"On our side? Yes," said Arkwright with some bitterness. "Here we are upon the bridge. You see we have come by instinct toward my work and my difficulties. Look at that charming little knoll which we are going to cross. Look at this river; see these great grease spots on its surface. When this river is a sewer how much will it do for us when we are trying to lift the cat? And only yesterday I learned of a scheme on foot to buy this tract along side of the river, cut down the trees and the knoll, sell the gravel in the banks, and set off the territory for house lots. That brings me to one of the practical questions which is disturbing me. How are any people going to live decent lives when they are all huddled together in the back streets. Now my idea is to buy this land myself, to put up houses for my workpeople, and gradually to give them more self-respect. John, I can't carry on this business as if my men and boys were so many files and vises and hammers. I want to get at their lives and make them something more than mere excuses for living."

Exactly; the problem which you propose regarding them is the same which perplexes you for yourself; how to make the life something more than meat, and the body than raiment."

Yes, I see it is, though I had not connected the two before." The two friends were leaning against trees upon the little knoll now, looking off upon the river that flowed at their feet, and at the hills beyond. They stood so in silence for some time, each busy in thought, which it was not easy to put into words.

"I am not a practical fellow, I suppose," said Pastorius, at length, as they walked away; "and my large bushel baskets I suspect sometimes cover up lights and do not extinguish them. I can't speak by the book regarding your scheme. I don't know your business or your means, and how easily you divert money from your regular channels; I don't know but you can be a landlord as well as a brass and iron founder, but I suspect the one business requires to be learned as much as the other. I will tell you, however, one of my thoughts, and you may take

it for what it is worth. You and I and these workmen are all part and parcel of a larger organization which we can't ignore in any of our calculations. We are citizens of a city, of a state, of a nation. We did not make this historic organization in which we find ourselves, and I believe the first question which any social reformer is bound to ask is, not is this a good thing by itself, but is it good in this place, with these people, in this state and country? I distrust schemes which leave Americanism out of the question, which take up methods which look successful at this distance, in France or Belgium. Those methods must be worth studying, not copying. If there is any principle in our American life which is characteristic, and not to be left out of account, it is the principle of individual participation, consciously, intelligently and harmoniously in the common life. The moment you draw up schemes which assume that the American mechanic is to be taken in hand and provided for, furnished with ready-made houses, and ready-made schools, and ready-made churches, and a ready-made community, you go counter to the vital principle of our nationality. With all our mistakes, we must work out our own national salvation through the means of the Person in the State, and should deprecate a community however orderly and æsthetically delightful which did not grow in a process of Nature; which was a foreign model in a native place. It might work well for a short time if you were to keep a store for your people, and build them a church and school-houses, and a hall, and make a little park, and do the thousand and one things which go to make a pretty spectacle for the driver-by, but the only enduring result will be when your people manage all this themselves, and manage it not as your people, bound together by that tie, but as voters in the Port and parts adjacent, members of the large body of city and state. The more you localize and confine them without at the same time enlarging their interests, the more surely will you contract their powers, and after a while they will be poor workmen because they are poor citizens. You must take our country as it

is, Edward; it is to struggle out of its present difficulties by being itself, not by trying to get rid of itself. Reforms in business, in society or in education, or in religion must be in the line of self-government, or they will come to nothing. That's my sermon and you may make what application seems best."

"Yes, it's the application that bothers me. I think I could have preached that sermon, nearly, up to the point where you left off. My trouble begins just there. What am I to do? The harder I work, the more I give myself to my business, the less satisfaction I get. I think it is something like the photographic paradox. The more perfect the photograph, the less satisfied you are with the portrait; and when I have become a consummate man of business, if such an event could be possible, then I should be the farthest possibly removed from my ideal."

"You think then that to be a thoroughly successful man of business you must become most completely a machine, and you seek to avoid that conclusion by carrying along with your business some associated work which shall save it from being grossly material?"

"Yes. That is pretty near it."

"There is a fallacy about your reasoning somewhere, Edward. No one's work can lead him away from the right conclusion, unless there be in the work itself something immoral, some compromise say with unrighteousness, as if one should say that business necessities compelled him to do what he felt to be, by the highest standard, wrong. It is true that some fishermen are called away from the rest to be fishers of men, but in all such cases their fishing for fish has been a part and the most important part of their training as fishers of inen. Depend upon it your success in attaining the highest ideal you may possibly set before you, lies by the way of your daily work, not by way of your daily leisure, useful as that is."

"You must not take away my dream, John, without giving me something in its place. My dream is of an organization, of which my foundry is only a shell. This or

ganization which I see is an organization of the souls of men; and just as I think my own life demands something more than that I should manage my business profitably, so I wish the men who serve me to have constantly before them a larger purpose than to make perfect castings. My dream is to put a lever under this mechanical life, a lever of intellectual and spiritual force, which shall steadily raise the whole establishment upon a higher plane. The first practical realization of the dream which I see is in working upon the family life, to make that what it should be, and through that to give the men a zeal for something more than the routine fulfillment of their daily work. It seems to me that by keeping such a purpose steadily before me, I can make my occupation less mean than it is."

