Read Ebook: The Chautauquan Vol. 04 April 1884 No. 7 by Chautauqua Institution Chautauqua Literary And Scientific Circle Flood Theodore L Editor

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Dissolution.

The following conditions serve to dissolve a partnership:

The expiration of the time for which the partnership was organized; ordinarily the completion of the business for the purpose of accomplishing which the partnership was formed;

The misfeasance of a partner; whenever a partner fails to act in harmony with his associates, or disposes of his interest in the partnership affairs;

After the dissolution, a partner acts no longer for his former copartners to the extent of entering into or incurring new obligations. Each partner however has full power to collect debts due the firm, signing the firm name to receipts, and also to liquidate outstanding obligations of the firm, unless by special agreement these powers are conferred on one partner alone. This is an arrangement which affects the partners only, third persons being protected in a settlement with any member of a late partnership dissolved.

After the business is wholly settled, all liabilities being paid, and not till then, is a partner entitled to his share of the partnership funds.

Notice of the dissolution of a partnership should be publicly given, it being necessary in the case of one or more retiring from the firm, in order to secure them from future liability. Individually this notice is given by mail to all with whom the firm has been dealing. This, in addition to ordinary publication of notice in newspaper, is sufficient.

SALES--Personal Property.

A sale is the transfer of certain property from one to another for a certain sum paid or to be paid, those being parties to it, to make it valid, who are competent to enter into a contract.

A sale effected entitles the purchaser to possession of the goods on payment of price agreed upon; or, if purchaser be given credit, at once, unless there be some special agreement to the contrary.

All sales are not made with an actual knowledge on the part of the vendee of the quality of his purchase, some being by sample. Sales in this manner give credence to the inference that the samples constitute a part of the goods sold, and therefore the goods must be of same quality as the samples, else the vendor does not comply with the conditions of the contract to which he is a party, and the purchaser may refuse to complete the sale by acceptance of the goods.

The quality of goods sold must be as represented by the vendor, if he warrants them by such representation, in order to secure a sale. In sales each one is supposed to be on his guard. "Let the purchaser beware," is the maxim. And if, without actual fraud, concealment or misrepresentation on the part of the vendor, the vendee is deceived in a purchase because of poor judgment, he alone must suffer the consequences and take the loss. A warranty of an article puts the vendor under the necessity of making compensation to vendee, if the article is defective wherein warranted.

A purchase of stolen property gives to the purchaser no title as against the true owner, or the one from whom the property was stolen, even though the purchase be made in good faith, and for a full consideration. "Let the purchaser beware."

There is but one species of personal property to which this will not apply, and that negotiable commercial paper.

Some contracts regarding sales must be in writing, and signed by the party to be charged, or his agent. What are they? See article on contracts.

READINGS IN ART.

The present paper has been abridged from "Italian Paintings," by Edward J. Poynter, R. A., and Percy R. Head.

Italian painting is divided into a number of schools, each of which has some illustrious artist as its founder, and a train of skillful and exact workmen following his methods. To study the style and methods of the master is to study the school. The most famous of these artists have been selected to represent the Art of Italy, the first of whom, the father of Italian painting, is

GIOTTO.

FRA ANGELICO.

Those pictures of Leonardo, which we may regard with confidence as the work of his own hand, fully justify the exceptional admiration with which he has always been regarded. He was excessively fastidious in his work, "his soul being full of the sublimity of art," and spent years over the execution of some of his works. The painting of the portrait of Madonna Lisa is said to have extended over four years, and to have been then left incomplete. His mind also was at times equally bent on scientific matters, and for long periods he was entirely absorbed in the study of mathematics. For these reasons he produced but few pictures; if, however, he had left none, his drawings, which fortunately exist in large numbers, would suffice to account for the enthusiasm which his work has always excited. It is certain that we do not see his pictures in the state in which they left his easel; from some causes, unnecessary to discuss, they have blackened in the shadows, and the colors have faded. Vasari praises beyond measure the carnations of the Mona Lisa, which, he says, "do not appear to be painted, but truly flesh and blood;" but no trace of these delicate tints now remains.

Leonardo was the author of many treatises, some of which only have been published. The most celebrated is the "Trattato della Pittura," still a book of high authority among writings on art.

