by all things, and hoard up, as in a vast granary, the harvest of his tals. Surgical and medicinal cures he effected everywhere; and so great was his celebrity in 1526 that Ecolampadius, a coadjutor of Luther, and a professor at Basil, called Paracelsus thither to occupy a chair of physic and surgery in that university. He remained there, however, but one year. His impatient spirit, his arrogance, his uncouth method of lecturing on an art he had never regularly learned, and above all the theological notions to which he fearlessly gave utterance, annoyed the good, dull students at Basil; and having quarrelled with a canon and the magistrates about a fee, he left Basil for ever. The last fourteen years of his life were devoted to wandering, and he died in the hospital of Saint Sebastian, at Salzburg, on September 24th, 1541. On his epitaph it was truly written that he bestowed and distributed his own goods among the poor.

Paracelsus stood in the front rank among a host of great freethinkers of his day. I claim all those earnest and questioning spirits, from Luther downwards, as freethinkers, because they dared to think freely. They look like giants through the haze of centuries, standing on the orient mountains, and hailing with deep and solemn voices the second dawn upon the earth of active, light-bringing intellect, which blazed up in vivid splendour far away, and displayed to the dwellers in the valleys the shadows of their colossal forms in strong relief upon its golden brilliancy. I look with awe, reverence, and thankfulness back upon these men. In an age of darkness, when men denied the blessings of light, they dared to let the brightness in upon the wondering multitude. In an age of ferocious tyranny, political and priestly, they dared to stigmatise the pranks of power as heinous sins. In an age when the Pope asserted his supremacy over the minds of men, dictating what they should think, and what they should believe, these heroic thinkers, by hard toil, laid the foundations of the right of private judgment, the right of free-thought, the right of free-expression. Let us not belie the past. It made the present. Let us not despise those men because the doctrines they believed were different from ours. Let us not, in the worst spirit of conceit, deny them their share of praise for the true service they performed in building up the great temple of civilisation. Let us all remember that three hundred years hence the doctrines we teach in our schools, in our colleges, in our churches, aye, and in some of our most advanced halls and chapels, may be as obsolete to the doctrines to be taught then, as those of three hundred years ago are to us.

That Paracelsus was a true freethinker is placed beyond a doubt by the testimony of his opponents and biographers. That he was noble-minded generous, frank, a student, not for fame, but from an insatiable desire to get knowledge, for the sake of knowledge alone, may be learned from the same, That he, like too many, aimed too high, and feeling himself possessed of faculties, feeling himself stirred by aspirations, which would carry

sources.

him into lofty regions of science, dared too much, failed, and sought solace for a time in low pleasures, is also certain. He was too impatient.

Science comes but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point. But Paracelsus knew not that as the law of accumulation. He tried to grasp all, and failed because the circle of knowledge was too narrow and confined to furnish data for correct conclusions. Bacon, who admits the justness of the principles upon which Paracelsus proceeded, charges him with imagining the responses of experience. But this is hardly fair. A man must come to some conclusions, and if his data be erroneous or deficient, he must of necessity arrive at erroneous and imperfect conclusions.

But what proof is there that Paracelsus was a freethinker? Much. His books were excommunicated by the church. He taught not only a new system of medicine, but a new theology. He was classed among those in that age who were partly atheists, partly heretics. His books, one tells us, abounded with much theological writing, which 'plainly smacked of atheism,' and sounded very harshly in the ears of a true Christian. He was reproached with confounding sacred and profane things, fables with heresies, Reason with Religion. He was accused of impiety; and it was averred he never prayed to God. Renauldin asserts that he taught pantheism in the grossest form.' Not only this, but he was a new, because he was a free, thinker in chemistry and medicine. Peter Ramus and Vossius both tell us, the one that in the hands of Paracelsus we see the art of medicine born and perfected, for the first time; and the other, that Paracelsus recalled chemistry from the grave.