"Make your perfect castings first, Edward," said his friend energetically, "and you will stop calling your occupation mean. Perfect the shop, and you will discover that the men's lives will grow with your own. You will have to work out this problem of yours, but let me tell you that whatever schemes you may have for improving the character of your men, they will all fail miserably if your business fails; and your business will fail unless you control it; and you will not control it unless you serve it.” "I don't see but you are preaching my mother's doctrines, John."

"Your mother's doctrines are good enough, Edward, until you can get better ones, and you never will get better ones until you have worked hers out. She represents the old-fashioned business mind that knew a relation between employer and employed such as is not now common; when the master knew his craft perfectly and expected his men to know it; when steady wages were paid, and men knew that so long as they did good work, they would get fair wages; when the aim of the shop was to turn out good work and not cheap work; when the men never thought themselves ill off even if their wives and daughters dressed in homespun, and never went ten miles from their home; when the boys were apprenticed and served their time to the end; when the name of a house was its trade

mark, and was held as sacredly as a knight held his coat of arms. Of course there was evil enough then, but the tone of working society at its best was such as your mother gives. The people did not care very much for art or literature, and their speech was not always very elevated, and they had homely customs. They were provincial and not cosmopolitan. Honesty is a provincial virtue, style is cosmopolitan, I suppose. Well, that day has gone by; but a better day is to be had only as we start from that foundation and build upon it. There are better days. It is possible for the woman of the next generation to be as fine an embodiment of the best ideas of work as your mother is of the last generation, but the possibility is made certain only by the completeness with which she makes the transition from the old times to the new."

66

But how can religion come into our daily work?" asked Arkwright.

"By leaving it there," said Pastorius. "The great difficulty with people is that they are forever trying to put religion into their daily work, as if it were some foreign element, instead of finding it at the very core of the work."

“Well, John, you create difficulties for me as fast as you demolish those I raise. I am of the same mind still. My business worries me. I don't get the hang of it. I make mistakes, and I end every day with being heartily sick of my occupation. My only relief is in studying how I may help my men in some way, and I please myself as I walk home at night with pictures of an ideal foundry, with good work well done, cheerful workmen, happy families. I must have such an ideal, or I should lose

faith. Then, when I come in the morning fresh and hopeful, I find some blunder I have made coming back to perch on my desk and flap its black wings at me, and the misery of it is that I can't seem to get hold of the work in such a way as to lessen mistakes and give myself some security against future accident. Sometimes I seem to see written over the door of the counting room, Milton's terrible line:

"To be weak is to be miserable."

I don't need an archangel to tell me that. I wonder if it is n't a devil that speaks it to me. However, I break away from it all with a sense that will is good for something, and I have that." Thereupon the young fellow strode over the ground as if his will had suddenly seized his legs. The two friends marched along in silence. Their course led them by Arkwright's familiar daily walk, and so it happened that they passed the little house where the geraniums stood in the window. A man was in the garden tying up a vine, and a girl stood by him, watching him. She was older than the young gardener whom Arkwright used to see at the window. Her companion looked up as the young man passed, and bowed. They returned the bow, taking off their hats.

"Who was that?" asked Arkwright. "I do not know. He bowed to you, I thought."

"I never saw him before, and my bow was more than half to that graceful girl by him."

"Well, they both deserve the best bows we could give them. He was a fine-looking fellow."

frequent topic of sermons, and the constant burden of the prayers of the colonists. Yale, founded at the close of the seventeenth century, was designed to inculcate an

orthodoxy of a more rigid type than Harvard was supposed to represent, and to educate a ministry for the service of the New Haven colony. Princeton, established in 1746, was intended to supply "the church with learned and able ministers of the word." Dartmouth was founded in 1769 on the fundamental principles of the Christian religion. Bowdoin was dedicated in its first years, at the opening of the present century, to the church of Christ. Amherst was planted in 1825 for the primary purpose of training men for the foreign missionary work. The intense religious character of all the older colleges, at the time of their foundation, is expressed in the energetic language of President Witherspoon of Princeton: “Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ; cursed be all that learning that is not coincident with the cross of Christ; cursed be all that learning that is not subservient to the cross of Christ."

66

But not merely in the purposes of their establishment was the religious character of the early colleges manifested, but also in their government and instruction. At Harvard, for example, the original laws regulating the religious duties of the students were of Puritanic strictness and minuteness: Every one shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus, which is eternal life." "Every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that they may be ready to give an account of their proficiency therein, both in theoretical observations of language and logic, and in practical and spiritual truths." "They shall eschew all profanation of God's holy name, attributes, word, ordinances, and times of worship; and study, with reverence and love, carefully to retain God and his truth in their minds." These and similar rules relating to religious and moral conduct, formed a large share of the "laws, liberties and orders" to which the early Harvard students were subject. They were not, moreover, dissimilar to the first laws of most of the earlier colleges. The course of instruction, also, was thoroughly pervaded with the religious element. The Hebrew

was studied in common with the Latin and the Greek; and the Old Testament and the New, in the original tongues, formed one of the principal books of linguistic study. Indeed to read the original of the two Testaments into the Latin tongue was the principal condition of receiving the first degree. A portion of the undergraduates, moreover, were required to repeat in public sermons whenever requested.

