YOUNG fellow of two and twenty, Andrew Wake Holman, was a private in Company C, of Colonel Humphrey Marshall's Regiment of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen County,-"Sweet Owen," as it used to be called, and came of good stock, his father, Colonel Harry Holman, a frontier celebrity in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism. Company C, out “on a scout," was picked off by the Mexicans, and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels not being clearly established, a drum-head court-martial ordered "the decimation.”

This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be shot. There being a hundred of Marshall's men, one hundred beans, ninety white and ten black, were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on dress-parade. Whoever drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoever drew a black bean was to die.

In the early part of the drawing An, drew Wake Holman-we always called him “Wake”—drew a white bean. Toward the close came the turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen County who had left a wife and baby at home. He and "Wake" were standing together, Holman brushed him aside, walked out in his place, and drew his bean. It turned out to be a white one. Twice within the halt-hour death had looked him in the eye and found no blinking there.

I have seen a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering both in women and men, splendid courage on the field of action, perfect selt-possession in the race of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman's exploit that day-next to actually

dying for a friend, what can be nobler than being willing to die for him?-is the bravest thing I know, or have ever been told of mortal man.

Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under Pickett at the battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56, he was in Nicaragua, with Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in our War of Secession. After the war, he lived the life of a hunter and fisher at his home in Kentucky, a cheery, unambitious, big-brained, and big-hearted cherub, whom it would not do to "projeck" with, albeit, with entire safety you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability. To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the love of life and the art of living. Yet was there a reserve, not to say a reticence, touching himself. During all my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.

It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, common sense, and courage. I held him in real affection and honor. When the Mexican War Pension Act was passed by Congress. I took his papers to General Black, the Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story. "I have promised General Cerro Gordo Williams," said General Black, referring to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, that his name shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But," said the General as he looked beamingly into my face, "Wake Holman's name shall come next." And there it is.

I

age

WAS a boy fourteen years of when I witnessed the following deed of rare courage and bravery.

The winter of 1878-79 was severely cold for two months prior to February, when several days of unsettled rainy weather caused a tremendous rise in the Maumee River. The breaking up of the twofoot ice in the river was the source of much damage for miles up and down the valley. Among other disasters was the demolishment of a half-mile wooden bridge across the stream at Napoleon, Ohio.

As the rainy weather cleared the Maumee of ice, steps were taken for the building of a ferry over the river, which divides the town into two parts. A cable was firmly anchored on each shore, and by means of pulleys a flat-bottomed boat, capable of carrying a considerable load, was put in use for the transportation of man and beast. This was in use only in the daytime.

The waters continuing to rise, the river became a mass of mad, swirling, muddy water. In the middle of the stream the water overflowed the ferry-cable for a distance of a hundred feet or more. The swiftly running current would carry the cable to its utmost tension, and, when released, it would spring up-stream with a wicked swish, like the snapping of a bowstring.

About nine o'clock on the night of February 15, word came to Duncan Dore, an uncanny Scot, who resided on the south side of the river, that his mother, over on the north side, was seriously ill. Scotch stubbornness must have had something to do with his determination to attempt a crossing of the turbulent stream.

An intimate friend of Dore's, one Ortez Randall, being the owner of a small skiff, Dore secured it and determined to cross alone. Randall, however, begged so hard to accompany him that Dore finally yielded, and the two men launched their boat. Being extremely anxious to reach the other side as quickly as possible, they ignored the advice of several men who went with them to the bank, and launched their boat up-stream from the ferry-cable,

but without taking into calculation the swiftness of the current in midstream.

Less than fifteen minutes after they had left the shore the men, who were waiting to hear the cry, "All 's well," were startled by agonizing shouts for help. It was surmised that Dore and Randall had been caught by the bowstring ferry-cable and their boat overturned. The cries continuing to come out of the blackness of the night, the men on shore reasoned that the two men had caught the cable as their boat was wrecked, and were clinging to it.

This was exactly what had happened, and the swiftly running water carried the two men to the limit of tension in the rope and then rebounded through icy water to the place of starting. Men could not long endure that experience.

Among the men who had heard the cries for help was a herculean woodsman by the name of Allen Mann. Calling to the others to help him launch another boat below the ferry-cable, he quickly divested himself of superfluous clothing and pushed out into the stream.

For half an hour he bravely battled with the current before his efforts were of any avail and he was in a position to help the men, whose cries were becoming fainter.

Finally reaching a point just below the spot where the cable left the water on its rebound, he turned his boat up-stream and rowed as man never rowed before.

In the meantime Dore and Randall had worked their way along the rope until they were near together, and as they were swept downward toward the waiting rescuer, Mann yelled, "Let go!"

