shows, while furnishing all possible accommodation for parish parties. The same spirit of emulation improves domestic architecture, introducing water and gas and side-walks into the remotest towns. A lecturer in a Western village finds himself indebted for his flattering audience to the attractions of the novel gas-illumination; and, being eagerly solicited to repeat his address in a certain place, presently discovers that the anxiety is not to hear him, but simply to prevent Oshkosh from receiving any privilege which Fond du Lac may not enjoy. Frivolous as the motive may seem, it is a powerful spring of improvement in our whole new country. It first did its work in the East, where town academies and turnpikes were built fifty years ago under its inspiration; and is now transferring its domain to the West, where it is working its miracles of civilization with a rapidity and success that no less universal or less immediate motive could rival.

But it works for evil too, as well as good. The extravagant fashions, the late hours, the expensive living, the high prices, travel as fast and as far as schools and churches. The fast driving, the gold-gambling, the gaudy drinking-houses, the gift-enterprises and showy weddings, the mania for piebald costumes, propagate themselves with telegraphic speed and American universality. If at Leavenworth and Omaha we find the newspapers, the gas-works, the paved side-walks, the stone fronts, the schools and churches of the Eastern cities, we still more surely find in their streets the Broadway saloons, and on their pavements the identical millinery of the metropolis. We find every vice of older civilizations blooming with hot-house luxuriance out of their fresh soil. The latest fashions flourish almost in sight of the desert and the buffalo; snatches of Italian opera or quotations from Emerson may be broken short by the whoop of the wild Indian, or the bark of the prairie wolf; and at the crossings of the ways we meet just as idle, over-dressed, and frivolous young men and women as we may see sauntering in the sun of any bright afternoon, up and down our city avenues.

In an era in which social emulation is the characteristic and unchecked passion, the landmarks of reason and piety are lost in the deluge of imitation and rivalry. What is good and what is bad spread as by contagion. The common school and the church are borne on the same universal tide which floats into every region the follies and extravagances and fashionable vices of the day. Religion is built up in stone and mortar with prodigious outlay; while its moral and spiritual foundations are undermined by ribaldry and unseemly jesting about all sacred things in the very columns that advertise the Sunday topics of the pulpit. The mania for hospitals, asylums, and reading-rooms spreads like an epidemic, and with it the passion for horrible exhibitions, in which the contortionist risks his life to amuse the fears and thrill the nerves of the spectators; or women exhibit their coarse immodesty to the vulgar gaze, while people of standing will eagerly applaud some lottery scheme, thinly disguised by the sacred name of charity.* Microscopic science informs us that two opposite currents run in the same slender tubules of the lungs: one setting out and carrying off the carbonic acid; the other setting in, charged with pure oxygen, death and life thus flowing in the same channel. And so it is with the current of social emulation, with this difference, that the tides here mingle, and both run one way.

One great peril of American society is the lack of manly, independent thinking, and individual conscience. Personal aspiration gets lowered to a popular standard. An average and compromised pattern of character is thrust on us by a tyrannical, hasty, and unreasoning public opinion. Things go by tides and rushes and sweeping floods; to colonize California, to occupy Colorado and Montana; to drive railroads over mountain-chains, whose bases are hot and sandy, and their summits lost in clouds and snows, or across deserts whose borders are in different climates. Already Chicago, by superior energy, has managed to secure no small portion of the trade due west from St. Louis, and naturally belonging to it, which that city is now striving to regain, by driving her Pacific Railroad to the Rocky Mountains, before the northern line shall reach them. If we knew all the legislative lobbying; all the rash heat and haste; all the efforts to procure Federal aid to some of those local enterprises; all the hard feeling, the false and treacherous bargaining, involved in such emulations, - we should see that whatever blessings follow them, as contributions to the opening and settling of the country and the increase of its wealth, they tend to degrade and demoralize the generation that handles them, and to undermine justice, fairness, and open dealing.* Is there not, East and West, a growing disposition to think success the proof of merit, and almost the test of right? If a man has public spirit (as it is called); if he is successful in his schemes, and helps forward the external prosperity of his community, — he may gamble like a German prince, outwit all his contemporaries with his sharp practice, and still stand at the head of society (so called), and even be found taking high ground in regard to the company he keeps, so that none but persons of the very highest social standing can hope to enjoy his acquaintance: and yet hardly a person will be bold enough to smile at the gigantic jest, or to rebuke the fantastic absurdity.

