glows in the gorgeous colors of the west at the decline of day, and rests in the blackened crest of the gathering storm-cloud. It is on the mountain's hight, and in the cataract's roar-in the towering oak, and in the tiny flower. Wherever we see the hand of God, there beauty finds her dwelling-place. VISIONS. BY AMANDA T. JONES, WHEN silent-footed Evening draws, And lights her silver lamp; Are dim with falling tears. And 'mong the chambers of the soul And holy hopes and high resolves Come thronging at their call. They breathe of bliss, and like the songs Their fond and soothing words. Amid its many cells, An echo to the thoughts they bring, They sing of death; the spirit thrills, As thoughts of the cold grave arise, And silent tears fall warm and fast; Then come the friends we buried once, From our rapt sight is falling. "Tis thus that twilight visions come, THE COUNTRY GRAVEYARD. BY MRS. ELLIE WATSON. WHERE the leaves, at eve, do rustle There, in quiet beauty lying, Is a country graveyard lone; A hand, ever pointing upward, And the words, "No graves are there." Blessed words, and O how soothing To the hearts of those who mourn, For the tender ties that bound them, By Death's hand asunder torn! Far above this world of sorrow Dwelleth she, an angel fair; She will die no more forever: Blessed thought, "no graves are there." GLOOM AND SUNSHINE. BY P. FISKE REED. THE day is dark, and cloud and gloom Has changed its patter on the pane, The angry clouds are floating low, I feel, though dark their shadows fall, THE POWER OF RIGHT. BY PROFESSOR B. H. NADAL. IGHT God: brings with it the evi religious character, and that of my immortality, because I set out from the idea and capacity of right in myself. Before we proceed to discuss the power of Rence is from viod; it b. By w path of light right, let us inquire what is right? And to this it unites with him, and we feel that if there had been no God there would have been no right; and because there is right there must be a God. Wrong, the contradictory of right, considered as realized, is the work of the creature, and must have had a beginning; but regarded merely as a possibility must be admitted as eternal, and, in the Divine mind, set over against right-without it the very conception of right is impossible. Right, which belongs to the nature of the infinite Being, and which stands in eternal opposition to wrong, both actual and possible, has passed over to us, both as an idea and as nature. The brutes have forms and degrees of intelligence; "the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib;" but we are the only earthly creatures that know the difference between right and wrong. This distinction is clear to the most illiterate, without explanation, and mysterious to the most profoundly cultivated after the deepest investigation. It is seen to arise in the mind of the child, whether in savage or civilized life, and is a crown of joy, or a chalice of poison to the man of years when flesh and heart are about to fail. This distinction has a sphere of its own, within which we may confine it for the purpose of examination and study, and yet is so vast and so expansive as to press into every other circle of thought and to offer itself as the regulating power of every mental process. It is at once simple and incomprehensible, narrow and infinite, on the surface and buried in the depths of an unfathomable ocean. If we consider this distinction as a part of our nature, we are at once brought to the conclusion that man is a religious being, and, therefore, immortal. For to feel that we are required to do right and yet are capable of doing wrong, is to acknowledge responsibility, one of the fundamental ideas of religion; while, at the same time, responsibility is wholly without meaning unless we are to exist in another state in order to meet it. This wonderful idea of right, then, considered both as a matter of speculation and as a part of our nature, draws after it the existence and character of God, and our own responsibility and immortality: it is the center thought of our being, around which all the other great ideas of humanity are compacted. I reach the conviction of the Divine existence, that of my own question our answer is threefold: we predicate right of the opinions and principles of men, of their sentiments and of their acts. These are the constituents of the one right, and when they concur and are highly developed in the same person, they form a complete, and beautiful, and powerful character. When we predicate right of the opinions and principles of men, we simply mean that these opinions and principles are true: the power of right in this case is the power of truth. When we say a man is right in his sentiments, we mean to ascribe to him good intentions, good motives, sincerity. Here the power of right is the power of a truthful and earnest soul. And when we say a man's actions are right, we mean to assert a correspondence between his conduct and the Divine law. The power of right in this instance may be called the power of external obedience; that is, of outward correspondence with the law of God. A little reflection will show that there is power in each of these forms of right, even when taken alone. First, a true opinion, clearly expressed, has a much greater chance of success than a false one, though the utterer of it may be a tool or a sycophant. Nay, there are thousands holding the truth in unrighteousness, who are never