A YOUNG LEADER FALLEN.

"He the young and strong who cherished

Noble longings for the strife,

By the wayside fell and perished,

Weary with the march of life."

EDMUND POTONIÉ, a young Frenchman, in the flower of his life and promise, has been stricken down by sudden death. About twenty years ago he attended with his father several of the Peace Congresses on the Continent. The principles and objects they unfolded made a profound impression upon his young mind, which, up to the day of his death, was never effaced. He entered into the spirit of the movement against war with all the enthusiasm of a young man's hope and faith. He essayed to organize a great international association of the friends of peace on almost the same basis, and with almost the same name, as the League of Universal Brotherhood; which, many of our readers are aware, occupied so many years of our own life and labour. The association which he virtually founded is called "La Ligue Universelle de la Paix." It was just entering upon hopeful and energetic action when his life of earnest zeal and effort for the cause ended suddenly at Berlin, whither he had gone for a short sojourn. We had hoped that he would long be a van-leader on the Continent, enlisting new and young hands to uphold and bear forward the white banner of universal peace and brotherhood, which those grown old in the conflict must soon pass over to others. For ourself, we looked upon him almost as a son, and watched his course with lively expectation; fully believing that he would live to see and enjoy a triumph over the war system which the grey-headed and bent advocates of peace cannot expect to behold in their day. But we trust that other young men in France may be found who will arise to fill his place and labour for the cause he loved and served with equal heart and hope.

Printed by W. M. Watts, 80, Gray's-Inn Road.

BIRTH-PLACE OF THE REFORMATION.

TAKE it for what it was and is to the most vital life of the Anglo-Saxon race, and of all peoples that have wrestled up to the high levels of civil and religious liberty, there is no square foot of space in England, or in Europe, upon which an Englishman or an American should set his foot more reverentially than upon the iron-hard, thin-worn floor of Wycliffe's pulpit in the old church of Lutterworth. So we believed and felt when we made that venture with a little of the deep veneration which the place should inspire in a thoughtful man. We say, inspire, which expresses a faculty that one does not often ascribe to wood, stone, or any inanimate thing. A poet of respected genius has versified "Sermons in Stones," which mean audible or intelligible speech. There are no stones put one upon another in the walls of any English or European Church so full of instructive speech, and inward and outward breathing, as these that enclose Wycliffe's oaken pulpit. If there be a point of space and a point of time in conjunction where and when a devoutly-read man in history might feel the impulse on him to take off his shoes and stand softly on his naked feet upon a given spot, it might well be in his first silent minute on this thin floor, on which the first apostle of the English tongue and of the Reformed faith of Christendom preached the truth of the great Gospel as he saw and felt it five hundred years ago. Stand reverently on these worn and narrow boards, and listen with attentive faculties to the preaching of these time-eaten walls. Some of their loosened stones have fallen inward upon the paved floor. But they preach their silent sermons as they lie crumbling in the half demolished pews. Who has not read of Archimedes and his lever? of his bold boast that if he could make it long enough and find an outside fulcrum point, he could raise the solid globe with it? Mind your standing, because the breath of centuries has thinned and weakened it. What Archimedes sought Wycliffe found just where you stand-a fulcrum-point and a lever that lifted a greater weight than the Grecian Sampson of mathematics promised to raise. Here he found and worked a leverage that made the Vatican and the Papal cathedrals of Christendom rock and vibrate as if an earthquake were shaking their foundations.

