Constantine and the Church: Imperial Favor and Vanity
By Joseph Harvey Waggoner
We must not lose sight of the fact that in making the church attractive Constantine was glorifying himself. While the bishops readily accepted personal favors and counted them as so much gained to the cause of Christ, they in turn seemed to think they were glorifying God by extolling the emperor, with much of the same feeling that actuates the followers of the pope to this day. Thus Neander says:— “It flattered his vanity to be considered the favorite of God and his destined instrument to destroy the empire of the evil spirits (the heathen deities). The Christians belonging to his court were certainly not wanting on their part to confirm him in this persuasion, having many of them come to the same conclusion themselves, dazzled by the outward splendor which surrounded the emperor, and which passed over from him to the visible church, and by looking at what the imperial power, which nothing any longer withstood, could secure for the outward interests of the church.” “Bishops in immediate attendance upon the emperor so far forgot, indeed, to what master they belonged that at the celebration of the third decennium of his reign one of them congratulated him as constituted by God the ruler over all in the present world, and destined to reign with the Son of God in the world to come. The feelings of Constantine himself were shocked at such a parallel!”—Neander, pp. 22, 23. Willard (Universal History) says:— “Surely it was not in the spirit of Christ, who said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ that Constantine made it the religion of the empire; and from henceforth we find its heavenly influence sullied by mingling with earthly things.” Whelpley, in his Compend of History, says:— “From this period the Christian church was loaded with honor, wealth, and power, nor did her virtue ever sustain a severer trial. The chief dignitaries of the empire could scarcely do less than imitate their master; and Christianity soon became a necessary qualification for public office. The church now no longer appeared in her ancient simplicity and purity; lords and princes were among her converts, and she was dressed in robes of state. Her ceremonies were increased; her forms of worship were loaded with pomp and splendor; her doctrines were intermingled with the senseless jargon of a philosophy equally absurd and vain, and the way seemed prepared not only for the decay of Christian doctrine and morality but of every science which distinguishes civilized from savage nations.”—Page 206. Guericke goes so far as to ascribe to Constantine and his unwise course the evils which befell the empire under Julian; and this not without a show of reason, as the following extract gives us to understand:— “Julian, a nephew of Constantine the Great, who, when a child, had seen his nearest kindred fall a sacrifice to the jealousy of Constantine, and had been trained up in solitude by worthless teachers for the clerical profession, soon learned to look with a secret bitterness upon the existing state of things, while a Christianity thus forced upon him by a hated court could not take root in his heart.”—Ancient Church, p. 244. With worldly preferments came bitter jealousies between the bishops, and from the time of the Nicene Council there was unceasing strife and war of words about doctrines and forms. The example set by Constantine of compelling conformity was followed by the several bishops to whom he had given the power of determining causes in the State as well as in the church. And while his action in that respect was for the purpose of giving uniformity of faith to the churches, it had directly the contrary effect when imitated by a number of bishops, as their creeds differed and their powers conflicted. Thus unmistakably does an evil tree bring forth evil fruit, however much men may admire it in its growth. It was in this age that the controversy between the Arians and Trinitarians raged fiercely, and the temporizing policy of Constantine, who, in the vain hope of uniting them, now favored this party and now that, served to embitter both parties, and to render them more determined and vindictive as their hopes and fears were raised alternately. We may be excused for giving at least one specimen of church literature, coming to us from the age immediately succeeding that of Constantine, to show both the spirit and subject of the controversy. It is from the “Orthodox,” or Roman side of the question:— “Since, then, Nestorius, that God-assaulting tongue, that second conclave of Caiaphas, that workshop of blasphemy, in whose case Christ is again made a subject of bargain and sale, by having his nature divided and torn asunder, . . . . . since, then, he thrust aside and rejected the term, Mother of God, which had been already wrought by the Holy Spirit, through the instrumentality of many chosen fathers, and substituted a spurious one of his own coining, Mother of Christ.”