4. That it was performed, usually, in the daytime, in the open air, in highways, fields or groves.

5. That men who perverted dancing from a sacred use to purposes of amusement, were deemed infamous.

6. That no instances of dancing are found upon record in the Bible, in which the two sexes united in the exercise, either as an act of worship or amusement.

7. That there is no instance upon record of social dancing for amusement, except that of the "vain fellows," devoid of shame; of the irreligious families described by Job, which produced increased impiety, and ended in destruction; and of Herodias, which terminated in the rash vow of Herod, and the murder of John the Baptist.

THE SILENT CITY.

even a hearse; only a few carriages. I look amazed, and feel that I have made a mistake. On making inquiry of the man at the gate in regard to the bell-tolling, the answer is, "It is only a child." I ask myself, Is it possible that bell struck so mournfully for a child? Why not ring out merrily, joyfully, that one poor prisoner has escaped the bondage; has broken the chains before they were entirely riveted? Mournfully that one little life has escaped the trials and temptations; fled from the loving shelter of the home-nest, the Father has rested His hand in blessing on the innocent head, and we must submit to His will.

Do we give that little soul back to God grudgingly, that we should toll a bell when its clay is entering a place where it will rest; where the soul will have that peace which we cannot give it? Let us sing no requiem, but rather a happy refrain, that one little one has gone without tasting the bitterness of sin; before the yoke has become insupportable, and sunk the wearer deeper into degradation and crime.

Reader, have you ever visited Greenwood, that city of the dead? And did you not find quietness there? Entering, and strolling through the various walks, looking on all those mounds that, not long ago, represented animated beings endowed with all the passions that man is heir to, and now are nothing but dust, must you not also drop some of the selfishness of everyday life while you are here? You surely would not bring any resentment or ill-will with. you to disturb the serenity of the dead. Does not the very atmosphere seem suggestive of rest? At no other place do the skies seem so ethereally lovely.

Sitting down by one of the lakes, with the birds warbling sweetly and loudly, as if their whole voice was given to singing their Master's praise, I could dream my life away quietly, evenly. As the place is, it looks like a calm, peaceful village: a village where the tongue of scandal is for ever hushed. Here are its church-spires of marble gleaming through the trees; there, is some gentleman's residence, with the grounds embellished by rare statuary, meandering brooks, and rare exotics, with everything that could cater to a refined and sensitive mind. Is it possible that our poor bodies shall repose in a garden like this until the Master shall call us? How many of us envy the sleepers their rest! The poor lie as easily as the rich. Mahogany and satin are no softer than pine and muslin. True, the rich have a marble or granite shaft gleaming high through the sunshine, but do they lie less low? Friends have erected tributes of respect to their memories; but to the passers-by they but mark the spot where the body reposes. But hark! the bell is tolling; some one is entering the portal. Some soul has gone to that bourne from which no traveler ever returns; has unraveled that mystery which the Father has lovingly promised us when our earthly pleasures have fled.

The mournful peal announces some newcomer. It must be a man of mark; some benevolent person, whose loss will be keenly felt by many. Out of respect, I walk down to meet the cortége, and condole with the sorrowing friends. I find no imposing array, no grand military parade, not

There are a thousand joyous things in life,
Which pass unheeded in a life of joy,
As thine hath been, till breezy sorrow comes
To ruffle it ; and daily duties, paid
Scarcely at first, at length will bring repose
To the sad mind that studies to perform them.
-Talfourd.

TOM PAINE'S RECANTATION.

MR. Z. F. SMITH, of Eminence, Kentucky, writes to the Louisville Courier-Journal, saying that he has found Thomas Paine's deliberate recantation of his atheistic opinions. Mr. Smith says that the recantation is printed in a book consisting of pamphlets bound together, and that the title-page reads as follows:

"The Recantation: Being an Anticipated Valedictory Address of Thomas Paine to the French Directory. New York. Printed for the Author. 1797.”

