a phial in which I carried some truck that gave his sisters the jerks. As quick as thought it came into my mind how I would get clear of my whipping, and, jerking out the peppermint phial, said I: Yes; if I gave your sisters the jerks I'll give them to you.' In a moment I saw he was scared. I moved toward him, he backed; I advanced, and he wheeled and ran, warning me not to come near him or he would kill me. It raised the laugh on him, and I escaped my whipping. I had the pleasure before the year was out of seeing all four soundly converted to God, and I took them into the church."

How to account for these phenomena we do not know, and shall not attempt to explain. Cartwright accounted for the jerks very simply, as he would no doubt have accounted for the other manifestations. "I always looked upon the jerks," says he, "as a judgment sent from God; first, to bring sinners to repentance, and secondly, to show professors that God could work with or without means, and that he could work over and above means, and do whatsoever seemeth him good, to the glory of his grace and the salvation of the world. There is no doubt in my mind that with weak-minded, ignorant, and superstitious persons there was a great deal of sympathetic feeling with many that claimed to be under the influence of this jerking exercise; and yet, with many, it was perfectly involuntary. It was, on all occasions, my practice to recommend fervent prayer as a remedy, and it almost universally proved an effectual antidote."

The moral and religious world, like the physical world, is subject to periods of internal agitation and upheaval, and one of these periods seems to have been at and about the beginning of the present century. The indications of that upheaval still exist in the long ridges that lie across the face of our early church history.

5. J. Chapman.

MINOR TOPICS

BEECHER HUMOR

Dr. Joseph Parker, in his recent eulogy on Mr. Beecher, said :

"God himself made Henry Ward Beecher a humorist, gave him a taste for comedy, and enriched him with the grace of playfulness. He prayed the better that he laughed so well. His tears were the tenderer because his humor was so spontaneous and abundant. He never laughed at truth, at virtue, at piety, at poverty, at helplessness. He laughed at the fools who undertook to roll back the ocean, to grasp the infinite and to be themselves the God whose existence they denied.

It is not much to say that to many preachers Mr. Beecher's method gave a new conception of the possibility of preaching. The whole idea of the sermon was enlarged. A sermon was no longer an analysis of words, a dreary creation and a distribution of particulars, a pedantic display of learned ignorance, an onslaught (tremendous in feebleness) upon absent doubters and dead infidels; nor was it a pious whine, an inoffensive platitude, an infantile homily, or a condiment for delicate souls. It was an amazing combination of philosophy, poetry, emotion, and human enthusiasm -all centered in Christ, and all intended to bring men into right relations with the Father. The sermon was not an object to be gazed at, but a gospel to be received, a divine gospel addressed to the sinful, the brokenhearted, the lost, the hopeless. It was a message from Heaven; a message for all lands, all times, all souls; a message whose moral majesty lost nothing on account of its human sympathy, but gained the more by reason of its tender tears and its eager importunity.

In Mr. Beecher's hands the sermon never affrighted men; never froze men ; never repelled men. It was the loveliness of love, the very heart of sympathy, the very condescension of God. Nor, though so rich in sentiment, was it ever weak. Behind all the tears there was a reason that had adopted its conclusions in the daylight; a philosophy that weighed evidence in scales of righteousness; an intellectual audacity that tried the spirits, whether they were of God."

The following extracts are from Eleanor Kirk's Beecher as a Humorist, noticed in another part of the magazine. Here we have Mr. Beecher's own words;

You cannot make a man laugh because he ought to laugh. You may analyze a jest or a flash of wit, and present it to the man, saying: “Here are the elements of mirth, and these being presented to you as I now present them, if you are a rational being you will accept the statement of them and laugh." But nobody laughs so. People laugh first and afterward think why they laughed. The feeling of mirth is first excited, and afterward the intellect analyzes that which produced

the laughter. It connects into an idea that which was first an emotion or an experience. Sermon: Heart Conviction.

"Why, what did you go to Boston for?"

"Well, that's a pretty question! That's the only place to go to! Why, if a man wants anything he allus goes to Boston. Everything goes there just as natural as if that city was the moon, and everything else was water, and had to go like the tides. Don't you know all the railroads go to Boston? And sailors say— you ask Tommy Taft- if you start anywhere clear down in Floridy, and keep up along the coast, you will fetch up in Boston. They have to keep things tied up around there. They fasten their trees down, and have their fences hitched or they would all of 'em whirl to Boston. They have watchers set every night, or so many things would come to admire Boston that the city would be covered down like Herculaneum. Of course the doctor went to Boston. Every single one of the first class folks was married off the week afore he got there, but one; there was just one left. But she was the very last of the lot. The doctor saw her in Old South Church. She was a-singin', 'Come, ye disconsolate.' The minute she set her eyes on the doctor- -!"-Norwood: Hiram Beers.

