into a dark underbrush. The branches, as they flew back in our faces, left them wet with dew. A wee path, made by the girl's dear feet, guided our footsteps. Perfumes of elderberry and wild cucumber scented the air. A bird, frightened from its nest, made frantic cries above our heads. The underbrush thickened. Presently the gloom of the hemlocks was over us, and in the midst of the shadowy green a tulip-tree flaunted its leaves. Waves boomed and broke upon the shore below. There was a growing dampness as we went on, treading very lightly. A little green snake ran coquettishly from us. A fat and glossy squirrel chattered at us from a safe height, stroking his whiskers with a complaisant air.

At length we reached the "place." It was a circle of velvet grass, bright as the first blades of spring, delicate as fine seaferns. The sunlight, falling down the shaft between the hemlocks, flooded it with a softened light and made the forest round about look like deep purple velvet. My little godchild stood in the midst and raised her wand impressively.

"This is my place," she said, with a sort of wonderful gladness in her tone. "This is where I come to the fairy balls. Do you see ⚫hem ?"

"See what?" whispered one tiny boy. "The fairies."

"Our little girl is gone into the Unknown," she wrote "that Unknown in which she seemed to be forever trying to pry. We knew she was going, and we told her. She was quite brave, but she begged us to try some way to keep her till after Christmas. My presents are not finished yet,' she made moan. 'And I did so want to see what I was going to have. You can't have a very happy Christmas without me, I should think. Can you arrange to keep me somehow till after then?' We could not arrange' either with God in heaven or science upon earth, and she is gone."

She was only my little godchild, and I am an old maid, with no business fretting over children, but it seemed as if the medium of light and beauty had been taken from me.

"Do you see them ?" he asked, his voice trembling with expectancy.

"Indeed," I said, "I fear I am too old and wicked to see fairies, and yet—are their hats red ?"

"They are," laughed my little girl. "Their hats are red, and as small-as small!" She held up the pearly nail of her wee finger to give us the correct idea.

whatever was loveliest. However, what was, was! I returned to my home and took up a course of Egyptian history, and determined to concern myself with nothing this side the Ptolemies.

Her mother has told me how, on Christmas Eve, as usual, she and Elsbeth's father filled the stockings of the little ones, and hung them, where they had always hung, by the fireplace. They had little heart for the task,

"Oh, very pointed!"

"And their garments are green ?" "As green as grass." "And they blow little horns ?" "The sweetest little horns!"

"I think I see them," I cried.

expenditures, and had heaped upon the two tiny boys all the treasures they thought would appeal to them. They asked themselves how they could have been so insane previously as to exercise economy at Christmas time, and what they meant by not getting Elsbeth the autoharp she had asked for the year

"And now-" began her father, thinking of harps. But he could not complete this sentence, of course, and the two went on passionately and almost angrily with their task. There were two stockings and two piles of

toys. Two stockings only, and only two piles of toys! Two is very little!

They went away and left the darkened room, and after a time they slept-after a long time. Perhaps that was about the time the tiny boys awoke, and, putting on their little dressing-gowns and bed slippers, made a dash for the room where the Christmas things were always placed. The older one carried a candle which gave out a feeble light. The other followed behind through the silent house. They were very impatient and eager, but when they reached the door of the sitting-room they stopped, for they saw that another child was before them.

It was a delicate little creature, sitting in her white night-gown, with two rumpled funny braids falling down her back, and she seemed to be weeping. As they watched, she arose, and, putting out one slender finger as a child does when she counts, she made sure over and over again-three sad times-that there were only two stockings and two piles of toys! Only those and no more.

The little figure looked so familiar that the boys started toward it; but just then, putting up her arm and bowing her face in it, as Elsbeth had been used to do when she wept or was offended, the little thing glided away and went out. That's what the boys said. It went out as a candle goes out.

They ran and woke their parents with the tale, and all the house was searched in a wonderment, and disbelief, and hope, and tumult! But nothing was found. For nights they watched. But there was only the silent house. Only the empty rooms. They told the boys they must have been mistaken. But the boys shook their heads.

Alack!

