voice," should stop and ask him "whether it was possible that Harrow School was disgraced by so disreputably dirty a little boy as I?" "I was dirtyno doubt;" the novelist adds, "but, I think, that he was cruel." At a private school he fared no better. He was accused, along with three other boys, of some untold wickedness-although "innocent as a babe!" "It broke my heart;" he says, "knowing myself to be innocent, and suffering also under the equally painful feeling, that the other three, no doubt wicked boys, were the curled darlings of the school, who would never have selected me to share their wickedness with them." The remembrance of the injustice he suffered, although fifty years ago, he adds, "burns me now as though it were yesterday. What lily-livered curs these boys must have been, not to have told the truth! I remember their names well-and almost wish to write them here." It is to be hoped that if any of the three still live they may read this scathing sentence. When at Winchester, to which he went when he was twelve years old, his brother Thomas Adolphus-known also as a novelist, chiefly dealing with Italian subjects, between whom and himself, at the date of his writing, there had been a fast friendship of forty years—was one of his worst foes. He was his tutor, and in that capacity," as a part of his daily exercise," thrashed Anthony with a big stick. The amount of flogging that he underwent seems incredible. He believes that he has been "flogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day or thereabouts, and I have often boasted that I obtained them all." Add to this that his father pulled his hair when he slipped in the morning in his Greek and Latin Grammar, and occasionally "in passion knocked him down with the great folio Bible which he always used." It must be confessed that the boyhood of the novelist was a hard one. Nor was his youth much better when he had to make his bread as an usher at Brussels, and even after his appointment to a clerkship in the Post Office, at £90 a-year. It is to be said, however, that such indignities as he endured, and as Dickens has also described as characteristic of his youth, are apt to bulk largely in the retrospective imagination of the well-to-do writer, when he was easily making his £4500 a-year, and saving a third of this sum for future contingencies. His mother, from what he says of her energy and capacity for enjoyment, must have been a strength, not only in herself, but to her sons. She was "an unselfish, affectionate, and most industrious woman," and although as a writer she "revelled in satire," and her book on "The Domestic Manners of the Americans," is chiefly remembered for the severity. of her satirical descriptions, "the poetic feeling clung to her to the last." The picture of her writing her novels "in a big house," outside of Bruges, while her husband and two of her children lay dying in adjacent rooms, nursed by her tenderly to the last, is a very touching one. Anthony Trollope was 19 years of age when appointed to a clerkship in the Post Office, and he remained in the service of the department for thirtythree years. There is a curious sensitiveness throughout the autobiography, as to the estimate that might be formed of his work as a civil servant. He was certainly, according to his own account, singularly incompetent as a youth of nineteen when appointed— unable to copy some lines from the Times newspaper," without making "a series of blots and false spelling," ignorant even of the multiplication table; and during the seven years he remained in London he does not seem to have improved much. He kept a watch "which was always ten minutes late," and of course very soon "achieved a character for irregularity." From time to time rumour reached his ears that if he did not mend his ways he would be dismissed. Colonel Maberly disliked him, and he hardly ventures to say that he did not deserve the dislike. Rowland Hill, even after Trollope had made his mark in Ireland as a surveyor, in which capacity he mainly spent his official life, evidently bore no good will towards him. In his turn, he says, he thought very little of Rowland Hill, and especially of his capacity of managing men, notwithstanding his distinguished service in the matter of the penny stamp. There must have been something, to say the least, very brusque and trying in his manner---as there was indeed to the last.* A story told by himself brings this well out. "On one occasion it was his duty to put a private letter, containing banknotes, on Colonel Maberly's table. The letter was seen by the Colonel, but before it could be dealt with he was called from the room. On his return it was gone. In the meantime I had returned to my room in the performance of some duty. When the letter was missed I was sent for, and there I found the Colonel much moved about his letter, and a certain chief clerk, who, with a long face, was making suggestions as to the probable fate of the money. 