supposed her a lady of large benevolence, hence the keenness of my disappointment, for in the South part of the city, where she resided during the life time of her first husband, she was spoken of, and is still remembered, as one who was ever ready to engage in every enterprise that had for its object the alleviation or elevation of suffering or degraded humanity. Knowing that Mr. Adams was far from wealthy, in comparison with her present husband, I think it but natural that I should feel at least surprised, when, in the midst of her present luxurious surroundings, she actually pleaded inability! In fact, I could not suppress a doubt relative to her veracity; neither the thought that her improved pecuniary condition had not resulted in an augmented expansion of the heart." The apparent difference in the character of my friend, as marked by her deeds, is not attributable to an altered disposition, but to the changed condition of which you speak. She has been, as you have remarked, in comparatively moderate circumstances, and yet was noted for her benevolence; she is now the wife of a positively rich man, and is, as you have stated, seemingly penurious.' "You quite bewilder me, Mrs. Weston. Your defense of Mrs. Vinton is a riddle which I am quite unable to solve, and must beg you to explain." Plainly, then, Mr. Adams possessed a large, warm heart, and never denied himself or wife the luxury of doing good, as means and opportunity afforded. Mr. Vinton's habits and inclinations are of a different order. When his money changes hands, he is pretty sure to obtain what he considers a full equivalent; or if, as is sometimes the case, he confers a public benefaction, the public is usually informed to what amount, and to whom the obligation is due." But you surely would not lead me to infer that Mr. Vinton limits his wife in her expenditures? Certainly, her home and personal adornments do not indicate lack of money, or restriction in its appropriation. I cannot mention a dwelling in which the elegancies of life are more lavishly displayed than in Mr. Vinton's; and surely no lady appears more splendid ly apparelled than his wife." "True; those things are among the costly pleasures in which he allows himself to indulge. The house is his home. The lady is his wife, and as such must represent his means and standing. And in order to secure that representation, he must of necessity, supply the means?" "Yes; he does so after his own manner and method." "And until his manner and method are more fully understood, I cannot feel quite persuaded that his wife is perfectly exempt from the blame which I attribute to her. It appears to me that from the large amount which she must expend, to dress in the style she does, she might, if charitably disposed, from that alone, reserve many dollars for benevolent bestowment. But I will suspend immediate judgment, and render a verdict only in accordance with further testimony." "Or rather, I will hope, annul the decision which I think you will not fail to see has been already rather hastily rendered.' "Perhaps so. I have expressed my opinion, hastily formed, it may be-but as founded upon appearances. I will gladly listen to any extenuating facts, and if the evidence favors your friend's claim, or rather your claim for your friend's acquital, I shall heartily rejoice to accord it." "And will you be convinced she did not wilfully refuse your request, and unfeelingly reject the call of humanity, if I tell you that the practice of her magnanimous husband is, to select and purchase. the articles, (without even consulting her taste) of which the elegant wardrobe of my excellent friend is composed ? ” Mrs. Weston, I am exceedingly amazed." "But still somewhat incredulous, I perceive. More explicit developments are yet wanting. Then fancy a shop-man leaving a box or package at No. 47 Pearl street, directed to the lady of the house, which, on opening, she finds to contain a five hundred dollar cashmere, or some similar costly trifle. This looks thoughtful and kind of the gentleman, truly; but at that very hour she is perhaps in want of a pair of gloves or gaiters, and has not wherewithal, unasked, to obtain them. Or, quite as unexpectedly, a beautiful moire antique, a magnificent velvet, or a splendid satin is sent to her house, and she has not money enough to purchase even a skein of sewing silk, with which to make the robe. She is obliged to present him with her milliner's and dress-maker's bills, and he promptly counts out, and graciously presents her with the exact amount. If an article is needed which his husbandly eye does not detect, and she is necessitated to ask for money, he invariably inquires what is wanting, and what sum is requisite for its purchase. And thus from year to year, she seldom passes a single dollar that has not its specified use. Her small fortune is swallowed up in his enormous one, and, as guardian of her first husband's child, even his slender income is subject to his step-father's control, and the very wages of her domestics are doled out with scrupulous exactness. Thus sit uated, instead of being able to add to your subscription list the sum of ten or twenty dollars, which I know would have afforded her great pleasure, I do not hesitate to express the opinion, that she has not today, as many pence." woman-hearted wife. From my heart, I sincerely pity