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

Was born at Castel Caprese, near Arezzo, in 1475. In 1488 he entered the school of Ghirlandaio, the master giving a small payment for the boy's services. His precocious abilities soon attracted the notice of Lorenzo de' Medici, and until the death of that prince in 1492, Michelangelo worked under his especial patronage. His earliest drawings show a spontaneous power which made Fuseli say that "as an artist he had no infancy;" but for many years he confined himself almost entirely to sculpture; and some of his greatest achievements in that kind of art were executed before he undertook his first considerable work with the pencil. This was the "Cartoon of Pisa," finished in 1505, and intended as a design for a mural picture to face that of Leonardo in the Council Hall at Florence. This cartoon is lost, but a copy in monochrome, containing probably the whole of the composition, exists in England. During its progress he had broken off to visit Rome, and execute some sculptural work for the pope; and in 1508 he went to Rome again to begin the great achievement of his life, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The paintings of the ceiling illustrate the Creation and the Fall of Man, together with other scenes and figures typical of the Redemption. The middle part of the ceiling is divided into nine compartments, containing the "Creation of Eve" , the "Creation of Adam," the "Temptation, Fall and Expulsion" in one composition, the "Separation of Light from Darkness," the "Gathering of the Waters," the "Creation of the Sun and Moon," the "Deluge," the "Thanksgiving of Noah," and the "Drunkenness of Noah." At the corners of the ceiling are four designs of the great deliverances of the children of Israel, the Brazen Serpent, David and Goliath, Judith with the head of Holofernes, and the punishment of Haman. There are six windows on each side of the chapel; the lunettes which surround them, and the spaces above them, are occupied by groups of the ancestors of Christ. Between the windows, at the springing of the vault, are colossal seated figures of the Prophets and Sibyls who foretold the coming of the Savior. They are arranged alternately as follows:--Jeremiah, Persian Sibyl, Ezekiel, Erythraean Sibyl, Joel, Delphic Sibyl, Isaiah, Cumaean Sibyl, Daniel, Libyan Sibyl; Jonah and Zachariah are placed one at each end of the chapel, between the historical compositions at the angles of the ceiling. These single figures are the most striking features of the design, and calculated skilfully to help the architectural effect. The side walls of the chapel, below the springing of the vault, had already been decorated with frescoes executed by Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Ghirlandaio, Luca Signorelli, and Perugino. Michelangelo's frescoes were finished toward the end of the year 1512. Vasari's statement that he painted them all in twenty months without any assistance is undoubtedly exaggerated; it possibly refers to the completion of the first half of the ceiling.

For the next twenty years Michelangelo did little or nothing in painting; but in 1533, at the age of fifty-nine, he began the cartoons for the fresco of the "Last Judgment" on the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel. This celebrated composition is entirely of nude figures, no accessories being introduced to add to the terror of the scene. Each figure throughout this vast composition has its appropriate meaning, and the power of design and mastery of execution are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. The picture was finished in 1541. Two frescoes in the neighboring Pauline Chapel, the "Conversion of Saint Paul," and the "Crucifixion of Saint Peter," which were finished in 1549, were his last paintings. He had accepted, in 1547, the position of architect of Saint Peter's, stipulating that his services should be gratuitous. He continued to carry the building forward, altering materially the original design of Bramante, until his death, which took place in February, 1564. His body was taken to Florence, and buried in Santa Croce.

Although the genius of Michelangelo has exercised a vast and widely diffused influence over all subsequent art, yet this master, unlike Raphael, formed no school of his own immediate followers. It must be admitted that Raphael owes him much, for he never found his full strength until he had seen Michelangelo's works at Rome, when his style underwent immediate improvement. None of those who worked under Michelangelo dared to walk directly in his steps; there is in his style, as there was in the character of the man himself, a certain stern individuality which gives the impression of solitary and unapproachable greatness. Of his assistants, the most eminent was Sebastiano del Piombo.

