must be incomplete. It is at the best, but a slave preaching freedom.

In the first place then, the Professional man should be free, should he not? Free from love of money, and the more specious, but equally selfish and degrading love of notoriety, reputation, or fame. He should be free from fear, whether of public opinion, or private enmity; he should be free from habits of idleness and indulgence; he should be free from every taint of deception or concealment. So far as he is himself concerned, he should have no aim, no end, beneath the purification and perfection of every power of intellect and heart with which God has blessed him. Let him live, not for applause, but so that the applause of the good will follow him; let him labor, not for political power, but in such a spirit that all true men will wish he had that power. What though he may never in this life, gain eminence or sway; can he not wait? Lucien Bonaparte tells us that his brother would not take a subordinate station in Paris, when offered one; he could wait, he said, till he made himself commandant; and shall we be more greedy of present honors than Napoleon?

No, my friends, let the Professional man take as his the old motto, "I bide my time," and rest assured, that if he walk his way fearlessly and uprightly his time will come.

Above all things let him be free from irreligion of every shade; let him never take one step, or frame one theory of life, upon any supposition which calls in question his deepest convictions and holiest feelings. Many a man dreads to own his real respect and love for the Bible; as well might the Englishman be ashamed of Magna Charta, or we of the Declaration of Independence: the Scriptures contain the Magna Charta of the spiritual freeman.

Let us, I have said, aim at nothing short of perfection; either morally or intellectually. Let us not cease to learn, be cause we are laboring. Too many of us when we leave school or college, give up the studies to which we have been devoted while there. We say we have finished our education when we begin to act; though we might as well say we have finished our education when we pass from the nursery to the school room. Education and life begin together, and will end together. Let us never, then, lose our interest in History and Science. To life's latest hour, and through its busiest hours let us keep our eyes open, and study daily. Can we say we lack time; that if we are students we cannot be lawyers and doctors? Why, a blacksmith of Massachusetts, working eight hours a day at the anvil, has made himself mas

age,

ter of fifty languages, though but twenty-eight years of and without early education. And in our State, the two men of deepest and most varied learning are riding the circuits, attending the Courts, and have always done so.

But are the views of life just suggested, held and acted upon by most of those in any Liberal Profession?

I will invite you to go with me to a lawyer's office in this, or any city, and there look at one who, though no representative of the whole Profession, is beyond doubt the representative of a very large portion of that Profession. He came from College knowing much of all that is in books; he had the means placed within his reach by his education, of truly becoming acquainted with the world, himself, and his Creator, to advance daily in usefulness and in liberty, the highest liberty to which man can attain-the liberty of having his will one with that of his Infinite Father. But what was all this education? what were all these means without the will to use them? This man entered upon his Profession, not as a field wherein he might employ the means given him at school and college; not with the hope and purpose of going forward in all knowledge, in all wisdom, in all labors of sympathy and usefulness;-no, incredible as it may seem, his sole idea of the Law was, that by it he could gain money and reputation; or as it has been paraphrased, "Pudding, and that finer pudding, addressed to the sixth sense of Vanity, called Praise."

To make a livelihood is every man's duty; to please his fellows is every good man's delight; but the true man will so live that these things shall be the accidents, not the ends, of his life and labor. This man, however, has made Wealth and Fame his ends, and all else subsidiary. Does he plead for the weak? It is because the glory of well-doing will follow. Let the weak be the unpopular, and let disgrace instead of glory follow the defence, and our advocate will sit tonguetied. Not because he is hard-hearted, but because he practises to win fame, and not disgrace; if with the fame-winning may go, by chance, helping his neighbor, well and good; and if with it go wronging his neighbor, lawfully, well and good again. If he can serve another, he is glad, but he cannot starve to do it; and by starvation he means not alone an empty stomach, but, even more, unsatisfied Vanity, or as he calls it, Ambition. He is honest, because Honesty is the best policy. He is laborious, attentive, and thorough, because he must be so to succeed. Thus does he practise virtue, on the ground of selfish gain, and, too often, leads others to despise

those virtues because they despise the motive which leads him to practise them.

And yet this man may not be vicious in any sense except this, that of his own free will he has come into subjection to his lower nature; he has sold himself, as Faust did, and walks the earth, not a freeman but the slave of an evil spirit: he has bartered his birthright for a mess of pottage. What does all his deep study of language avail him now? His only criticism is to find flaws in his opponent's pleadings. What cares he for his thorough knowledge of mathematics, pursued even to that intricate problem, so beautifully solved here two weeks since, the Shadow and the Screw? To be sure in all his dealings he knows how to apply the screw, but for Mathematics, Addition will serve all his purposes.

Nor is it the weak intellect only which is thus enslaved. The mightiest minds are often, like the powerful spirits of whom we read in the Arabian Nights, in subjection to lower natures. It is scarce a fairy tale that men are by enchantments turned to beasts. The founder of modern science, Francis Bacon, was, as you all know, "the greatest and the meanest" of men. And many, many a man, who, in youth despised what was niggardly, and loved only honor and virtue, has, in order to gain an independence, as it is called, so devoted himself to money-making as to end his days in slavery: not, like my poor woman, slavery to the snuff-box, but to a far harder task-master, the strong-box.

