having been a convert and a member of Dr. Payson's church, in Portland, Maine. She was naturally proud, though grace had made her good. She looked at everything in the light of duty. Her whole religious life was strained very high, and was filled with crosses. She took them and carried them herself, and put them upon her children. And everything that was brought to me was brought as a duty. I must read the Bible; I must learn the Catechism (though I never did learn it); I must do a great many things."

In the whole realm of parental government and discipline nothing requires to be handled with more care and wisdom than the rod. Some children are brought up under the grim shadow of punishment. They are ever reminded of, and often seriously made to feel, the dread consequence of waywardness and disobedience. While it may be true that the rod is a necessary factor in parental discipline, it certainly should not be allowed to occupy the most prominent position. To evade punishment many a child will commit a double, treble crime; the second crime to hide the first, and the third to hide the second. Very few parents have wisdom enough to be entrusted with any instrument of penalty. Dr. Lyman Beecher, great as he was, was not always sufficiently cautious in his administration of law; for his illustrious son makes use of these words: "I recollect distinctly that I used to tell lies. If there are any here who did not, they may cast the first stone! I was truth-loving. I preferred the truth; but I took refuge in falsehood as a rabbit takes refuge in a hole to save himself from the hounds. It was a covert from something that was worse to me than telling lies. My father's short, sharp, abrupt way of speaking, and his very abrupt something else when I had done wrong, was a terror to me. I did not want to tell a lie, and I was always sorry when I had told one; but the dread which I had of being reprimanded and punished was such that I sought to avoid it by resorting to falsehood."

In spite, however, of all shortcomings and deficiencies which characterised his religious education at home, he was from his earliest days a child of God. He blossomed like

He

The

the apple tree among the trees of the wood, and luscious fruit was found on him at a very early date. His opening out was beautiful beyond any power of description. grew, in the true and full sense of the term. He developed in sweetness of disposition and amiability of manner as he increased in bodily stature. His growth was proportionate. He maintained a beautiful equilibrium in all departments of his being. In some children, mind opens out more quickly than body, and there appears that anomaly usually called precocity, which is only a most dangerous species of disease; in others, the body grows, leaving the soul lagging behind, a dwarf. But Henry Ward grew symmetrically; in him soul and body kept pace with each other all along. Bodily, intellectually, socially, spiritually, he was a pretty, lovely child; and from the chamber of childhood he passed into the hall of youth in the glory of spotless innocence. central force in his character was love. How deeply and dearly he loved his parents, and how unspeakably precious to his soul was the unbroken sense of their love towards him. "He tells us how, as a boy, he woke up one midsummer night and listened, with a sense of half uneasy awe, to the wild cry of the marsh birds, whilst the moonlight streamed full into his room; and then as he grew more and more disturbed, he suddenly heard his father clear his throat, ‘a-hem,' in the next room, and instantly that familiar sound restored his equanimity." He loved God with an affection too deep and sacred to be expressed in feeble words. He loved Him as he saw Him revealed in the sparkling purity of the sky, in the imperial majesty of the mountain, in the solemn grandeur of the forest, in the charming, captivating loveliness of the valley, in the smiling, fragrant magnificence and fascination of the garden; and above all, he loved Him in the life and death and resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. His spiritual life, even as a boy, was tender, deep, broad; and nothing saddened him more than to hear bald austere representations of the Divine Being. He was in sympathy with nature in all her various moods; but he hated everything that was horrible and frightful and unnatural. "I remember a minister," he says, "that came to our house when I was a boy. He was one of those men

who seemed to think that religious impressions were beneficial just in proportion as they made children cry; and it was as easy to make me cry as to make a tree rain after a shower by shaking it. He used to talk with us children on the subject of religion, and he told me some hobgoblin stories about bad boys. And O, they were the naughtiest, the wickedest boys that ever lived! He told me how a bad boy got sick, how he saw the devil coming after him, and how he cried, "O mother, mother, there is the devil. There he is as far as the onion-bed. There he is coming through the gate! There he is inside the door!' I saw forty devils in the air. I dreamed of them. I did not shake off the feeling of terror which that conversation produced on my mind for years. And I cannot recall that I was a bit better for it. I used to suffer terribly on account of it, but I did not see that I was any better able to resist temptation. I did not put forth any greater efforts to avoid those evils that are incident to boyhood. I was just as likely to get mad and thrash my younger brothers. When I was sent to mill with instructions to come right home again, I was just as likely to linger by the way. I was just as likely to do work by eye-service. I do not recollect that frightening me by telling me about the devil ever did me any good, though it caused me a great deal of suffering." His God was a Father, gentle, loving, tender-hearted, sympathetic, forgiving; the devil was a monster whose very name sent thrills of terror through his heart. It was in love that he discovered both Mount Sinai and Calvary; and as far as he himself was concerned, Mount Sinai lay in the background hidden from view by Mount Zion.

