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of his great heart, (heart-age,) action from the heart. And because he now can die without being shaken or perturbed by any of the dastardly feelings that belong to self-seeking and work, because he partakes of the impassibility of his principles, we call him a hero, regarding him as a kind of God, a man who has gone up into the sphere of the divine.

Then, since courage is a joy so high, a virtue of so great majesty, what could happen but that many will covet both the internal exaltation and the outward repute of it? Thus comes bravery, which is the counterfeit, or mock virtue. Courage is of the heart, as we have said; bravery is of the will. One is the spontaneous joy and repose of a truly great soul; the other, bravery, is after an end ulterior to itself, and, in that view, is but a form of work, -about the hardest work, too, I fancy, that some men undertake. What can be harder, in fact, than to act a great heart, when one has nothing but a will wherewith to do it?

Thus you will see that courage is above danger, bravery in it, doing battle on a level with it. One is secure and tranquil, the other suppresses agitation or conceals it. A right mind fortifies one, shame stimulates the other. Faith is the nerve of one, risk the plague and tremor of the other. For, if I may tell you just here a very important secret, there be many that are called heroes who are yet without courage. They brave danger by their will, when their heart trembles. They make up in violence what they want in tranquillity, and drown the tumult of their fears in the rage of their passions. Enter the heart, and you shall find, too often, a dastard spirit lurking in your hero. Call him still a brave man, if you will; only remember that he lacks courage.

No, the true hero is the great, wise man of duty,-he whose soul is armed by truth and supported by the smile of God,-—he who meets life's perils with a cautious but tranquil spirit, gathers strength by facing its storms, and dies, if he is called to die, as a Christian victor at the post of duty. And if we must have heroes, and wars wherein to make them, there is no so brilliant war as a war with wrong, no hero so fit to be sung as he who has gained the bloodless victory of truth and mercy.

But if bravery be not the same as courage, still it is a very imposing and plausible counterfeit. The man himself is told, after the occasion is past, how heroically he bore himself, and when once his nerves have become tranquillized, he begins even to believe it. And since we cannot stay content in the dull, uninspired world of economy and work, we are as ready to see a hero as he to be one. Nay, we must have our heroes, as I just said, and we are ready to harness ourselves, by the million, to any man who will let us fight him out the name. Thus we find out occasions for war,—wrongs to be redressed, revenges to be taken, such

as we may feiga inspiration and play the great heart under. We collect armies, and dress up leaders in gold and high colors, meaning, by the brave look, to inspire some notion of a hero beforehand. Then we set the men in phalanxes and squadrons, where the personality itself is taken away, and a vast impersonal person called an army, a magnanimous and brave monster, is all that remains. The masses of fierce color, the glitter of steel, the dancing plumes, the waving flags, the deep throb of the music lifting every foot,-under these the living acres of men, possessed by the one thought of playing brave to-day, are rolled on to battle. Thunder, fire, dust, blood, groans,-what of these?-nobody thinks of these, for nobody dares to think till the day is over, and then the world rejoices to behold a new batch of heroes. And this is the devil's play, that we call war.

LIGHT.

There are many who will be ready to think that light is a very tame and feeble instrument, because it is noiseless. An earthquake, for example, is to them a much more vigorous and effective agency. Hear how it comes thundering through the solid foundations of nature. It rocks a whole continent. The noblest works of man, cities, monuments, and temples, are in a moment levelled to the ground, or swallowed down the opening gulfs of fire.

Little do they think that the light of every morning, the soft and silent light, is an agent many times more powerful. But let the light of the morning cease and return no more; let the hour of morning come, and bring with it no dawn; the outeries of a horror-stricken world fill the air, and make, as it were, the darkness audible. The beasts go wild and frantic at the loss of the sun. The vegetable growths turn pale and die. A chill creeps on, and frosty winds begin to howl across the freezing earth. Colder, yet colder, is the night. The vital blood, at length, of all creatures, stops congealed.

