that which might be the first snare, the first step in a career that shall lead down to darkness and the grave. And oh, what sorrowful spectacles God is witnessing! As a pastor during these five-and-twenty years, I have been called to see so many, and during the last few days others still, and the thought has often come to me, What spectacles the All-seeing Eye must witness every week and every day amid the more than half a million of people that fill our great city! Ah, the picture is beyond all human pencil. Doré left behind him many most extraordinary pic. turesque specimens of his genius in depicting the terrible. The hand of Doré never painted a single week's experience in Brooklyn, for he would have had to put into it everything that was terrible and revolting-health in ruins, hope destroyed, affections crushed, prayers silenced, the chosen seats of domestic peace made desolate. He might put in the distant back-ground the vanishing vision of a happy past, and in the foreground the terrible certainty of an unending woe, prison houses with doors that open only one way. He might peo

Many of the full sermons and condensations published in this REVIEW are printed from the authors' manuscripts; others are specially reported for this publication. Great care is taken to make these reports correct. The condensations are carefully made under our editorial supervision.-ED.]

ple his canvas with men whose shattered forms are tenanted by tormented souls, with little children on whose lips the smiles seldom play, with women in whose cheeks furrows have been plowed by tears wrung from a breaking heart. Paint that, and you see what God sees every week in our own beautiful and beloved city; and then light it up with the glares that flash from the infernal fires, and you will be bound to confess that, though you see it not yourself, that Omniscient Eye beholds it continually. And we ought not to turn our sympathies, our prayers, our earnest example and our influence, from these most heart-rending spectacles. In view of this, do you wonder that year after year, and often during the year, I have come to this pulpit bowed in spirit, with a woe is me if I lift not up my voice and cease not continually to warn, continually to instruct, continually to invite, that, as far as I am permitted to shepherd these households and homes, I may be kept guiltless from having failed to present the whole gospel of love, and do all that is in my power to save from a doom like that.

Therefore it is that I have brought you this morning this passage, presenting this great fact from this one standpoint; not its political bearing, nor its scientific bearing, nor its medical aspect its personal aspect, its domestic aspect. And I brought this declaration of God, not man's utterance, but His, when I read to you that it was right that no one should put a stumblingblock nor an occasion to fall in the way of his brother, that it was right and good not to drink wine whereby thy brother doth stumble or is made weak. I lay down this principle, that you and I have no right to do that whose influence is mischievous to others; and we are to withhold ourselves from this, not from a law of self-preservation, but from a law of brotherly love. The legal liberty of a good man or a good woman never should be exercised when a moral evil will flow from that exercise. are never to put stumbling-blocks and occasions to fall in the way of others.

We

That is just as thoroughly a Bible doctrine as that great central, glorious doctrine set forth last Sabbath morning, of the atoning blood and sacrifice of Jesus Christ; not so vital, of course, but it comes from the same source; it is a part of the same gospel. I say again, abstinence from that which injures others, should come home to every one that loves others with the grip of a moral obligation. That is the principle which God's Word lays down. The Apostle says it is μalov-fair, beautiful, morally right, not to drink wine whereby thy brother stumbleth and is made weak and destroyed. You may say it is inexpedient. Well, expediency is a limber word, often. It has been used sometimes to excuse sin. I have no idea of expediency, but right. In the long run, it is never expedient to do aught save what is right. It never can be expedient to do wrong.

The inherent evil of using all alcoholic beverages and intoxicants is twofold. One reason is that it exposes you and me to danger. The inevitable tendency of alcohol is to strike right to the brain, overturn the throne, and through the brain reach the very soul. I confess here that I have been an abstainer, from childhood, for self-preservation also; I could not put a coal of fire in a nervous system as inflammable as mine without danger of combustion, conflagration. But that is not the greatest reason. It is because it puts a stumbling-block in the pathway of others, whom you and I, according to the Golden Rule, are to love as we love ourselves.

I

Then I again repeat the proposition, that no good man or woman has a right to do anything the influence of which is certainly hurtful to their fellow-men and possibly hurtful to themselves. have a legal right to do a great many things that I have no moral right as a Christian to do for a single moment. I have a legal right to take strychnine, if I choose, or arsenic; I have no moral right to commit self-destruction. I have a legal right to do many things which by their influence may work fatal injury to my fellow-men. The

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