or perverseness of feeling, either of us should be prompted to mislead another, to lower the reverence of truth, to disturb the foundations of faith, to make virtue seem worthless or shadowy, then, O Lord, enable us to resist the evil in thy spirit of love and holiness and peace. Bring back the wanderer to thy fold, and save all from going astray. Plant in the soul a higher reverence of thy truth; establish a living faith on everlasting grounds; quicken the eye to see virtue, how full it is of worth, how substantial, how divine; and enable us to aid each other in building up our whole life after the pattern which thou hast revealed and made glorious in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

CHAPTER III.

NEIGHBORHOOD.

THE bond of friendship has been sometimes stronger than that of either the filial relation or the fraternal. The bond of neighborhood is always looser than either;-looser, but not less natural.

Attachment to the neighborhood is, on the contrary, just as natural as attachment to parent, to brother or sister, or to friend, and, in virtue of the same nature, feebler and more diffusive.

There are different methods by which neighborhood is produced. The simplest, and perhaps earliest, is what may be called local. Different persons and families are brought near together in one place. The nearness begets acquaintance, sometimes ripening into intimacy. The identity of place establishes affinities through their occupations, whether the same or different. If the same, they will often help each other in the common work or business. If different, the very difference unites them, each supplying what the other wants. So to nearness of place

is added the principle which, as commerce, encircles the world; and within a small community the germs soon appear of the relations and interests which, under other names, constitute states, nations, the world.

Suppose the few families gathered about some waterfall, or near the head of the tide on a large river, or upon deep and secure bays of sea or ocean, or anywhere else, growing to thousands, the city supplanting the village, and, for the work and traffic which once occupied them, navigation, commerce, trade, connecting them with a wide interior communication, and introducing them into relations with all islands and continents. By such a process neighborhood passes gradually from mere place to something else. It connects men of corresponding pursuits, of certain degrees of wealth or want, of kindred tastes and habits. One may hardly know who they are that go into the next door, or hear the same voice from the same pulpit year after year; the community of place has dissolved in community of business, or of position, or of character, or whatever it may be, good or ill, dividing society, and creating new neighborhoods.

Even place, however, has always something to do with neighborhood. The citizen may think little about it, when he is at home. But

when he has gone abroad, and for weeks and years seen no form from his native home, heard no voice speak of whom and what he loves there, the stranger who comes from the same spot is at once a neighbor. He has walked the same streets, known the same names, been one of the many to whom that earth and sky are sacred, and the very stones of this Jerusalem are precious. As, on the other side, while place seemed most closely to define the relation, already the incipient tendencies to neighborhood grounded on some other basis appeared. Other things being equal, the farmer would connect himself with the farmer, the mechanic with the mechanic, the tradesman with the tradesman. Persons of active habits would meet each other more naturally than those of retired manners. The studious will seek such as understand and help their thoughts. Not barely from pride, on the one side, envy on the other, but from the relations and affinities generated by their respective conditions, the richer and the poorer, even of the smallest and simplest society, will indicate the approach of that separation which becomes too often almost an impassable chasm. Thus the elements of neighborhood, beginning with that which fixes the name, and going out into the various classes of affinity which succeed, all really coexist throughout, in different degrees and combinations.

But what has all this to do with the celestial guidance and comfort? Much, in various ways. First, as it reveals one great power of the Divine Creation. Not more really does the Unseen Power plant the trees in the forest, open the oceans, cut the channels of the rivers, and clothe Nature with the whole primeval beauty, than it leads men into these solitudes, and excites them to their several processes of cultivation, and in and through the whole draws them into the relations and kindnesses of an enlarging community. Let us learn to see God in man and his deeds, as distinctly as we have been taught to see him in Nature and her works. Chiefly, however, as this view discovers to us a large sphere of duties, of allurements, of sorrows.

1. There are duties, duties of divine and perpetual obligation, connected with this natural fact of neighborhood. We owe to the men near to us, to those we meet from day to day, to the society with which, whether through place or any cause, we are connected,—we owe to each and all the highest debt, a pure and noble life. Every neighbor in every condition has the right to look always to each person for that greatest beneficence, a true man. And that same beneficence he is bound to impart. We may be rich or poor; we may be honored or dishonored; we may be sought of men or cast off by men; we