The whole Northern Pacific coast, west of the Rocky Mountains, was saved to our Republic by the Christian Missionary, Doctor Marcus Whitman, the coadjutor of Rev. Henry A. Spaulding. This is not the place to repeat what liberty owes to the preachers of the Gospel; yet such patriots have rendered a service to learning equally worthy of notice. The best universities of the Old World, and nearly all of the New World, have been founded by the clergy.

There are poor sermons as well as those that are good; and yet taken as a whole the literature of our pulpits, in our Republic alone, would in a single year amount to a quarter of a million volumes of two hundred and fifty octavo pages each. Not always is the value of such productions to be judged by a merely literary standard. John Wesley's sermons are tame reading in these modern days, yet of all his forty thousand sermons no one was void of power. The discourses of Whitefield were better in their hearing than in their reading, but his power was felt over all the English-speaking world, evoking the admiration of such men as Garrick, Hume, Chesterfield and Franklin, as well as of hundreds of thousands who bore the Christian

name.

If these are called exceptions, we must remember that John Owen, instructor of thousands, "among whom was John Locke, William Penn, Dr. South, Dr. Whitby, Sir Christopher Wren, and Launcelot Addison father of the celebrated essayist," - owed his conversion to an obscure preacher whose name he never learned.

The truth, reaching the soul and rousing its dormant energies, takes care of itself. Adam Smith owed the source of his political ethics to Fénelon. The devout John Newton lives in the works of Cowper, that "forerunner of English poetry"; in Scott the renowned commentator; in Wilberforce, statesman and philanthropist, and in thousands of others whose widening influence emphasizes the value of a single life in the service of God. Mr. Buckle attributes to Chillingworth's Religion of the Protestants" the honor of having shaped the thought of the seventeenth century.

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton's career, as an emancipator and philanthropist, dates back to the preaching of a single sermon in Wheeler Street Chapel of Spitalfields. It was to Dr. Samuel Davies, that prince in the American pulpit, Patrick Henry owed the impressions of the eloquence of which he became so great a master. To

the plain pastor of Boscowen, New Hampshire, Daniel Webster owed much of the success of his life, as was shown in his almost filial affection in the mention of Dr. Wood's name. Lord Chatham, entranced, made

on whose words all Britain was the ponderous sermons of Isaac Barrow his lifelong study.

In the homage literature pays to the Bible, we shall discover the reasons why the most learned among the world's nobility have recognized in the teachings of the Book of books, the vital truths which the truest scholarship and the profoundest learning cannot afford to lose. The disciples were plain and unlettered men, but it was their contact with the Master that made them great. Even Pilate's name gathers its sad history because he was compelled to pass judgment against, or acquit, the Christ. The ages will not, can not, erase the declaration of Christ: "the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in that day." We are concerned with it in time, and shall meet its truths in eternity.

VIII.

THE BOOK IN LITERATURE,

It was the request of the historian Prescott that after his death they should leave his body, clothed with the garments of the grave, alone among his books so sacred were the silent associations of his library; and his dying wish was carried out to the letter.

When Neander died they placed the volumes of his patient toil upon his bier; and thousands of scholars and citizens, led by their king, followed the worn-out body to its last resting-place.

There is something sacred in the volumes whose very silence is become a living language. The works of such men cannot die. When Jeffreys in his review of Wordsworth's "Excursions" said "This will never do," the poet's answer was sent back: "It must do; I know very well that my work will be unpopular, but it will be immortal." In nearest approach to an earthly immortality

are the works of the intellect given for future generations to ponder. Napoleon counted forty centuries on the silent pyramids; but immortality of intellect in its conception of Truth is infinitely higher and more enduring than layers of granite.

All thought will find expressions for itself. It lays its claims upon the cedars of Lebanon, and they are bent to its pleasure. It digs for the precious metals, and mints them for its use. It belts the continents and makes pathways of the seas.

Carlyle puts this truth thus: "All that man does and brings to pass is the vesture of a thought. This London city with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a thought, but millions of thoughts made into one; -a huge immeasurable spirit of a thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, palaces, parliaments, hackney coaches, Katharine docks and the rest of it? Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick."

Some one has aptly described the locomotive as "thought dressed up in iron." If so, the bounding steamship is the creature of somebody's brain. Machines count one, two, three, four-and