has been, the "power behind the throne:" a power characterized by finesse and the absence of that sobriety and foresight which inhere in the consciousness of responsibility. She should be on the throne, not behind it. That her rule would be humane, moral, benignant, is attested by her efficiency in abolitionist and in all moral and religious reforms. Not without much ado has her right to sit and vote in conventions and to speak in public-other than as actress or singer-been conceded. Senile conservatism fifty years ago pronounced it "unwomanly" and "unsexing" so to do. The world does move. God's handmaidens now prophesy. John Wesley recognized their right, and thereby imparted additional impetus to the world's movement in the right direction.

Phillips went further than the "right of prophesying." He demonstrated for women the right to vote-a right now enjoyed in municipal affairs in several Anglo-Saxon countries. "This," said he, "is the greatest question of the ages. It covers the whole surface of American society. It touches religion, purity, political economy, wages, the safety of cities, the growth of ideas, the very success of our experiment. If the experiment of self-government is to succeed it is to succeed by some saving element introduced into the politics of the present day." That "saving element" he believed to be woman suffrage conferred by State action.

Wendell Phillips believed that the Gospel is a guide to live by. Its contents and principles are intended for application to all the daily affairs of individual and communal life. The pulpit is a failure if it does not awake and instruct the moral nature. "Christianity he regarded as the spirit of heaven at work on earth—as a divine influence embodied in human life and set to right wrongs and save the lost. Christ he regarded as the author and finisher of redemption, his career as the model of every worthy and noble life."

The Radical Club in Boston often invited the presence of Mr. Phillips. Emerson, Longfellow, Frothingham, Weiss, Higginson, Julia Ward Howe, and other celebrities were members -radicals all, and he a radical of the radicals. But when religion was under fire his position was one of "exemplary conservatism" befitting the "champion of orthodoxy." In opposition to Emerson he claimed that "there was something essen

tially different in [Christianity] from the religious experience of other races" than the Hebrew-that it is divine; in criticism of W. H. Channing, that it is "the determining force of our present civilization." "Jesus is the divine type who has given his peculiar form to the modern world." He is not effeminate, as John Weiss charged. Those nearest to him are the most masculine, the most war-like-"as Paul and Luther and Wesley." "Sentiment is the toughest thing in the world-nothing else is iron." Of "free religion" and "liberal Christianity" he had not an exalted estimate. He deliberately "believed in the orthodox creed in the orthodox sense." As a practical philanthropist he was compassionate, judicious, and liberal. All classes of sinners and sufferers gutter-snipes, paupers, tramps, lost women, criminals-evoked his love. Jesus of Nazareth re-appeared in him. His gifts were large. Written records show an aggregate of over $65,000 between 1845 and 1875. Yet this was but a fraction of what he bestowed at home and abroad. Liberality was bounded only by resource.

Any review of the life and character of Wendell Phillips, the foremost of the world's orators, would be inexcusably defective if it did not consider the oratory itself. "He had all the qualities of a great orator," said the Boston Herald"command of himself, warm sympathy, responsive intellect, splendid repartee, the power to flash, the power to hit close, the language of the people, a wonderful magnetism, and an earnestness that made him the unconscious hero of the cause he pleaded." His lecture on "The Lost Arts" netted him $150,000. His repertory was encyclopedic. His magnetic manner and witchery of style were such that he could "talk entertainingly about a broom-handle." He never spoke merely to amuse, but in Lord Bacon's phrase, "for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate." As a speaker, H. W. Beecher said, "He had the dignity of Pitt, the vigor of Fox, the wit of Sheridan, the satire of Junius, and a grace and music all his own." "The graceful dignity of position, the finished elocution, the silvery music of the voice, the sparing yet significant gesture, the keen eye, the noble expression of countenance," Dr. Martyn tells us, distinguished his last appearance in public as they had the thousands of its predecessors. Connoisseurs testified that no other speaker, here or in Europe,