The next Christmas I helped with the little festival. It was none of my affair, but I asked to help, and they let me, and when we were all through there were three stockings and three piles of toys, and in the largest one was all the things that I could think of that my dear child would love. I locked the boys' chamber that night, and I slept on the divan in the parlor off the sitting-room. I slept but little, and the night was very still-so windless and white and still that I think I must have heard the slightest noise. Yet I heard none. Had I been in my grave I think my ears would not have remained more unsaluted.

Yet when daylight came and I went to unlock the boys' bedchamber door, I saw that the stocking and all the treasures which I had bought for my little godchild were gone. There was not a vestige of them remaining!

Of course we told the boys nothing. As for me, after dinner I went home and buried myself once more in my history, and so interested was I that midnight came without my knowing it. I should not have looked up at all, I suppose, to become aware of the time, had it not been for a faint, sweet sound as of a child striking a stringed instrument. It was so delicate and remote that I hardly heard it, but so joyous and tender that I could not but listen, and when I heard it a second time it seemed as if I caught the echo of a child's laugh. At first I was puzzled. Then I remembered the little autoharp I had placed among the other things in that pile of vanished toys. I said aloud:

"Farewell, dear little ghost. Go rest. Rest in joy, dear little ghost. Farewell, farewell."

That was years ago, but there has been silence since. Elsbeth was always an obedient little thing.

The coming and the going of the light, The pure stars shining, wheeling through the night,

The rousing and the onset of the storm, Love's happy voices when the days are warm,

torical forms-Romanism and Protestantism. In the first we see Christianity not yet set free from Judaism and paganism. Chiefly, according to Sabatier, it is the latter which modifies and corrupts Christianity; in this estimate we do not altogether agree. We think Romanism is the new experience of Christian relationship, expressed in ancient forms, pårtly Hebraic, partly Greek, partly Roman. Sabatier, however, apparently thinks that "the material is Greek in form, in color, in every fiber of its tissue." "Names and etiquettes were changed, but not the things themselves;" which appears to us but a halftruth. A new life was poured into the old forms; the forms were partially Christianized by the process, and the life was partially paganized by the forms. This principle Sabatier himself seems to us to recognize in the sentence: "Christian piety becomes [in Roman Catholicism] devotion, i. e., a ritual and meritorious practice, as in the ancient cults. But we must not be unjust and attribute something to Catholicism that it condemns. It does not say that external practice is sufficient; the Church esteems it vain and even culpable unless accompanied by the affections and the will." This appears to us admirably to indicate the position which Romanism, as a development, but an imperfect development, occupies. Paganism is indifferent to morality, and regards the external ritual alone essential. Ghristianity-the Christianity of Jesus Christ and of Paul-regards the external rite with indifference, and cares only to establish the filial and the fraternal relation. Romanism insists on both the rite and the life. Protest ant Christianity, to continue our report of Sabatier, is not a new cult, a new dogma, a new rite; he who so apprehends it wholly misapprehends it. It is a reaffirmation that the filial relation is the all-essential and the only essential, since out of that must necessarily spring, also, the fraternal relation. Protestantism "is not a dogma set up in the face of another dogma, a Church in competition with a rival Church, a purified Catholicism opposed to a traditional Catholicism. It is more and better than a doctrine, it is a method; more and better than a better Church, it is a new form of piety; it is a different spirit, creating a new world and inaugurating for religious souls a new régime." This is an admirable statement of Protestantism idealized. And from this ideal Sabatier rightly concludes that Protestantism can have no permanent forms-neither of ritual nor dogma. "Always interior, invisi

ble, ideal, the religious principle that it represents accompanies the life and activity of the spirit into all the paths that man may pursue and in all the progress that he may make." But it appears to us that Sabatier is, though quite unconsciously, unjust to Romanism, in thus comparing Romanism as it actually exists with Protestantism as he idealizes it. In setting bounds which religious development must not pass, and in undertaking to express itself in formularies which cannot be changed, Protestantism is inconsistent with itself. Traditionalism, which i is consistent and in place in the Church of Rome, is incongruous and out of place in any Protestant Church. If Protestantism is to be idealized, Rome should be idealized also; in which case Protestantism would represent illimitable development springing from the heart of a Christian demccracy—that is, of a people all of whom are in direct filial relation with the Father-God, and receive illumination and guidance directly from him; Romanism would represent a limited and cautious development under the control of a Christian hierarchy—that is, of an ecclesiastical autocracy which stands, or is believed to stand, in direct filial relation with God.

