in a quiet way, hanging them on nails and wrapping them round about hinges or bars. Before leaving England for Khartoum the last time he sent to each member of the Cabinet a copy of Clarke on the Scripture Promises, which was one of his favorite books. His telegram to the Rev. Mr. Barnes, dispatched from the War Office on this same occasion, was, "I go to the Soudan to-night; if He goes with me all must be well." The whole story of his life is written in these simple words. He called the presence of God his "Koh-i-noor."

Whether he had any experience which corresponds at all closely to what we term conversion is not clear. His brother writes: "It is difficult to say at what period of his life his thoughts began to take a serious turn. One thing is quite certain, and that is that through his mother's loving tenderness the seed was sown in childhood, and that the terrible scenes of rapine, starvation, and murder he witnessed in China caused that seed to bring forth its own fruit in good time." The Rev. Mr. Barnes says, "He told me that he could not remember a period when, thinking of these things [the joys of heaven], he had not longed for death." Before Sebastopol, when he was twenty-one, we find cropping out in letters and journals much the same ideas that characterized his whole life. He was not connected strictly with any seetion of professing Christians; the two he most favored were the English Presbyterians and the Church of England. He was truly catholic. "Protestants and Catholics," he said, "are but soldiers of different regiments in the same army." Berzati Bey, his black Mohammedan secretary in the Soudan, taught him, he says, "the great lesson that in all nations and climes there are those who are perfect gentlemen, and though they may not be called Christians are so in spirit and in truth."

He had a whole bushel of peculiarities and eccentricities, nor was he by any means without weaknesses and faults and sins. He had an almost morbid appreciation of the value of time; inaction was terrible to him. Hence he was not always placid or patient. Ambition and pride, or the fear of their

rising again though so firmly held down, troubled him more or less to the end. He was not in all things worthy to be an example, not a model of all the virtues, and he would have been the last to claim it, or to profess entire deliverance from the fleshly nature, but there have been very few men who strove so earnestly to conform their lives to the will of God or to imitate Jesus Christ. He seemed to care for nothing except to serve his Lord and to do good. A prayer he often uttered was, "May I be ground to dust if He will glorify himself in me." Much of his life was a living sacrifice, a suffering for the sins of others. He stands out not as a little hill, but as one of the mountains of God; a hero among heroes, a saint among saints. The last letter which he sent from Khartoum, December 14, 1884, just before the veil finally shut in around him, contained these closing words: "God rules all; and as he will rule to his glory and our welfare, his will be done. I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, have tried to do my duty."

He is not dead. Such men cannot die. The admiration of what he was and what he did must raise up many to emulate his high example, to copy his unshakable faith, his fervent love, his absorption in the divine will. He was “a man as unselfish as Sydney, of courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honor stainless as Outram, of sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as Napier, of faith as steadfast as More.”

Unbounded courage and compassion joined,
Tempering each other in the tenderest mind,
Alternately proclaim him good and great,
And make the hero and the man complete.

James Mudge

ART. VIII.-THE TEACHER'S CALLING.

ONE who entered it in the year of Victoria's crowning and who still goes in and out accomplishing its service may be fairly thought to know something of its nature. Teaching is now one of the great "businesses," with branches many and varied, dealing or aspiring to deal with all the young of our species; that is to say, with all our species. Viewed in its aggregate, it is oceanic and sublime, fit theme for orators. This pen would be content could it but trace the quiet ways of the individual teacher. The beginner in our calling may, like a recruit in the army, like a ship putting to sea, have initial stock and store in good supply, yet he is at its beginning only. Even here one endowment born, not gained, he must have the teacher temperament. This is not easy to define. It is a fitness to be the colorless link between truth and soul, as the Colorado beet between sunshine and sugar, inexhaustible light and sweetness on either hand. A bishop of our Church gave public thanks "that I am an emotional man." Happy for an orator but not for a teacher. Like Denham's Thames, he must be

Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.