RAFFAELLO SANZIO,

Raphael's manner as a painter is divided into three styles, corresponding with the broad divisions of his life's history. Unlike Michelangelo, whose genius and individuality is stamped on the earliest works from his hand, Raphael gained, as his experience of what had been done by his contemporaries was enlarged, a deeper and further insight into his own powers. His first, or Peruginesque style, characterizes those works which he produced while still the companion of his master, before his first visit to Florence; of these pictures the most important are the "Sposalizio" at Milan, and the "Coronation of the Virgin," in the Vatican. His second, or Florentine, style covers the four years from his arrival in Florence in 1504, to his departure for Rome in 1508; here the manner of Fra Bartholommeo had great influence upon him; to this period belong the "Madonna del Cardellino" in the Uffizi, "La Belle Jardini?re," of the Louvre, the "Madonna del Baldacchino," in the Pitti , and the "Entombment" in the Borghese Gallery, at Rome, his first attempt at a great historical composition. It is in his third, or Roman, style that Raphael fully asserts that sovereignty in art which has earned him the name of Prince of painters, and appears as the head of his own school, which, generally called the Roman School, might perhaps, as he collected round him followers from all parts of Italy, more fitly be termed the Raphaelesque. This third period includes all his great frescoes in the Vatican, with a host of easel pictures; for, short as Raphael's life was, his works are wondrously numerous, and our space permits mention of only a few of even the most celebrated.

It has been questioned whether Raphael's art gained by what he learnt from Michelangelo, some critics affirming that his earlier style is his best. This, however, must be considered to be entirely a matter of taste. Most painters--unless, like Fra Angelico, so entirely absorbed in the mystical side of their art as never to change their style--as they gain in power of expression, lose something of their youthful emotional fervor; and it is possible to assert that in the magnificent design of the "Incendio del Borgo" the dramatic element is more in evidence than in the "Disputa." But what is lost on the emotional and religious side is compensated for by the gain in power of representation; and it is difficult to stand before the cartoon of "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes," and not to confess that Giotto himself could not have imparted a more implicit trustfulness and childlike belief in the power of the Redeemer to the look and gesture of St. Peter; and while the magnificent simplicity of the youths drawing the net is conceived in an equal spirit of truthfulness to nature, the grandeur of style and the knowledge displayed in the drawing is so much pure gain on his earlier manner.

The Loggie, or open corridors of the Vatican, were also adorned by Raphael's scholars with a series of fifty-two paintings of Biblical subjects from his designs; the whole series was known as "Raphael's Bible."

Among the greatest oil pictures of Raphael's third period may be enumerated the "Madonna di Foligno" in the Vatican; the "Madonna della Sedia" in the Pitti Palace at Florence; the "Saint Cecilia" at Bologna; the "Madonna of the Fish," and the picture of "Christ Bearing His Cross," known as the "Spasimo," in the splendid collection at Madrid; the "Madonna di San Sisto" at Dresden, which obtained for the artist the name of "the Divine;" and finally the "Transfiguration" at the Vatican, the sublime picture on which his last working hours were spent, and which was carried at his funeral before its colors were dry.

TIZIANO VECELLIO,

The splendid artistic power of Titian may perhaps be better discerned in his portraits than in the more ambitious works of sacred art. He stands unquestionably at the head of portrait painters of all ages and of all schools; not even Velasquez equaling him at his best. Beside religious pictures and portraits he painted a great number of subjects from classical mythology. Among the most famous, beside the "Bacchus and Ariadne," mentioned above--the pride of the English collection--may be named the "Bacchanals" of Madrid, the two of "Venus" in the Uffizi, at Florence, the "Danae," at Naples, and the often repeated "Venus and Adonis," and "Diana and Callisto." He is seen at his very best in the "Venus" of the Tribune, at Florence, perhaps the only work of his which has escaped retouching, and in the exquisite allegory called "Sacred and Profane Love," at the Borghese Palace, at Rome. As a landscape painter, he possessed a sentiment for nature in all its forms which had never before been seen, and his backgrounds have never been equaled since. The mountains in the neighborhood of his native town, Cadore, of which, as well as of other landscape scenes, numerous pen and ink drawings by his hand are in existence, inspired him, doubtless, with that solemn treatment of effects of cloud and light and shade and blue distance for which his pictures are conspicuous.

