TRIBUTE TO JOHN WEISS,

ON THE DAY OF HIS DECEASE.

IN reference to no man of this generation could it seem more absurdly untrue than of John Weiss, to say he is no more. His spirit has been a flame which we can but conceive as asking for more fuel, and, in the mortal body or not, never going out. The personal continuance, to use his own frequent phrase, he was so curious about, could be more appropriate to the quality of no other person. From a centre of original force proceeded all his expression of look and tone. The style of no writer of the time we live in is more individually marked, and the moral was as deep in him as the imaginative stamp. His heroic fidelity to his convictions never flinched. Truth to what he thought, in his theology and in the hard days when the Moloch of slavery demanded and secured so many sacrifices for its shrine,-he maintained every grain and at whatsoever cost. His genius was alike rare in its critical and in its creative form, although it was for wide popular appreciation both too subtile and too deep. No shade of meaning in his own mind was beyond his power

to indicate, or in another's page too latent and lurking for his sentiment to detect. He will be mourned by the constituency of an intellectual and spiritual brotherhood and sisterhood as characteristic in its endowments as was the master who, with a man's and woman's temper, refined their fancies to the utmost purity and raised their ideas of God and Nature to the loftiest pitch. It is too soon either to estimate his abilities or utter the grief we feel that his so extraordinary traits now cease on earth to be shown. We can only, in this opportunity of the single moment allowed, note the passing, into that mystery of the Unseen none brooded over more wistfully than he, of an intelligence which was itself the lustre of a loving soul, as the flashes of day issue from the heat of the sun. For he too "was a burning and a shining light."

C. A. BARTOL.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE.

I.

THE WORK OF RELIGION.

HE conditions of modern intelligence are

THE

SO

changed from those of any previous period with which the sentiment of Religion has dealt, that it is obliged to take a new departure, to include and use. the new conveniences. There never was such an extension of mental activity, and never so many objects furnished to keep it continually stimulated. Cheap publications of every kind spread the moods of the period far and wide. Their range passes through all the speculative forms and all the emotions of which the soul is capable. The very richness of material is a cause of distraction, for the mind grows embarrassed as so many departments throw wide their doors at once, and display their collections. And there is no statement too scientific to resist the inventions of popular treatment. It is macerated, dissected, canned, as it were, for the use of emigrants and travellers. Every condition of half-knowledge appropriates it.