—Evagrius’ History, p. 4. Such effusions as the above, by no means scarce in that age, are worthy of the place they occupied, standing as they did midway between the inquisition and the corrupting influence of Constantine’s conformity acts, which paved the way for the inquisition. We turn now to the consideration of the story of Constantine’s vision of the cross. By those who are wont to ascribe to Constantine the qualities of a genuine Christian, and to extol his actions as of great benefit to the cause of pure religion, this vision has been dwelt upon as an event of the utmost importance, yes, as the very turning point in the struggle between paganism and Christianity. It is to be regretted that so often idle stories will obtain general credence and pass into history for settled truth, because they are suffered to exert an influence which truth alone should be allowed to exert. There are few who have not heard the story that Alexander the Great, after conquering the world, wept because there were no more worlds for him to conquer, and the belief in this story has become so general that it is considered, in the minds of most people, a truth not to be disputed. Yet the story is utterly groundless. This will illustrate our remark. This story about Alexander, however, is entirely harmless. But not so the story of Constantine’s vision of the cross. That has been used as an evidence that he was led by the Lord himself, even in his battles, and that he was the favorite of Heaven, chosen to establish the Christian religion in the Roman Empire. Yet history plainly shows that it is only an idle tale. And here again we should feel called upon to apologize for the amount of evidence offered, were it not that we consider the subject one of real importance. For, surely, if Constantine did see such a vision, if Heaven thus miraculously called him to set up the cross of the Prince of Peace as the standard by which he should establish his empire and slay his enemies; if the life and acts of Constantine were not only favored but directed by the Lord, as his flatterers assumed, that fact should be well attested. But, on the other hand, if it was a mere fable by means of which a superstitious people were deluded into the belief that a selfish, jealous, ambitious warrior was divinely directed in his battles; and if this fable has been, and even yet is, used to give influence to systems or forms of worship invented by Constantine or adopted from paganism and forced upon the church by imperial authority, then too much pains cannot be taken to expose the cheat, and thus to rescue the minds of men from the bewildering mazes of traditional error. We may say here with the apostle Paul, “If any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant;” that is, any man may choose ignorance if it pleases him. But there is no necessity for remaining so; for no point seems to be made more clear. Whelpley speaks of it thus:— “There are various accounts given and various opinions formed concerning the conversion of Constantine. Whether his mind was swayed by the power of truth, or by temporal, political, and interested motives, is not easy to determine. It is related, and believed by some, that his conversion was miraculous. They say that he saw in the heavens the sign of the cross with this inscription in radiant letters, touto nika, i. e., ‘By this conquer;’ and that upon this, he immediately embraced Christianity. His life and conduct were by no means eminent for Christian virtue; nor was he wholly free from crimes of the deepest dye.”—Compend, p. 206. He discredits the story on the just ground that Constantine’s life, neither before nor after that time, gave any evidence of being guided by Heaven or influenced by Christian principles. “The silence not only of all contemporary history, but of Eusebius himself, in his Ecclesiastical History, gives a most dangerous advantage to those who altogether reject the story.”—History, p. 287. Neander takes the same view of the case that is given by Whelpley above:— “But the supposition of a miracle here is one which has in itself nothing to recommend it, especially when we consider that the conversion, as it is called, of the Roman emperor, such as it really was, could in no wise possess the same significance in the sight of God, who respected not the person, but looked upon the heart alone as an acceptable sacrifice, as it had in the eyes of men dazzled and deceived by outward show. In this particular way it is scarcely possible to conceive that a change of heart, which is the only change which deserves to be called a conversion, could have been wrought. Much rather might we presume that, in this way, the emperor would be misled to combine pagan superstition with a mere coloring of Christianity. And were we to judge of the end which this miracle was designed to subserve, by the general consequences of the emperor’s conversion on the Christian church within the Roman Empire, it might be questioned whether these consequences were really so benign in their influence on the progress of the kingdom of God, as they were imagined to be by those persons who, dazzled by outward show, saw in the external power and splendor of the Christian church a triumph of Christianity.” And in this connection he gives an additional fact which is of great importance, namely, that the story was varied to suit the different tastes of the different classes in his army:— “Pagans saw, in this case, the gods of the eternal city engaged to deliver them from the disgraceful yoke. Among them, accordingly, was circulated the legend of a heavenly army, seen in the air, and sent by the gods to the succor of Constantine. Among the Christians, on the other hand, the story was propagated of an appearance of the cross.”