It is often too easily assumed, that no direct rebuke of the popular temper can have any effect; that fashion is mightier than conscience or the truth; that the world will and must have its way; that the aspiring heart and the consecrated will must retire into privacy and strict seclusion, if they would indulge their morbid, sanctimonious ways. The average life of the times says, "These are not times for such delicate moralities;" and indeed some tender souls have been foolish enough to talk of Protestant nunneries and monasteries as the only hope of modern piety.

But this is a cowardly retreat before a powerful, yet after all a very vulnerable, and by no means unconquerable, enemy. The social emulation of our people - now coarse, now refined; now avowed, now secret - is a spirit not to be exorcised, but to be instructed; not to be done away, but to be purified and restrained. It is to be defecated of its taint by the sturdy criticism of those who still believe in the might of truth, the sanctity of goodness, and the power of prayer and holiness, and in the possibilities of a Christian life. Courage, moral courage, is the great want of American society. It is cowardice among men and women who know better; cowardice in the pulpit and the press, cowardice in society and on the platform, in the home-circle and in the world, that leaves folly, extravagance, and wickedness their unchallenged arena. Would that we had a few moral leaders, - not men aiming at a cheap capital of religious repute by becoming extravagant and professional censors of what they do not understand, but men of conviction, intelligence, and moral standing; who, instead of going apart and disdainfully leaving the great tide of humanity to its own course, saving only their own feet and skirts, would boldly go into the stream, and preserve, by wisdom, justice, and piety, the costly freight it bears! The country has too much education and too much aspiration, not to value, not to heed, not to follow, better counsels than it receives. A great heart of courage is a real power in the world. A few genuine leaders of public sentiment might greatly change the aspect of American society. Our people are as apt for what is good as for what is bad. Their external circumstances, especially in the West, are favorable to large, strong, generous views. This tendency is now abused to encourage latitudinarianism of morals, rudeness of manners, and laxity of opinion. But, after all, the largest and most generous views are really the divinest, noblest, purest. The great region of the West, gigantic in its features, is breeding a physical race, worthy to be the shrine of a nobler spirit and a grander faith. We believe the impurities will settle, the perilous fires slacken, the folly abate, under principles vital and ever active at the heart of our society. But, meanwhile, can a single generation afford to wait the gravitation of events? Are we willing personally to be only tools spoiled in making a civilization which is to be worth something a hundred years hence? Individual character is the immortal end of our existence; and only atheists and infidels are prepared to build up civilization on the ruins of generations whose follies, vices, and sins are counted on to prepare the soil, filling with their refuse the deep quagmires which are thus to become the foundations of future stableness.

ART. VI. -PHASES OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY.

First Historical Transformations of Christianity. From the French of Athanase Coquerel, the Younger. By E. P. EVANS, Ph. D., Professor of Modern Languages and Literature in the University of Michigan. One volume. Boston: Wm. V. Spencer. 1867.

AGAIN we have to thank Professor Evans for an excellent translation of a book eminently adapted to the wants of candid and inquiring minds. This time it is a thoroughly religious work that is offered us; the "First Historical Transformations of Christianity," by Athanase Coquerel, the younger, - a man who, like his illustrious father, has distinguished himself not less by his acquirements as a scholar and his eloquence as a preacher than by his fearless declaration of unpopular truths, and his brave endurance of such forms of persecution as the church and the world still tolerate for the punishment of heretics and innovators.

The treatise - contained in one small volume of less than