After all, freethinking is the foundation of all grandeur of character. And the fearlessness, the hopefulness, the hardiness with which Paracelsus, by intuition, threw himself upon this element of greatness is very touching. He was born in a chaotic world. He stood there with vast powers of design fermenting in his brain, but no materials nor tools to build withal. He struggled there like a giant, fighting in the twilight, the only light he had flashing from the weapon wherewith he fought. He was like an eagle caged, a wild horse maimed. He traversed the world over to satisfy his craving intellect, to nourish his active thought, which preyed upon itself when it found no fitting nutriment. He was a grand spectacle of undisciplined

power.

Robert Browning has written a poem on his life a deep and touching tragedy, I would sooner trust the poet than the biographer to delineate for me the character of Paracelsus-because the poet puts himself, by the force of his imagination, into the position of his hero, and literally recreates the character; but the biographer generally narrates mere facts, imputes common motives, is not capable of analysing and recomposing the elements of a character like that of Paracelsus by the fire of genius. The tone is low-the poetry of real life is not there-and we do not see that

this great man is a great man at all. Not so the poet. He, having mastered the facts, appreciated the conditions, felt the obstacles, is, for the time, the man. Robert Browning has done all this. We see in his poem the gigantic intellect, ardent imagination, and fearless moral temperament of the man Paracelsus displayed before us.

His life was like a stormy July day. The dawn is clear, soft, and golden; the lark sings aloft, and the bee hums below; fragrance rises balmily from the wild rose and woodbine, and the dew lies like spangles on the grass; the wind hushingly whispers among the tall dark pines, and murmurs scarcely audible through the stout branches and majestic girth of the green chesnut trees; nature lies before us, 'fresh as on creation's day'-all is calm, the breathing of unawakened aspirations, the boyhood of the day. Then the scene changes; the winds mutter in fitful gusts, leaden-hued masses of vapour, like the snowless peaks of mountains, loom up over the distant hills; the air is awfully still. Soon, black clouds, laden with lightning, blind the brilliancy of the sun, as up the steep rack of heaven he goes unerring on his way, now darting his imprisoned splendour through the rifts and chasms of lurid cloud, and now stooping his broad bright brow into a tremendous sea of darkness; ere noon the lightnings flash, the echoing thunder clangs, and booms, and roars, and

'The big rain comes dancing to the earth,'

like tears of wrath and agony shed by some mighty being struggling in the folds of the tempest; but the elemental conflict, dimming the lustre of aspiring youth, careers on, driven by the fierce wind, far away. Again the sun beams forth. Noon, still, majestic, tranquil noon covers for awhile, with her robe of glory, the forests and the mountains, the meadows and the cities, the seas and the streams: one hour of peace, one moment of repose, and again the banner of the tempest is upheaved over the blue horizon, again the trumpet-note of the blast breaks upon the dreadful stillness. The whole sky is hidden; the lightning-laden clouds burst in rain and fire over our heads; the huge trees bend, and moan, and shriek, as the tornado of the blast uproots the weakest of their brethren; the mightiest and the meanest, man and the beasts, shrink before it in terror. Yet all the while the sun is still shining above the storm, and the mountain tops glow whitely in his presence; and, at length, as he glides towards his goal, and you track the path. way of his fiery chariot by the windows of light in the vast exhausted stormclouds, then the wind rolls up the heavy curtain, and as he rose in promise, so he sinks in glory, shedding a thousand gorgeous hues upon the mass of vapour hanging between his radiance and the sons of men.

So it was with Paracelsus. His early life was calm and peaceful, though the breath of aspiration stirred the smooth surface of his youthful mind. But as he grew in years, as he yielded to the prompting of an eager spirit, he met, as all must do who dare be free, with storm and tempest, with agony and

triumph. The clouds of vice and disappointment dimmed, but could not extinguish, his clear and lustrous eye; and when-not old, but worn with toil-he felt the hand of death upon him, then his primal strength returned, his primal brightness blazed forth once again.

