the question of a vigorous defense of these tracts against timber thieves and against the sheep-herders who now invade them for the most part illegally, but sometimes, as in Oregon, through the mistaken leniency of the law. That this is possible by a show of determination to enforce the regulations is clear from the management of the Yosemite National Park under military supervision, the success of which is leading Californians to inquire why the old Yosemite grant should not now be receded to the government and have the benefits of inclusion in the Park which surrounds it. There was certainly never a more opportune time to consider questions of the preservation and scientific control of the great forests. Their relation to fire and flood has been forcibly brought home to us by the disasters of the early summer. Now is the time to agitate for the Appalachian and White Mountain parks-both sadly needed-and for the project to transfer the care of all the reservations to the Forestry Bureau of the Department of Agriculture, now under the direction of a trained and public-spirited officer. The President's trip is also likely to in duce more of his countrymen to see the magnificent scenery of the West. He was happy in his choice, among his companions, of two such lovers and interpreters of nature as John Burroughs and John Muir, writers whose preaching of the gospel of outdoor life is one of the sanest influences of our berated times. Mr. Roosevelt's debt of health to the West and his appreciation of its great natural features lend practical force to his wish that his countrymen shall know it better. His regretful statement that the larger proportion of visitors to the Yellowstone are foreigners would probably apply to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado as well, if not to the Yosemite. All three of these marvelous regions should be as familiar to our people as Niagara or the White Mountains. The spoiled child," say the Japanese, "should be made to travel," a prescription which may well be made for the child in danger of being spoiled. It would be fortunate if well-to-do parents in the Eastern States could see the advantage of sending their sons out from the fret and luxury of our complex life into the wholesome calm, simplicity, and unforgetable majesty of these Western wonderlands. OPEN LETTERS The Minister's Day's Work OTWITHSTANDING considerable pop minister is fairly entitled to a place among the world's workers. To be sure, he does not take his dinner-pail every morning and join the procession of factory operatives, nor does he put in an appearance at the counting-room a few minutes past nine of the clock. When Saturday night comes it is difficult to estimate his weekly output in terms of pounds or bales. Nevertheless, the minister works-not the lazy minister, but the average minister. Some work harder than others, some more wisely, but they all work, and as a rule they work as hard as law⚫yers, physicians, railroad officials, marketmen, or street-sweepers. Sunday is not the minister's chief workingday; it is his exhibit day, and is not a hard day to the preacher prepared for it. Then it is that the labors of the six previous days reach their glorious consummation. No minister in good health and with a tolerable measure of faith ever complains about Sunday. It is then that his pulses quicken and his heart thrills with the joy of bringing things to pass. It is true that the average minister has little leisure time on Sunday, but if the weather has been fairly decent, and he has kept himself in good form, and people have been reasonably appreciative and sympathetic, he goes to his slumbers Sunday night no more exhausted than a man ought to be who has anything to do in God's world, and not a bit more weary than he often is on Saturday night or on Wednesday night. His Sunday and the value and attractiveness of his part in it will depend altogether on the steadiness and definiteness of the work the week through. Let us follow him up, beginning with Monday. That day from time immemorial has been supposed to be his own peculiar property, and the average minister still differentiates somewhat between it and the days that follow. But the pressing demands of modern life have encroached upon this time for rest and relaxation. The ministerial clubs usually meet on Monday, and if a man stays away, he is in danger of being thought ascetic and exclusive. It is the time, too, for the regular session of the executive committees of various missionary and philanthropic boards, and as the average town minister belongs to half a dozen, he must often yield several hours of his precious Monday to careful consideration of appropriations or of delicate questions of administration. Then, there is likely to be in the evening some social or semi-professional function at which he is in duty bound to appear. So Monday flies by, and the minister is fortunate if he has secured an hour on the golflinks, or a brisk little spin on his wheel, or a frolic with his babies, or a bit of a fishing excursion with his growing boy, or a chance to dip into the novel of the month, or a half-hour's reading from the poets with the mistress of the manse. The truth is, the average minister's Monday does not amount to as much in the way of recreation and personal indulgence as the average