We copy that part of the document which constitutes the recantation:

"Having for some time past experienced great compunction of mind by reflecting on my late presumptuous and inconsiderate attack on the Christian religion-I say inconsiderate, because I did not at that time sufficiently consider the arguments in vindication of its Divine original which abound in the works of many of its able and distinguished defenders, especially those advanced by the celebrated Mr. Locke, in his excellent Essay on Faith and Reason,' and the masterly and conclusive arguments in its favor drawn from a consideration of its internal evidences by the ingenious Scamme Jennings, a man who, like myself, at one time discarded every idea of a revealed religion. And, as I have ever wished to support the character of a man of candor, I have always thought it my duty attentively to weigh and impartially to consider the various publications that have appeared in the world as answers either to my political or religious principles-hence I have been led to peruse the last answer to my 'Age of Reason,' written by the learned Dr. Watson. I believe it is a fact well known that I have never been much attached to the priesthood; but, however, in considering his work, I endeavored to lose sight of the local profession of the man, and applied myself to a close and impartial investigation of his argument. He is certainly

ARMENIAN ABBEY OF ST. LAZARUS, NEAR VENICE.

cause he has espoused. In him the learned and ingenious Gibbon found an opponent whom he dared not attempt to oppose, and I must candidly avow, whatever odium and disgrace it may expose me to from those men whose minds are not open to conviction, and will not acknowledge their error merely because of having long persisted in it, that in his book I found all my objections answered, and all the imaginary difficulties which lay in the way of my receiving Christianity fully removed. I have, therefore, been led to re-peruse the Scriptures in a much more unprejudiced and attentive manner than I ever did, the result of which is, that I am now fully convinced, upon clear and rational principles, of my mistaken zeal, in vainly attempting to sap the foundation of the Christian's hope and endeavoring to promote the cause of infidelity. And I do hereby publicly, candidly, and solemnly retract and regret my infatuated presumption in engaging to attempt the destruction of that Divine structure which is built upon the Rock of Ages, and which will assuredly flourish after my name and that of all its opposers, for upward of seventeen hundred years, are buried in oblivion. Whatever my former prejudices against revelation may have been, they are now all vanished, and I firmly believe that God has been graciously pleased at sundry times to make known His will to man, as an aid to the great but fallible gifts of reason. And I do most sincerely regret my temerity in having given so much offense to the pious and well-disposed part of the community, both in Europe and America."

a man that does honor to his profession. In his 'Apology for the Bible,' he makes a full display of those peculiar talents which he so eminently possesses for vindicating the

WANT OF PATIENCE.-More failures are consummated by want of faith and want of patience than anything else in the world. We cannot grow rich by sowing mustard-seeds on a damp flannel, though they begin to sprout before our very eyes. Concentration is not isolation or self-absorption.

TO-DAY.-Enjoy the present, whatever it may be, and be not solicitous for the future; for if you take your foot from the present standing and thrust it forward to to-morrow's event, you are in a restless condition. We are dead to yesterday, and not yet born to to-morrow.

DISCOVERY OF TRUTH.-To dis cover a truth and to separate it from a falsehood is surely an occupation worthy of the best intellect, and not at all unworthy of the best heart.

THE ARMENIANS.

BY GEORGE SMITH.

FOUR nationalities, or wellindividualized races, have a living interest in the issue of the struggle in which the Turk has recently been engaged. The Hellenic people, claim their old land up to the Maritza, in the first instance, and would fain reenter Constantinople at once as the representative of the Powers which cannot trust Russia. The Sclav is as much the heir of the future as the Hellen of the past. Could the two agree, there would be no room for Russia south of the Danube, and the Eastern Question would be solved so far as its European side is concerned. But, in spite of the slavish

vices of a long-oppressed people, the Sclavs may escape both Austrian and Russian domination, and find time to prepare for independence under the guarantee of Europe. The Asiatic side of the question, also, involves the destiny of two races, older than even the Hellenic, and long more outraged than the Sclavonian. The Jew and the Armenian find their origin in the roots of history. They point to their ancestors by name in the Bible register of the sons of Noah, who colonized the old world from the still Armenian Ararat. If the Jew is silent while the empire of the Turk seems about to break up, it should not be forgotten that he has suffered most of all. Nor is it unknown to others than those who are of Israel, that the national party of the Jews is ever increasing under the thrill which the last assault on Islam has sent through east and west. Old men like Sir

