regarded the division of the body as an enduring injury to the cause of Christian truth, and as wholly unjustifiable. He believed that, had the two parties remained together, each would have been of essential service to the other in checking tendencies to the extremes of orthodoxy and of radicalism. Dr. Ellis's preaching was almost wholly on what may be termed peculiarly evangelical subjects. He regarded it as the sole province of the pulpit to minister to the birth, nurture, and growth of Christian piety. His range of subjects was as wide as this aim would authorize, and no wider. His sermons were attractive and edifying to his hearers in the proportion in which they listened and he preached with the same end in view. It was equally impossible for him with his exquisite taste to lower the tone of the pulpit, and with his earnestly devout spirit to secularize its ministrations. As a pastor, Dr. Ellis can have had no superior, whether in the broad scope which he gave to the office or in the assiduity, wisdom, and love in which he performed its duties. Those immediately under his charge always found in him the sympathy and helpfulness that they needed in every crisis of personal experience, while they relied on his counsel as no less judicious than kind in all practical matters of doubt or difficulty. But he regarded and taught them to regard propagandism as an essential duty of the church; nay, even as an indispensable condition of its being a veritable church of Christ. He organized an extensive missionary work, especially among German families that had no special religious attachments. The aim was to bring these people into the church. The Sunday-school was accordingly made not a substitute for church-going, but an avenue for the introduction of children, and, so far as was possible, of their parents, through and with them, into the full enjoyment of religious privileges. Room was accordingly found for them in the church-edifice, and large numbers of them have been in constant attendance. From the Sundayschool and from the families connected with it, very many children have been brought to the church for baptism, and by parents fully instructed as to the meaning of the rite, and profoundly impressed by the obligation which it implies. Of those thus gathered into the Christian fold not a few have become communicants, and are in their several circles centres of the happiest Christian influence. With this specific work, the members of the First Church, under their pastor's inspiration and guidance, have united a large range of charitable operations, equally for the relief of want and for the diffusion of Christian knowledge and piety. At the same time, in very numerous benevolent associations, Dr. Ellis has been a constant worker, and by his rare business capacity has been especially efficient in the shaping of plans and modes of usefulness, in the selection of agents, and in the management and apportionment of funds. Dr. Ellis has been too hard a worker in his profession to do much outside of it. Yet, in whatever he has done aside from the range of clerical duty, he has shown that only time was wanting for successful authorship. In his contributions to periodical literature, he has fully sustained, as a writer, his reputation as a minister. He was happily associated with Rev. Dr. Sears as editor, for a considerable period, of the Monthly Religious Magazine. He has prepared several valuable historical papers, and the sermons connected with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his church show an ability and skill in the treatment. of historical subjects which might under altered circumstances have won for him a distinguished place beside his brother in that special department. We have given but a very imperfect sketch of what Dr. Ellis has done. Still more inadequate must be the attempt to say what manner of man he was. Yet, all along, the man has been greater than his work, and has immeasurably enhanced its value by the soul that he has put into it, by his weight of character, by his blended firmness and meekness, by the manifest consecration of his whole spirit and life to the service of God and man through the Gospel of Christ. A. P. PEABODY. THE PANTHEISTIC PANACEA. The new practice of the healing art, curing without medicine, is founded on the theory that God is not only infinite, but that he is all; man but a shadow, who finds but a second shadow in the material world. And, as God cannot be sick, so sickness is but the name of an unreality, an apprehension or fear, to dismiss which from our thought is to be rid of disease. The doctors of this view are physicians metaphysical, a school of philosophy whose application to the morbid conditions of human life is a form of piety transcending any wordy and symbolic ritual of the Church. But is man nothing imaginably or indeed in himself? As a modest person tries to make himself small in a great and distinguished company, so does true religion consist in reducing to annihilation the whole of ourselves? The good earthly parent would have his child obedient, but not confounded and absolutely lost in filial devotion. He is pleased, rather, as his offspring grow, to