her, when I think of the deep mortification which her inability to meet the frequent similar demands, must occasion her." 66 It is hard and unpleasant to be convinced of the defection of an individual, especially one in whose favor we are prepossessed; but in the present case I am most happy to exonerate the wife, even at the expense of the husband. I am not disposed to impute blame in act or motive, to the blameless." "Neither would I unadvisedly proclaim the faults of even the erring, save to vindicate the cause of the unoffending. And in this instance, my only motive in expos ing the delinquencies of one, is to defend a high-minded, pure-hearted woman, from unmerited aspersion." and I thank you My dear Mrs. Weston, I honor you for the earnestness with which you vindicate the character of your absent, and I am now thoroughly convinced — unjustly accused friend. You have moreover, imparted to me a lesson, for it-which I will treasure for reproof, and for future profit. Henceforth I will strive to remember how imperfect is our knowledge of individual character, as founded upon acts or position; and how often and deeply, the really excellent may I I cannot doubt your competency to sustain the assertions which you make, but had they come from the lips of one less acquainted with the parties, or less lenient in judgment, I would not hesitate to reject as in the present case-be wronged by them as malicious and libelous. Knowing indiscriminate and hasty judgment. the name of Mr. Vinton to be widely think I shall not soon forget, neither readknown and favorably regarded by the pub-ily forgive myself for the unkind thoughts lic, I am wholly unable to restrain, or yet and feelings to which I have just given express my unbounded amazement in view such unqualified, bitter expression. of such undreamed of disclosures." "I desire, Mrs. Eberle, you do not Your surprise, though quite natural, is think what I have uttered, has been not greater than, I presume, would be prompted by the spirit of reproof, but simMr. Vinton's, should he happen to learn ply by the wish to remove the opinion that he is even suspected of being restric- which you unwittingly though with aptive or niggardly towards his wife. As parent reason entertained derogatory to you have remarked, he stands well in the the principles of a most estimable woman. public estimation, and is not esteemed a We are all, and ever inclined - and that hard, or mean man, in his business trans- naturally enough-to form our estimate of actions, or his home provisions. He is persons according as circumstances prerather methodical and calculating, than sent them. Our fault in this, chiefly conpositively mercenary. But you have to- sists in imputing to motive and design, the day witnessed an instance of the embar- deeds or delinquencies which subject them rassment, self-denial, and painfully sup- to our censure, when, in reality, the depressed sympathies, to which his business- fection of will and purpose, is alone bound, arbitrary spirit subjects his noble, chargeable to extraneous circumstances, which are adverse to, and wholly beyond individual control. Thus, in our almost THE RESURRECTION. NO. II. of the Future Life. BY REV. A. G. LAURIE. impossible knowledge of the human heart, What the Scriptures teach us of the Nature of the causes which impel or suppress its active tendencies, we are ever liable to form grossly erroneous conclusions; and unless we set an uncompromising sentinel at the door of our judgment hall, a prejudicial verdict may go forth, when, could we with our intellectual vision perceive the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we should be led to commisserate, or at least to refrain from censure, where we so often thoughtlessly condemn. The case we have instanced is neither solitary nor rare. "There are many, it is to be feared, from whom, as from Mrs. Vinton,-their actual worth unrecognized we withhold the love and respect which, could their true lives shine forth in deeds, we should rejoice to render; and many too, like Mr. Vinton, whose wealth and position obtain for them the deference which, could we rightly understand their actuating motives, could see the inner man, we should feel little inclined to accord to them more than merely Christian forbearance. Without designing to be harsh or uncharitable, we meet with so much that is averse to our sense of right; so much that grates upon our sensibilities and disappoints our hopes, that, without the consent of reason, we are often betrayed into the expression of hasty, and not unfrequently, unjust judgment." Oldtown, Me. Even plenty itself, the most profuse evidence of God, is often that which most shuts us in from him. In the blasted harvest and the unfruitful year, perhaps, we fall upon our knees, and think of his agency who retains the shower and veils the sun. But when the wheels of nature roll on their accustomed course, when our fields are covered with sheaves and our garners groan with abundance, we may lift a transient offering of gratitude; yet, in the continuous flow of prosperity, are we not apt to refer largely to our own enterprise, and bless our "luck?" In our essay of last month, we spoke of the eagerness we all feel to secure some positive knowledge of a future life, of the answer which God has given to this desire, in the resurrection of Christ Jesus, witnessed