Equipped thus as fairly as he may be, he finds as he begins his work his intellectual activity developing with new energy. The demand for it is enormous. It is not merely that even the simplest branch of every course of study is now rapidly unfolding, liable to change its aspect and call for methods somewhat new, but his study of his pupils is to be earnest, careful, unceasing. They are so evanescent, here for an hour and then gone, and what he does he must do quickly. Yet if his teaching does not touch them it is wasted. He has to study each separately to find what expression in the face of truth will best affect each. These are living volumes, and to master these is the teacher's task when schoolroom work is done, even to remember them on his bed and canvass them in

his night watches. This personal task, so needful to successful teaching, puts a limit on the working size of classes. Reading from manuscript is lecturing, not in any sense schoolmaster's teaching. It may have many good qualities, but of personality, kaleidoscopic variety, and magnetism it has scant supply. To teach thirty for the usual hours is enough for a sound mind in a sound body; to do the intellectual labor required for success leaves small margin for idleness in the fleeting day.

Another lively call upon the teacher is that for reverence toward his pupils. Weems tells us that Washington learned his A B C's of one Dade, and the rural schoolmaster lived to boast that he between his knees laid the foundation of the great man's greatness! If the first rule of oratory is, "Reverence your audience!" surely that of teaching may well be, "Reverence your class!" Awkard, heedless, willful, many may be, but they are human and there is a duty to even the stupid and the bad. Who can wholly say what possibilities are in them? They are to be the bankers and men of affairs, the professionals, the voters and sovereigns of their generations, and the world is in their day to be what they make it. Life is full of surprises, and many a teacher has been astonished at the unfolding of character and power where he little thought. And this has sometimes been frankly attributed to a self-respect engendered by the teacher's respectful bearing. "Humani nil a me alienum puto." The teacher works in choice material, and the boy is not always the father of the man as expected, sometimes of the man unlooked-for. It is a thing of beauty when a noble boy, his strength growing with his days, becomes, like a goodly tree, conspicuous, benign and wholesome in his generation, and his teacher gratefully finds his early reverence not misplaced, his early hopes come true. Even when he sees what he would

rather not, and fears lest

The young disease, which shall subdue at length,

Grow with his growth and strengthen with his strength,

the teacher remembers the early possibility and does not

regret to have seen the statue in the block, however it may have proved in the carving.

Still another grave demand upon the teacher is this-to create the atmosphere of his schoolroom. It was in a rude district of rural Connecticut, where an athlete had utterly failed, that it came clear to this pedagogue that three quarters of his work was to be done with the heart. Years have strengthened the conviction. One often hears that "It is of little consequence what you learn, but it is of great consequence of whom you learn it," and "To sit on one end of a log with Mark Hopkins on the other was a liberal education." These "quotements" are trying to say that the teacher's personality is in his work the determining element. He must be the luminary of his room, beaming love and truth within its walls, "but the greatest of these is love." His pupils there are his family, and there for the time his efforts and his affections are to concentrate. A loving, self-sacrificing personality gives to instruction a degree of magnetic power that makes tough topics very manageable and dry ones entertaining. Love your pupils. "Assume a virtue if you have it not," and it will take root, thrive, and bear fruit. Theologians have said that the Great Teacher inspired in his disciples far more than came from his own lips or than he witnessed concerning himself. If this be so, it must have been due to his marvelous personality, the unspeakable halo in which he lived and moved. Could a teacher have in himself some, even faint, reflection of that personality-and it is worth a lifelong endeavor-he, if otherwise equipped, would indeed be ready for every good word and work that his calling demands.

As for financial returns, the calling is one of earnings, not of profits. Its wages would have contented Agur, being decidedly above those of the anthracite miner and below those of the president of a trust. In view of the cost of preparation the teacher is the most scantily paid of all the intellectual laborers except those in the Gospel ministry. One who has never known a surplus of manna-has in his quiet life by