An Injured World.

While Babylon was in its splendor of architecture and gardens and all which art could invent and riches attain, it was also infamous in crime and vice. Power was acquired and retained in the old ages not by treaties or purchase, but by force, and self was enlarged by the destruction of the distant neighbors. When by the labors of a few centuries some town had become a great city it then became an object of envy and toward it armies began to march. Thus every city was a fortress. As the moneyed institutions of the present contrive vaults that may protect gold from the grasp of criminals, so each city of the earliest epochs was kept as in a safe, for all the surrounding tribes were its confessed and natural enemies. What assaults were made upon Damascus, and Jerusalem, and Carthage? Isaiah had seen Babylon reaching

out her cruel hands, and having stained them with blood withdraw them laden with treasures into the imperial city. He had seen remote provinces plundered by the Assyrian kings, as Tacitus knew of a time when the Roman generals had marched out northward into flourishing nations and had made a solitude and called it peace.

This scene, taken from almost any page of ancient history, shows us how man injured his own world all through those remote periods, and having shown us those old solitudes it asks us if man is not still making his own home tremble and his domain to be as a wilderness. In a different manner from that seen by Tacitus our times make a solitude out of the great areas over which they march. A great world indeed we possess after all the insults and wrongs we have heaped upon it, but it seems that compared with what it might be it is only a wilderness. Disposed in the economy of nature to blossom, man denies it the privilege and tramples over it until, instead of being a garden of verdure, it is

a field of dust. A priori our planet ought to be a very delightful one, for it was made by a great workman, one not liable to place out in the universe an inherent moral failure. The sacred poetry tells us that "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," and all religious minds accept of such a psalm and sing it with delight; but the logical inference must be that there are elements of greatness in the earth if it came from such a sublime origin. There must be some mistake about it if in any way we think it a poor design or a badly executed design. There must be possibilities here invisible to us. If we make a comparison between the irrational and the rational forms of life, we shall find among the animals a generic success, a success of the lion, a perfection of the elephant, a perfection of the deer and the antelope. The nightingale and the bird of paradise, and all the thousands of species of birds, reach at once their form of happiness and the decoration of plumage and song; and, as though they attained this by the order of a thoughtful God, those which enjoy a

perfection of plumage do not receive a perfection of song, and those which are allowed song are denied the pictured or painted plumes. To each is assigned a form of goodness of some grade and all the individuals reach it. You will find no leopard that has not beautiful spots and no oriole that cannot build the little cottage on the end of a swinging bough. Out of such a comparison we must emerge with the feeling that man, too, must have been granted great forms of success, not as inevitable, like the spots of the leopard or the voice of the linnet, but as being easily possible to all. The universe coming from a single mind, and that mind far removed from caprice or injustice, must bear in its contents the impress of this one mind, and if the bird, and the brute, and the goldfish, and silver-fish reach at once a special" perfection, we must include man in the fortunate group and declare that his higher faculties were made for a still nobler triumph than can be found in the woods where the deer seems so happy or in the groves where the birds sing. Above the

irrational world in his powers, he was destined for a greater result.

Anakreon in one of his minor odes, in order to compliment the friend of his heart, says that each creature has its armor and weapon-its outfit for its special fortunate career. "The ox can defend with his horns, the hare by its fleetness, the lion with its chasm of teeth,' the bird can escape by flying, to man is given wisdom and to woman beauty." This poem harmonizes with our assertions thus far and reveals the law that the universe must possess the same elements in all its details, and that man was born not into misery but into a beautiful land of both possession and pursuit. But now comes the application of Isaiah's words. Some destroyer has passed over it, and is still passing over it, making it to tremble, turning its gardens into a wilderness. Some Babylonian or other despots despots are reaching out and desolating homes and provinces, and are either annihilating public goods or are gathering into one house the food, and clothing, and jewels which should have