Down goes the frost to the earth's centre. The heart of the sea is frozen, nay, the earthquakes are themselves frozen in, under their fiery caverns. The very globe itself, too, and all the fellowplanets that have lost their sun, are become mere balls of ice, swinging silent in the darkness. Such is the light which revisits us in the silence of the morning.-It makes no shock or scar. It would not wake an infant in the cradle. And yet it perpetually new-creates the world, rescuing it each morning as a prey from night and chaos.

So the true Christian is a light, even "the light of the world;" and we must not think that because he shines insensibly or silently, as a mere object, he is therefore powerless. The greatest powers

are ever those which lie back of the little stirs and commotions of nature; and I verily believe that the insensible influences of good men are as much more potent than what I have called their voluntary and active, as the great silent powers of nature are of greater consequence than her little disturbances and tumults.

GEORGE W. BETHUNE.

THIS graceful scholar and eloquent divine was born in New York, on the 18th of March, 1805. He is the only son of Mr. Divie Bethune,' a native of Rossshire, Scotland, who for many years was an eminent merchant in New York,eminent not only for business qualifications, but for an intelligent, ever-active piety. In 1819, he entered Columbia College, and, three years afterwards, the senior class of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. During that year (1822) he was the subject of a revival of religion that took place in the college, and he resolved to devote his life to the Christian ministry. After graduating, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary, and, in 1827, was settled over the Reformed Dutch Church at Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, New York. In 1830, he removed to Utica, to take charge of the new Reformed Dutch Church, which he gathered and built up; and in 1834, he was called to the First Reformed Dutch Church, Philadelphia. After laboring in this field two years, a number of his friends in that city determined to build a new house of worship for him; and in 1837, he was settled over the Third Reformed Dutch Church, worshipping at the corner of Tenth and Filbert Streets. Here he remained twelve years, when he left to take charge of the Reformed Dutch Church on Brooklyn Heights, New York, where he now resides.

In consequence of his fine scholarship, and his power as a writer and an orator, Dr. Bethune has received many invitations to posts of high honor and trust. The chair of Moral Philosophy at West Point was offered to him by President Polk; and he was elected Chancellor of the University of New York, to succeed

1 Dr. Bethune's mother, Mrs. Joanna Bethune, was the daughter of the celebrated Isabella Graham, and inherited much of her mother's spirit of earnest philanthropy. She was very active in founding the Widow's Society and Orphan's Asylum in New York, and was among the first in laying the foundation of many benevolent institutions, such as the Sunday-school, the Society for the Promotion of Industry, &c. &c.

2 Another subject of that revival was the late Erskine Mason, D.D., for twenty. one years pastor of the Bleecker Street Church, who died May 14, 1851. His Bermons were distinguished for great compactness of thought and severe logical arrangement, united to a fervid and often impassioned eloquence, that gave him a very high rank as a pulpit-orator. An octavo volume of his sermons, entitled The Pastor's Legacy, has been published since his death, prefixed to which is an excellent memoir, by Rev. William Adams, D.D. Read also a very discriminating and beautifully-written article on his character, by the late Rev. R. S. Storrs Dickinson, for two years assistant pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, whose early death was a great loss to the Christian church.

Mr. Frelinghuysen. But these and other honors he declined, feeling it to be his duty to remain in the pulpit as the pastor of a people devotedly attached to him. The following are his chief publications:-The Fruits of the Spirit, a volume of Christian ethical essays, published in 1839; Early Lost, Early Saved, on the death and salvation of infants, 1846; a volume of Sermons, 1847; History of a Penitent, or Guide to an Inquirer, 1847; an edition of Walton's Angler, with copious literary and bibliographical notes, 1848; Lays of Love and Faith, with other Fugitive Poems, 1848; The British Female Poets, with biographical and critical notices, 1848.