I have spoken of the Lawyer, but the Physician, the Teacher, the Clergyman are, but too frequently, enslaved also; their Professions ceasing in their hands to deserve the name of Liberal Professions. I have known those who stand high in the world's esteem, who studied Divinity because the pulpit of fered, as they thought, the readiest access to notoriety.

But Mammon and Lucifer are not the only slave dealers among the fallen angels; there is one who presides over the regions of partizanship, political, scientific, and religious; and many a mighty soul bears his iron yoke. Look around you, and how few are the truth-seers, or truth-seekers even; how countless the Partizans. And partizanship soon leads to selfishness; for as Coleridge has said, "He who begins by loving even Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”

I do not think, then, that those who fill the so-called Liberal Professions realize their position, their duties, and their

Aids to Reflection. 65.

privileges: I think they are, too commonly, not freemen: I believe that, before assuming their Professions, they are but seldom so taught as to ensure a practice becoming freemen.

And yet, if those who fill the Professions which should become the free, are slaves, where shall we look for freedom? "If the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" But it is not for himself only, nor chiefly, that the Professional man should live: nor is his calling Liberal because it offers great helps to self improvement.

In those old times when a few were freemen and the mass politically enslaved, the free were the leaders of those in subjection, and toward them, when true to their duties, existed the mighty feeling of loyalty, a feeling which many think is now gone. But loyalty has not left the earth, neither is the old relation done away. Now, as ever, the freeman should be the leader of him who is less free: thus and in no other way may he ensure and increase his own true liberty. And upon the fact that the members of a Profession are leaders of their fellows depends now the claim of that Profession to be thought Liberal. The Clergyman, the Instructor, the Lawyer, the Physician, have liberal Professions because their callings enable them, in the best sense, to be the Leaders among their brethren. Leaders to what? To the same spiritual freedom to which the goodness of God has elected them. Upon this rest their claims; from this spring their duties; and if they are not true to this they are traitors.

In those old days the free led the mass to battle; they battled for that political freedom which they so much needed: our freemen have to lead in warfare too, warfare against the Powers of Darkness, intellectual and moral, for the spiritual freedom which we need. Let us look now at our Professions and see what each may do in this great contest.

In the first place we have the Professional Teacher. He drills our warriors, leaders and all, for the warfare with the Arch-Enemy. To repeat what has been said elsewhere, if a foreigner were to ask where our police is, or where the standing army with which we hope to control millions of men,we could take him to our Common School houses, and say, "Here are our barracks; these young ladies are our drill-sergeants, and by their aid we are able to put a police-officer into every breast. Napoleon thought his system perfect when he could place a spy over every suspected man in Paris, but we carry the matter a great deal farther, and place each under such a keen-eyed officer as to prevent suspicion."

Great are the duties, and vast the influence of the Profes

sional Teacher: he is the leader in our Republic,-the sceptre has passed into his hands. If true to his best powers, and highest ideas; if filled with a spirit becoming his place, he is the first of Freemen, the head of Professional men.

Mr. Stephens, a late traveller, tells us that the school of the American Mission at Athens is doing more for Greece than all the Diplomacy of the Empires of Europe. And so it is everywhere; the Schoolmaster is the only true Conqueror. We, in our folly, call destruction conquest, when the only true victory is in producing. The wilderness is not overcome by felling its oaks, but by planting it with grain. Men are not conquered by being driven into a hateful servitude, but by being drawn into a loving loyalty. Napoleon soon loses his hold on us," the kind earth soon shrouds up his bloody footprints;" but the result of the Teacher's labor increases with every passing year. He may govern now ten minds, in a few years, through those ten a hundred, a little while longer and he rules a thousand, and after a few generations, those over whom he has some control could not be numbered. In the words of Carlyle, in whose writings this train of thought constantly recurs, "the monarch may rule over all heads, but the Teacher rules in them."

But the whole work of the Instructor is not comprised in the instruction of the young. He should be the man to give us all higher ideas of Education, and to suggest better systems than now prevail. From the year 1500 to the present time there has been a wonderful progress in respect to mental culture, more especially with regard to its spread through all ranks. But still, how very common is the notion that the purpose of the School is, not to educate, i. e. to lead, or bring out the powers of the human being; but that it is to instil, implant, or put into that being certain information which may enable him to buy and sell, speak and write, advantageously. Fellenberg said he did not wish to make scholars, but to make men. We are too apt to stop, even in scholarship, at "the three Rs," and to think Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, not the tools for Education, but education itself.

There is another great work before the Teacher; I refer to the work of influencing, reforming, aiding the parents of children under his charge.

In our cities and through our country, boast as we may, ignorance and vice oppress men like a night-mare. The labor of Christianising man is, comparatively, but begun. Stop in our streets, and open your eyes for an instant; what do you see? Disease, squalidness, passion, evil in every form: