laide, in one of Miss Bremer's novels, believing herself to be dying, consoles Alaric, her lover, with the assurance that he will soon follow her, and that they will meet in heaven, which would be no heaven to her without him. Never was Love more worshipped than in our days ; never were more pains laken to enlist all imaginations in his favor, and to introduce him into every heart of the least susceptibility. Yet what is the complaint which we everywhere hear? The heart is not met ; we have a power to love which is not called forth; the heart is lonely, sad, and sighs for some one to love, some one it can love, which will fill its capacity to love, and on which it may lavish all its wealth of love. But in vain. There is no such object. We try one, then another, then still another, all to no purpose. No one comes up to our idea ; no one understands us; no one enters into all our feelings, and responds to all our pice sensibilities. Our deep and rich affections, longing to overflow and fertilize a kindred heart, are repulsed, forced back upon their source, and stagnate and rot. Such is the tone of the complaints we hear. Indeed, the very age itself is a lovesick maiden. It believes in love, celebrates it in prose and rhyme, and sighs and whimpers that it can find nothing to love. All this is natural and inevitable. Love, left to itself, is madness, and cannot be satisfied with love. is never for two successive moments in the same mood ; and it is never, when obtaining, the same as when demanding. Nothing can satisfy it. No human being can meet its caprices, or appease its cravings.

Now, all this comes, not from the fact that love is sought, or is regarded as a good, but from the fact that it is sought for its own sake; subordinate love to religion, love only in reference to God; seek the love, the peace, the tranquillity of the family for God's sake, and not for the sake of the family itself, and the whole tone and temper change. There is no less love, no less generous or tender affection, no less sensibility, no less of all that which in love is lovable ; but the love is controllable, is no longer a madness, is rational ; for it now lives not on itself alone, feeds not by devouring itself, but is nourished, sustained, directed by something higher, nobler than itself, — something nor time nor change can affect, and which keeps it as fresh and vigorous, when age and care have furrowed the cheek or frosted the brow, as in the heyday of youthful beauty. Nothing in this world more needs religion than does love itself. Only the religious can truly love, or find love a blessing. It is only where God is loved supremely and exclusively that there is real marriage, — marriage in the Christian sense of the word. They only receive the fruits of the Sacrament of Marriage who are married in God, and love each other with infinite tenderness for the love of God. Then are they indeed no longer twain, but one, made one by the true medium of union, the living and lifegiving God. Their union is perfect and living, and is indissoluble till death. There is no return upon' self, no asking if one loves or is loved, whether one understands or is understood, appreciates or is appreciated ; each looks to God, finds the other in him, and is satisfied. Where it is thus, there may be family in its true sense. Husband and wife, parents and children, love each other, for they all love one another in the one love of their Father in heaven. There is no discord, no division, for they are all one in this higher love. Such family is sacred, is holy ; its sweet affections, its peace, its solicitudes, its troubles, are all religious, and acceptable offerings to God. Infirmities are borne with, personal qualities do not impair affection, and toil, and want, and suffering do but endear the members the more to one another, and make them the more indissolubly one. Yes, there is religious family. The error is not in extolling family, is not in exalting the virtue and peace of domestic life, when referred to God, but in detaching the family from religion, in making it in itself religious, and in seeking it for its own sake. Seek God and him only, and you may find the family; and then, but only then, will it be all you desire it.

The principle we have asserted in relation to love, marriage, and the family, holds good throughout every department of human life. Philanthropy, in our days, is a high-sounding word, and it is regarded as a high compliment to a man to call him a philanthropist. But philanthropy, in itself considered, is a mere human sentiment, and brings good neither to its subject nor to its object. It has never effected any thing great or good for the race. It has been the mainspring of none of those noble institutions which have more or less flourished in every age of the Church, and from which mankind have derived so much advantage. Moved by a simple love of humanity, men may talk finely, use charming words, and vent much exquisite sentiment ; but they effect nothing, unless it be to aggravate the evils they undertake to cure. Philanthropists are the most useless race of mortals, as well as the most disagreeable, that it is easy to imagine. Their heads are full of kinks and crotchets, and there is no living with them. They intermeddle with every thing, and mind every body's business but their own. They seem to fancy that their trade of philanthropy gives them the right to trample on all the laws of good-breeding, to outrage every honest feeling, and to make themselves supremely offensive. Poor creatures ! they are just a-going to effect something great and glorious ; but, alas ! it is always they are just a-going to do it.

