ence due to useful members of the community, and receive the protection to which their helpless innocence entitle them. Trees, birds, music-these are efficient instructors, which elevate and refine. Who does not remember with fondness some familiar tree near his parental dwelling; some favorite bird as an acquaintance from childhood; some family tunes which have vitally identified themselves with his early education? The sight of a tree, the cooing of a dove, the sound of a sacred tune at church, have often in this remote country, called up a thousand pleasant associations of home and its memories. The Germans act wisely in giving all classes of society access to amusements which refine and instruct. They are extremely fond of out-door life. What Goethe said of the Strassburghers, may be said of the Germans generally: "They are passionately fond of walking, and they have a good right to be so." Old and young, rich and poor, wise and unwise, all walk; walk through the same walks, among the same trees to hear the same music; walk every day and walk long too. This practice has its bodily uses. As a nation, the Germans are remarkably healthy. You meet few hot-house plants among them, or sickly appearances, who seem to have been shut out from natural sun-light half their days. The climate may be entitled to some praise for this, but their habits do more, their life in the open air and diet. Their diet is far more simple than ours. They begin and end the day with a very light meal; they do not eat so much heavy, hot, half-baked undigestible food. Their cooks, like their authors, do not deal so much in omnibus dishes. They prefer to undertake less at a time and attend to it thoroughly. Hence dyspepsia and its train of suffering are unknown to them. The Germans pay great respect and veneration to the resting-place of the dead. Their burialgrounds are delightful places of resort, which are visited during all hours of the day. The hillocks are interspersed with shrubbery, the walks are lined with trees, and during the summer, flowers bloom on almost every grave. The "God's Acre" is a spot in which the whole community feels a deep interest, for each has some kindred dust reposing there. The tombstones are nearly all in the form of a cross, with a short inscription, a short passage from Holy Writ, or the beautiful phrase, "AUF WIEDERSCHEN," which cannot be rendered into English-often it has greeted me from the adode of the dead and from the lips of the living, but always kindled new hopes in me for "the land of the blest." The crosses and monuments are hung with wreathes woven by the hand of affection. Bouquets are strewn on the green turf, while plants are busily blooming submissive cheerfulness over their dust. Each cemetery has a dead-house, where persons must be placed soon after their decease, until the day of burial. On a pleasant morning in August, I visited the Cemetery of Munich, in its dead-house were eight corpses, whose coffins were strewn with wreaths of evergreen and flowers. Every grave was a flower-vase, edged with turf, and at one end was a basin for holy water for the whole cemetery. A crowd of well-dressed and ill-dressed persons, rich and poor, were scattered along its aisles, fondling some flowret on the grave of a departed friend, sprinkling the hillocks with water, and putting holy water into the little basin. I will venture to call even the last act a virtue, the token of a tender and well meant recollection. Each had a little can to carry water. Some brought chaplets with them to hang on the cross. A little girl was carefully winding garlands around and across a little grave. I asked her for whom she wove her "kranz." She replied, "fur unsern Heinrich.” When she had carefully done or work, she walked around it with a slight quiver of emotion on features and wondered whether he saw her, and then turned to me saying "Nicht wahr, wir schen ihn wieder?” I pressed her little hand in mine, and told her of the "Spirit Home" in our Father's house, where all the good shall "meet again ne'er to sever," and how happy the meeting of His children there, and of their everlasting, unbroken fellowship, where there shall be no more This daily bestowment of affection upon the memory of the dead, tenders and soothes the hearts of the living. It makes the grave a spot of pleasure rather than grief, a thin veil which seperates time from eternity. It enables them to treat the departed as those who are still members of their household, with whom they still can enjoy a communion as real as when they were visibly with them, if they are "members of the same body." They are to them like those who have gone on a journey, and they can feel pleasure in the prospect of following them. They have only crossed the boundary, which Like a narrow stream divides That heavenly land from ours. The early Christians were in the habit of celebrating the days on which their friends died, as birth-day festivals. They would assemble around their graves on each returning anniversary, and sing hymns of praise to God, for having redeemed and triumphantly taken them to Himsel. So the Christian still can look into the grave; "Since Jesus has lain