—Neander, vol. ii, p. 9. This proves that it was not an appearance which the soldiers professed to see, but merely the story of an appearance, varied to suit the various superstitions of the parties and to give them confidence in their leader in battle. Waddington gives a view of the question as comprehensive as it is concise:— “In the first place, the story which we have shortly given is related by no contemporary author except Eusebius; next, it is related in his Life of Constantine, and not in his Ecclesiastical History; it is related in the year 338, or six-and-twenty years after the supposed appearance; it is related on the authority of Constantine alone, though it must have been witnessed by his whole army, and been notorious throughout his whole empire; and lastly, it was published after the death of Constantine. In an age, wherein pious frauds had already acquired some honor; by a writer, who, respectable as he undoubtedly is, and faithful in most of his historical records, does not even profess those rigid rules of veracity which command universal credit; in a book, which rather wears the character of a partial panegyric than of exact and scrupulous history—a flattering fable might be published and believed; but it can claim no place among the authentic records of history, and, by writers whose only object is truth, it may very safely be consigned to contempt and oblivion.”—Church History, pp. 82, 83. It should be noted that the influence of “Eusebius, the great church historian,” is brought to bear in favor of the story, but it is not related by Eusebius in his history, but only in his eulogy of Constantine, which is generally regarded as not worthy of credit. Dr. Dowling, whose subject led him to a careful examination of this and other events in connection with Constantine’s career, says:— “For my part I have no hesitation in regarding the whole as a fable. It was not till many years after it was said to have occurred that Constantine related the story to Eusebius, and in all probability he did it then by the instigation of his superstitious mother, Helena, the celebrated discoverer of the wood of the true cross (?) at Jerusalem, some 250 years after the destruction of that city and all that it contained, and the disappearance of the identity of its very foundations, under the plowshare of the Roman conqueror Vespasian. The subsequent life of Constantine furnished no evidence that he was a peculiar favorite of Heaven; and the results of his patronage of the church, eventually so disastrous to its purity and spirituality, are sufficient to prove that God would never work a miracle to accomplish such a purpose.”—History of Romanism, p. 31. WHO SHALL BE THERE?
By E. E. Miles
Who shall walk the golden pavements
Of that city built on high,
View with rapture Eden’s glories,
Never seen by mortal eye?
Who shall wear the crown of glory,
Wave on high the victor’s palm?
Who shall see the King in beauty,
And unite in life’s sweet psalm? Who shall walk by life’s cool river?
Who shall meet the loved again,
And, united, part, no, never—
Never feel one throb of pain?
Who shall be where sin and sorrow
Are forever passed away,
Where shall dawn no sad to-morrow,
But shall reign an endless day? Tell me, shall the proud and haughty,
Shall the rich and vain be there?
Can none without gold to offer,
In that city have a share?
Can no poor one, sad and weary,
Who in anguish sighs for rest,
Ever hope to reign immortal
In that land so fair and blest? Lo! the answer cometh to me,
“Blessed are the pure in heart;”
All good things the meek inherit,
In Christ’s kingdom have a part.
Poor and lowly, though the owner
And despised by rich and great,
They can claim far greater riches
Than the proudest man’s estate. —E. E. Miles, in World’s Crisis. The Best Part of Life: Daily Duties
THE best part of one’s life is the performance of his daily duties. All higher motives, ideals, conceptions, sentiments, in a man are of no account if they do not come down and strengthen him for the better discharge of the duties which devolve upon him in the ordinary affairs of life. Christ’s First Temptation.
By Thirza M. Foster
“Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.” Matt. 4: 1, 2. The person here tempted was Jesus. He was so named because it was said of him, “He shall save his people from their sins.” The tempter was the devil, the prince of the fallen angels. The Holy Spirit suffered Satan to tempt our Redeemer, that by this means he might manifest his pure and sinless character. The Father designed that the very ways which the tempter employed to disqualify his Son for the work of redemption should increase his fitness for that work. “For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” Heb. 2: 10. “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.” Heb. 5: 8. The first Adam, placed in the garden of Eden, with everything pleasant to look upon and good for food, yielded to the power of Satan, disobeyed God, and fell. The second Adam, away in the wilderness, “with the wild beasts,” after a long fast, and when suffering keenly from hunger, encountered the same wily foe, obeyed God, and overcame. We read, “And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” Matt. 4: 3. Jesus in his mediatorial work “took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.” His human nature rendered him dependent upon his Father’s providential care; and to have wrought a miracle by converting stones into bread, to supply himself with food, would have been to distrust God’s promises and withdraw his confidence in his Father’s all-sufficient power to provide for him. Satan doubtless pretended to be a friend to Jesus. He reminded him how much he needed bread, and advised him to take care of himself, at the same time insinuating that if he did not exercise his power, he would be wanting in proof of his divine mission; for he says, “If thou be the Son of God,” &c., implying a doubt as to whether he really was the Son of God or not. Having considered the nature of this temptation, and the motive which Satan presented to give it effect, let us now see how Jesus met and repelled it. “But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Matt. 4: 4. The expression, “It is