right except for a price, and yet even in their hands the truth can not be without force. Indeed, such is the power of truth that its influence is felt when it is totally wanting, and a falsehood, assuming the name and guise of truth, is accepted and honored; whereas if it had presented itself without disguise, it would have produced nothing but disgust. How often has a whole system of error been rendered palatable by stirring into it a few grains of popular and obvious truth! Truth is never rejected nor error accepted as such; but truth has often been persecuted as error, and error as often honored as truth. But how little power will truth have when hypocritically or indifferently held, compared with what it might have if the heart and the life followed the professions and the arguments! Something of the same kind may be said of right as predicated of the sentiments. If a man loves the truth, and thinks he has it when he has not, there is power in the mere sentiment of truthfulness-the zeal is genuine if the idea is false; the cause is weak in itself, but strong in highest, in the only complete sense, is triple; the brain and the heart within, and the daily life cal make one glorious system, that must not be divided, and can not without violence. Truth, the right of the intellect, attains a permanent position in the soul only when embraced with right sentiments, and only through such sentiments, that is, through the transparent love of truth, can the ideal pass into the actual, and the common life become an epic replete with the triumph of reason over passion-of right over wrong. the truthful soul and earnest love of its champion. Such is the assimilative power of earnestness that it is capable of converting the impalpa-without-the intellectual, the moral, the practible threads of a false theory into massive bolts of argument, of placing apparently solid foundations under air-castles, of drawing the forces of the opposition over to itself, and of fusing the most discordant materials into its own mass. Earnestness, in cases not to be numbered in the history of the world, has given victory to the grossest error and injustice. It is not the error, but the honest though mistaken zeal that conquers in spite of the error. There may be nothing in men's nature responding to the notions of this hero of error; but there is something that responds to his truthful design, to his noble and honest purpose, and that kindles at contact with his fiery zeal. Right sentiments, then, have power even when they exist apart from correct opinions, and are clogged and impeded by false theories. In regard to right actions, a man may be an Atheist or a fatalist, and thus utterly ignore the distinction between right and wrong; his actions may be outwardly right only from selfishness or fashion; and yet even here, where we have the merest shell of right, we see its power-selfishness is compelled to employ it in order to gain its ends. Every rogue and hypocrite wants the reputation of doing right that he may the more easily do wrong. A good name is dear to an honest man, both as a badge of character and as a means of doing good; the villain prizes it as the treacherous duplicate key with which he finds his way into his neighbor's iron safe. This, then, is the high ideal of humanity: perfect truth, boundless love for truth, considered especially as moral, and constant practice of truth. Toward this we are continually to aspire; it is our privilege to be always approaching it, but our destiny, while on earth, never fully to attain. Even inspired men have but partially realized it, for they have all had their uninspired moments. It was left for him who was at once both human and superhuman, both an infant of days and the everlasting Father; it was left for Jesus of Nazareth to convert this glorious ideal into a living reality; to give it a brief abode in the earth-to leave it in the world as the crown of history, the source of the noblest civilization and the faultless pattern of humanity. With him truth was unmixed with error, the love of right never misapplied, and life without a blemish. But is there any thing in all this to dishearten us? Is it not merely saying that man can not become God; that the Son of Mary alone can be God and man at the same time? And is it not still true, as the divine Teacher has expressed it, that if any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine-know all that is necessary to be known? perfectly right, it is equally impossible for him whose master passion is the love of right ever to be fatally wrong. He who seeks truth everywhere and always, and is willing to find it any where, even among enemies, is already the owner of the oyster containing the goodly pearl-he will soon find the hid treasure-he is already within the field that incloses it, and his feet are pressing the sod that conceals it. Thus we see that even when the seamless garment of right is rent by violence, or separated into half-living forms by the sharp instrument of analysis, the separated and fragmentary parts still retain a portion of their power, and, in some If, therefore, it is impossible that even the cases, become mighty for wrong. Truth, earnest-wisest and best of men should always be perness, and obedience form a trinity, the name of which unity is right; and this unity receives its character as much from the union as from the nature of the constituent parts. An axiom in morals is one thing as an