Our age teems with philanthropists of all sorts, sizes, and colors. It claims to have a large share of generous sympathy for man. It is socialist. It is terribly pathetic over depressed humanity, especially the poorer and more numerous classes. Never before has man understood the value of man ; never before has he felt for man as man. Now, for the first time in the world's bistory, man sees a brother in his fellow-man, and a man in the humble, toil-worn laborer, as well as in the lordly noble. An ocean of love for the oppressed and indigent is now stirred up from its depths, and the race, after its sleep of six thousand years, awakes to a sense of the duty it owes to each of its members. Take courage, ye poor and neglected, ye wronged and outraged, ye oppressed and down-trodden, ye perishing classes, one and all! It is the glorious nineteenth ceutury, the century of light, of love, of humanity. Now blessed are the poor, for now shall they have the Gospel preached. All men are brethren. Man measures man the world over ; hear it, ye poor and outcast, and lift up your heads; bear it, ye rich and proud, whose eyes stand out with fatness, and tremble. A new age commences. order so long foretold, so long and so ardently desired, now descends from heaven, and the Saturnian years begin. Oppression shall end, slavery shall cease, the captive shall go free, the bruised spirit shall be healed, and all men shall be as brothers, and love one another. Admirable ! But how? What a question ! Up start a thousand schemers and projectors ; each has a sovereign remedy, and there is a confusion of tongues, as if Babel had come again. Such muttering, sputtering, chattering, vociferating, pulling and hauling, clatter and racket, that one is glad to escape with a whole skin ; and unless he has a large share of grace, must wish it had pleased Heaven to have given him his birth in some other than this enlightened and philanthropic nineteenth century.

Now, with all deference to our enlightened philanthropists, we must express some doubts whether this age is so original as

The great

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it imagines. Some go so far as to deny it originality altogether, and it has been publicly declared that it has not done so much as to “ invent even a new humbug.' This

may

be

saying too much ; but, after all, it has not falsified the word of God, which declares there is nothing new under the sun.

It was not left to this age to be the first to preach the Gospel to the poor, or to discover the real worth of man as man. The antics which people play, the capers they cut, when they get a new idea into their heads, are often as much a proof of their igporance as of their knowledge. Many is the fledgling philosopher or philanthropist who fancies the world is rapidly advancing, because he has learned something to-day of which he was ignorant yesterday. Sometimes we fancy we are making discoveries, when we are only learning what the scientific take it for granted every body knows, as was the case with Bacon in regard to the Schoolmen.

No Christian has ever needed to be taught the very commonplace truths which so inflate our modern reformers, for every Christian has learned them in his catechism. The Christian needs not this flood of light which the nineteenth century boasts.

What it calls a flood of light is to him but the last flicker of a farthing-candle, and he wonders where these enlightened reformers came from, that so small a light so dazzles their eyes and turns their heads. Surely they are birds of the night, owls or bats, and no eagles, accustomed to gaze on the sun. Certainly every man must deplore the condition of the millions of our race unblest by the light of the Gospel, perishing for lack of the bread of lise ; certainly every Christian must and does deplore the physical wretchedness of vast multitudes in all countries, but chiefly for the moral destitution which too often accompanies it. He feels with and for the poor and destitute, and does all in his power to relieve their wretchedness. Not he stands indifferent to suffering humanity, or in the way of relief. But there is a great distance between that love for the masses which originates in the simple love of man for his own sake, and that which originates in the love of God and loves them in and for him. The one we call philanthropy, the other charity, and the age makes such a fool of itself in regard to the former simply because it wants the latter. Philanthropy turns its head because it is ignorant of charity. We grant the age philanthropy, the love of man, for it sets up man against God; but this, instead of being its glory, is its shame. It boasts the less, because it has not the greater.

a

In nothing is the absolute insufficiency of man for himself more striking than in the philanthrophic efforts of the day. Whether our philanthropists have for their object to relieve the indigent, io liberate the slave, to check a prevalent vice, to remodel the state, or reorganize society, they proceed as madmen, prove utterly impotent, save to unhinge men's minds, to unsettle what is fixed, and to throw into chaos what has been reduced to order. Never was more breath or ink wasted over the indigent classes ; never was a greater variety of splendid schemes devised for their relief ; and never was there a period in the bistory of the world when they were more in need of help and when they received less.' What is now done for them only increases their disquiet, their intense longings for what they have not and cannot get, — only sharpens their sensibilities, and augments their sufferings. The evils of poverty are more than half relieved, when you have removed from the poor the craving to be rich, and made them contented with their state in life. Philanthropy cannot understand this ; she cannot conceive a good for them, unless they are placed in another rank in life ; and all her tears over them, all her exhortations to them, only increase their craving to be other ihan they are, and deepen the sense of their misery.

So it is, and so it must be, when we rely on philanthropy, and mistake it for that love which the Blessed Apostle says is the perfection of the law. When we do so, we begin at the wrong end, and seek God in man, instead of man in God. Man out of God can do no good, can receive no good, that is, no good in any deep sense of the word. The true course is the reverse ; it is to begin in God, and to find all in him. The love we should have for our neighbour, and which his good, as well as our true worth, requires us to have, is, not that human sentiment beginning and ending in man which our philanthropists contend for, but that blessed charity which loves God above all things, with the whole heart and soul, because he is infinitely amiable and deserving of all love, and our neighbour as ourselves for the love of God. Not by any means is it wrong to love our neighbour ; not by any means is the love of mankind to be discountenanced ; but it must,

; through religion, be made infinitely more than philanthropy, or it will inevitably be less. As we said of the love of the family, so say we of the love of mankind. The merely human sentiment has never its complement in itself, is always weak and whimpering, and evaporates in words, sighs, and NEW SERIES. VOL. I. NO. I.

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