and amply attested by fit and crelible persons, and of the sufficiency of this fact and this testimony to satisfy all our reasonable moods and wishes. We stated that while we did not mean to limit God by denying the possibility of his granting special help by spiritual agencies to extraordinary needs, we yet did unqualifiedly condemn the practice on the part of Christian men, of nourishing expectations of such unusual helps, of fostering those secret cravings after a knowledge of the unseen world which lurk in all our bosoms, into fond hopes and morbid anticipations that we may become recipients of some heavenly signals; and we asserted our opinion, that in all such cases, the secret of the importunity was to be sought, and almost certainly to be found, in a feebleness of faith in the resurrection of Jesus, in a dissatisfaction with the all-sufficiency of that Divine demonstration to establish our confidence in our own immortality. We concluded with an admonition that when, at any time, we find our prospect of the future growing cloudy with doubts, or, what is quite as likely, dim and shifting under the steadfast gaze of our minds highly excited, and long and instantly fastened on it, our wisest course is our humblest; not to insist ambitiously on summoning spirits from the air or skies, but to sit down meekly at the feet of the risen Christ, the chief of Spirits, and listen while he talks to us; to read the simple, and therefore, on such a topic, sublime story of his reappearance from the dead, till the scene and the persons grow real to our sight; till, by the Magdalene's side, we too see him through the dawn, and hear the low-toned " Mary," which turns her The great mind is ever humble and stu- despair to rapture; till, in the close shut dious. room with the eleven, he looks on us to, and soothes and cures the fever of our incredulity, with his "Peace be unto you behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself;" and if, after that grand and convincing proof, designed by God for the satisfaction of all Christian believers, we, as believing Christians, still seek further assurance from inferior Spirits, and individual revelations, and receive it, why, then, that we are very singularly needy, that God detects some special want, some unusual spiritual defect in us-so unusual as to warrant him to step aside from his ordinary course, and by miracle to supply it. And now, turning from that unhealthy spiritual solicitude, which, if gratified as it seeks to the full, by visions and revelations of the mysteries of the unseen, would disgust us with all earthly duties, and merge all earthly distinctions --all the modest social proprieties, and the sober delights of household and friendly, and ordinary human intercourse-in the glare of an unsupportable heavenly light, and in the high excitements of a spiritual intoxication, let us at present direct you to the source authorized by God, for the rational satisfaction of that curiosity we all feel in reference to our destined condition when we escape from the flesh. That source is the New-Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It may not grant to each of us just the precise amount of information which we think would suffice us. It may refuse to speak positively on certain points, which, quite unblameably perhaps, we would wish to see set forth with emphatic distinctness. But let us remember, that it was not designed for us only, but for its believers generally; that to enlarge on the particulars we desiderate, might have necessitated the com.pression, perchance the omission of some, which are of greater personal interest to others, and that, it is God's own selected mode, in which he gives us what he knows, rather than what we think, to be the best and completest information for us, on so august a theme. In the first place, then, that we shall all live hereafter, and in a greatly advanced spiritual state beyond that we occupy here, is, I assume, the conviction of all Univer salist Christians, and therefore it is ours, for we are Universalist Christians. The question with us now, is, as to the particulars of that exalted life—such particulars as God has seen best to disclose to us. The fact of an after life is proclaimed to us, by the Resurrection of the Lord. That we shall live, and live a holier and a happier life than here, free from trial, temptation, and sorrow, and death, all this we think is involved and expressed in his triumphant resurrection, and in the calm and lofty dignity-so different from his agitation and misery in Gethsemanewhich invests him in his every appearance after it. But that, "if he lives we shall live also," "if he be lifted up from the earth, he will draw all men unto him," into the life immortal, into a far holier and happier state of being than that we here possess, is, I think, all that can be certainly deduced from the fact of his own resurrection, and the promise it bequeaths to us. Others may gather larger information in regard to our immortal condition from that signal revelation. But this is all I glean from it; that we shall live, and live forever, (for we cannot imagine the heavenly life of Christ coming to a close,) and in a far more exalted condition than here, when death dismisses us into eternity. And this surely is much. To know that we shall live then in blessedness, free from