friend," with which the stern old Puritan was used to meet a stranger, than in the ardent profession of regard required by the custom of our day. Not to venture farther upon a topic which has invited the keen humor and earnest eloquence of such reformers as Dickens, Thackeray and Curtis, this single glance, we think, will have served to remind us how successfully hypocrisy, in the garb of usage, preys upon the integrity of business life and social character.

Next to custom, perhaps, the most common disguise of hypocrisy, is expediency. In following out the laws of policy-in striving for what they believe some valuable end, men often forget the simple rules of honesty and justice. Yet few will candidly confess an error, but with instinctive self-justification attempt to make the worse appear the better. Thus, alas! how inevitably, expediency brings us to hypocrisy. It is chiefly through this secret channel that it works itself into public, as through custom, into social life. Like the leaven hidden in the mass, it works the better for its secresy, permeating with a subtle influence every branch of national, municipal, we had almost said judicial business. Too many of our public men-men of acknowledged power-like Belial,

seem

For dignity composed, and high exploit,

Yet all is false and hollow.

"Aliud clausum in pectore, aliud in lingua promptum habere," is a prominent and respectable principle in politics. Like the bodiless forms of pestilence and famine, corruption from a thousand sources creeps in upon us, even where everything looked fair and calm, and it is hypocrisy which covers its insidious progress and lulls men into a careless feeling of security.

The only other of the particular disguises we need to mention, is plausibility. It is under this seductive form that it insinuates itself into the church and does battle most successfully with conscience. Alas! that it is so; there are but too many "who practice falsehood under saintly show." Much as we respect, nay, even revere a sincere, consistent, earnest Christian character, we are yet far from regarding this as infallibly attested by a public profession of repentance and faith. We hold that a man cannot be judged or judge himself by the simple fact that he is within the pale of the congregation. In a matter of such infinite moment, and yet so manifold embarrassments as the eternal welfare of the soul, one is easily persuaded that the change which he desires has actually become a quickening influence in his inmost lifetoo apt to take the plausible form which he observes as a sincere expres

sion of a vital principle within, and too apt, moreover, to fall short in charity for the weaknesses of those whose lives, without such earnest professions, are perhaps informed with as much of the spirit of true godliness. The story of the pharisee and publican, was no fable. We have both among us now.

We say we cannot judge a man by what he seems to be. Much that is plausible is not genuine. We would follow him from his closet and his knees to the great test of daily life. We would see if he endure the thousand little ills and vexations which make up a day of common experience; more meekness and patience than another who pretends to nothing beyond a fair morality. Whether his charity is satisfied with the opportunities it finds upon the thoroughfare, where men may look upon it, or turn aside to minister to those also, whose sorrows visit them in secret-if he meet wrath and reproveth with a “soft answer;" if in those trifling matters whose delicate shading relieves the rough tracery of toil and care and disappointment, that sensitive propriety which can hope for no reward but its own approval, tempers his daily walk and conversation. Ah! we should find spurious as well as genuine, even among those who make much show of carrying the cross. The deeds of many a man speak loudly of charity, benevolence, self-denial, when if you could interrogate the heart, the only answer would be pride, selfinterest, ambition! While we gladly reverence the good and true, we cannot be blind to the many who seem only to discourage the feeble in virtue by their own weakness, who promise but do not,

"Making true the saying odd,

Near the Church, but far from God."

We can hardly more than allude to its general effect upon individual and social character. It tends to dwarf the mind, for truth is the sole object and one great source of intellect. But hypocrisy is the perfection of falsehood, and can have no kin to truth. It assails the morals by destroying self-respect; for how must he despise his own meanness whose soul is but a bitter mockery of his life. It makes a man a miserable coward. He always fears himself, lest his own treachery betray him, and suspects his neighbor, knowing too well how a fair appearance may conceal a treacherous intent. How quickly sympathy and every gener ous emotion would die out in such a soil; how easily would selfishness and a false honor flourish! Such are some of the obvious fruits of hypocrisy. Yet, in its milder forms few, very few, avoid it. A purely honest life is in the highest sense heroic.

W. S. P.

The Outlook.

"The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracks that please us well,
Through four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow."

My dream of life is closing. The hazy, mellow light, through which all things assume fantastic and beautiful shapes, passes off, and the "cold white light of morning" streams over me and heralds the mounting light of Life's sun. As the spells wear off, and my dreams melt into the realities of existence, the singing voices of myriad legions, steadily fighting the battles-the joyousness of earnest and ardent hopes the stifled groans of yielding despair-the confused voices of conflicting passion-the distinct and heavy tread of Civilization marching on to its conquests, sound loudly in my ears.

From my high retreat, abstracted from all participation in these varied movements, and looking at them only through the medium of books and newspapers, I find myself impelled by their necessity to descend into the arena, where my opinions and endeavors, in a small way, must become active forces.