The two men heard him and, realizing that help was below, obeyed his command. Mann ceased rowing, reached over the side, seized the two men, worked them around to the stern of the boat, and by a tremendous effort of strength pulled both in, where they sank exhausted. They landed a mile below, but were quickly conveyed to anxious friends and relatives.

This was before the day of Carnegie medals, and no special attention was given to the bravery of Allen Mann.

Ring through a picturesque country:

EADING history is much like travel

every one is expected to see the striking features, which the guide-books will not fail to point out. But of the quiet places But of the quiet places by the wayside, the hidden valleys, and the mountain springs-of these the tourist, hurrying through history, will know but little.

There are not a few such unfamiliar but interesting side paths in religious history.

The great leaders and reformers we know; but besides the conspicuous actors, there have been from time to time men of moderation, fashioned in a gentler mold and of lucid reasonableness, characters once of much attractiveness in the circles of those who felt their influence, whose names have been almost forgotten, and whose writings are preserved, but rarely read, in unfrequented recesses of old libraries. Yet we owe much that is best and fairest in the life and ideals of our time to this succession of men of largeminded charity in ages of intolerance, a truly apostolic succession, although uncanonized, after the order of that great Apostle who left to his followers this injunction, "Let your moderation”—or, as the word may be read-"Let your reasonableness be known unto all men."

One of these byways of history well worth our following is disclosed in the letters of Leibnitz, Mme. de Brinon, and others who in the latter part of the seventeenth century were engaged in serious efforts to restore the lost unity between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches. Though our histories scarcely

notice this episode, it was a scene in which were interested princes and princesses; theologians and statesmen; the Protestant Leibnitz, at that time the greatest philosophical mind of Europe; the Roman Catholic Bossuet, the most famous orator of France; the Emperor Leopold, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire; the French King Louis XIV; and two popes, Innocent XI and his successor. Some of the most notable women of the time were likewise so deeply interested in it that, it is said, they did not find the long epistles of learned scholars and divines dry reading. One of them, Mme. de Brinon, through whose hands many of the letters passed, was indefatigable in her zeal to bring the matter to successful issue, giving the correspondents little rest in her endeavors to keep up the negotiations. It was of her that Pellisson, a French Catholic, who was engaged in the correspondence, wrote to Leibnitz: "Madame de Brinon finds fault with me on your account. She says, and I believe she is right, that we think of nothing else but your dynamics, and not at all of your conversion, which is the one object of her desire, as of mine."

This movement, though carried on for thirty years, made little noise. The letters were purposely not printed, and remained for many years afterward unpublished. The whole narrative of it might well be recalled now because it contains much of suggestive value in relation to present questions concerning the reconciliation of the unhappy divisions of the church.

To this object at that time, a Roman

Catholic bishop of Spanish descent, Royas de Spinola, literally devoted his life. As early as the year 1661 the Emperor Leopold entered into a project for the pacification of the troubles of religion which desolated Germany, and with all the zeal, it was said, that could be desired of a Christian prince. He commissioned Spinola with full power to treat with the princes of Germany, charging him to make all practicable efforts of conciliation. Spinola, having later been empowered, though with some secrecy, to represent Pope Innocent XI, entered into correspondence with leading Protestant theologians, and succeeded in formulating twenty-five propositions, drawn up with great moderation, setting forth the views of Protestant divines, which were gravely considered, so Leibnitz states, and received sanction at Rome. So near, and yet so far, came the two main currents of modern religious history toward meeting at that point in one broad stream.

Spinola, as we are told in the preface of an early account of these endeavors, was well fitted for this by his "character of sweetness, of piety, and of moderation seldom found among controversialists, especially in the heat of their disputes." He maintained, on his part, that the "difference between the Roman Church and the Protestants does not consist in the fundamentals of salvation, but only in matters that have been added." Unwearied in his labors, and always pursuing his ever-receding hope, Spinola spent his days in ceaseless travels from court to court; nor did he rest even when suffering excruciating pains, laying down his life at last, without receiving the blessing promised to the makers of peace, but worthy to be remembered as "a martyr of moderation." As this instructive episode of religious history drew toward its close, it lost its earlier hopefulness, and passed into a more sharply defined debate between Bossuet the orator and Leibnitz the philosopher. Leibnitz's description of his method commends itself as the method to be pursued in any discussion the object of which is not to change opinions so much as to reconcile them. "In important matters," he wrote to Mme. de Brinon, "I like reasoning to be clear and brief, with no beauty or ornament-such reasoning as accountants and surveyors use

in treating of lines and numbers." Of his correspondents on the other side he wrote: "The force and beauty of their expressions charm me so far as to rob me of my judgment; but when I come to examine the reasoning as a logician and calculator, it escapes my grasp." Yet afterward this same dispassionate thinker, when all his logic failed to reach terms of agreement, wrote to Bossuet, "I believe an overture of the heart is necessary to advance these good designs."