Moses Montefiore, and young men like Professor Kaufman, of the Jewish College of Buda-Pesth, acknowlege, in the "Daniel Deronda" of George Eliot, the most real as well as vivid exposition of sacred longings which seek in Palestine, no longer a grave for the dust of Israel, but a home for their scattered children-a throne for their visible power. And what the Jew has been to the Theocracy as its oldest representative, the Armenian was to the Christianity in which the Theocracy is fulfilled. The children of Noah, who clung to the Ararat plateau all through the Assyrian and Egyptian, the Hellenic and Latin efforts after a world-wide civilization, were the first, as a people, to profess Christianity. Dertad, or Tiridates, their king, was baptized by his cousin, Gregory the Illuminator, thirtyseven years before Constantine submitted to the rite. And all through the nearly sixteen centuries the four or five millions of Armenians have clung to their faith, like the five or six millions of Jews to theirs, with a constancy that has defied the persecution of the Fire-worshipers, the sword of the Saracens, and the outrages of the Turks, who gave the last blow to their independence. Like the Jews, the Armenians have in large numbers sought in other lands the protection to life, and property, and faith denied them in their own. I have met them, and know not a few of them well, in cities so remote from each other and Ararat, as Calcutta and Bombay, Cairo and Constantinople, Moscow and Amsterdam. Thousands of them are prosperous British subjects; thousands more at home have been made Protestants by the accomplished American missionaries there.

The Hellenic, the Sclavonic, the Jewish interest in the disintegration of the Turkish Empire all understand; but not so many are familiar with the case of the Armenians. Are a people who add to the commercial virtues of the Jew, the historic claims and high character of the earliest Christian kingdom, whose intellectual power Russia has long practically used-as now in Trans-Caucasia-and whose press has left its mark on the scholarship of Europe, to be left to be quietly absorbed by any other Power, just as they have been ignorantly abandoned so long to Turkish oppression? Is the solution of the Eastern Question to leave Armenia a province of Russia, or to make it again one of the few and most necessary Christian kingdoms of Asia, as

Nature would seem to have made the high table-land of Armenia to be the birthplace of a great race. It forms the northern portion of the still more famous plateau of Iran, whence all the early migrations and civilization of man radiated, south unto India, or west and north in successive streams to the lands of the Mediterranean. The triangle between the most easterly gulf of the Great Sea, the Black Sea, and the Caspian, an area of which Ararat is the centre, is Armenia, from whose mountains and lakes the great rivers of our earliest history find their way to these seas and the Persian Gulf. Ezekiel mentions the horses fed on its rich pastures; their breed was as famous then as that of Arabia since. Such was its repute for the precious metals and stones, that on one occasion the Romans carried off its king in chains of gold. Herodotus places its warriors in the army of Xerxes; for, from even the earliest times, Armenia was the Switzerland of the East. Placed between the Great Powers of the ancient world, Asiatic and European, it was now independent for a time, and now subject to Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman supremacy. The subjection of all the highlands of Syria and Armenia to the suzerainty of Rome opened to their people at the earliest time the door of Christianity. The story which Eusebius seems to have found in the records of the great Christian city and college of Edessa was undoubtedly apocryphal, but it seems to mark the close as well as early connection of Armenia with the Apostolic Church at Jerusalem.

Akbar, king of that portion of northwestern Mesopotamia, hearing of the miracles of Christ, is said to have written a letter to "Jesus, the good Saviour," in the spirit, and almost the very words of Nicodemus. "Come to me,' wrote the prince, "and heal my distemper," after declaring that the miracles of healing showed one of two things: "Either Thou art God come down from heaven to do these things, or Thou art the Son of God, and so performest them."