For twenty years Dr. Bethune has been continually invited to deliver orations and lectures at various colleges, and before societies in different parts of the country; and of these the following have been published:-1837, On Genius, delivered at Union College; 1839, Leisure, its Uses and Abuses, before the Mercantile Library, and The Age of Pericles, before the Athenian Institute, Philadelphia; 1840, an Oration before the literary societies of the University of Pennsylvania; and the Prospects of Art in the United States, before the Artists' Fund Society, Philadelphia; 1842, The Eloquence of the Pulpit, at Andover Theological Seminary; and The Duties of Educated Men, at Dickinson College; 1845, Discourse on the Death of Andrew Jackson, Philadelphia; and A Plea for Study, at Yale College; 1849, The Claims of our Country on its Literary Men, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College.

OUR COUNTRY.

What has God done, what is he doing, what is he about to do, in this land? He has set it far away to the west, and made it so circumstantially independent, that, if all the rest of the habitable earth were sunk, we should feel no serious curtailment of our comforts. The products of the whole world are, or may soon be, found within our confederate limits. He brought here first the sternest, most religious, most determined representatives of Europe's best blood, best faith, best intellect; men, ay, and women (it is the mother who makes the child) who, because they feared God, feared no created power,-who, bowing before his absolute sovereignty, would kneel to no lord spiritual or temporal on earth, and who, believing the Bible true, demanded its sanction for all law. To your Pilgrim Fathers the highest place may well be accorded; but forget not that, about the time of their landing on the Rock, there came to the mouth of the Hudson men of kindred faith and descent, men equally loving freedom, -men from the sea-washed cradle of modern constitutional freedom, whose union of free burgher-cities taught us the lesson of confederate independent sovereignties, whose sires were as free, long centuries before Magna Charta, as the English are now, and from whose line of republican princes Britain received the

boon of religious toleration,-a privilege the States-General had recognised as a primary article of their government when first established; men of that stock which, when offered their choice of favors from a grateful monarch, asked a University; men whose martyr-sires had baptized their land with their blood; men who had flooded it with ocean-waves rather than yield it to a bigottyrant; men whose virtues were sober as prose, but sublime as poetry; the men of Holland! Mingled with these, and still farther on, were heroic Huguenots, their fortunes broken, but their spirit unbending to prelate or prelate-ridden king. There were others, (and a dash of cavalier blood told well in battle-field and council;)-but those were the spirits whom God had made the moral substratum of our national character. Here, like Israel in the wilderness, and thousands of miles off from the land of bondage, they were educated for their high calling, until, in the fulness of times, our confederacy with its Constitution was founded. Already there had been a salutary mixture of blood, but not enough to impair the Anglo-Saxon ascendency. The nation grew morally strong from its original elements. The great work was delayed only by a just preparation. Now God is bringing hither the most vigorous scions from all the European stocks, to "make of them all one new MAN;" not the Saxon, not the German, not the Gaul, not the Helvetian, but the AMERICAN. Here they will unite as one brotherhood, will have one law, will share one interest. Spread over the vast region from the frigid to the torrid, from Eastern to Western Ocean, every variety of climate giving them choice of pursuit and modification of temperament, the ballot-box fusing together all rivalries, they shall have one national will. What is wanting in one race will be supplied by the characteristic energies of the others; and what is excessive in either, checked by the counter-action of the rest. Nay, though for a time the newly-come may retain their foreign vernacular, our tongue, so rich in ennobling literature, will be the tongue of the nation, the language of its laws, and the accent of its majesty. ETERNAL GOD! who seest the end with the beginning, thou alone canst tell the ultimate grandeur of this people!

Phi Beta Kappa Oration.

1 After the eventful issue of the siege of Leyden, the Prince of Orange and the States-General, grateful to the heroic defenders of that city, offered them their choice of an Annual Fair or a University. They chose the University; but, struck with the nobleness of the choice, the high authorities granted them both. The University was established in 1575, and became the Alma Mater of Grotius, Scaliger, Boerhaave, and many other renowned men. See page 688.

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