It is unnecessary to deal with the school of painting which exists in Italy at the present day. It would be paying it too high a compliment to regard it as the legitimate successor of the art of those great epochs whose course we have tried to sketch. The modern Italian school is little more than an echo of the modern French. And seeing that there is no principle clearer or more certain than this, that a great national school of art can flourish only when it springs from a sane and vigorous national existence, it is not to be wondered at if a country so convulsed by the political passions and so vulgarized by the social triviality and meanness of modern times, should be in this respect cast down further than her more fortunate neighbors by the same causes which have soiled even the best art of the nineteenth century with something of dilettantism and affectation.

SUNDAY READINGS.

THE EXPULSIVE POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

There are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace from the human heart its love of the world--either by a demonstration of the world's vanity, so that the heart will be prevailed upon simply to withdraw its regards from an object that is not worthy of it, or by setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of its attachment, so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon not to resign an old affection, which shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange an old affection for a new one. My purpose is to show that from the constitution of our nature, the former method is altogether incompetent and ineffectual, and that the latter method will alone suffice for the rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong affection that sometimes domineers over it. After having accomplished this purpose, I shall attempt a few practical observations.

Love may be regarded in two different conditions. The first is when the object is at a distance, and then it becomes love in a state of desire. The second is when its object is in possession, and then it becomes love in a state of indulgence. Under the impulse of desire, man feels himself urged onward in some path or pursuit of activity for its gratification. The faculties of his mind are put into busy exercise. In the steady direction of one great and engrossing interest, his attention is recalled from the many reveries into which it might otherwise have wandered; and the powers of his body are forced away from an indolence in which it else might have languished; and that time is crowded with occupation, which but for some object of keen and devoted ambition, might have driveled along in successive hours of weariness and distaste, and though hope does not enliven, and success does not always crown this career of exertion, yet in the midst of this very variety, and with the alternations of occasional disappointment, is the machinery of the whole man kept in a sort of congenial play, and upholden in that tone and temper which are most agreeable to it. Insomuch, that if through the extirpation of that desire which forms the originating principle of all this movement, the machinery were to stop, and to receive no impulse from another desire substituted in its place, the man would be left with all his propensities to action in a state of most painful and unnatural abandonment.

A sensitive person suffers, and is in violence, if, after having thoroughly rested from his fatigue, or been relieved from his pain, he continues in possession of powers without any excitement to these powers; if he possess a capacity of desire without having an object of desire; or if he have a spare energy upon his person, without a counterpart, and without a stimulus to call it into operation. The misery of such a condition is often realized by him who is retired from business, or who is retired from law, or who is even retired from the occupations of the chase and of the gaming table. Such is the demand of our nature for an object in pursuit, that no accumulation of previous success can extinguish it, and thus it is that the most prosperous merchant, and the most victorious general, and the most fortunate gamester, when the labor of their respective vocations has come to a close, are often found to languish in the midst of all their acquisitions, as if out of their kindred and rejoicing element. It is quite in vain with such a constitutional appetite for employment in man, to attempt cutting away from him the spring or the principle of one employment, without providing him with another. The whole heart and habit will rise in resistance against such an undertaking. The else unoccupied female, who spends the hours of every evening at some play of hazard, knows as well as you, that the pecuniary gain, or the honorable triumph of a successful contest, are altogether paltry. It is not such a demonstration of vanity as this that will force her away from her dear and delightful occupation. The habit can not so be displaced as to leave nothing but a negative and cheerless vacancy behind it--though it may be so supplanted as to be followed up by another habit of employment to which the power of some new affection has constrained her. It is willingly suspended, for example, on any single evening, should the time that was wont to be allotted to gaming require to be spent on the preparation of an approaching assembly.

The ascendant power of a second affection will do what no exposition, however forcible, of the folly and worthlessness of the first, ever could effectuate. And it is the same in the great world. You never will be able to arrest any of its leading pursuits, by a naked demonstration of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of stopping one of these pursuits in any way else, but by stimulating to another. In attempting to bring a worldly man, intent and busied with the prosecution of his objects, to a dead stand, you have not merely to encounter the charm which he annexes to these objects, but you have to encounter the pleasure which he feels in the very prosecution of them. It is not enough, then, that you dissipate the charm by your moral, and eloquent, and affecting exposure of its illusiveness. You must address to the eye of his mind another object, with a charm powerful enough to dispossess the first of its influence, and to engage him in some other prosecution as full of interest, and hope, and congenial activity, as the former. It is this which stamps an impotency on all moral and pathetic declamation of the insignificance of the world. A man will no more consent to the misery of being without an object, because that object is a trifle, or of being without a pursuit, because that pursuit terminates in some frivolous or fugitive acquirement, than he will voluntarily submit himself to the torture because that torture is to be of short duration. If to be without desire and without exertion altogether, is a state of violence and discomfort, then the present desire, with its correspondent train of exertion, is not to be got rid of simply by destroying it. It must be by substituting another desire, or another line of habit or exertion in its place, and the most effectual way of withdrawing the mind from one object, is not by turning it away upon desolate and unpeopled vacancy, but by presenting to its regards another object still more alluring.