business man's Sunday stands for in what it seldom fails to bring him of physical rest, social joys, and selfish pleasure. But granting that Monday is more or less a holiday, how about Tuesday, Wednesday, and on through the week? Now we are ready to measure the nature, the bulk, and the worth of a minister's real work. There are three lines of labor in which a minister is engaged almost constantly from the beginning to the end of his workingyear. The first has in view his pulpit, the second his parish, the third the general public. Twenty hours a week is a conservative estimate of the time which the high-minded preacher gives to the preparation of his sermons. It is strenuous labor, too. No man can keep his place long in the modern pulpit who relies on scrap-books and homiletic monthlies for the pabulum of his pulpit discourse. The keen competition of the newspaper, the magazine, the review, the novel, the fresh scientific treatise, forces the minister to delve deep. It is not easy for the average business man to appreciate the pressure under which the conscientious minister labors because of the unrelaxing demands of his pulpit. Through all the six preceding days Sunday is looming up as a testing-time which he cannot evade or escape. The decent minister loathes repetitions and platitudes. Once and again during the earlier part of the week he wonders at his own presumptuousness when he reflects that in a comparatively few hours a hundred, five hundred, a thousand people will be coming together to hear him speak for the space of half an hour. He knows, too, that most of that congregation will have heard him scores of times. After all, what has he to say more than he has been saying for the last ten or twenty years-"Be good, do your duty, love God, serve your fellow-men"? If he has not something simple, clear, direct, helpful, to say about the deeper side of a man's personal life, about the forces that build manhood and sustain the children of earth through the sorrows and fears of this mortal life, he does not want to set foot again upon his pulpit stairs. And it is this responsibility for the words of his mouth that impels him to bring to bear on his task for three or four hours each morning every ounce of intellectual and spiritual power which he possesses. He knows that he will have only half an hour in which to hammer a sense of unseen realities into minds burdened with thoughts of temporal things, or, as a great English preacher once put it, only half an hour in which to raise the dead. A variety of employment certainly makes toil easier, and the minister confesses his good fortune in that his afternoon and evening occupations are usually quite unlike those of the morning. But he is still in the harness; only now it is with the parish and the public that he is immediately concerned. The modern minister regards his people both as his field and as his force. As his field, he takes cognizance of individual needs and family relationships. That carries him out day after day on his round of pastoral calls. There is less, to be sure, in these days than there was a generation ago, of mechanical and perfunctory calling. Wise pastors reserve themselves as far as possible for special cases. But, after all, if a man wants to build up a church,—and most ministers do,-nothing is more effective than a great deal of calling. People return his call by coming to his services, and if he never knows and sees them, they are less disposed to go where he can be found. The newcomer, too, must always be sought out, and five afternoons in the week are none too long for even a moderate amount of wisely directed labor of this sort. It is genuine labor, too, sometimes very wearisome, sometimes unproductive, too often unappreciated. But those who still cherish that fine old conception of the ministry as a cure of souls do not shirk personal contact with their flock. But the church is a minister's force, too, his army to be generaled, his institution to be administered. If he had only to furnish the motive power, his profession would be easier; but in nine cases out of ten he has to attend to the running of the machinery, too. A network of organizations, ranging from the Band of Hope, composed of the tots, up to the Men's Club and the Women's Missionary Society, seek his counsel and direction. The number of really efficient workers even in a big church is woefully small. So the minister puts his shoulder to the wheel, and concludes that it oftener takes less time and energy to do a given thing than to get some one else to do it. All the while the public makes constant and frequently just claims upon the minister. The pleasure of his presence and a brief address is sought for the opening of the new hospital for crippled children. The anti-saloon crusade must have his services in connection with one of its most important committees. The Woman's Club covets the hearing of his paper on Browning. He is everybody's man. People who have never ventured inside the doors of the church where he preaches demand that he shall put aside every other engagement and bury their dead. Very often, too, they want a eulogy when the material for it is altogether lacking. "What shall I talk about?" said a minister the other day, in despair over the duty expected of him at the funeral of a man regarding whom it was