there, he dreads not its gloom." And there is a heavenly meaning in hanging a cornet of evergreen over the dust of the pious dead, or twining festive garlands around their turf. RELIGION. LIKE snow that falls where waters glide, They melt in time's destroying tide, Religion's rays no clouds obscure, His heart may break with sorrow's stroke, Like diamonds shining when they're broke, JESUS CHRIST: A MEDITATION FOR ADVENT. FROM THE GERMAN OF REV. P. SCHAFF BY REV. G. F. KROTEL. WHEN the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, the desire of all nations, in order to redeem the world from the curse of sin, and to establish an eternal kingdom of truth, of love, and of peace, for all that believed in His name. Jesus Christ is the end and result of a two-fold process, which preceded his personal advent upon earth, and whose first beginning extends back to the creation; yea, has its roots in the counsel of redemption formed by eternal love before the existence of time and the world. He is, in the first place, the culmination and end of all revelation, or God's communication of Himself to His rational creatures. The entire history of mankind before His birth, extending through four thousand years, is a preparation for his coming-the voice of one crying in the wilderness: "Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." This preparation can be most distinctly traced in Judaism, which is a mysterious system of types, shadows, and promises of the coming Messiah. Here the process is from above, downward; here God descends to his chosen people, and reveals himself more and more clearly in word and deed. Here the divine contents of christianity are prepared for mankind. The Mosaic law reveals the holy will of God, and, by contrast, our sin and guilt; and therefore awakens the knowledge of sin, the sense of guilt, and the longing for redemption, far more clearly than this can be done by the voice of natural moral consciousness or conscience, and thereby proves itself to be a schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. Comp. Rom. 3: 20; Galat. 3:24. The daily sacrifice in the tabernacle and in the temple served the same purpose, and the same is true of the entire ceremonial-law, which constantly kept alive the feeling of the need of atonement, and, as the shadow directs to the body, continually directed attention towards the realities of the new covenant, and, above all, to the one all-sufficient atoning sacrifice of Christ upon the cross. As God demands absolute fulfilment of the law and purity of heart, accompanied by the promise of life and the threatening of death; and as He cannot possibly make man the subject of a cruel sport, but is the true faithful and merciful God, the moral ritual law of the Old Testament must already contain, as in a shell, the sweet kernel of the promise, that he will, at some future day, realize the perfect fulfilment of the law, and present the ideal of righteousness and holiness in a living form, and that he will point out to the poor sinner the way by which he may reach it. Without such an assurance the giving of the law upon Sinai would be a fearful irony on the part of God, and would lead man to despair. But we find the promise or prophecy inseparably combined with the law. Yea, it is even more ancient than the law which "entered." Rom. 5: 20. It begins to rise already, like a star of hope in a dark night, immediately after the Fall, in the well-known declaration concerning the woman's seed, which should bruise the serpent's head; it afterwards beamed with still greater brightness in the age of the patriarchs, through whose descendants all the families of the earth should be blessed; it lived in Moses, who was a prophet as well as a lawgiver, and pointed the people to a greater prophet who should come after him. Deut. 18: 15. But from Samuel's time, about eleven centuries before the birth of Christ, prophecy, which had hitherto been irregular, assumed an organized form, and, as a continuous prophetical office and class, accompanied the Levitical priesthood and the Davidical kingdom up to the time of Babylonish captivity. It survived this catastrophe and superintended the reorganization of the restored people and the rebuilding of the temple, expounding and applying the law, rebuking abuses in church and state, predicting the terrible judgments of God, but also his merciful love; reproving and correcting, but also comforting and encouraging, culminating in an increasingly distinct reference to the coming Messiah, who would redeem Israel and the world from sin and misery, and establish a kingdom of peace and righteousness. Thus ante-christian Judaism on the one hand, as far as it is an economy of law, exhibits itself as a religion of repentance, and on the other hand, as far as it is a chain of promises, as a religion of hope and of the future, which, like John the Baptist, constantly points beyond itself to the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. Prophecy expired with Malachi; and Israel was now, as it were, left to itself, through a waiting period of four hundred years. But now, immediately before the advent of the Messiah, the whole Old