article of trade and a means of making money, and quite another thing when responded to and embraced by a noble and truth-loving soul-the love of an earnest heart, when given to a false and visionary theory, is widely different from the love of the same heart when possessed by some grand and ennobling truth-the beautiful system of Christian ethics received by Simon the magician and Paul the apostle finds very different illustrations in the history of the two men. Right, then, in the Here is enough of right within human reach, not merely to ennoble the soul, but even to exalt sheer mediocrity into glorious heroism, and to nerve the single heart and individual arm against all the power of a selfish and corrupted age. Only be sure that you love the right with an ardent, glowing, ever-increasing passion-that there is no sacrifice you would not make for her honor and advancement, and no toil you would not undergo in her service, and you are already mighty. A brief examination will show that the power of right, as we have presented it, lies imbedded in our moral and intellectual constitution, and necessarily results from the relations of our being. lead us, even to the scaffold, or still worse for intellectual pride, to the opinions of our opponents, and to the ranks of the opposite party in religion, philosophy, or politics. It is to press on after truth in our investigations without regard to the profits or the glory of discovery; to be as glad to detect and as frank to confess our own errors as those of our antagonists; to feel that there is no study, no enterprise we are as much interested in as being and advancing right. The character thus formed wins by its beautiful simplicity, astonishes by its disinterested devotion, awes by its unbending rectitude, and persuades by all three; men love it because it is truly lovely, and confide in it because they can not help it. The man possessing such a character feels himself called, as one has said, to bear witness to the truth; his life, his fortunes are of little moment-the results of his life are of infinite moment. He is the priest of truth; he is in her This is deducible, a priori, from what we know and are obliged to conceive of God. If right is a part of his nature, and the eternal inherent rule of the Divine life, it must certainly be impressed on his creation, and become, in like manner, the rule of all finite intelligences. The universe must bear it on its broad breast as a motto; must be built up around it and gravitate toward it-opposition to it must be conflict with the highest harmony and war with God himself. If his nature is the highest-the essential right-pay; he has bound himself to do all things, to and it is his object to bring his intelligent creatures into harmony with himself in this respect, he certainly has not failed so to construct the universe that right and its adherents shall have the advantage of wrong. But not to push the a priori argument, let us come directly to the cause of the power of right; why is right powerful? We reply, right is powerful because of the character it forms, because of its adaptation to be dominant in every sphere of activity, and because of the immediate cooperation and blessing of God. First, then, it is strong because it is its nature to produce a strong character. We do not say that every good man is an example of what we mean by a strong character; but we do affirm that every man becomes strong in proportion as right works itself out in him, as it becomes established in his affections and in his intellect. The being right in the sense of which we speak, is not that rhetorical sentimentalism that finds vent in unmeaning prettinesses concerning the excellence of virtue, while it would not touch one of her burdens with a little finger; neither is it that philosophical appreciation of the true and the good sometimes exhibited by the scientific moralist in disgraceful contradiction with his life. One of these loves right as a gay girl does a flower, simply as a decoration; the other as most conquerors have loved their soldiers, as a means of plunder or glory. To be right in the grand and noble sense of which we are treating, is to regard it not as a means, but as an end, to love it above all things, to seek it in all things, and to follow it whithersoever it may venture all things, to suffer all things for her. There are two qualities of mind which right has a tendency to produce, which, more than any others, contribute to the formation of a strong character; they are courage and the power of calm reflection. There is a courage which is purely natural, or, perhaps, only animal; it lies more in the motions of the body than in those of the soul; the result rather of unheeding passion than of well-considered purpose. If such a courage could be induced to pause and reflect on the threshold of a dangerous encounter, flight, in all probability, would follow reason; but with the brute's want of thought there is the brute's ferocious assault on the enemy. There are also cases, many of them, where courage, genius, and wrong are found united; where the man has sold himself for the objects of a godless ambition; and reputation, happiness, life, and the soul's eternal weal are freely risked in a thousand emergencies. But if the suggestions of such a mind were those of truth and right, instead of those of lawless ambition, how calm would be his soul in the midst of the battle-storm, and how infinitely