cially Americans with their great inexperience of leisure, will not learn in this slow and thorough fashion, and, indeed, it is better for them to attain sound notions and artistic interests by reading beforehand. But let me warn them of one thing as certain. If they venture to obtrude themselves into these sanctuaries without being duly initiated into their mysteries, the sibyls will be dumb, the oracle will give no response; and they will depart with emptiness and weariness of heart for their portion. How often in my travels have I not seen this melancholy result! How often have I seen respectable elderly people, who had more shrewd business qualities than the whole population of an Italian town, led through galleries and churches, looking with vague bewilderment around them, utterly at a loss what to approve or to condemn, hopelessly at sea about the names of the artists, and the technical words read out to them! And all this-not for want of brains, but of proper preparation. I have got almost to the limits of my paper; and see how small a way I have reached into Italy! But I were indeed a bad guide if I exhibited the very same kind of hurry of which I am making complaint. Indeed, I think part of that charge, as applied to Americans, arises from the peculiarities of their country, which mislead them when they come to another not lying about in vast materials, but bound up tight and small, with its sights not spread over a continent, but compressed into a country. In America most important halting places in any ordinary travel are six, eight, or twelve hours by rail apart, and there is nothing wonderful to see on the way. Hence it is quite natural for an American to start from Turin to Florence, or to Rome. It does not strike him, perhaps, as any exhibition of hurry. But if he will realize that in Italy he has come to a country of such old and condensed culture, that every town is worth seeing, that there are history and art in every place, he perhaps will arrive at my conclusion, that for a tourist who wants to see Italy, to stay six hours together in a train is a great mistake, almost a crime. Let me conclude with an anecdote which illustrates the extremest form of this crime of hasty ignorance. A friend of mine met an American lady and her daughter just returned from Italy to England, and naturally turned the conversation upon the lady's travels. Where had she been? She guessed she had done most of Europe. What particular countries? All that were worth seeing. Italy? Oh yes, of course; they had been round Italy for a good many days. What city did she like best? Couldn't say, they were all pretty sleepy. Rome, for example? "RomeMatilda, my dear, can you remember, were we in Rome?" "Oh yes, ma, don't you remember that was the place where you bought the party stockings" !!! BE REVOLUTIONS. EFORE man parted for this earthly strand, While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood, God put a heap of letters in his hand, But ah! an inextinguishable sense Haunts him that he has not made what he should; That he has still, though old, to recommence, And bade him make with them what word he Since he has not yet found the word God could. would. And man has turn'd them many times; made And empire after empire, at their height The letters have combined, something was And droop'd, and slowly died upon their One day, thou say'st, there will at last appear -Ah, we shall know that well when it comes near ; The band will quit man's heart, he will breathe free.-Matthew Arnold. [June 1.] SUNDAY READINGS. SELECTED BY BISHOP VINCENT. THE IMPERFECT ANGEL. His angels He charged with folly.-Job iv. 18. Whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in nowise lose his reward. -Matt. x. 42. I WISH to speak about God's purity. That purity is incomparable in its perfection, overwhelming in its intense splendor, and appalling, not only to human but also to angelic thought, in its searching severity. And at the same time I want to put the truth of God's purity in its right relation to His patience and long-suffering and gentleness. It might depress and discourage us to look at one side of the subject without, at the same time, looking at the other. Side by side with the texts setting forth God's unapproachable purity, I have, therefore, placed texts which set forth the patience and beneficence of His character, and the scrupulous and delicate equities of His administration. In the addresses of Eliphaz the Temanite, God's strict and unapproachable purity is depicted in exalted and impressive phraseology. I do not know, however, that I could rest the whole weight of what I have to say upon the address of Eliphaz alone, because I am not quite sure how much in these addresses we are to account inspired. And here, in passing, I would warn against the not uncommon practice of picking out isolated words or sentences or paragraphs from the Bible, and looking upon these fragments of speech as inspired apart from the great whole. Views are sometimes expressed-in the speeches of Job's friends for instance that are not finally refuted till after the lapse of fifteen or twenty chapters. Unless you take large and comprehensive views of the drift of the sacred books, and see how part fits into part, you will very soon find yourself in serious difficulties upon the subject of inspiration. This seer Eliphaz sinned through overweening confidence in his own prophetic gift, and Job had to pray on his behalf before his error could be cleansed, and the sure favor of the Most High could be restored to him. You come to the study of the Book of Job. As a whole, it is easy to accept it as a faultless inspiration. Take out the speeches of any of these three