These remarks apply not merely to love considered in the state of desire for an object not yet attained. They apply also to love considered in its state of indulgence, or placid gratification, with an object already in possession. It is seldom that any of our tastes are made to disappear by a process of natural extinction. At least, it is very seldom that this is done by the instrumentality of reasoning. It may be done by excessive pampering, but it is almost never done by the mere force of mental determination. But what can not be thus destroyed may be dispossessed, and one taste may be made to give way to another, and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind. It is thus that the boy ceases, at length, to be the slave of his appetite, but it is because a manlier taste has now brought it into subordination, and that the youth ceases to idolize pleasure, but it is because the idol of wealth has become the stronger, and gotten the ascendency--and that even the love of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart of many a thriving citizen, but it is because drawn into the whirl of city politics, another affection has been wrought into his moral system, and he is now lorded over by the love of power. There is not one of these transformations in which the heart is left without an object. Its desire for one particular object may be conquered; but as to its desire for having some one object, or other, this is unconquerable. Its adhesion to that on which it has fastened the preference of its regards, can not willingly be overcome by the rending away of a single separation. It can be done only by the application of something else, to which it may feel the adhesion of a still stronger and more powerful preference. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have something to lay hold of--and which, if wrested away, without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind as hunger is to the natural system. It may be dispossessed of one object or of any, but it can not be desolated of all. Let there be a breathing and a sensitive heart, but without a liking and without affinity to any of the things that are around it, and in a state of cheerless abandonment, it would be alive to nothing but the burden of its own consciousness, and feel it to be intolerable. It would make no difference to its owner, whether he dwelt in the midst of a gay and goodly world, or placed afar beyond the outskirts of creation, he dwelt a solitary unit in dark and unpeopled nothingness. The heart must have something to cling to--and never, by its own voluntary consent, will it so denude itself of all its attachments that there shall not be one remaining object that can draw or solicit it.

The misery of a heart thus bereft of all relish for that which is wont to minister to its enjoyment, is strikingly exemplified in those who, satiated with indulgence, have been so belabored, as it were, with the variety and the poignancy of the pleasurable sensations that they have experienced, that they are at length fatigued out of all capacity for sensation whatever. The disease of ennui is more frequent in the French metropolis, where amusement is more exclusively the occupation of higher classes, than it is in the British metropolis, where the longings of the heart are more diversified by the resources of business and politics. There are the votaries of fashion, who, in this way, have at length become the victims of fashionable excess, in whom the very multitude of their enjoyments has at last extinguished their power of enjoyment--who, plied with the delights of sense and of splendor even to weariness, and incapable of higher delights, have come to the end of all their perfection, and, like Solomon of old, found it to be vanity and vexation. The man whose heart has thus been turned into a desert can vouch for the insupportable languor which must ensue, when one affection is thus plucked away from the bosom, without another to replace it. It is not necessary that a man receive pain from anything in order to become miserable. It is barely enough that he looks with distaste at everything--and in that asylum which is the repository of minds out of joint, and where the organ of feeling as well as the organ of intellect, has been impaired, it is not in the cell of loud and frantic outcries where you will meet with the acme of mental suffering. But that is the individual who outpeers in wretchedness all his fellows, who throughout the whole expanse of nature and society, meets not an object that has at all the power to detain or interest him; who neither in earth beneath, nor in heaven above, knows of a single charm to which his heart can send forth one desirous or responding movement; to whom the world, in his eye a vast and empty desolation, has left him nothing but his own consciousness to feed upon--dead to all that is without him, and alive to nothing but to the load of his own torpid and useless existence.

We hope that by this time you understand the impotency of a mere demonstration of this world's insignificance. Its sole practical effect, if it had any, would be to leave the heart in a state which to every heart is insupportable, and that is a mere state of nakedness and negation. You may remember the fond and unbroken tenacity with which your heart has often recurred to pursuits, over the utter frivolity of which it sighed and wept but yesterday. The arithmetic of your short-lived days, may on Sabbath make the clearest impression upon your understanding, and from his fancied bed of death may the preacher cause a voice to descend in rebuke and mockery on all the pursuits of earthliness, and as he pictures before you the fleeting generations of men, with the absorbing grave, whither all the joys and interests of the world hasten to their sure and speedy oblivion, may you, touched and solemnized by his argument, feel for a moment as if on the eve of a practical and permanent emancipation from a scene of so much vanity.

But the morrow comes, and the business of the world, and the objects of the world, and the moving forces of the world, come along with it, and the machinery of the heart, in virtue of which it must have something to grasp, or something to adhere to, brings it under a kind of moral necessity to be actuated just as before, and in utter repulsion toward a state so unkindly as that of being frozen out both of delight and of desire, does it feel all the warmth and the urgency of its wonted solicitations, nor in the habit and history of the whole man can we detect so much as one symptom of the new creature, so that the church, instead of being to him a school of obedience, has been a mere sauntering place for the luxury of a passing and theatrical emotion; and the preaching which is mighty to compel the attendance of multitudes, and which is mighty to still and to solemnize the hearers into a kind of tragic sensibility, and which is mighty in the play of variety and vigor that it can keep up around the imagination, is not mighty to the pulling down of strongholds.

The love of the world can not be expunged by a mere demonstration of the world's worthlessness. But may it not be supplanted by the love of that which is more worthy than itself? The heart can not be prevailed upon to part with the world by a single act of resignation. But may not the heart be prevailed upon to admit into its preference another, who shall subordinate the world, and bring it down from its wonted ascendancy? If the throne which is placed there must have an occupier, and the tyrant that now reigns has occupied it wrongfully, he may not leave a bosom which would rather detain him than be left in desolation. But may he not give way to the lawful sovereign, appearing with every charm that can secure his willing admittance, and taking unto himself his great power to subdue the moral nature of man, and to reign over it? In a word, if the way to disengage the heart from the positive love of one great and ascendant object, is to fasten it in positive love to another, then it is not by exposing the worthlessness of the former, but by addressing to the mental eye the worth and excellence of the latter, that all things are to be done away, and all things are become new.

To obliterate all our present affections by simply expunging them, so as to leave the seat of them unoccupied, would be to destroy the old character, and to substitute no new character in its place. But when they take their departure upon the ingress of others, when they resign their sway to the power and the predominance of new affections, when, abandoning the heart to solitude, they merely give place to a successor who turns it into as busy a residence of desire, and interest, and expectation as before--there is nothing in all this to thwart or to overthrow any of the laws of our sentient nature--and we see how, in fullest accordance with the mechanism of the heart, a great moral revolution may be made to take place upon it.

This, we trust, will explain the operation of that charm which accompanies the effectual preaching of the gospel. The love of God, and the love of the world, are two affections, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity--and that so irreconcilable that they can not dwell together in the same bosom. We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it, and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one. Nothing can exceed the magnitude of the required change in a man's character, when bidden, as he is in the New Testament, not to love the world; no, nor any of the things that are in the world, for this so comprehends all that is dear to him in existence as to be equivalent to a command of self-annihilation. But the same revelation which dictates so mighty an obedience, places within our reach as mighty an instrument of obedience.

