nd keep, children to rear,--busy people, anxious people, of
extremely diverse characters, but united by a common desire to live
nobly. The difficulties of noble living are very great,--never so
great, perhaps, as now and here,--and these people assemble every week
to converse upon them. What more rational thing could they do? If they
came together to snivel and cant, and to support one another in a
miserable conceit of being the elect of the human species, we might
object. But no description can show how far from that, how opposite to
that, is the tone, the spirit, the object, of the Friday-evening
meeting at Plymouth Church.

Have we "Liberals"--as we presume to call ourselves--ever devised
anything so well adapted as this to the needs of average mortals
struggling with the ordinary troubles of life? We know of nothing.
Philosophical treatises, and arithmetical computations respecting the
number of people who inhabited Palestine, may have their use, but they
cannot fill the aching void in the heart of a lone widow, or teach an
anxious father how to manage a troublesome boy. There was an old lady
near us at this meeting,--a good soul in a bonnet four fashions
old,--who sat and cried for joy, as the brethren carried on their
talk. She had come in alone from her solitary room, and enjoyed all
the evening long a blended moral and literary rapture. It was a
banquet of delight to her, the recollection of which would brighten
all her week, and it cost her no more than air and sunlight. To the
happy, the strong, the victorious, Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses
may appear to suffice; but the world is full of the weak, the
wretched, and the vanquished.

There was an infuriate heretic in Boston once, whose antipathy to what
he called "superstition" was something that bordered upon lunacy. But
the time came when he had a child, his only child, and the sole joy of
his life, dead in the house. It had to be buried. The broken-hearted
father could not endure the thought of his child's being carried out
and placed in its grave without _some_ outward mark of respect, _some_
ceremonial which should recognize the difference between a dead child
and a dead kitten; and he was fain, at last, to go out and bring to
his house a poor lame cobbler, who was a kind of Methodist preacher,
to say and read a few words that should break the fall of the darling
object into the tomb. The occurrence made no change in his opinions,
but it revolutioni