Testament, Moses and Isaiah combined, appeared in a personal embodiment, and after shining for a brief time expired in incomparable humility, like the dawn in the brightness of the rising sun of the New Covenant. John the Baptist, that earnest preacher of the law, who, laying the axe unto the root of the rotting tree of his nation, called to repentance, because the kingdom of heaven was at hand: John the prophet, rich in consolation, who directed his disciples away from himself to the sin-destroying Lamb of God, and, as the friend of the bridegroom, conducted the Messianic bride to the Saviour, was indeed the greatest among them that are born of women, and yet, in regard to his official character, less than the least in the kingdom of heaven of the New Covenant, whose glory exceeds that of the Old Covenant represented by him—the preparatory state of types and shadows-as much as the bright sunlight surpasses the glimmering of the stars, and the light of the moon in a dark night. Such is the Jewish religion, as it flowed from the fountain of divine revelation; as it continued to live on in John and his parents, in the mother of Jesus and her relatives, in the disciples of John and the apostles, in the venerable Simeon, aud Anna the prophetess, in Lazarus and his pious sisters, and such it was at its final confluence with christianity. We cannot so distinctly trace the preparatory steps of christianity in the midst of heathenism. For this, in its essence, is a false religion, a "wild growth" upon the soil of fallen human nature (to employ a descriptive term of the new Schelling school,) a darkening of the original consciousness of God, a deification of the rational and irrational creature, and, intimately connected with it, a corruption of moral consciousness, which went so far astray as formally and religiously to sanction natural and unnatural vices. Com. Rom. 1: 19, etc. Even the religion of Greece, which, as the artistic creation of the poetical imagination of Homer and the highly-gifted Greeks, has not improperly been termed the religion of beauty, to distinguish it from the Egyptian religion of enigmas, and the Roman religion of politics and expediency, is marred by this moral turpitude. Properly speaking, it totally lacked the proper idea of sin, and consequently of holiness and purity of heart. Sin appears, in Homer and the Greek classics-with the exception of a few deeper perceptions of a Socrates and Plato, who, by being exceptions, only establish the general rule-not as a perversion of will, and as a crime against the gods, but as a folly of the understanding, and a crime against men; and besides this it very often proceeds from the gods themselves; for "Infatuation" is a "daughter of Jupiter." Diomedes threw stones at Mars, and wounded the finger of the delicate Venus with his spear without committing sin; whilst Clytemnestra, on account of her unfaithfulness to her husband, is a great sinner. According to the popular religion of Greece the gods are nothing but men. They have bodies and senses like mortals, only that they are of colossal proportions; so that Mars marches along like ten thousand men, Neptune covers seven acres, and Juno makes the forests tremble by her steps. They eat and drink as we do, although it be only nectar and ambrosia, and consequently their immortality and olympic majesty is dependant upon the gratification of their stomach. They are confined to the limits of time and space as we are. Although at times honored by the ascription of omnipotence and omniscience, they are nevertheless subject to the blind power of an iron fate, which even rules over father Jove; and they are also deluded, and rail at each other on account of their ignorance. Ulysses conceals himself beneath seal skins, and is thus able to surprise the omniscient Proteus. Their heavenly bliss is disturbed by all the wretchedness of an earthly existence. Jove threatens blows and death against his fellow gods, and makes Olympus tremble, when he shakes his locks; the finger of Venus bleeds when wounded by a spear; Mars is cast down by a stone; Neptune and Apollo are obliged to work for wages, and are cheated; and jealousy and dissension reign in the marriages of the gods. They are indeed called holy and righteous, but in the very same Homer and Hesiod they appear full of envy and contention, hatred and sensuality, and mutually excite each other to lies and cruelty, perjury and adultery! How deeply must christianity have declined in Germany, when its greatest poet could hold up regenerated Hellenism as the highest ideal of beautiful humanity, and when the next greatest, and at the same time noblest and most thoroughly national of its poets could express a longing after the "gods of Greece," and, instead of a feeling of joyful gratitude, could sing with a feeling of sad lamentation: "To enrich One among all these This world of Gods had to pass away." This perversion is great and disgraceful enough, even if we give all due weight to the fact, that this same Schiller, in another place, and in a better mood, praised the "Religion of the Cross" as the highest union of "Humility and power;" and at least knew, to some extent, how to |