"put such intense feeling into so small a compass of voice, scaling the heights and sounding the depths of oratory in a colloquial tone." The epithets he coined "clung and stung." Thus Rufus Choate was a "political mountebank;" Daniel Webster was "Sir Pertinax McSycophant, the mob-mayor of Boston," "a lackey in the mayor's chair;" and to the "cuckoo lips of Edward Everett" he referred with biting disdain. Matter of speech he was always preparing. Speaking of this he said: "The chief thing I aim at is to master my subject, then I earnestly try to get the audience to think as I do." On every subject he thought his way through and out. "Writing" he stigmatized as "a mild form of slavery-a man chained to an inkpot." Comparison of him as an orator with others is superfluous. He was sui generis. None by study of him can equal him. George William Curtis is right in the statement, "The secret of the rose's sweetness, of the sunset's glory-that is the secret of genius and eloquence." An independent income added to his power as a public speaker. The poor clergyman who borrowed five dollars every Saturday and returned them on Monday assigned as a reason for the practice that he could hold forth so much more effectively with that amount of money in his pocket. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips possessed a joint fortune of about $100,000, and his income from lectures ranged from $10,000 to $15,000 a year. Thus the great agitator was able, to quote his own words, to "stand outside of organizations, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect, no party to save, no object but truth, to tear a question open and riddle it with light." Grandly and faithfully did he discharge the functions of his allotted and chosen office.

"Wendell Phillips is dead!" was a sentence first spoken on February 2, 1884--a sentence caught up and transmitted from lip to lip throughout civilization. Funereal honors were commensurate with his fame. They were of fleeting duration, but the honors due to his godliness, philanthropy, patriotism, and service to mankind will outlast all time. Through their permanent effects "he being dead yet speaketh."

Richard Wheatted,

ART. IV. THE TRUE IDEA OF CREATION.

CREATION means that which was caused to exist, and necessarily implies dependence upon the will and power of a supreme Creator. It is self-evident that no finite being can be selfcaused. Whatever is self-existent is eternal; and whatever had a beginning was created, or caused to exist. The continuance in being, also, of any created thing, is but the continuance of the same creative power and will by which it began to be.

The Bible ascribes all finite existence to the power and will of a personal self-existent Being; but certain systems of philosophy ascribe existence to a law of development, or an evolution from the preceding conditions of the universe itself. In one form or another these later philosophies maintain the self-existence or eternity of the universe. Either a personal or impersonal cause of existence must be recognized, for no other is conceivable.

The law of parsimony in logic, which forbids the multiplying of principles or things when the phenomena can be explained by one, favors the thought of a personal Creator. Every other idea of the cause of existence requires too much. Every theory which ignores God acknowledges the eternal self-existence of matter; the eternal self-existence of the principle, or law, of development; and the eternal self-existence of the force or power by which the principle, or law, acts upon matter: a triple series of eternal existences which still leaves the variations and changes in nature unexplained. The idea of a personal Creator renders all these speculations unnecessary and explains every thing.

Sir Isaac Newton, the prince of natural philosophers, says that "blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every-where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing." 99% This argument of Newton's has never been answered.

The idea of creation is the center around which skeptical philosophy and theology have waged their fiercest war; yet the contest has often been a mere war of words, each attributing to

*Newton's Principia, book iii, p. 506.

the other a meaning which, if defined at the outset, would be promptly denied. Herbert Spencer, in his First Principles, refers to the Christian doctrine as "the carpenter theory of creation," which is a complete misnomer when applied to creation out of nothing. Even Dr. W. B. Carpenter, who so bravely resisted the atheistic tendencies of many of his contemporaries, was so fettered by the predestinarianism of his early creed, and by his opinion that the universe is the corporeity of the Deity,* as to characterize the idea of special creations as "the anthropomorphic figment conceived in the lowest stage of religious development of an artificer beginning the work of creation (according to Archbishop Usher's chronology) on the 23d of October, 4004 B. C., proceeding with its successive stages for six days, and then, fatigued with his labors, taking a sabbath day's rest, during which the newly created world had to go on as best it could." Such a caricature of belief could only have been designed to promote prejudice, unless we charitably suppose Dr. Carpenter to have been ignorant of the current views of religious people respecting creation.

A definition is generally a stepping-stone to truth, and if the words "creation" and "created" were restricted to their true sense, namely, that of causing or being caused to exist, such travesties of opinion would be avoided, and the descriptions given in the books of Genesis and Job, and in other parts of the Bible, of the gradual arrangement of the universe would be acknowledged to be the same in essential principles with the deductions of true science. Creation is not an emanation nor a development. It is the act of a free supreme intelligence. Creative power is the power by which any finite thing exists and is what it is.

The terms "architect," "artificer," and "maker," when used in reference to men, imply the formation of things out of ma terials already existing, as a house is built of wood or stone, or a machine of iron and brass. But when used in reference to the works of the Creator they always include, in the mind of a believer in the Bible, the idea of causing or producing the materials themselves, as well as the forms under which they appear. No one imagines that God works as an artificer if he believes in the divine omnipresence.

*Nature and Man, p. 53.

Ibid., p. 402.