temptation, and liability to sin, and sorrow, and accident, and that we shall never, never die. Yes, this is much. But we insist on more. We are anxious for particulars. Some of us, I dare say, speculate a little upon unimportant ones, as, how divested of this body of ours, we shall retain our likeness so as to know each other there; how the organs of our senses, of sight, and speech, and hearing, left behind, we shall communicate with each other; what, if any, shall be the material appearance of our abode, how its landscapes will be enlivened, whether the lovely variety of scenery which charms us here will have its counterpart there, so that we shall gaze again, on a more glorious scale, on the mighty mountain, and the leaping flood, the solemn forest, and the broad champaign. On details like these, trivial as they seem to the intenser moods of our souls, we do, all men do, dream at times. But when the preacher or the poet essays to lift his audience with him in the high fancy of faith to some momentary Pisgah, whence he may disclose to them the heavenly splendors, he finds that he can imagine and describe them, only by reproducing the objects and appearances which delight him here. And so we have Dr. Watts, who I dare say lived among quiet pastoral scenery, singing in two certainly exquisite lines, Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, viting, certainly, as is such a prospect, it is just as decidedly warranted by any Scriptural disclosures on the subject, as the pictures of Dr. Watts or Thomas Aird, for the Bible is entirely silent upon all such details.. The glowing descriptions in the Apocalypse, of which some reader, perhaps, is thinking, as convicting me of error in this assertion, have reference, not to the kingdom in heaven, but the kingdom of heaven, the New Jerusalem which was to "come down from God out of Heaven." Rev. xxi. 2. Does the New Testament, then, say nothing on this topic, to appease our cu while another, from a far loftier range of riosity, and to fill us with anticipations of the picturesque, chants nobly, how "We shall walk in clear, white light, With kings and priests abroad, And we shall summer high in bliss Among the hills of God."* And then, again, there are others, as the Puritans for example, whose sense of heauty is at best but smail, and who conscientiously suppress even what they have, whose conception of heaven consists mainly of scenes and acts of perpetual devotion; who preach and pray of it as an everlasting Sabbath, (and we know what a Puritan Sabbath was,) and whose settled notion of it is, (as a dear and revered brother, now himself there, once said to me,) that we shall all sit on white pine benches, and sing psalms through all eternity. Yet, unin *After this was written, my expressed conjecture that Watts was a resident of a level country, and my implied one, that the author, then unknown to me, of the lines which follow his was wont to gaze on bolder scenery, were both curiously verified. In conversation with an English artist, he mentioned that he had been brought up at Stoke Newington, where Dr. Watts lived so long. I inquired what was the aspect of the landscape. "Wide, and gently undulating fields of richest verdure, with smooth streams flowing through them " was his reply. Soon afterwards, in a book of Poems by Thomas Aird, and in the Poem in that volume, entitled, "The Devil's Dream on Mount Aksbeck," I found the other lines, which I had previously picked up in fragment somewhere, and stuck them in my memory for their bold beauty. In another page of this number see more about them, under the head, "The Devil's Dream." The point in regard to them is, that Aird is a Scotsman. The English Watts, reproduces the green fields and flowing streams of England, in his conception of Heaven, and the Scot, in his, summers high among the hills of God." delight when we think of our future home? That we have such anticipations at all, is sufficient to suggest that it does. For only from the New Testament have we caught that feeling of brightness and bliss which the very utterance of the word And yet, "heaven," awakes within us. it opens up to us not a foot-breadth of the celestial territory; it gives us not a glimpse of the nearest of its landscapes. But there is one word, the most suggestive of all human words, I think, of brightness and magnificence, a word comloftiest ideas of splendor, and our lovelibining in its single utterance at once our est ideas of soft and lustrous beauty, which it almost solely dedicates to heaven, and to themes connected with heaven. That word is Glory. And such is its power and effect upon us, so does it of itself not only characterize, but really constitute what conceptions of heaven we have, that when in our highest moments, our thoughts go up and stand beside, and look within, those gates which opened long ago to admit the ascending Christ, and have ever since stood open night and day, we see there a vision of boundless spaces, and millions of saintly and angelic forms moving to and fro; but we can fix none of them, we can define no face, no figure of them all,--save perhaps, mother, the baby face once cradled on thy bosom, its cheek now close to the heart of Christ,-perhaps, husband, wife, one familiar human face, foremost in the radiant crowd, looking steadfastly on thee; all others, and all else, all |