written,” frequently occurs in the New Testament, and refers us back to the Old Testament Scriptures. Whatever is written there is always referred to by Christ and his apostles as sufficient proof of any doctrine to be believed, or duty to be performed. The scripture to which our Saviour here referred is written in Deut. 8: 3: “And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not; neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.” This passage was very appropriate to the circumstances in which Jesus was then placed. Israel journeyed forty years in the wilderness, when they were ignorant as to how they would be provided for. God wanted to teach them to put their trust in him and depend wholly upon his word; and he verified his promise unto them, and fed them with bread from heaven. “Man did eat angels’ food.” Jesus knew that he was in the path of duty. God by his Spirit had led him into a solitary place to fast and pray, that he might be better prepared for the work he would have to do, and the trials he would have to endure. Jesus when he was upon earth ate and drank to sustain life, but he did not make it his first inquiry, What shall I eat, or what shall I drink? Oh, no. He made it more than his meat and drink to do his Father’s will. He said to disciples, “I have meat to eat that ye know not of. . . . My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish his work.” Jesus was tempted, yet without sin. He was always obedient, his faith never wavered; he overcame, and he is set down at the right hand of the Majesty in the Heavens, there to make reconciliation for us. Satan is working in this world with all power. He has agents helping him all through the land. They design to overcome the little company who are striving to keep the commandments of God. We need to fortify ourselves mightily to withstand their influence. Then let us give heed to the exhortation of the apostle, and have on “the whole armor of God” and “above all take the shield of faith.” Jesus in every encounter with the adversary held fast to this shield. He fully believed every word which proceeded out of the mouth of God. It is only such faith as this, that will make us valiant soldiers for God and his truth. Satan can do nothing with those who by faith stand upon God’s immutable word. They may be looked upon as the filth and offscouring of the world. They may have to follow Jesus into prison and to death, or they may be banished to the most solitary place in the earth, but God will not forsake them. He has promised, saying, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee; be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.” Isa. 41: 10. We can be strong in the Lord to endure every trial, while we look by faith beyond earth’s conflicts to the victor’s crown. We have only a little longer to stay in this wilderness of sin, only a little longer to battle with our foes. Then Jesus the mighty Conqueror will come to deliver his faithful ones, and take them home to reign with him forever in his kingdom. ONE Sunday morning Mrs. Livingston Guyer walked into church very late, as was Mrs. Livingston Guyer’s custom, and at every onward step the drops and bugles on her mantle shook, and the hard ball trimming on her dress rattled, and the beads around her throat clinked, and her hoop ear-rings struck the beads, adding to the clatter, and the dangling ornaments on her bonnet struck like tinkling cymbals. There was a missionary in the pulpit that day, a man browned by foreign suns, who had come to tell the fashionable New York audience of the benighted heathen whom the church of Christ was trying to convert. He told them of the Feejee Islanders who arrayed themselves in fantastic garments covered with curious ornaments, and draped with fringes of beads and balls. He described the rings they wore pendent from their noses, and the bracelets that encircled their arms and ankles. The audience listened attentively, and their sanctimonious faces said, as plainly as words could say it, “From all such folly, good Lord, deliver us!” An old-fashioned fellow sitting under the gallery, one Common Sense, thoroughly unprejudiced, and somewhat unpopular, looked hard at Mrs. Livingston Guyer, and taking into account the fringes, beads, and ornaments on her dress, and the hoops pendent from her ears, and the bracelets on her arms, thought there was a distinction without a difference between this woman and a Feejee Islander. The missionary told his audience of the Burmese women who colored their faces to make them beautiful, and discolored their teeth by chewing betel-nuts. He gave account also of the Africans who blackened their eyebrows with antimony, and stained their finger nails red. The faces of the audience expressed surprise at such unnatural practices; but the old-fashioned fellow in the corner fell to studying the face of a belle present, whitened by some preparation of chalk, and reddened by rouge, and he regarded attentively the teeth of a man discolored by the use of tobacco. He knew, moreover, there were complexions in that audience bleached by eating arsenic, eyes brightened by the use of belladonna, and masses of hair changed by some decoction from the natural tint to a fashionable hue, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, see why the heathen were worse in this respect than these people in a high state of civilization. The missionary informed his audience that heathen devotees tortured their bodies by unnatural contortions and painful attitudes, thinking to appease the anger of an offended deity. The faces of the audience indicated pity for such ignorance; but Common Sense glanced over to