But this deep religious color of college government and instruction has now, at least in most eastern colleges, to a large degree disappeared. The undergraduate is still required to attend church twice on the Sabbath, and prayers daily in the chapel; but beyond these simple requisitions, the college usually makes no religious demands upon him. The instruction, too, has lost its religious hue. Hebrew is relegated to the Theological Seminary; and the only direct study made of the New Testament is a recitation in its Greek of a Monday morning. But this custom that once obtained of devoting the first exercises of the week to the New Testament Greek is now obsolescent. Its chief purpose is to prevent the student from studying on the Sabbath unsabbatarian subjects; but as its influence in this respect is slight, the custom is slowly passing away. A study of the evidences of Christianity and of allied topics is also made in many colleges, but it is brief and necessarily superficial. The rapidly enlarging field of human knowledge renders it expedient, in the judgment of many college officers, to consign these subjects to the divinity school. American colleges, as a class, have, therefore, ceased to be distinctively religious institutions.

And yet in the establishment and organization of many of the Western colleges the religious idea is still very prominent. Not a few of the colleges in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa and the adjoining States are outgrowths of domestic missionary movements, and are primarily designed for the training of a Christian ministry. The first educated men that, as a body, entered either the North-west Territory, the states that were formed out of it, or the adjoining territories, were the home missionaries. Their aim

was to permeate the new West with Chris tian influences; and among the first and most effective means they employed was the establishment of colleges. These colleges were, therefore, Christian in their origin, purpose and method of operation. Iowa college was founded in 1847 by the famous "Iowa" or "Andover Band" (twelve graduates of Andover Theological Seminary who went to Iowa in 1846), and has for thirty years been one of the chief means in the evangelization of that great state. Western Reserve College sprang from the desire of the home missionaries in Ohio for a school for the education of ministers. The corner-stone of Illinois College was laid by the domestic missionary association. The spirit and motive that ruled in the establishment of Oberlin College are expressed in the inscription written on a banner that waved in its first years from a flagstaff in the little village: "Holiness unto the Lord." Many, therefore, of the recently established colleges of the West are preeminently Christian in their foundation and

purposes.

Indeed, in the case of the vast majority of our three hundred and fifty colleges, the religious element, though of little weight in the legal organization and scholastic working of the college, has a most important influence in the daily life and on the character of the students. The professors and instructors are, as a rule, Christians, though it is seldom that a religious test is made a condition of holding an office of instruction. Yet as a matter of fact the large majority of the members of our college faculties are members of the church. Amherst college demands no assent to any religious creed of her instructors, yet it is the testimony of President Seelye that "we should no more think of appointing to a post of instruction here an irreligious than we should an immoral man, or one ignorant of the topics he would have to teach." Princeton, too, exacts no religious tests of her professors; but, writes Dr. McCosh, "most of our instructors are Presbyterians, though we commonly have members of other religious denominations." Brown University demands no religious pledge; but, says President

Robinson, "it would doubtless decline to take an atheist or an avowed skeptic as a professor." Oberlin college has "no confession of faith-prescribed by custom for the instructors in any department of the college," writes its president, Dr. Fairchild; "but it is customary, and has been from the foundation of the school, to appoint as instructors . . . such only as give evidence of Christian character, as this term is commonly understood among evangelical believers." The University of Michigan, too, demands no religious test of its professors, yet, "as a matter of fact," says President Angell, "the great majority of our instructors have always been communicants in churches. The holding of a post of instruction at Harvard and Yale necessitates no obligation to any religious creed, yet a large number of the professors of the two colleges are recognized as Christians. Although, therefore, the large majority of the colleges demand no test oath of their professors regarding their religious principles, yet the great body of these professors are Christians. As now conducted, the American college is primarily devoted to the promotion of knowledge and intellectual discipline, but the Christian character of its professors renders its influence Christian in the highest degree. The American college is Christian in the same way in which the American government can be said to acknowledge the existence of a God. Though the existence of a Supreme Ruler is unrecognized in its constitution, yet it is constantly confessed in the carrying on of all the departments of the state.

Into the life of the students, also, religion is thoroughly ingrained. Almost one-half of the twenty thousand men who are pursuing regular college courses are Christians. The proportion of the number of Christians and of those not Christians varies much with the different colleges. The lowest extreme is probably that of one to five, as at Harvard, and the highest nine to ten, as at Oberlin and a few other colleges. At Dartmouth and Bowdoin it is estimated that one from every three students is a Christian; at Yale two from every five; at Michigan University and Western Reserve