6

Through three centuries the light of his life has pierced, and now flows round our brows. He stands up there, in the misty distance, a giant among his peers. He stands up there, one of the greatest freethinkers of his day. Some one called him a second Luther.' And he was a second Luther. He was one of those who, with Copernicus, Gallileo, Luther, Ramus, prepared the way for Bacon and Descartes, Harvey, and Newton. He failed because the age was not ripe enough to afford him the materials of success. By his free thinking and free daring he has taught us two great lessons: first, that the worship of pure intellect not only fails to give satisfaction, even to the mightiest, but that intellect, uncontrolled by love, is a great source of evil; secondly, he stands there a land-mark of the past; and, by comparing the chemistry of Paracelsus with the chemistry of Faraday, we see what progress has been made-we learn that true knowledge is piled up slowly and painfully-that, however dark, however dreary, however successless the lot of man, at any epoch, may appear, his struggles have not been without result -and that his sufferings and his martyrdom tend to a final and triumphant issue. EUGENE.

PRIESTS.-The Priest is not a negative character, he is something positive and disagreeable. He is not, like the Quaker, distinguished from others merely by singularity of dress and manners; but he is distinguished from others by pretension to superiority over them. His faults arise from his boasted exemption from the opposite vices, aud he has one running through all his others-hypocrisy. He is proud with an affectation for humility; bigoted from a pretended zeal for truth; greedy with an ostentation of active contempt for the things of this world; professing self-denial, and always thinking of self-gratification. As he cannot be armed at all points against the flesh and the devil, he takes refuge in self-delusion and mental imposture-learns to play at fast and loose with his own conscience, and to baffle the vigilance of the public by dexterous equivocations; sails as near the wind as he can; shuffles with principle; is punctilious in matters of form, and tries to reconcile the greatest strictness of decorum and regularity of demeanour with the least possible sacrifice of his own interest or appetites. They (the priests) indulge in all the sensuality that is not prohibited in the decalogue; they monopolise every convenience they can lay lawful hands on, and consider themselves as the peculiar favourites of heaven, and the rightful inheritors of the earth; they are on a short allowance of sin, and are only the more eager to catch all the stray bits and nice morsels they can meet.-Hazlitt.

CORRESPONDENCE.

GOOD NEWS FOR CHRISTIANS.

are

MR. EDITOR,-Among the most remarkable signs of the times none so pregnant with mighty future results as the sudden springing up of all kinds of athenæums, mechanics' and literary institutions, reading rooms, and societies of all kinds of names with all kinds of rules,-all having the same object, however diverse their modes of realisation may be the spread of education. Amongst these societies-though it cannot be denied a theological surveillance is maintained and carried out more or less rigidly in them, depending upon the preponderance of the cloth in their councils-there is such a spirit abroad, that canters have to be exceedingly cautious how they apply the breaks to the wheels of progress; and have frequently (in spite of their aprons, shovel hats, and white neck cloths) had such practical and utilitarian lessons digged into them, that priestcraft seems in those bodies to be very nearly defunct as regards that omnipotent influence which heretofore they have swayed, and the possession of which they consider vested in them by a right divine.

All large towns have now one or more of these literary clubs, aad there is much to be learned from their gradual progression. At first the cloth opposed these institutions in toto. But common sense being rather too strong, they joined the education phalanx-feeling, from their position, that the people, who have but barely time to get food, with perhaps but half an hour for reading, would be certain to place them in influential positions in the proposed associations. They used this power well, almost efficiently, committees then naming, under a pretended carefulness to avoid wounding individual religious opinions, decided not to have theological works in their institutions. How this worked in practice is well known: all the fusty, musty, stupid, brutal, antiquated, fabulous, and blasphemous works of the clergy from the year one were admitted in them, and the rule was never carried out, except to exclude works of progress, one of which alone would perhaps have disseminated more valuable information, and stimulated more thought and reflection among the members of the institutions than all the works of all the bishops that ever lived put together.

It was a clique of this kind acting in the spirit described that but very lately burned the Eastern Travels' of Harriet Martineau; and it is the common sense of mankind, brought to bear upon these mental Vandals, that has caused the committee of the same institution to censure the members of the committee who so acted. In the same spirit, the Leader newspaper was lately burned at Oxford, and an atheistical work, called the 'Logic of Death,' at Macclesfield. But what is the result? Why that even those who cannot read, even children ask, 'Can these books, if in error, not be