How wonderful are these moral forces that move the world of mind, transform the life and structure of nations, and regenerate the cycles of human history! Here in this quiet, rural village in Leicestershire, in

the midst of tree-bound and level farms, threaded and illumined by a branch stream of the gentle Avon, Wycliffe set in motion a force that moved the world; and while the world was moving on the ground-swell of mental emotion, little Lutterworth was perhaps as quiet and still as to-day. He has been called "the morning-star of the Reformation." But the light and warmth of stars do not equal or express the vitality. which he infused into the great movement. His life was more than a light to it. It gave to it virtually its first pulse of action; and the beats of the onward movement, though sometimes slow and faint, were felt through the two centuries that intervened between him and Luther. This he did, and did it here in this rural village: he first put the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the homely, honest English tongue of the common people; for there was no English people nor English language in Alfred's day; and a small portion of the English nation in Wycliffe's could read what Alfred wrote or speak what he spoke. The Pope at Rome, and his legates, cardinals and bishops in England, and all through Christendom, were not much moved with fear at Wycliffe's Latin disputations with the monks at Oxford. He might overmaster them in argument, without breaking or bending a beam in the great structure of their system. But when he took Christ's Gospel out of the iron coffin of the coldest of all dead tongues, in which they had shut it from the masses of Europe for centuries, and put it in the living vernacular of the English people, fearfulness surprised them, as if they saw the same handwriting on the walls of Papal dominion that Belshazzar saw on his. No Reformation in England, or France, or Ger. many, could have been produced or begun while the New Testament was shut up in Latin. None knew this better than the Roman hierarchy; and they regarded it as the most pernicious and guilty high treason to their system for any one to put the pure and simple truths of the Gospel before the masses in their own native tongue. This Wycliffe did, and did it here in quiet little Lutterworth, whither he had been driven by a persecution that would have drunk his blood had it not been for stout John of Gaunt and a crown more jealous of the political than the spiritual domination or doctrines of the Pope. Here he translated the New Testament verse by verse, feeling that in each he was putting out a lamp into the darkness which no tempest of Papal persecution nor night-damps of ignorance could ever extinguish. A modern painting represents him here sending forth apostolic couples of converted monks with copies of his manuscript Gospels. Another equally impressive might be painted

representing his copyers at work upon the text written with his own hand; showing two or three shaven polls clustering over the manuscript; for some of his missionary monks doubtless transcribed those Gospel words which they carried forth to the people. What faith! what labour! to lighten a great land of darkness through a few gimlet-holes! to revolutionise a people's creed and customs with manuscript books! What a mighty belief uplifted his soul that, put in those quaint, hearty words of the common people's speech, the spirit of God would clothe them with tongues of fire! One of his Testaments must have spoken to Chaucer in this way, for he was one of Wycliffe's earliest converts. He was but two or three years the junior of the great Reformer, and was a special favourite at court and in aristocratic circles. He lacked the bold heart and strong convictions of his master. He ran well for a time, and bore much obloquy and persecution. But the strain was too great for his endurance. He succumbed, recanted, and betrayed his associates of the new faith, and in other defections made work for bitter and healthy repentance in later years, as his "Testament of Love" fully proves. It was only one of the truth-rays that radiated outward from Wycliffe's life that alighted upon Chaucer's opening mind. It lit up within him that light and glow of thought which made him as much the father of English poetry as his teacher was the father of the English Reformation. Wycliffe's Testament, very likely, was the first book that Chaucer ever saw written in the English language, as it existed after the Norman conquest; and had the poet not seen what expression and working power it gave to the words of the Gospel, he might have penned his immortal verse in Latin or Norman-French.

Who that has read the very hornbook of English history can stand in Wycliffe's pulpit, and look around upon the dilapidated walls of the old Lutterworth Church without being stirred with these impressive reminiscences? Here he stood for years and put forth those brave utterances that made the principalities and powers of the Papal empire writhe with rage. When their long arms of persecution had well-nigh reached him, a stronger than theirs rescued him from their grasp. In the middle of a sermon which their persecution threatened to arrest, fell dead in this his pulpit. He looked and spoke and breathed his last within these walls. Now what house built with men's hands on the island of Great Britain should be held more sacred by the whole Englishspeaking race in both hemispheres than this old Lutterworth Church, in which Wycliffe preached and died? In what English edifice should all

he