our command. Nor is this sort of originality to be depreciated. It is really the highest sort. Lowell says:

Originality consists quite as much in the power of using to purpose what it finds ready to its hand as in that of producing what is absolutely new.

Speaking of Rousseau's genius the same critic observes:

If his ideas were suggested to him mostly by books, yet the clearness, consecutiveness, and eloquence with which he stated and enforced them made them his own. There was at least that original fire in him which could fuse them and run them in a novel mold. His power lay in this very ability of manipulating the thoughts of others.

Emerson says:

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

After this commendation of literary buccaneering we are not surprised when Oliver Wendell Holmes says of Emerson :

He believed in borrowing, and borrowed from every body and every book. Not in any stealthy or shamefaced way, but proudly, royally, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription.

The eloquent and versatile Henry Cabot Lodge says of Daniel Webster:

The faculty of obtaining and using the valuable work of other men, one of the characteristic qualities of a high and commanding mind, was . . . strong in Mr. Webster. . . . It is one of the familiar attributes of great intellectual power to be able . . . to use other people and other people's labor and thought to the best advantage, and to have as much as possible done for one by others. This power of assimilation Mr. Webster had to a marked degree. He could maintain or construct where other men had built; he could not lay new foundations or invent.

Macaulay, in his noble portraiture of the great Montague, testifies thus:

He was represented in a hundred pamphlets as the daw in borrowed plumes. This reproach was, in truth, no reproach. . . . It is surely praise enough for a busy politician that he knows how to use the theories of others; that he discerns among the schemes of innumerable theorists the precise scheme which is

wanted and which is practicable; that he shapes it to suit pressing circumstances and popular humors; that he triumphantly defends it against all objectors, and that he carries it into execution with prudence and energy; and to this praise no English statesman has a fairer claim than Montague.

All

"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter." thought comes from God. Evil thoughts are but God-given thoughts corrupted by the world, the flesh, or the devil. What the great German exclaimed, "O God, I think thy thoughts after thee," is true of every man. Being God-given, they are "from everlasting to everlasting." The hoariest liter. ature is but a record, crooned or scribbled at the cradle of the human race, of our every-day thoughts.

The thoughts we are thinking our fathers did think.

The thoughts we are thinking the first man thought. As Sir Isaac Newton said in substance: "Trace every law, every force, back to the last, to the ultimate analysis, and you will find neither law nor force, but simply God-God, back, and under, and through, and over all;" so trace every thought back through all the genealogies of men and angels, and you will find it emanated from the Logos. Εν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος . . . Πάντα δι' αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, v 8 καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. John i, 1, 3. We are to no more give credit for a thought than for a breath of air, a burst of sunshine, or the sweep of a landscape. Acknowledgment is impossible, for there is not a thought whose parentage is known, humanly speaking. I challenge any one to point to an intellectual father, ancient or modern, who has begotten an hitherto unbegotten thought. Wendell Phillips delighted in showing that even our jokes and quips and bon mots, even our Irish bulls, are older than the pyramids, and as for science, philosophy, and architecture, we are but droning over the alphabet beyond which are the countless massive tomes with which the prehistoric were familiar. I challenge any one to find a shade of thought from Dante to Tennyson that did not shine through the psychical prisms of forty centuries ago. That was a great saying of Carlyle's: "The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past."

But not so with the phraseology. The phraseology belongs, up to a certain point, to the inventor. We have no right to

use it without proper credit until, like the prophet of old, we have fairly devoured it and lost it. Once digested and assimilated, using it as naturally and unconsciously as we use the strength of the ox that formed a portion of the dinner of the previous day, the phraseology as well as the thought is ours. If you would preach like Tillotson, South, or Taylor; like Saurin, Massillon, or Bourdaloue; like Chalmers, Spurgeon, or Simpson, devour and digest and assimilate their thought and style and vocabulary until they are woven into the warp and woof-into the very texture-of your being, and thus become yours. And when your own, you have a right to use them at pleasure.