a man whose boots were instruments of torture to him, and to a woman whose head was poised in an unnatural attitude, shoulders thrown distressingly high, and a waist compressed until her muscles, sinews, diaphragm, heart, lungs, and liver failed to do the work allotted to them by nature; and, reflecting that this bodily contortion was adopted to propitiate the goddess Fashion, he wondered if the missionary might not return to foreign lands with tales of American heathen. The missionary told his audience of heathen mothers who threw their children into the Ganges, and cast them before Juggernaut, as offerings to their gods. The audience shuddered convulsively at the monstrous tale, but Common Sense had his eye fixed on a shivering child standing within the cold shadows cast by the church. Its neck and arms were bare, and its little knees, blue with the biting cold, knocked together painfully as the child waited for the nurse who held protracted discussion with a boon companion. Common Sense recognized the child as the representative of a large class given up by their mothers to the absurdities of fashionable dress and the incompetency of servants, until disease and premature death were the result; and he wondered if heathen mothers in their sacrifices were more culpable than American mothers in their neglect. The missionary told his audience of the divisions of caste. He informed them that the higher orders despised inferior grades; and if a person fell to an inferior rank, his old companions in the former caste had a right to subject him to insult, and put upon him every indignity their scorn might conceive. Great astonishment was written on the faces of the audience; but Common Sense looked straight at a fashionable woman who shrank from her poor neighbor in the pew, and that very day had refused to speak to a woman whose social position had once been equal with hers, but who, through reverses of fortune, had sunk to a lower station. He thought, with such examples before him, that the orders of caste in heathen society had a parallel in the social divisions of American communities. The missionary told his audience of the heathen belief in oracles and omens, and their practice of consulting jugglers and priests in important affairs of life. The audience smiled contemptuously at their folly; but Common Sense thought of the multitudes who consult fortune-tellers and clairvoyants in important affairs, and saw before him men and women who believed in signs and old witches’ fables, and lately had even put faith in a board called Planchette, and he pronounced them not one whit less heathen than the nations in foreign lands. The missionary horrified his audience by his account of heathen parents who sold their beautiful daughters into slavery, and for a consideration doomed them to a life worse than death. The audience wept over wickedness like this; but Common Sense remembered a marriage ceremony in that Christian church, where the bride was young and beautiful, and the bridegroom old and ugly. He remembered the smiles of the bride’s parent as he gave away the fair girl to the cruel-visaged foreigner, and the disgust on the bride’s face as she shrank away from the man who claimed her as his wife. “Gave her away” were the words the parent used; but they were not true. Sold her away, he should have said; sold her into slavery for money and position. That parent sat within the house of God that day, and in his heart condemned the heathen bargain; but Common Sense saw, with his clear-sighted vision, that the Christian contract was alike criminal. The missionary told his audience of the heathen festivals, with their offerings of gold, fruits, and flowers, and sometimes human lives. He described the attendant drunkenness, debauchery, and immorality, in language that made the Christian audience before him shudder. Common Sense beheld the shudder with a sarcastic smile. He knew of festivals in America with offerings of gold, fruits, flowers, and not infrequently excesses that were suicidal in their nature. He knew that debauchery and drunkenness often marred these social feasts, and that the tone of morality was exceedingly low. He could look around the Christian audience, and see men who, in their club-houses, were no better than the degraded heathen; and women who, in the excesses of fashionable society, violated their marriage vow of love and honor, and sacrificed their true, pure womanliness in the dance and wine-cup until they could not cast the stone of condemnation at their heathen sisters. The missionary told his audience of the abject condition of many foreign tribes who herded together and lived in miserable huts in an atmosphere of filth and degradation. The refined Christian audience sickened at the description, and on their incredulous faces was written questioning if such things could be. Common Sense frowned at the incredulity, and wished they might take a step only a little out of Broadway, where the New York poor huddled in cellars and crowded tenement houses, breathing an air of filth and contamination, and living lives of lowest degradation and crime. It were easier to believe in foreign heathen with such a sight of American heathen. The missionary talked of the nations who bowed to idols and gods of their own making. The Christian audience devoutly thanked God that they were not like those poor heathen; but Common Sense was picking out of that Christian audience men and women who bowed to Mammon, Fashion, Pleasure, Ambition, and a thousand gods of their own making. At the close of the service, the missionary made a powerful plea for foreign missions, and solicited a contribution for ameliorating the condition of the benighted heathen. The audience responded liberally, for their hearts had been touched, and Common Sense smiled approval. His smile was followed by the suggestion that another contribution double the previous sum be taken for ameliorating the condition of American heathen, and advancing the cause of home missions. The audience were utterly confounded, and highly indignant. They did not understand Common Sense at all.