Life in College, and Life beyond it, does it not resemble Life on a "three decker?" She sails on a careless course over the boundless solitude, steadied on upright keel. The blue vault above tainted with no clouds, and the slender trucks carving strange hieroglyphics in the sky. The idle mariners hang idly over the prow, and watch the arrowy light of the dolphins' trail-the silver flash from the wings of startled and tiny flying fish. They dreamily bend over the stern and count the phosphorescent sparks wake, or face the stainless planks, in the solemn night watches, and listen to the faint hum from the main deck. They look out on the ocean, immeasurable and mystic, quivering like a burnished emerald, and trace the shafts of pale light flowing down from the "Heaven's moon" to the "Ocean's moon "—and the deep tranquillity is broken only by occasional gales.

Yet this is not the only phase of life they lead. Succeeding it is the sharp roll of the drums that beat to quarters-and the ghastly array of surgeons' instruments-the unsheathing of boarders' weapons-the shot from the heavy guns gleaming and burning over the waters-the hoarse cries of command and the shrieks of dying men, scarcely lost in the roar

of the cannon-the bloody tide, gathered from sandy though slippery decks, spouting from the scuppers, and the rapid recoil from the broadsides, which shake the great ship from kelson to truck. Yet though the life of the mariner be of alternate rest and endeavor, they who go forth from these College walls will find no respite from their appointed tasks.

In a few weeks one hundred men will stand face to face with the world, gathered together from every section of this great Republic, and representing the customs, usages, and temperaments peculiar to an hundred different localities-after acting and being reacted upon for four years, they separate forever. I often meditate in this drama of College life, whereof the actors in the first part are boys, and in the last, as the curtain drops, are men. From these halls of song and revel and study, they move out to join the grand pageantry of civilization, in whose ranks they must enlist, whose banners they may perhaps carry to taste the sorrows they knew of, only as painted by their favorite poets, to meet the rank offenses, whose odor reaches them faintly in their seclusion-to grapple with ambitious men staking all on the die -to study and solve problems in law, and evenly balance the scale of justice to match the ebbing tide of life, and mitigate the strong agonies of dying men, whose watch of life has run down ere they were readyto stand on the lofty battlements of Zion, and head the never ending, still beginning fight with evil.

I sometimes smile at the intense enthusiasm of those around me. The black look of experience, with tales, and records, and facts thickly strewn over its pages, whose base significance I dare not mention,I know they have not read. Perhaps it is well they should not, for some I shall recognize their handwriting there, and in the unsteady lines find it a little tremulous-the sorrows of Werter, nothing more.

There is a quiet pleasure in tracing out, as imaginary lines, the destiny of each man with whom you are acquainted. Yet often ending in wilder speculatiors, and start the train of possibilities, rather than probabilities. Imagination grandly whirls the former car like the starward bound ærial coursers, far into space and time, and finally rests it on summits of fame to which it is even gross presumption to aspire, and arrant folly to ever dream of reaching. Amazed at the wildness of my fancy, I turn to the humbler car of probabilities. The lame drag-horses of experience pull it slowly along over the coarse flinty pavement of stern fact, at times up the rising ground of success, yet often down the sinking road of failure, until it finally rests on the unambitious top of one

of the thousand hills of respectability—a horizon around it with no attribute of vastness.

Proud and wild were we as we entered the gates of Alma Mater, when they swung back on golden hinges to admit the ambitious candidates. Life and knowledge, and the problems of human existence, were veiled in mystery. Grand and solemn it is to me, that ere we leave, we have reached the springs of human actions-have been led through the walls of divine philosophy, and discovered treasures richer than the Spanish galleons ever bore.*

In years that have not yet been measured in the thread of time, I will return to this place, and, if perchance the old buildings still resist the touch of time, and stately halls in grand and imposing array—all dedicated forever to the cause of learning-do not rest massively in the foundation of the present humbler tenements-I will wander through the corridors-spring up the well-worn stair ways, and face the room we once did occupy, and see in the future what we saw in the past:

"Another name was on the door,

I lingered; all within was noise,

Of songs, and clapping hands and boys,

That crashed the glass, and beat the floor."

I will wander, as long before, over the green turf of this campus,see the idlers carelessly stretched on the lawns, and listen to the clear strains that spring out of hearty breasts, strains that rise up to meet the mystic sounds, which the majestic elms murmur, as the gentle winds from over the sea change them to wind-harps. The swelling Gaudeamus-the more lightsome notes of Litoria-the sadder tones of Alma Mater, now go into my heart and lose themselves among the creations of fancy. I will not forget them. In other scenes fragments of them shall live in my memory, and be held there with all the tenacity with which the amber-like sea-shell retains the music of the deep, when carried to the sanded desert. And I will walk by the margin of the bay, and watch the swift motions of the boats, frail as the cockle shell, and catch "the measured pulse of beating oars "-or follow them as they recede or draw near on the bosom of the ebbing and flowing tide. Those were hours condensed with movements, when, as we

* And hereafter, if from those I know now, there will be one, who shall strike a gallant blow for humanity, or shall lighten the burden of its woes, with joyous satisfaction, I will say to my friends, "I saw the training of that arm. Four years I scanned the light of that eye, flashing with good will to man."