Saints:
  Or in the night, after a little sleep,
  I wake, the chill stars sparkle; I am wet
  With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost,
  I wear an undressed goatskin on my neck,
  And in my weak, lean arms I lift the Cross,
  And strive and wrestle with Thee till I die.
  O mercy, mercy, wash away my sin!"

A mournful spectacle. Devotion excited to madness, while mind, heart, and conscience, all are dumb, and the poor weak body only bears the heavy burdens which the tyrannous soul heaps upon it!

Devotion, then, needs conscience. Conscience tells a man that he must act as well as pray. Devotion makes the great act of prayer. Conscience works out into the actual of every-day life, the ideal of which devotion has conceived. Will then devotion and conscience be sufficient for a noble manhood? Devotion and conscience alone developed, have ofttimes, in the days that are past, formed some stern old grand inquisitor, torturing the life out of human sinews because he ought. The grand inquisitor's devotion and conscience told him that he ought to advance the holy faith by every engine in his power, and therefore, as he considered that the rack, the thumbscrews, the rope, the fire and the faggot were the best possible engines, he used the same to the utmost of his ability; and thought, alas for humanity! that he was doing God service.

The grand inquisitor had devotion, he had conscience, he probably also had nerves of iron; but he could not possibly have had a heart. Devotion, then, and conscience need a loving, human heart. Will these three be sufficient? The picture grows fairer, we begin to feel less pain when we turn away from the stern, dark portrait of the grand inquisitor, which frowns so grimly in the picture gallery of history, and look upon that fair and gentle upturned face, half shaded by the veil that covers her head. That is a nun of the order of Saint Theresa.

The pale, emaciated countenance tells of many a vigil protracted through the long hours of the night; those wild eyes once saw, or thought they saw, the picture of the Virgin hanging in her cell smiling on her as she prayed; yea, and have wept many a tear as she repeated her sins over to her confessor, or as she stood by the bed-side of some poor sufferer, while those gentle Christian hands smoothed the dying pillow. Rest in peace, soul sainted and dear! The tears thou didst once shed, are wiped away now forever; the sins thou didst once bewail, are all forgiven now, for thou hast loved much!

But the day of nuns has gone forever. A higher development must be sought for. The nun becomes impossible when we train the intellect; Devotion says, Worship; the Mind adds, The Lord thy God. The Conscience says, Do right; the Intellect shows what is right. The Heart says, Love thy fellow-men; the Intellect tells the right way of loving them. Piety and charity! these are glorious! these are the two angels from Heaven which prompt us to help our brothers who need our help; but intellect must show us the way to do it. To take a single instance. Piety and charity cannot show us how to drain and ventilate and rebuild the hovels of the poor in New York. No, every spade, every saw, every hammer employed in that most righteous undertaking must be directed by intellect, by science. Piety and charity may prompt, but intellect must guide.

I know full well that many a woman's heart, guided only by her sacred instinct of loving, acts out the law of right without any conscious questioning of the intellect; that a thousand tender feet carry the gospel of Christ along the alleys of New York and London, or along the corridors of the Crimean hospital, though even there also woman's wit has to aid woman's heart. The noble heart, the Christian love of Florence Nightingale took her to those eastern shores; this made the voice tender and the hand gentle. But whoso reads the account of what she did, will see that beside these, wit and wisdom, keen discerning of means to ends, ability to see what ought to be done, intellect, reason in short, was necessary in order to make a Florence Nightingale possible, together with an exhaustless fund of bodily endurance, fortitude and stoicism.

Thus, then, we find that devotion, conscience, heart, and intellect are all necessary to each other in the harmonious development of Human Nature. Will they be found sufficient for a perfect life?

Put together a strong soul, a tender conscience, a woman's heart, and a man's intellect, and we have a Charlotte Bronté,—surely one of the best types of the modern mind. Will she find these four noble parts of Human Nature sufficient for the task of living?

Let Charlotte Bronté answer, walking painfully across the moor with hand held hard to beating side, sitting now and then upon a stone to keep herself from falling, wondering why the daylight blinds her so, obliged to give up Villette owing to the terrible headaches which it brings on. Let Charlotte Bronté answer, dying before her time at thirty-nine years of age, when the path of fame was just beginning to be bright before her, and the world was just beginning to know how much it wanted her. Charlotte Bronté, the gifted and the feeble, the lynx-eyed and the blind, so full of glorious strength and pitiable weakness! Charlotte Bronté, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard as a giant's grasp upon her throat! Charlotte Bronté cannot tell why she is so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,—why earth, our beautiful earth, is like a charnel house to her. And yet we think that the most ordinary passerby could see very satisfactory reasons why Charlotte Bronté was what she was, and felt what she felt. Hollow cheek and faded eye, teach their wisdom to their possessor last of all. The pale-eyed school-girl, who never played along with the other children, never ran and laughed and shouted with the rest, little knew what days and hours and years of dulness, of pain and agony, she was laying up for the future, what a premature grave she was digging for herself. Peace be with her, her toil is over; it is now three years since Heaven received in Charlotte Bronté one angel more.

Intellect, then, needs body. Come, then, and see me build a Man! A calm, silent devotion, a conscience pure and reverent, a heart manful and true, an intellect clear and keen, a frame of iron,—with these will we dower our hero, and call him Washington!

From me Washington needs no eulogy. Free America is at once his eulogy and his monument! It is useless to say more. Every one here feels in his heart a higher praise than can be uttered by the tongue. But let me ask you, What would Washington's qualities of mind and heart have availed his country, unless the manly strength, the frame of iron had been added? A good man he might have been, a patriot he surely would have been; but the Father of his Country, never! The soul that trusted in God, the conscience that felt the omnipotence of justice and right, the heart that beat for his country's weal alone, the mind that thought out her freedom, was upborne by the body that knew no fatigue, by the nerves that knew not how to tremble.

Washington had to endure physical fatigue enough to have killed three ordinary men. And how well did his youth prepare him for a life of protracted toil. Hear his biographer Irving. "He was a self-disciplinarian in physical as well as mental matters, and practised himself in all kinds of athletic exercises, such as running, leaping, pitching quoits, and tossing bars. His frame even in infancy had been large and powerful, and he now excelled most of his playmates in contests of agility and strength. As a proof of his muscular power, a place is still pointed out at Fredericksburg, near the lower ferry, where, when a boy, he threw a stone across the river. In