Bossuet's biographer, Cardinal Bausset, cannot understand why these negotiations, which had opened so hopefully and in which so much talent, learning, and goodwill had been engaged, came, as by some fatality, to no results. A later editor of the correspondence said "the union failed. through the fault of men and things." Leibnitz himself said it failed because of "reigning passions." He had entered into the effort for religious pacification because he believed it to be right and that there was nothing in the nature of things to prevent it; but, besides the theological differences which he deemed not irreconcilable, were "men and things," especially the French king, with his ambition to assume the same authority in the church that Henry VIII had in England. Moreover, the Protestant world, still filled with bitter resentments on account of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and apprehensive for the future, was in no temper for the mediation of these makers of peace. Leibnitz and those pacific theologians could not foresee how the alliance of church and state, the union of religious and temporal powers, has rendered it impossible for the church to rise above all political fortunes and to realize its own spiritual unity, as over two centuries of inheritance of religious divisions is at length teaching the Christianity of the present age to understand it. Though the hope then entertained of the reunion of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism may still seem to be only a Christian sentiment and a philosopher's dream, at least. the political causes of strife in religion are being done away with now that Italy celebrates the jubilee of Cavour's achievement of a free church in a free state and the American Catholic Church flourishes in a land of democracy.

When Leibnitz was disappointed in the

project of reunion, he wrote to one of his friends: "I, too, have worked hard to settle religious controversies, but I soon discovered that reconciling doctrines was at vain work. Then I planned a kind of truce of God, and brought in the idea of toleration." This is a thought to be laid to the heart of our common Christianity, that toleration is indeed a means to a higher unity, but that a "kind of truce of God" among the churches is not the full measure of peace and catholicity.

One other reflection of Leibnitz, as he reluctantly abandoned his futile correspondence with Bossuet, seems to anticipate by two centuries the laymen's movement, which is becoming significant and powerful in the modern church. "That the "That the business may progress with greater justice and agreement," he said, "and be less liable to failure, I think it ought not to pass through the hands of the clergy, who have their own special views, which sometimes are more allied to their own prejudices and passions than to the good of the church. Not that this is the case from any evil intent on their part, but from a kind of necessary consequence." So he urged that "associating laymen in the enterprise might give it a character likely to insure success." The lay power to which Leibnitz appealed failed him; but now, if the theologians and ecclesiastics fail, the Christian laymen may take the matter of church unity into their own hands, and make a success of it.

In England, likewise, ever since the time of the Reformation there has been an almost unbroken succession of men of irenic spirit and largeness of view even during times of civil and ecclesiastical strife. Toward the end of this same seventeenth century in which Leibnitz and his correspondents labored and failed, a company of “Men of Latitude" were gathered at the University of Cambridge. A pamphleteer of the times describes them in this passage, well worth quoting, for it serves to characterize cleverly a partizan use of names still employed in current conversation, both political and religious:

I can come into no company of late but I find the chief discourse to be about a new sect of Latitude-men. On the one side I hear them represented as a party very dan

gerous both to the King and Church, seeking to undermine them both; on the other side I cannot hear what their particular opinions or practices are that bear such dangerous aspect. The name of Latitudemen is daily agitated amongst us both in taverns and pulpits, and very tragical representations made of them. A Latitude-man therefore (according to the best definition I can collect) is an image of Clouts, that men set up to encounter with for want of a real enemy; it is a convenient name to reproach a man with; 't is what you will, and you may fix it on whom you will.

These men so named were the Cambridge Platonists, the highest-minded and most spiritual teachers of their age, of whom Bishop Burnet in his "History of his own Time" thus speaks:

Men who studied to examine further into the nature of things than had been done formerly. They loved the constitution of the church, and the liturgy, and could well live under them; but they did not think it unlawful to live under another form. They wished that things might have been carried with more moderation. And they continued to keep a good correspondence with those who differed from them in opinion, and allowed a great freedom both in philosophy and divinity, from whence they are called men of latitude.

Without dwelling upon their opinions, we select from a somewhat earlier group in this succession of apostolic reasonableness two men of whom in their ideals and efforts Matthew Arnold's words are true: "They kept open their communication with the future. Their battle is ours too; and that we pursue it with fairer hopes than they did, we owe to their having waged it and fallen." One of these, who is best known from Lord Clarendon's incomparable portraiture of him, was Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. We recall him to grateful memory because he was among the foremost in an age of mutually intolerant Puritanism and Episcopalianism to see with clearer vision what the peaceable unity of the church in liberty might be; and his conception of it, which his time could not understand, was as the dawning of that ideal of the one comprehensive church which, in the beginning of this