It brings for admittance, to the very door of our heart, an affection which, once seated upon its throne, will either subordinate every previous inmate, or bid it away. Beside the world, it places before the eye of the mind Him who made the world, and with this peculiarity, which is all its own--that in the gospel do we so behold God, as that we may love God. It is there, and there only, where God stands revealed as an object of confidence to sinners--and where our desire after Him is not chilled into apathy by that barrier of human guilt which intercepts every approach that is not made to Him through the appointed Mediator. It is the bringing in of this better hope whereby we draw nigh unto God--and to live without hope is to live without God, and if the heart be without God, the world will then have the ascendancy. It is God apprehended by the believer as God in Christ, who alone can disport it from this ascendancy. It is when He stands dismantled of the terrors which belong to Him as an offended lawgiver, and when we are enabled by faith, which is his own gift, to see His glory in the face of Jesus Christ, and to hear His beseeching voice, as it protests good will to men, and entreats the return of all who will, to a full pardon and a gracious acceptance--it is then that a love paramount to the love of the world, and at length expulsive of it, first arises in the regenerating bosom. It is when released from the spirit of bondage, with which love can not dwell, and when to the number of God's children, through the faith that is in Christ Jesus, the spirit of adoption is found upon us; it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires, and in the only way in which deliverance is possible. And that faith which is revealed to us from heaven, as indispensable to a sinner's justification in the sight of God, is also the instrument of the greatest of all moral and spiritual achievements on a nature dead to the influence, and beyond the reach of every other application.

Thus may we come to perceive what it is that makes the most effective kind of preaching. It is not enough to hold out to the world's eye the mirror of its own imperfections. It is not enough to come forth with a demonstration, however pathetic, of the evanescent character of all its enjoyments. It is not enough to travel the walk of experience along with you, and speak to your own conscience and your own recollection of the deceitfulness of the heart, and the deceitfulness of all that the heart is set upon. There is many a bearer of the gospel message who has not shrewdness of natural discernment enough, and who has not power of characteristic description enough, and who has not the talent of moral delineation enough, to present you with a vivid and faithful sketch of the existing follies of society. But that very corruption which he has not the faculty of representing in its visible details, he may practically be the instrument of eradicating in its principle. Let him be but a faithful expounder of the gospel testimony; unable as he may be to apply a descriptive hand to the character of the present world, let him but report with accuracy the matter which revelation has brought to him from a distant world, unskilled as he is in the work of so anatomizing the heart, as with the power of a novelist to create a graphical or impressive exhibition of the worthlessness of its many affections--let him only deal in those mysteries of peculiar doctrine, on which the best of novelists have thrown the wantonness of their derision. He may not be able, with the eye of shrewd and satirical observation, to expose to the ready recognition of his hearers the desires of worldliness--but with the tidings of the gospel in commission, he may wield the only engine that can extirpate them. He can not do what some might have done, when, as if by the hand of a magician they have brought out to view, from the hidden recesses of our nature, the foibles and lurking appetites which belong to it. But he has a truth in the possession, which, into whatever heart it enters, will, like the rod of Aaron, swallow up them all--and unqualified as he may be, to describe the old man in all the nicer shading of his natural and constitutional varieties, with him is deposited that ascendant influence under which the leading tastes and tendencies of the old man are destroyed, and he becomes a new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let us not cease, then, to ply the only instrument of powerful and positive operation, to do away from you the love of the world. Let us try every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of Him who is greater than the world. For this purpose, if possible, clear away that shroud of unbelief which so hides and darkens the face of the Deity. Let us insist on His claims to your affection, and whether in the shape of gratitude or in the shape of esteem, let us never cease to affirm that in the whole of that wondrous economy, the purpose of which is to reclaim a sinful world unto Himself, He, the God of love, so sets Himself forth in characters of endearment, that naught but faith, and naught but understanding are wanting, on your part, to call forth the love of your hearts back again.

And here let me advert to the incredulity of a worldly man; when he brings his own sound and secular experience to bear upon the high doctrines of Christianity, when he looks upon regeneration as a thing impossible, when feeling as he does the obstinacies of his own heart, on the side of things present, and casting an intelligent eye, much exercised, perhaps, in the observations of human life, on the equal obstinacies of all who are around him, he pronounces this whole matter about the crucifixion of the old man, and the resurrection of a new man in his place, to be in downright opposition to all that is known and witnessed of the real nature of humanity. We think that we have seen such men, who, firmly trenched in their own vigorous and homebred sagacity, and shrewdly regardful of all that passes before them through the week, and upon the scenes of ordinary business, look on that transition of the heart by which it gradually dies unto time, and awakens in all the life of a new felt and ever growing desire toward God, as a mere Sabbath speculation; and who thus, with all their attention engrossed upon the concerns of earthliness, continue unmoved to the end of their days, amongst the feelings and the appetites, and the pursuits of earthliness.

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