friends, and you do not then get the product of an infallible inspiration. You have much noble truth, much beautiful and sacred poetry, and much blundering assertion that needs to be corrected and modified by God's own summing up of the controversy, at the end of the providential visitation. The nine or ten speeches of these friends were crowded with as many mistakes as the rough draft of a child's first letter. Eliphaz the Te manite, who spoke with such sublimity of idea and such stateliness of diction, erred just as much as the rest of them. His error consisted, however, in the misapplication of truths that were obviously inspired, rather than in the premises he laid down as the basis of his appeal to Job. He was right in his abstract principles. We may accept, without scruple, the truth heard in this vision of the spirit-world about the inconceivable purity of God. The truth is amply sustained by other portions of the Bible. The seraphim veil their faces with their wings. In that attitude they bear witness to the truth, that in the unapproachable light of God's presence, the highest angels are frail and foolish, and marred with imperfection. The Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, declares that "none is good save one, that is God." [June 8.] I. God's ideals of purity are so transcendent and so terrible, that the purity of the angel nearest to His throne is a little better than stain, shadow, darkness, in comparison. "His angels He charged with folly." The very mention of an angel may touch a spring of scepticism in some of our minds, and predispose us to resent the view here taught by Eliphaz as an extravagance resting upon the flimsy basis of a speculation. We may be tempted to set little store by this lesson of a night vision that visited the hysterical spiritualist of Mount Seir, who made such grave mistakes in his noonday logic. Is not the whole subject, with the angel in the background, vague, misty, fanciful? Well, I rather wonder at the indisposition to believe in celestial intelligences, when our astronomers invent them for us by the thousand. It is true they do not take the responsibility of fitting them with wings, as did the Bible prophets, nor do they determine the exact tinge of the complexion, as did the mediæval painters, but they assume, and assume rightly, that man is not the only intelligent and observing being in the universe of God. Not very long ago a popular and accomplished astronomer assumed, in the pages of the magazine he edits, that mathematical and inquiring and knowledge-loving creatures, like ourselves, exist in the planet Mars. He further intimated his conviction that these beings, as the result of careful observation and reasoning, have come to a great deal more knowledge about the Artic and Antarctic regions of our globe than we ourselves possess. They have probably long since settled the moot question whether there are open seas around the north and south poles. There are not a few people who will swallow the astronomical angels of Mr. Richard Proctor with undisguised satisfaction, but who will wish to strain out from their well-filtered creed the angels of Eliphaz and Ezekiel and Zechariah and John. They are perfectly willing to believe in the celestial intelligences in Mars and the other planets, who watch our globe from afar in the interests of scientific theory, but not in the angels who stand about the Creator's throne, and who have been interested for untold epochs in the same moral problems as ourselves, and who have passed nearer to the center of those problems. It is surely not unscientific to assume the existence of the pure and mighty beings spoken of by seers and prophets of olden time, nor speculative to ponder well the words which declare, that in comparison with God Himself the angels have about them traces of finite dimness, blemish, imperfection. The fall of some of their number shows that as a class the angels have not yet passed beyond the stage of defectibility. They have not risen into a wisdom so complete that no illusion can betray it, nor into a strength so unassailable that no temptation can score its record of disfigurement upon their lives. The fall of one great spirit from his first estate proves the possible corruptibility of the rest. They are free, it is true, from actual transgression, but they are passing through the first crude stages of a development in which, because of inward weakness and limitation, there is perilous room for the wiles of the tempter. A traveler crosses a continent, and in the temperate zones of the continent he finds a plant that sheds all its leaves in the winter and degenerates into a mere skeleton. He passes to the subtropical regions of the continent, and finds that same type of plant shedding only its weaker leaves in the winter time when the tempered cold breathes upon it. He passes on into the latitude of perpetual summer. This species of plant has now become an evergreen. But he knows that it is not an evergreen, by its own tenacious strength and indestructible vitality, like the fir, or the yew, or the cedar. The handfuls of shed leaves that lie around it in the subtropical region remind him that it belongs to a type with innate defect and weakness. It would fade again if transplanted to the snow. And so God looks upon humanity. Its fall is universal. He looks upon the holy ones about His throne. He sees gaps in their glittering ranks. These mighty ones who minister before the throne and make the melody of the temple, have revolted fellows. They belong to a defectible kindred. Perhaps these unfallen ones owe much of their freedom from evil to the shelter of the calm heavens through which they move. God dare not subject