I never saw a man who was large enough to report the whole truth in respect to anything which he looked at. It has not been considered safe, I think, in Heaven where the manufactory of men is, to put everything in everybody. The result is that one man carries so much, and another so much. Why, it takes about twenty men make one sound man.-Sermon: Christian Sympathy.

On one occasion a well-intentioned but feeble-minded, feeble-voiced woman arose in Plymouth prayer-meeting and meandered on for a long time in mystical meaningless talk. When she finally sat down, Mr. Beecher (who had sat motionless, with downcast eyes, all the while) looked up with the play of a humorous twinkle on his face, but said, with a perfectly serious voice, "Nevertheless I am in favor of women's speaking. Sing eight thirty-eight " or whatever the number of the hymn was.-Editor of Beecher as a Humorist.

Natural genius is but the soil, which let alone runs to weeds. If it is to bear fruit and harvests worth the reaping, no matter how good the soil is, it must be plowed and tilled with incessant care.—Lectures on Preaching.

A compliment is praise crystallized. It bears about the same relation to praise that proverbs do to formal philosophy, or that form does to poetry.-Eyes and Ears.

Did you ever know a person who could pray down an arithmetic? Did you ever know a person who, going to school and finding himself puzzled by a tough problem, could get it solved by asking God to solve it for him? Did you ever know anybody to accomplish anything intelligently except by legitimate head-work?Lecture-room Talks.

The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. Sermon: The Way of Coming to Christ.

men.

Good men, you know, pay all the taxes of bad men. Virtuous men pay the state bills of dissipated men. Patriotic men pay all the war bills of unpatriotic Citizens that stay at home pay the expenses of politicians that go racketing about the country and do nothing but mischief.—Sermon: The Strong to Bear with the Weak.

A LAMENT

O woe is me, and woe is me! to tell the tale I'm telling now!
And to relate the bitter grief that's come to me in spelling, now!

I'm neither idle, nor a dunce. I take to study readily;
I see through Algebra at once; Geometry goes steadily;
Geography, and History, and Botany are dear to me;
But Spelling is a mystery that never will be clear to me!

I know the rules all off by heart—a work beyond conception, sir-
But what's the use, when from the start each thing is an exception, sir!
Word after word exactly glides, until I have them pat, you know,
And then some dreadful letter slides, and there I am in statu quo!

I find a score that terminate precisely in t-i-o-n,

When suddenly, as sure as fate, one changes to c-i-o-n;

Or something sounding just the same as something else not strange to you-
Indeed it's an outrageous shame-will floor you with a change or two.

I'd think o-u-g-h, of course, would be the same wherever found,

But though I tried till I was hoarse I think the same 'tis never found ;

'Twas "plough," and "through," and "cough," and "dough "-there's something

strange and dense in it!

Can any mortal learn to know this sound that has no sense in it?

Some consonants must doubled be; some consonants stay single, ma'am ;
The rules that twist the "final e" would make your senses tingle, ma'am !
And as for "1," and "f," and "s," and "y,"-which one to choose-
A cat might lose nine lives for less, and boys have only one to lose.

The words that end in "ing" and "ness"; the compounds, and the primitives;
The diphthongs all in such a mess; the mixtures called "derivatives";
The horrid twists from " ce" to "ge"; the y's which aren't wise at all—
Conspire to tease and addle me, as if I had no eyes at all!

If there were any single thing that followed where it ought be

Without some hidden catch or spring not in the place you thought 'twould be!

If there were any single rule that wouldn't break from under you—

But here the wise man and the fool must both fall in and blunder through!

O could I but the rascal reach, I'd surely find him killable!

The man who first invented speech and blundered on each syllable!
I'm not a dunce, I said before, in Logic or Geography,

But, oh my heart is sick and sore, with studying Orthography!

M. E. B., in Chautauqua Young Folks' Journal.

[The following advertisement is taken from the Baltimore Advertiser and Journaı of August 23, 1773, a copy of which is in possession of Dr. L. J. Allred, of Ocala, Fla., by whom it is furnished.]

"Mount Vernon in Virginia, July 15, 1773. The Subscriber having obtained Patents for upwards of TWENTY THOUSAND Acres of LAND on the Ohio and Great Kanhawa (Ten Thousand of which are situated on the banks of the first-mentioned river, between the mouths of the two Kanhawas, and the remainder on the Great Kanhawa, or New River, from the mouth, or near it, upwards, in one continued survey) proposes to divide the same into any sized tenements that may be desired, and lease them upon moderate terms, allowing a reasonable number of years rent free, provided, within the space of two years from next October, three acres for every fifty contained in each lot, and porportionably for a lesser quantity, shall be cleared, fenced, and tilled; and that, by or before the time limited for the commencement of the first rent, five acres for every hundred, and proportionably, as above, shall be enclosed and laid down in good grass for meadow;