of Christian aspiration; it was a time for raising it. The Hebrew Moses was not fitted to lead the great exodus of Israel, but by frequent interviews with God. He had to go up into the mount to receive his strength and his instructions. We, as Christians, were appointed a Moses, to conduct our generation. We, too, needed to ascend above the plain of the multitude. Our speculation must be higher and wider. We were to impress a character upon this struggle. It would go down to the future, bearing our superscription. It lay in our power, by the grace of God, to instruct mankind by an unparalleled spectacle. We could astonish all nations by showing them a war, on our part, without the demoralization of war.

The influence of Christianity was already obvious enough. Notwithstanding such a surge of excitement as never swept over a people before, all was, as yet, restrained by order and law. Impatient the North had been, but its impatience had only shown the strength of its obedience. The very bed of the sea had been upheaved beneath, but the swell of the waves had still regarded the shore. The swelling heart of the North had heard and heeded the decree of law, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. It was the perfection of civilization. Let us say boldly, and more truly, it was the triumph of Christianity.

But there were not wanting omens of danger. An able and influential daily newspaper even uttered threats of sedition. It was, perhaps, the outcry of patriotism, untaught and unrestrained by religion. It may have portended what would have occurred in a less Christianized nation. Wise men foresaw that such a spirit, if it prevailed, would be the worst defeat of our cause. Such a spirit would be the only possible defeat of our cause. Our victory must be a moral victory, or

victory itself would be defeat. On the Church of Christ rested the responsibility of speaking the calming word. No other voice than hers, speaking in the name of her Lord, could pronounce effectually the mandate, “Peace, be still.” Oh, what a longing invaded and usurped the mother-heart of the Church, to see her children now walk worthy of the vocation with which they were called. The glorious occasion must not pass by unused. Such an opportunity of signalizing, on a colossal national scale, the power of Christianity, does not occur once in a thousand years. War, without the demoralization of war. It would justify our cause more splendidly than success. It would be better to fail thus, than to succeed otherwise. A defeat, so suffered, would be a more signal vindication, than victory less worthily won. Let the North see to it. Let the Church see to it. Let us see to it. Let me see

to it.

It was in just such a set, solemn, awful sense of universal and individual responsibility, that the Christian Commission originated. It would be beggarly failure to comprehend the truth ourselves, or craven abandonment of it at the challenge of her foes, were we to commute the claim of the Church by the abatement of even one tittle from this. The Church had an ear to hear the call of the great occasion. She recognized in it the voice of her Lord. He seemed to say, Take care that my cause suffer no detriment in the war. She organized her obedient reply, and named it THE CHRISTIAN COMMISSION.

THE CHARACTER AND THE LITERARY INFLU

ENCE OF ERASMUS.

WE

E do not now remember to have met with the suggestion anywhere, but it has frequently occurred to us that, of all the ancients who have become historic, Cicero was best prepared to be at home in modern civilization. Such was the breadth of his culture, and such the cosmopolitan catholicity of his appreciation, that, to our fancy, it involves but little incongruity to think of the polite and philosophic Roman re-nascent, as a fully naturalized citizen of our times. We do not imagine it would occasion more than perhaps a slight involuntary start, to step out, shortly after reading some of his epistles, and recognize the writer, redivivus with the air and habit of a thorough-bred "modern gentleman of stateliest port," quietly purchasing a ticket at a railway station, or dispatching a message by Morse's Telegraph; and we seriously insist the anachronism would not seem so very flagrant, to light upon a paragraph in the papers some morning, announcing that "Hon. M. T. Cicero had already signified his willingness, and might therefore be expected, to address his fellow-citizens, at such or such a time and place, on the great questions now pending before the country."

A certain similar facility of accommodation to differ

ent states of society it is natural to conceive as belonging to the character of Erasmus. One does not, however, derive it from a similar origin. In the case of the Roman your impression arises from that largeminded power of anticipating future forms of civilization, yet more nobly endowed, which you naturally attribute to him, by inference from the generous though eclectic sympathy he certainly did extend to all the varieties with which he was acquainted. In the case of the Dutchman, on the other hand, you simply feel that there is no reason why this man should be unfit for any order of things. His capacity of versatile adaptation does not seem to you positive, like Cicero's, but negative rather without repulsions than, like the other's, instinct with attractions. You do not see in him, as in Tully, any of that rare mental compass which, embracing all countries and ages in its equal regard, suggests at once the unity of our race and our immortality, and marks out its possessor as intended. "not for a day, but for all time;" nor is there any breathing of the child-like curiosity and wise docility proper to comprehensive genius. You discern barely a miraculous absence of qualities having a specific adaptation. You are quite sure he had no ill-timed idiosyncrasies, that would be prompting him to aim at conforming the world to any romantic ideal standard of his own. He bowed reverentially to authority. If he ever did anything contumaciously, it was when he believed what the Church believed. You judge that he would make no difficulty wherever placed. He would not wage war with existing institutions-unless indeed. it chanced to be the fashion; and then if he could not restrain his shafts of wit, he would at least take care to let them fly, after the manner of a fire-wheel in pyrotechnics, as nearly as possible in the direction of every

radius successively in the whole circumference, so that all parties might fare alike. He would keep a wellbehaved and gentlemanly conscience. He would have constitutional objections to having constitutional objections to anything. Under a monarchy he would be a loyal subject, in a republic a law-abiding citizen, in a revolution an adherent of all parties and none. short, superadding to so goodly an assemblage of nega tive qualifications a nice instinct for his cue, such a man would be at his ease indifferently in any social, political, or ecclesiastical order whatever.

In

At a very small expense of ingenuity, one could assign him several exceedingly suitable niches in the temple of history. For instance, had he been permitted a spontaneous birth in patriarchal times, he would infallibly have been Jacob; and not Jacob himself wore the kid-skins to receive the blessing of his father with a more natural grace and a more appreciative humor, than Erasmus would have displayed in his place. The circumspect Gamaliel, it is safe to assume, did not exceed the pious gravity with which Erasmus would have pronounced his conservative advice to let the doctrine of the Nazarene alone. There is enough of truth in Coleridge's suggestion of a parallel between Erasmus and Voltaire, as to their method of attack, to render it not improbable that, in the eighteenth century and in France, Erasmus might have enlisted in the same service with Voltaire, wielding, with even a better instructed skill, the glittering fence of the Frenchman's infidel raillery. Still more naturally, perhaps, he would have found his way into Sydney Smith's parish, preaching worldly wisdom and a humane morality on Sunday, and alternately cracking jokes and feeding his flock with physic for the cure of their souls during the week.

Such, in outline, appears to us to have been the char