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slightest deviated from a befitting line of conduct; characterizing the misdemeanor and reading sharp lessons of rebuke.

Judge White was all this time sitting at the end of the front seat, just under the speaker, enjoying the old gentleman's disquisition to the last degree; twisting his neck around to note if the audience relished the "down comings" as much as he did; rubbing his hands, smiling, chuckling inwardly. Between his teeth and cheek was a monstrous quid of tobacco, which the better he was pleased the more he chewed; the more he chewed the more he spat, and behold, the floor bore witness to the results. At length the old gentleman, straightening himself up to his full height, continued, with great gravity:

"And now I reckon you want to know who I do mean? I mean that dirty, nasty, filthy tobaccochewer, sitting on the end of that front seat"his finger meanwhile pointing true as the needle to the pole-"see what he has been about! Look at those puddles on the floor; a frog wouldn't get into them; think of the tails of the sisters' dresses being dragged through that muck." The crest-fallen judge averred that he never chewed any more tobacco in church.

I

I trust enough has been said to afford you a truthful and vivid notion as to what these men were. honor them for their chivalric heroism. I revere them for their lofty faith, their burning zeal, their simple-hearted piety, a practical character that knew no limits. I love and bless them, for they were my own fathers in the ministry.

That I have not exaggerated or shot wide of the

mark, let the following extract of a letter from the late President Harrison, whose long residence in the West entitled him to speak, bear witness:

HARRISON'S TESTIMONY.

Who and what are they? I answer, entirely composed of ministers who are technically denominated "Circuit riders,” a body of men who, for zeal and fidelity in the discharge of the duties they undertake, are not exceeded by any others in the world. I have been a witness of their conduct in the Western country for nearly forty years. They are men whom no labor tires, no scenes disgust, no danger frightens in the discharge of their duty. To gain recruits for their Master's service they sedulously seek out the victims of vice in the abodes of misery and wretchedness. The vow of poverty is not taken by these men, but their conduct is precisely the same as it would have been had they taken one. Their stipulated pay is barely sufficient to enable them to perform the services assigned them. With much the larger portion the horse which carries them is the only animated thing which they can call their own, and the contents of their valise, or saddle-bags, the sum total of their other earthly possessions.

If within the period I have mentioned, a traveller on the western frontier had met a stranger in some obscure way, or assiduously urging his course through the intricacies of a tangled forest, his appearance staid and sober, and his countenance indicating that he was in search of some object in which his feelings were deeply interested, his apparel plain but entirely neat, and his little baggage adjusted with peculiar compactness, he might be almost certain that that stranger was a Methodist preacher, hurrying on to perform his daily task of preaching to separate and distant congregations, and should the same traveller, upon approaching some solitary, unfinished, and scarcely habitable cabin, hear the praises of the Creator chanted with peculiar melody, or the doctrines of the Saviour urged upon the attention of some six or eight individuals, with the same energy and zeal that he had seen dispayed in addresses to a crowded audience of

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a populous city, he might be certain without inquiry, that it was the voice of a Methodist preacher.

It is a style of speech much in vogue among certain classes of littérateurs and philanthropists to sneer at the imbecility and cowardice of the ministry. Sydney Smith's characterization of some of his own fraternity, "decent debility," is indiscriminately applied as a just description of the entire body in this country. I have heard the question propounded by a famous orator, and it was greeted by deafening cheers, "What are the forty thousand pulpits of America doing? What have they ever done for the cause of human progress?" Ask the school-houses and universities of New England. Were not the clergy their architects? did they not lay their foundations and build their walls? Ask the thousand agencies in operation for ameliorating the condition of the suffering and destitute, for reclaiming the vicious and degraded, for saving the abandoned and lost. Have not the clergy devised them and put them into execution? Ask the public conscience and the private sense, which are every generation growing clearer in their recognition of right and truth, the morals of business, society, and domestic life; the standards of which every decade are becoming more and more. elevated. If the clergy have not been the largest contributors to these benign results, tell me the names of those who have? Whose counsels and words of solace have smoothed and softened the couch of pain? Whose hymns have kindled the light of immortality in the glazing eye? Whose voice of prayer has been as a staff upon which the departing soul leaned as it

went down into the dark floods of death? And who, when there was a vacant chair by the fireside, and a desolate room in the house which it well-nigh broke the heart to enter, came to tell of Him, who in Bethany said, "I am the Resurrection and the Life?" Measure me the power of the Sunday-school, the influence of pastoral visiting, the might of the spoken word and of the secret prayer, and estimate their force in the aggregate of our national life. Because their influence is like that of the dew, silent, or as the shining of the sun, familiar, men fail to recognize and note it. Match me their self-denial, exhibited in obscure toil, unappreciated labor, simple-hearted, ceaseless efforts to do good, which get no sympathy except from God? Match me their tireless zeal and unflagging patience, their offerings upon the altar of country and humanity from the ranks of pseudo-philanthropy, whose God is reform, whose evangel is destruction, whose battle-cries are curses?

But if the country east of the Alleghanies fails to give satisfactory answer to this question, then go and receive it in the cabins of the West. See the glorious structure of a Christian civilization rising upon the soil of the prairie land, and take it as an attestation of what the old preachers did for the cause of human progress. Although they were not the only laborers, without them it never could have been reared.

Have you seen that valley world in its wild luxuriance and glory, with its mountain barriers at east and west, standing as sentinels to guard it from unlawful approach, with its chain of gigantic lakes upon the north, whose wedded waves lift up their nuptial salutation to the ocean in Niagara's roar, and on the

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south a tropic sea to wash its coast, traversed from north to south by a river unmatched among the streams of earth, sweeping as a royal conqueror along, receiving tribute from many a far province and distant empire? Have you seen it with its illimitable reaches of corn and cotton as they ripen to fill the mouths of the world, and keep its back from nakedness? Have you seen its inexhaustible mines of coal, iron, lead, and copper; its quarries of marble and fields of sugar? Have you seen the husbandman leading the merchant, the capitalist, and the manufacturer by the hand, bidding them possess this rich domain, and enjoy it?

Upon a noble bluff of the Ohio river did the dreamer, John Fitch, first behold the vision of steam applied to navigation. Here is the prophecy of the seer receiving its amplest fulfillment. Here is that mightiest vassal of man's mechanical genius working its sublimest results.

Here are fourteen sovereign States, with populous and thriving cities, almost the product of Aladdin's Lamp, with busy hordes of growing millions, with steamboats, railroads, magazines and warehouses unnumbered, with mineral, agricultural, and commercial wealth beyond our power to estimate.

Here is society starting on a higher plane than it has ever travelled, and man girding himself for a grander task than he has ever wrought. "Woman, at home almost for the first time, the sacredness of her nature ensured by the sanctity of her position, infancy at play, childhood at school, all alike greeted by the hallowed beam of the Sabbath; and all invited to the porch and altar of prayer. These attest the glory