—Harper’s Bazaar. Ferdinand II., Grand Duke of Tuscany, was also, it appears, the slave of his infirmities. He was often seen walking up and down his apartment between two large thermometers, at which he anxiously and continually glanced, putting on skull caps, of which he had five or six in his hand, according to the degree of cold or heat that the instrument pointed toward. So,43too, with the Abbe de St. Martin, who, in the seventeenth century, was so notorious for his monomania. He had always nine skull caps on his head to keep him from the cold; and on the top of those he put a wig, which, of course, was never by any chance in its proper position. More than this, he wore nine pairs of stockings, one over the other; his bed was of brick, under which there was a furnace, where he made a fire in order to obtain just that amount of warmth that he desired. The Jesuit Ghezzi wore seven caps under his wig. Fourier, the mathematician, who had returned from Egypt nearly dead with rheumatism, suffered severely when he found himself in a temperature below 20° Réaumur; and a servant followed him about everywhere, in readiness to offer him additional coats and wrappings. During the latter years of his life, when rendered hors de combat by the asthma, from which he had suffered since his youth, he lived almost entirely in a kind of box, which allowed no deviation of the body, and allowed nothing to pass except his head and arms.—Shilling Magazine. Dumb-Bells.
By M. H. W. J.
“When I was managing a cotton-mill,” said Mr. J——, “the girls in the weaving-room used to complain that they could not make the bobbin-boys hear them call for more bobbins. I finally bought several bells, and for a little time they worked well. No matter if the boy was at the other end of the room, the bell made itself heard above the clatter of the looms, and the girl was supplied with full bobbins.” “But by-and-by the girls began to complain that the boys were getting careless about the bells, that they did not pay attention, and they were hindered worse than before. The boys answered that they did not hear the bells, the girls did not half ring them any more. I charged them both to be careful; but things kept growing worse, till finally the overseer came one day and said there would soon be a pitched battle between the weavers and bobbin-boys if something was not done.” “So I went up to the room and took position by one of the looms. When the bobbin-boy was not very far away I rang the bell, but he paid no attention. I studied over the cause a little, and it flashed upon me. A great deal of oil is used about the machinery, the girls’ hands were greasy, the bell-metal porous, and often snatching up the bells by the metal instead of the handle, they had become filled with grease, and would give scarcely more sound than a wooden bell.” “I made a strong solution of sulphuric acid, stood the bells in it awhile, and after they were cleansed and returned to the weaving-room there was peace again between the boys and girls.” But those dumb-bells furnished a text for many reflections to me. I thought, to how many people has the once clear, decisive voice of conscience become a dull sound. When Mrs. A—— asked me to take a dollar chance in an easy chair that somebody had given to a church, and I asked her wherein lay the difference between venturing a dollar there and in any gambling saloon, she told me that she was once just so prudish; but she had thought and prayed over the subject a great deal, and had received light. “The good end justified the wrong means!” When I asked Mr. B——, the liquor-seller, how he dared to deal in the accursed stuff that made widows and orphans, and filled hell with victims, he coolly answered, “Well, to be frank with you, I did have a great many qualms of conscience at first, but I reasoned on the subject, and did not allow myself to be guided by any morbid sentimentality, and as I never sell but to men of means and good pay, who could and would get it somewhere else, I concluded I might as well sell it and get the profit as any one else, and my conscience never disturbs me now at all on the subject.” His dumb-bell was saturated with whiskey—perhaps I ought rather to say—muffled with greenbacks. Miss C—— reminded me again of the dumb-bells when she told me a few days ago, “When I first joined the church I didn’t care to dance any more; I really was so squeamish as to think dancing and card-playing were inconsistent with a profession of Christ. But after a little I fell in with many other church members who enjoyed these amusements, and theater and circus-going, just as much as ever, and I concluded I had been overnice and self-conceited in my ability to judge as to the propriety of the matter. I concluded if I set myself up as too good to do what other Christians did, I might be a stumbling-block, and in that way fail to be, as Paul says, ‘all things to all men, that I might win some,’ or something to that effect. And the more I do as the rest do, the more I am convinced that my later conclusion was the better one.” “My poor young lady,” thought I, “what a very dumb bell yours is—soaked in pleasure and self-seeking!”—M. H. W. J., in American Messenger.