Our Lord's reply is an expansion of the words to Thomas, on the blessedness of those who have not seen and yet have believed, and He promises to send a disciple after "I should be received up to Him that sent me. Thaddæus, accordingly, is represented as having gone to heal Akbar in the name of Jesus, of whom the grateful sovereign said, "I have so believed in Him that I would go with an army to extirpate the Jews who crucified Him, if I did not fear the Roman power." The whole story is doubtless a later reflection of the events which mark historically the introduction of Christianity into Armenia. The spot was that of Echmiatzin, still the ecclesiastical capital, near the base of Ararat, which means "The Descent of the Only-Begotten," for there the light of the Lord first shone, and the first Christian church was built. The church has an interest still for the rare traveler who finds his way thither, far above that of any holy place in all history, save Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The time was the year 302. Of the royal house of Armenia, which Chosroes the Great had made illustrious, two only escaped massacre at the hands of the Persians-his son Tiridates, and Gregory, whom some accounts represent as the cousin of Tiridates. During their exile, Gregory was educated in Christianity at the Cappadocian Cæsarea, while Tiridates succeeded, with Roman aid, in

the head of the infant Church in Armenia, was cast into prison, and the king waged a bitter persecution against his followers. But, as in the Akbar legend, being seized by sore sickness, he was healed through the prayer of Gregory, and accepted for himself and all his people the true faith. Gregory received episcopal consecration at the hands of the Metropolitan of Cæsarea, and laid broadly and deeply the foundations of the oldest Church of Christendom, which has withstood alike the persecutions of the infidel, and the pressure of those of the Greek and Latin rites who menaced its independence. A few, indeed, have succumbed to the arts of Rome.

What are called the United, as distinguished from the Gregorian Armenians, are represented at the Porte by a Patriarchate, the disputes about the succession to which have led the Vatican to throw all its influence on the side of the Sultan in the fight of Islam against Christianity. But to this day the successor of Gregory, as Catholicos or Patriarch, rather than the suffragan of any other prelate, rules the four millions who follow the old Armenian rite, and from Echmiatzin sends forth bishops and priests to Calcutta and Pekin, and the regions between. The work of the enlightened and enlightening Gregory was continued by scholars like Miesrob, translator of the Bible and modifier of the old Haik alphabet; Moses of Khorene, most accurate and patriotic of historians; David, the philosopher and expounder of Aristotle, down to the sixth century. No nation at that period-few nations at any time—had annals so bright. From Byzantium to Rome, and Alexandria to Athens, there was no place of culture in which Armenian scholarship was not represented.

The bitter and persistent persecutions of the Zoroastrians of Persia stopped all that. The succeeding wars of the Mohammedans, and especially the Turks, completed the miserable work, driving forth to happier lands than their own every scholar and teacher and priest who could escape. Now and then, in the centuries from the sixth to the hopeless supremacy of the Ottomans in the fourteenth, some Armenian or Armeno-Jewish dynasty would manage to exist in the intervals of oppression, or to obtain recognition from the Caliphs. But through it all, and to the last hour of political autonomy, Armenian independence meant Christianity, as much as it ever did in our own history.

Driven to Lesser Armenia, to the shelter of the Cilician Taurus, King Rhupen, or Ruben, held the ground till he could help the Crusaders, and his alliance with them and the kings of Cyprus has been correctly described as forming "the last bulwark of Christianity in the East." After a heroic resistance, Leon, the last king who ruled even a portion of Armenia, was taken captive by the Mamelukes, then became a fugitive in Europe, and died in Paris in 1393. The Crescent had blotted out all of the Cross that the Persian Magi had left in Armenia, while the Parsees also thenceforth became fugitives, till, like their quondam Armenian victims, they found an asylum under the Christian Government of India.

From that time to this, all that is best in the Armenian nation has sought a career in commerce, while waiting and longing for the hour, which seems at hand, when they may once more become an independent nationality. Scattered, they are still as much a people as the Jews. Like the Jews also, theirs has been the romance of history. The atrocities of Timour, the raids of the savage Koords, and the permanent oppression of the Turks in the west, desolated the fair pastures and once flourishing Christian cities of the highlands of the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Araxes, till, at the opening of the seventeenth century, the rivalry of Shah Abbas with the Ottoman Ahmed once more gave