confidence in machinery. We carry this so far that in the language of political life we set a machine to run a machine. Yet we know better than this, for we elect officers when we have established offices, well aware that however perfect may be the mechanism, a perfect man is needed for the best use of it. Hence, with all our confidence in it and in those who are using it, we find it necessary to furnish from the life of the people the added thought which is required. Thus we have in our government an Indian Department, administered by many men and at great cost; but we have also scattered through our towns little associations to make sure that the governmental machinery is doing its work well. We try to incite those who are using it, and to improve the wheels which they are running. We have an elaborate system of civil service intrusted to men who are in honor held to see that it is honestly administered, but at the same time we have our private associations, our papers, and numberless lectures and essays, not only to make the wheels better, but to make sure that there shall be spirit enough in those to whom they are intrusted to see that the best work is done in the best way. One of our wisest manufacturers foresees the time when the wheels which have made much of the industry of New England will stop, because the Merrimac River, losing its

forests, will lose the rains of heaven which it can now gather together and harness to the wheels of our factories. The wheels must have the constant force from above them. The need of maintaining the spirit need not be urged, although we do need to remind ourselves and others regarding it. Even public sentiment, with all the intricacies of its feeling and instincts, cannot be trusted to do what needs to be done for the community and for the nation, but must itself be taught and inspired by single men of lofty spirit, of bravery, of intense feeling, who can breathe into the public heart and public voice the spirit of a wise enterprise and advance.

We recognize this principle of the spirit in the wheels; we see it in nature. Thus when our Lord called the attention of his disciples to the lily by the roadside, He bade them mark not so much the form and texture of the flower as the spirit within, which gave it being and beauty, and He used it that by means of it God might secure the confidence of men in his continual care. So the stars in the heavens are not merely masses of nebulous dust condensed and made to shine; they are held in their places by the power which created them, led on their way by the fingers from which light passed into them; and infinitely the finest thing in all the heavens is, not the stars, but

the spirit which inhabits them; and nothing so fine has been said about them as that they declare the glory of God; and no use so fine has been made of them as when the watchful shepherd invoked their spirit for the purifying and the governing of his own word and thought. It was a noble and beautiful thing when our master in science, with his pupils gathered around him at Penikese, before he spoke to them of the rocks, or opened his lips to give them any counsel, bade them lift their hearts to God in prayer, to feel the Spirit which ruled the world whose interpreter he

was.

We see the spirit in history, too. History is not the record of events, of the movement of men, the conquest of states; history is the record of thought, of the spirit within the deeds of men, ruling and overruling for the working out of its own intent. The coming of the Pilgrims to our shores was not the sailing of a hundred men and women in a wretched ship. It was the movement of the divine thought.

"The word of the Lord by night

To the watching Pilgrims came,

As they sat by the seaside,

And filled their hearts with flame.”

The vessel itself was a "poor, common-looking ship, hired by common charter-party for coined

dollars; calked with mere oakum and tar; provisioned with vulgarest biscuit and bacon;" yet, "Thou little Mayflower hadst in thee the lifespark of the largest Nation on our Earth."

It is so in our later history. The War of the Revolution did not accomplish a mere change of rulers and the removal of the seat of government. It was the march of an idea; of liberty working out its own freedom and gaining its ascendency through the men and armies which it employed. It was in the spirit, and for the spirit, that Warren cried as he fell: "It is sweet to die for one's country!" Our late war was the movement of the spirit of liberty and unity in the mechanism of armies and of governments, and it was of this that our own laureate cried exultantly: "O, beautiful, my country!" And again: "There is something magnificent in having a country to love!" When Guizot asked Mr. Lowell how long the American Republic will last, he made answer,not saying as long as its rivers run, and its mines yield gold, — but thus: "As long as the principles of its founders continue to be dominant." He saw, as any prophet must see, that a country can never be made or preserved by wheels, but that its life is in the spirit which employs them, and that so long as the spirit is brave and true, when it moves, the wheels will move; when it is lifted

up from the earth, the wheels will be lifted up beside it, and that the spirit of the living creature gives to the wheels their strength. It is a good sign that in these times of ours we are rising to this thought. We have immense confidence in mechanism. We are learning to turn to the spirit, and of late we have come often to speak a word which a few years ago was rarely heard, or spoken only by some one out of sympathy with the methods of his age. I mean arbitration, the coming together of men and men, the meeting of nation and nation, not to determine their rights, settle their controversies, define their boundaries by strongly adjusted wheels, by armies and by navies, but by honorable thought, by the honest interchange of opinion, by right reasoning, and upright judgment.

We have seen painfully of late the impotence of wheels in a great necessity, and the need of spirit. Europe has been heavily loaded with mechanism. The English, French, German, Russian, Austrian, Italian armies have tramped across the continent, and navies matching the armies have vexed all the seas. But when a nation, cruel and base, murdered helpless people because of their faith, there was not power enough in all the machinery of Europe to defend a man from his murderer, or to place a shield before a helpless child. The machinery of the Powers, as for some reason they