While all true education is moral, yet it is usual to speak of two kinds-the religious and the secular. The secular education of Henry Ward was by no means neglected. He was early sent to school; and he passed from class to class, from grade to grade, until he graduated at Amherst College when only twenty-one years of age. He did not prove a very brilliant and successful scholar. His verbal memory was exceedingly defective, and he had no love for mathematics. Had he found it necessary or expedient to make his will on leaving college, in all probability he would have

bequeathed Euclid to his infernal majesty the devil. But his school-life was full of profit to him. Even then he was a great student of human nature. His fellow-students lay before him as so many open books. He studied them, and thereby discovered that it requires an artist to manage human beings. Character-reading was his chief study. And even before he left college he had begun his career as a public speaker. He used frequently to speak at temperance gatherings, and hold conference meetings. From Amherst College he went to Lane Theological Seminary, where he studied theology under his father for about three years. But here again it was his chief delight to come into contact with living men and speak to them on sacred themes. He now preached as often as opportunity presented itself. Finding Hebrew dull, and systematic theology dry, he found public speaking a perennial fount of joy and delight. He was a born orator. Kind nature had endowed him with the fundamental, essential, prerequisite condition of eloquence— genuine sympathy. A fire burned within him, and he must speak. He was a preacher, even in spite of himself.

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His father had designed him for the ministry from the cradle, and never dreamed for a moment that he would be anything else than a preacher. He trained him for it as for a profession. Speaking of a "call" to the ministry, Mr. Ward Beecher makes this reference to himself: "Young men are sometimes brought up to it, as I was. never had any choice about it. My father had eight sons. Only two of them ever tried to get away from preaching; and they did not succeed. The other six went right into the ministry just as naturally as they went into manhood." But his father's choice became his choice as well. He could not have kept out of the pulpit had he tried. God had ordained him minister of the Gospel in a council of eternity. To put it in his own words: "I am specially ordained. My mother ordained me. God sent her to be my ordaining power." If he had entered the ministry alone through external compulsion he could never have spoken in such a strain as the following: "I am the happiest man that lives. You could not tempt me out of this place. Suppose they had offered me the senatorship of the United States, do you

suppose I would have accepted it? Never, never! I do not expect to be tried. It is not the style of men that they are after now. They do not look into churches and pulpits for public men to-day. But were they to do it, there would be no temptation in it. There could be no temptation in it. Do you suppose I could be bribed out of the pulpit if Brown Brothers offered me a full half-partnership in their business? Never! There is not money enough in all the Rothschild's coffers to bring me the happiness that I have in your confidence and generous support, and the liberty which I have of discharging my conscience by free speech in your midst. I tell you there is a secret in living to do good. There is a secret in fidelity to men's consciences, and in that sympathy which can appeal to God and say, 'Thou knowest that I love my country; thou knowest that I love my fellow-men; thou knowest that I love thee, and that my whole life, from core to circumference, and from circumference back to core again, is in this blessed work of reconciling men to God, and thus building them up in Christian virtue and purity.' More of happiness than you can extract from wealth, or honour, or pleasure itself, you can -I say to every young man who is rightly endowed, and who has a heart that beats for this world-extract from the sphere of the Christian minister. You never will find a nobler sphere than that. If you come for the sake of honour, if you come for the sake of support, keep away; but if you love the work, and are willing to take it through good report and through evil report, there is not on this earth another calling that delights as it does to be an ambassador for Christ, and to be a friend of man among men. Here is a place where a man, humbling himself, becomes a leader. Here is a place where a man, throwing his life away, finds it. The pulpit is above all other places on the earth. It is higher than the law, higher than the Senate, higher than the Governor's seat, higher than the Presidency. And it is open to all. You can come if you love the business, and here you will find joys that care cannot ruffle, and remunerations that time itself cannot take from you.' And in the intensity of his feeling he again cries out: "Oh! call me not away! Tempt me to nothing else! Now, hence