almost impossible to say one good word. "Shall I talk about the brevity of life, or the longevity of life, or the progress of mankind during the last fifty years?" Thus long afternoons and evenings far into the night are consumed by a multitude of miscellaneous and sometimes irksome duties. The minister does not recount them for the sake of awakening sympathy. They are inevitable elements in the vocation to which he has deliberately given his life. The only justification for citing them is to neutralize the impression that the average minister does less than his share of the world's work. Apart from the labors that fruit into pulpit ministration and pastoral and public service, is no accounting to be made of the mental strain and the spiritual travail which are an inalienable part of the ministerial calling? Not only does the minister carry on his heart the sorrows of a great many persons who look to him for succor, but there are hours when the tide of his own faith ebbs. Is a minister's fight with his doubts worth anything to the world? Because he always seems so sure of his hold on the eternal verities, is it to be thought that he is content to pass on to others a merely traditional faith, instead of one that has been wrought out in long hours of painful questioning and wrought at last triumphantly into the very texture of his own life? The effort which a minister makes to keep and broaden, to intensify and make real, his own faith, to adjust it to the growing light of science, is as necessary and as noble a part of his work as anything that he does. Howard A. Bridgman. A Painting by Frederick MacMonnies WITH an international reputation as a sculptor, his studio full of orders, an assured future of honors and prosperity, Mr. Frederick MacMonnies had nothing to gain, and much to lose, by transferring his allegiance to the sister art in which he was a novice. Yet from boyhood there had ever been the desire to paint, and from time to time, practising with the brush as a diversion, the handling of pigments had exercised a strong fascination over him. Two years ago Mr. MacMonnies made a serious essay, exhibiting anonymously at the Salon, and, unknown, reaping most flattering honors; thus, with astonishing celerity, gaining a second reputation not inferior to that which he already enjoyed. It is no new thing for the practice of both plastic and pictorial art to be united in an artist's power, but the famous instance of Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel, the greatest, most exalted compositions from any sculptor's hand, is typical of the whole achievement. For, as a rule, the sculptor continues to dominate, conveying form and the great qualities essential to clay and marble in a medium which can convey many other qualities and beauties. It is distinctly as paintings, as assuredly as are those of Velasquez and Rembrandt, that Mr. MacMonnies's portraits are to be classed. The natural bias, the limits, the peculiar merits, that would seem to have been brought unconsciously from the study and occupation of former years are not to be found; it is as though the artist's talent had been born again -the talent of a painter of painters. The form is rather limited, being distinctly modified by the atmosphere; the color is very brilliant, and is so pure that it seems transparent, glowing, yet with the stability and body of thick stained glass; the resemblance is accentuated by the way one clear, flat tone is placed next another, giving a most vivid effect from a distance. The rendering of character is startling in its reality. Selecting the sitters who appealed to him, Mr. MacMonnies has presented the dramatic quality of interesting personalities, unusual, attractive, compelling curiosity and attention. Without any psychological or literary aids, we are made to realize the general characteristics, the thoughts, the aims of these people, what they stand for in life. Too often in modern painting the sitter is but a model; here are men and women. It would never be necessary to explain that Mr. John Flanagan is a sculptor, or that Madame la Comtesse de Trobriand, seated in her ornate drawing-room, décolleté, bejeweled, her white hair curled in fashion, her well-preserved hand resting on the high cane which supports her aged frame, has been a wholly satisfied supporter of the old régime. In the portrait of M. Georges Thesmar, which has been selected for our illustration, the coloring is very quiet-toned and restful : the lights that gleam on helmet and breastplate, the dashes of red in plume and trousers, tell delightfully in the composition. How accentuated is the simple character, the unconscious attitude of a very strong, brave young man! Nothing could be less posed. He is painted just as he stood up in the studio, as straight as though on guard, a stalwart figure, with a plain, unaffected face. The artist's fair-haired little daughter, with her doll, clings affectionately to his military cloak. The interior has not been slurred over: a window opens behind the officer's head, various members of the family come into the background, as well as a mirror on the wall reflecting the painter at work. And this is done with great dash and breadth; details are touched in without being detailed, and are subordinated to the solidly painted central group. Pauline King. |