them to the same terrible temptations that shall one day be suffered to confront the Son, and that shall leave Him unhurt. upon His own nature in the Son. There is no defectibility there. Should that nature pass through all the risks of an incarnation, it will come back to the Father's bosom as spotless as when it left it. An incarnation with its perils and possibilities would be fatal to an angel. The angel belongs to a family some members of which have faded out of their first purity, and have dropped into moral darkness and decay. Fallen and unfallen were made out of the same lump; they are offspring from the same stock. God can never forget how much of their loyalty they owe to the shelter of His presence. [June 15.] God looks And then the holiness of the angel will appear as little better than a frailty if we think of it in comparison with the uncreated holiness of God. The Divine holiness has in it a transcendent originality, with which that of the creature can never hope to vie. The holiness of the angel is but a feeble response to a vo cation received from another. It is a mere echo. God's holiness is both original and originative. When there was no living creation to play upon His heart, He was just as rich in love, purity, righteousness, and all high moral attributes, as He is to-day. His character is the masterpiece that shall yet move universal imitation. In His care for the moral perfection of the universe, He cannot suffer a lower ideal than Himself to fill the heart of any of His reasoning creatures. Talk about the worship of the holy angels! God's own hand breaks up the image. He Himself becomes the disenchanter. In the judgment of the Most High, the holiness of the angel verges upon a frailty because of its inferior vitality and its less consuming fervor. The bright heralds of heaven have visited this world of shadow from age to age, but perhaps they have not entered very much more deeply into its tragedies than happy and light-hearted children enter into some of the tragedies of death with which they have been brought into contact. They have been messengers of God's holy wrath, but we do not read that in these scenes of judgment they were filled with pulses of unresting compassion that all but identified them with their victims. We do not read that they ever bled in the secret place of the spirit for Egypt's smitten and wailing moth ers. When the angel of the Lord appeared over the plague-stricken Jerusalem, and the sword was uplifted against its children, we do not read that the angel would fain have received the sword into his own soul. No angel knows what it is to love with a mighty intenseness that makes the love necessarily vicarious, and the heart break with pure grief over the sin and grief and shame of others. Their service is service rendered in balmy climes and amidst speckless sunshine. Their missions take them by rainbow paths and into firmaments filled with the breath of eternal spring. The orbits through which they glide on noiseless pinions are smooth and thornless. The ladders by which they ascend and descend between the presence of God and the creation to which they minister are twined with flowers and crossed with steps of gold. No Bethlehems, or Gethsemanes, or Golgothas have ever immortalized angelic devotion and love. Their love, however crystal pure, is a love to which sacrifice is strange. It does not draw them into incarnations and propitiatory of ferings and down into the shadows of vast redeeming shames and agonies. [June 22.] The defect of the angel is a defect of narrowness. In comparison with the catholic and all-comprehending love of God, his love is insular and restrained. All perfect moral qualities are boundless. We call the love clannish, and imply reproach in the term, that shuts itself up to one family, or to one group of families only. We call zeal for the interests of one class, caste-prejudice. We call a man a patriot who is devoted to the welfare of his own race, and we call a man a philanthropist who is devoted to the welfare of man as man without distinction of race, and philanthropy is confessedly nobler than mere patriotism. There can be no perfection in the love that does not look out toward the larger humanity. Benevolence and righteousness win our praise, in proportion to the circles through which they extend themselves. Think of the boundless fields through which God's attributes work. Angels minister to individuals. An unseen army hovered near Dothan to protect a solitary prophet from his enemies. They came in their hosts to attend Elijah and Lazarus to their new scenes of life. God ministers to worlds from His richer fulness, as they from their poorer moral resources to individuals. And then the holiness of the angel has about it the defect and limitation inseparable from the briefness of its own history. It is a frail thing of yesterday in comparison with the holiness of God. Think of the amazing epochs through which God's holiness has been unfolding itself. The worth of a moral quality is proportioned to the period through which it has verified and established itself. Hoary hairs add their own distinctive glory to righteousness. The virtues of the angels are lustrous beyond earthly dreams, but they are the virtues of neophytes. The heart of a true Christian is always drawn out to a young convert; but however singleminded and fervent and trustful that convert may be, he cannot command the homage we accord to the pure and long-tried saint. In comparison with the Ancient of Days the angels are but like converts of yesterday. Their life is of recent birth, and seems to link itself in God's sight with the most fragile and ephemeral things. Their love is but of a |