more sublime his courage! If he trembled at all, it would not be for his own safety, but for the honor of the right and for the awful danger of its enemies. The explanation of the matter is, that ambition is less a love of power and fame than of self; at least it is only a love of these for the sake of self. Self is the point toward which the ambitious man would draw every thing within the circle of his thoughts; self is the great source of his solicitude-the object he would enrich, and glorify, and invest with supreme power; and, hence, in all his struggles, his courage is only the inspiration of an all-absorbing selfishness; it has no deeper root, no wider range, no higher aspiration than self. This self-deification-this morbid, all-subsidizing self-love, with all its overstrained intensity and demon-like potency, contains, at least, one element of manifest weakness, and that is, the bitter, irrepressible conviction, that the object of love is unworthy; that such a self ought to be hated and despised. A courage having its stronghold in such meanness and corruption, must sometimes falter, and is destined, sooner or later, with a terrible crash, to give way altogether. This is not the courage so striking, though negatively, described by the apostle when he tells us that "perfect love casteth out fear." The love of self is indeed great; but the consciousness of ill-desert, and an occasional glimpse of coming doom open the door to fear and mar its perfection; the passion for self is fierce, mighty; but reason, though generally borne down by it, will now and then assert its authority, declaring it moral madness, and weakening the soul by dividing it against itself. His ever In a character whose chief trait is devotion to right, self-love is not indeed ignored, but subordinated and regulated: self is the servant of right, anxious to do and ready to die for its master. While the hero who draws his inspiration from self-love only, is doomed to see much that is revolting in the object of his devotion, the other, the moral hero, daily and hourly sees in right fresh reasons for increased ardor of attachment and zeal in his services. Right has no blemishes, no defects to weaken his faith or lessen his love; every contemplation of it reveals new beauties and sublimities which tend to complete the glorious vassalage of his soul. present conviction is, I must do, and think, and say only what is right. Pursuing the right in all his studies, enshrining it as a divine principle, obeying it as a divine impulse-the expression of an unspotted conscience, it grows all through him and over him, pervades him like his blood, covers him like his skin, becomes the soul of his soul, and draws him up to companionship and equality with angels, till we are reminded of the beautiful words of Paul, "We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." His soul becomes radiant with the glory of right-a visible expression and living representation of it. To cleave to it becomes his highest good; to depart from it more terrible than earthquake, plague, or sword-more to be dreaded than all the power of its enemies. To sacrifice fortune, fame, and even life, is less, infinitely less, than for one moment to renounce it. And when this conviction is carried up into the sphere of religion, as in its highest manifestations it always is, it joins the soul to God and completes its courage by mailing it with a sense of the Divine favor, and nerving it with a conviction of the Divine assistance. Divine veracity, trusted with the whole soul, has pledged the assistance of infinite power and the solace of heavenly love: the home of the soul henceforth is the pavilion of the Almighty, the secret place of the Most High-the tabernacle of God is with men. He feels that the stars, which, in their courses fought against Sisera, are doing battle for him; that the strife he wages is not his own but God's, and that the very possibility of harm to him is forever excluded-the body may fall, but the soul no arrow can pierce, no sorrow darken. Thus it is that the great ideas of God and religion pass into the soul of man, and endow him, as the champion of right, with a heroism more than mortal. A PICTURE FROM LIFE. BY MRS. HARRIET E. FRANCIS. (TEP softly, for on the little couch lies the pet, STEP the plaything, the cherished babe of the household. The soft, lily hands still clasp a tiny basket, and a sad, sweet smile yet answers our own; but the bright eyes, "too bright, alas!” wander restlessly, and the low, moaning voice quivers the mother's heart-strings, and brings the tears to the eyes of all. . . . The bright, glad sunshine that is bathing the earth in beauty, steals not through the closed blinds, and the draped canary-bird pines for morn. O when will it be morn again to these aching hearts; for death has set his signet on the snowy brow, and the rounded arms and dimple hands will soon be laid low in the dark grave, where no mother can smooth the silken ringlets, and no father kiss the chubby cheek-no, never more on earth! Sorrowful dispensation! A father's breast heaves with agony; a mother's tears gush up from the deep fountain of sorrow within. Light, joy, and gladness to the little babe that No more moans, has entered the heavenly fold. no more parched lips nor throbbing brow, no more darkened windows or hushed birds; but Savior's smiles, angel's care, bright, dancing beams, joyful caroling, and light, light for evermore. |