have them become independent and distinct in an identity of their own as well as his. Such is nature's way. The old mother bird pushes her brood over the edge of the nest, to fly on their own account; and for what is the human soul fledged of the spirit but to be somebody itself, and wing its course in this wonderful universal air? If God is or swallows all, then we are not his relations and can have with him no tie. He is not a father. He has no kith or kin. He is Saturn devouring all he begets. Worship and even sacrifice of self are thus hypocritical or impossible. ing, we could not so presume or pretend to be. is absurd. Many have questioned the divine being, but the human none are so foolish or hardy as to deny. If suicide of the human could occur, the divine, too, would disappear. Prayer would perish, because there could be none to pray to, if none to pray. Fruit, like the grape, may be preserved in its own juice; but the fruit of the spirit would be smothered, if it grew not fresh on that tree of life which, not producing it, were a barren bole. Not exist- The Christian God is, therefore, an improvement immense on the Pagan. Consecration in time and personal continuance in eternity depend on our being more than drops or mist of a mirage, dissolving in the sea from which they rose. But, if we be more than reflections in water or a glass, and have an individual, persistent substance of our own, we must not be passive alone, each to a superhuman agency. We must be and do something every way, far as our faculty may go, for ourselves, looking out for our health, on our guard watching against all the ills flesh is heir to or incurs by its own fault. Mind-cure practitioners tell us it is not by exertion, but renunciation of will, that the miracle of restoration ever was or can still be wrought. But how save by will is will to be renounced? What but a higher wish can put a lower wish away? To bear may require a stronger will than to do; and to do our best, while we endure patiently what no effort can avoid, is more acceptable to God than any obsequious cringing to his decrees or surrender to fate. Even the heathen Neptune was confessed and adored, not by the sailor's lying down in the bottom of the boat, but bravely breasting and steering through the storm whose wind and wave would go over him, unless he went over them. Not pantheism in medicine, which were the sentinel's desertion of his post; and not atheism or materialism, which is disloyalty to the commander-in-chief; but theism, which is the use of our own powers in reliance on the divine help and blessing, is the proposition which alone can be clearly maintained. That all is God and for the best is a fine speculation, formulated as pantheism, optimism, or spiritualism, or however else it be called. But, applied to conduct, to all our actions to others and theirs to us, it is half truth and half a lie. All was good, said God over his finished work. But the law, broken by Adam and Eve, or breaking them by not being by them kept, brought the flaming sword in the hands of the avenging angel upon the walls of Eden, with a curse casting them outside the gate. If mind-cure, beautiful as an opinion, lead to any neglect or violation of the conditions of health,-wholesome exercise, drugs that are specifics, drains, quarantine of small-pox, cholera, and plague, use of pure water and air, prevention of human contagion, carnal pestilence, hateful garments spotted with the flesh, then no fine gold ever grew so dim as will all the glory of recovery of this immaterial kind, whose value will thus depreciate like an irredeemable note, and turn from a panacea to a bane. There is no one method which is a cure-all, no single sovereign remedy, infallible potion or lotion, magnetic, mesmeric, animal, or intellectual operation, which can be an antidote to all maladies or sure deliverance from death. No marvels of restoration or resurrection have succeeded to introduce wonder-working as the usual way to set a limb, subdue a fracture, open blind eyes and deaf ears, or fetch back from the brink of the grave. The common sense of mankind has not abdicated in favor of prodigy or thaumaturgy. The surgeon cannot yet lay down his case of instruments nor the apothecary close his shop. God and nature furnish no examples of medical monopoly. Speak well of the bridge that carries you over, and learn there is more than one causeway. Thank whoever, in your distress of body and mind, has pulled you through. The ropes and pulleys are many in this live vessel which, with all on board, ploughs the human sea; and the rigging sooner or later will require, to manage it, all hands. But, having stated thus some criticisms or exceptions, I must proceed to advocate the point of mind-cure, properly interpreted and defined, as no local, passing craze, but deserving and sure to have more attention than it has received. In "As You Like It," the Duke says to his co-mates in exile of the cold and biting wind, "This is no flattery: these are counsellors But there is teaching above the elements, and a remedial agency when they, in their fury, have done their worst. Sickness and sin, as one writes me, are our foes alike, both |