In other words, if you would preach like Tillotson, Tillotsonize your mind and heart; or like Simpson, Simpsonize; or like Chalmers, Chalmerize; or like Spurgeon, Spurgeonize. If you would write like Addison you must appropriate, not by theft, but by assimilation; in short, Addisonize. Master his style, read the books he read, write upon the same or kindred subjects, view things from his stand-point, and you will at last be Addisonian. But above all the masters of men towers the Man of Nazareth. He is the only man worthy of assimilation. Do not stop to assimilate even a Chalmers, or Spurgeon, or Simpson; no, not even a prophet or apostle or martyr. These men were great and good. But they were great and good only so far and in proportion as they assimilated the Christ. My message then to my brethren in the ministry is, by all means assimilate the Christ. He is the matchless model. Let him be so thoroughly woven and interwoven, fused and interfused, throughout your entire being, physical, psychical, and soulical, that you can say with Paul: "Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." In short, be not Simpsonized, nor Spurgeonized, nor Chalmerized, but be EMMANUELIZED.

Merritte Driver.

ART. VI.-ALFRED GRIFFITH.

THAT men notably conspicuous in their day are often in so brief a time overtaken by oblivion is not of necessity disparaging to them. The fact, that in so many cases men occupying large place in the thought of their own generation are but vague and shadowy figures to the next, has at least partial explanation in the ephemeral character of contemporary records. In the stress and strain of work they have no time, had they even inclination and faculty, to take thought for the future. Literature, indeed, has here and there an instance of great doers giving the world its best records of their deeds, but the instances are quite exceptional. The makers of history are seldom its writers as well. The Xenophons and Cæsars and Grants of history are easy to count.

There hence is little cause for marvel, less perhaps for blame, that men whose heroic service in the planting and training of Methodism is worthy to be had in perpetual memory are themselves so little known; that many of these, at no greater remove from us than a single generation, are scarcely more than names; and, most of all to sorrow for, that in the case of many the oblivious years have swept beyond our reach the means of recovering them to the recognition of the Church. On the roll of our worthies one may read their names. By searching we may find in our Conference necrologies appreciative mention, but of the most meager sort, of their lives and work. Tradition, too, makes some report; but, as mostly with tradition, its reports are vague, relating in the main to idiosyncrasies of character or oddities of speech. But when all we have is counted up, the fact remains that, with respect to many who in their day were princes in our Israel-workmen who were the masters in the founding and building of Methodism-no sufficing record anywhere exists. While here and there some noted leader lives in the annals of the times, scores deserving only less renown are without memorial, save in the record of their names and the grandeur of their work.

The fact we thus recall has easy explanation in the conditions under which they were wrought. It was an era of aggression in which their lot was cast. It was appointed them to lay

foundations; to strengthen stakes and lengthen cords. At first every thing was new; paths were untrodden; material was in the rough. There were sites to choose, plans to form, and arduous tasks to execute. They were voices in the wilderness, in highways and hedges, sounding on unaccustomed ears the invitations of the Gospel. Soon their success was in itself engrossing. On every field "the slain of the Lord were many." Every-where their eyes beheld fields "white unto harvest." To care for the slain and reap the fields and garner the sheaves; and, repeating the work, to plant and sow for new harvests; day and night aglow with zeal to recruit anew the armies of the Lord -this was their unchanging mood, the task to which their lives were set. These exactions of the time, imperative as necessity itself, while rich in material for history, were in the last degree unfriendly to its production. For had there been both competence and inclination for this less urgent but more thoughtful work, opportunity was so little at command as to render its undertaking antecedently improbable. Especially improbable it was that the reflective mood and judicial habit, essential to the writing of biography or history, would have exhibition in a time of such complete abandon to evangelistic occupations. The stress and heat of battle, with the clash of arms and shout of captains, is not a time for the delineation and portraiture of leaders. So the men whose task it was to blaze their way through pathless woods, to cross unbridged rivers, on whom came daily the care of folds and flocks scattered over vast reaches of newly-opened country-or later, when the pioneer had prepared the way for the regular itinerant, appointments were so many and daily rides so long that scarce an hour could be redeemed for seclusion and study-and when in the favored work of stations duties were so constant and engrossing-men whose lives were set to these conditions were certainly amenable to no censure in failing to put upon the canvas of their times satisfying portraits of the men who were "workers together with God" in the great evangelistic movement of the century.

A noted man of the class referred to in these remarks was Alfred Griffith, of the Baltimore Conference. His ministry began while the Church was yet in the dawn of its organized existence, and extended over the period of perhaps its most wonderful development and growth; and though through much