It is not necessary for us to follow Sabatier further into his third division, “ Dogma and its Nature." That dogma is necessary, because it is the expression of life, and that it is necessarily unstable because the life is ever changing, follow, of course, from his positions as already reported. The soul lives; therefore it must express its life. It lives in communities; therefore it must formulate common expressions of its life. These common expressions of a common experience, when emotional, are hymns; when intellectual, are dogmas. And in each case they must change with changes of language and of life.

It has seemed to us, on the whole, that we could do our readers a better service by reporting this book than by criticising it. Those who, with us, welcome the "newer thinking" as an advance on the old will welcome this volume as a valuable contribution to that broad, catholic, and liberal the ology which has for its teachers such men as Erskine, Maurice, Robertson, Bushnell, Brooks, and Beecher. Those who identify the Christian faith with the old expressions of it in theology will regard this volume as a most dangerous one, just because its style is so clear and its spirit so devout.

President Eliot on Educational

Reform'

The literature of education is rapidly becoming worthy of its subject. The dull, jejune, homiletic treatises of former days have now given way to scholarly, virile, and practical discussions of this great phase of human interest and activity. Americans may well be proud of the fact that the writings of their countrymen are just now the most effective contributions to clearness of educational thought and to improvement of educational practice.

In the forefront of students and administrators of education stands the dignified and courageous figure of the President of our oldest university. For nearly thirty years he has sounded the bugle-call for the army of educational progress, and under his leadership that army has made conquests that have mightily promoted the efficiency, the culture, and the civilization of our people. President Eliot is probably the most potent personal force that has ever affected American education. Horace Mann aroused the sleeping conscience and intelligence of New England, and called it to the search for its duty as to public education; but President Eliot has not only led Harvard University to the point where it has become one of the most efficient educational institutions in the world, but he has pointed the way to the recasting of all elementary, secondary, and collegiate education, to the end that waste may be averted, individual capacity discovered and developed, and the standard of the Nation's intelligence elevated to a higher plane. All this is abundantly testified to by the volume of essays and addresses from his pen that has just been published. Their distinguishing characteristics are candor, knowledge, forcefulness, and, when necessary, combativeness. They touch education at every point. They never fail in clearness, in definiteness, or in broad sympathy both for studies and for

men.

The first paper of the volume is Dr. Eliot's inaugural address as President of Harvard College. It was delivered twenty-nine years

Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses. By Charles William Eliot, LL.D., President of Harvard University. The Century Company, New York. $2.

ago; yet it foreshadows with unerring accu” racy the development of the writer's subsequent thought. It definitely turns aside from the weary debates, centuries long, as to the relative importance of various subjects of study, and sharply directs attention to the defective methods of organizing and imparting instruction. "The practice of England and America is literally centuries behind the precepts of the best thinkers upon education." That sentence may almost be said to be the text of the papers that follow.

Since, in the long run, the efficiency of all schools depends upon the standards set by the highest, it is to the regeneration of colleges and universities that Dr. Eliot turns first. What is a liberal education? Are the colleges now giving a liberal education? These were among the earliest questions that Dr. Eliot undertook to answer. His reply to the first question is, substantially, that a liberal education is not something fixed and definite in content, but rather something that expands with the progress of knowledge and the movement of civilization. A liberal education, therefore, must be defined in other terms than those of the old and fixed courses of study. It must be broad, catholic, generous; no human interest may be a stranger to it. Otherwise the higher education itself is in danger.

"Liberal education is not safe and strong in a country in which the great majority of the men who belong to the intellectual professions are not liberally educated. Now, that is just the case in this country. The great majority of the men who are engaged in the practice of law and medicine, in journalism, in public service and the scientific professions, and in industrial leadership, are not bachelors of arts. . . . This sorry condition of things is doubtless due in part to what may be called the pioneer condition of American society; but I think it is also due to the antiquated state of the common college curriculum, and of the course of preparatory study at school. When institutions of learning cut themselves off from the sympathy and support of large numbers of men whose lines are intellectual, by refusing to recognize as liberal arts and disciplinary studies languages, literatures, and sciences which seem to these men as important as any which the institutions cultivate, they