'The letter has been taken,' said the Colonel, turning to me angrily, and, - , there has been nobody in the room but you and I!' As he spoke he thundered his fist down upon the table. Then,' said I, 'by — * In illustration, the writer may repeat what Wendell Holmes said to him in 1874, when on a visit to Boston. He too had suffered from Trollope's manner. "Why, sir," Holmes said, "he roared like a lion. He addressed me from the end of the table, in a voice enough to shake me from my seat." you have taken it!' and I also thundered my fist down-but accidentally not upon the table. There was there a standing movable desk at which, I presume, it was the Colonel's habit to write, and on this movable desk was a large bottle full of ink. My fist unfortunately came on the desk, and the ink at once flew up, covering the Colonel's face and shirt-front. Then it was a sight to see that senior clerk, as he seized a quire of blotting-paper, and rushed to the aid of his superior officer, striving to wipe up the ink; and a sight also to see the Colonel in his agony hit right out through the blotting paper at that senior clerk's unoffending stomach. At that moment there came in the Colonel's private secretary, with the letter and the money—and I was desired to go back to my room!" A youth who could address his superior, and use his fist in this manner was evidently somewhat troublesome, and we hardly wonder that Colonel Maberly should have given "a bad character" of him when he went to Ireland shortly afterwards. The stuff, however, was in young Anthony, and Ireland strangely made the opportunity for its development. There have been few more interesting narratives than the story of Trollope's youth, and nothing more remarkable in recent biography than the manner in which the distinguished and laborious writer rose out of a youth so unhappy, and useless, and ill-conditioned as his was. A VILLAGE CHURCH. Far hence, high up among the Southern Alps, And all the place is sweet with sun-warmed pines, Comes swerving up through bruisèd hillside balms, A little at His feet. ELLICE HOPKINS. W The Court of the Gentiles. ERASMUS. HIS number of Sunday Talk is, as is fitting, to THIS have for its principal theme, the Northern Reformation--or what is generally known as the Reformation of Luther, and in following out this idea my Gentile must necessarily be one who belonged to the period, and, if possible, one who had some hand or part in that stirring and noble work. When this was announced to me, with all the weight of editorial authority, my thoughts at once fixed upon Erasmus ; but second thoughts, which are often better than first, though not always, almost immediately suggested the awkward and perplexing questions-but how can he be a Gentile? did he not live in a convent? was he not ordained a priest? and are not, or does not, the Roman Church, from which he received his orders, hold tenaciously to the doctrine that those who are priests once are priests always? These questions were not to be easily answered, or to be lightly set aside. They seemed to suggest that Erasmus could not by any means be claimed as a Gentile, or as one whom we could fairly detain within our court, and I began to think of Hans Sachs, the poetic cobbler, and chief singer of the Reformation; of the noble and satirical Ulrich von Hütten the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, and that still greater company of obscure men who listened to the heart-stirring words of Luther, and taking his work upon their hands, manfully carried it on, and firmly established it in Europe, in spite of kings and princes, popes and cardinals, and all the sufferings their faith brought them to. Then my thoughts reverted to Erasmus, and third thoughts being, as Tennyson tells us, a riper first, I could not get rid of the conviction, that if there was a Gentile of the Reformation at all, he was none other than the little, thin, pale-faced nervous scholar of Rotterdam, the brilliant wit and scourge of monks. And such Erasmus really was. His name was cast out by Papist and Protestant alike. Though a priest, he renounced his orders. The monks called him a second Lucian—a fox that had laid waste the Lord's vineyard. A doctor of Constance had his portrait hung up in his study, that he might spit at it. And Luther, and the rest of the Reformers, much as they wished to gather him into their fold, holding the opinions and taking up the position he did, they could not admit him. .He was the true Gentile of the Reformation, repudiated and anathematised by both parties, and by which with the greater fierceness, it would be hard to tell. Erasmus, to use a quaint expression of Anthony Wood's, tumbled into the lap of life in the city of Rotterdam, October 28, 1467. His parents were never married. Margarita, his mother, was the daughter of a physician. Gerard, his father, was the youngest of a family of ten sons, belonging to Gouda. Of a gay and mirthful disposition, Gerard had no taste for the cloisters, which his parents and the monks wished him to enter; and in order to escape their persecutions, and perhaps to avoid the shame of his intimacy with Margarita, he fled, and after many wanderings found refuge in Rome, where he earned a livelihood as a copyist, and where, on hearing the story maliciously spread by his relatives that his beloved Margarita was dead, he in a fit of desperation took the irrevocable vows, and quitted the world. On returning to Gouda, soon afterwards, he found the mother of his son in perfect health, and revenged himself on the fraud which had driven him into the cloisters, by remaining faithful to his vows. When nine years old Erasmus was sent to the famous school at Deventer, belonging to the Brothers of the Common Lot, and presided over by Hegius, pupil of the a celebrated Greek scholar, Rudolph Agricola, the first to bring the new learning, which played so important a part in the Reformation, across the Alps. Here he soon gave promise of the brilliant scholarship he afterwards displayed. "Go on as thou hast begun," said his teacher, Sinheim, to him on one occasion, "thou wilt before long rise to the highest pinnacle of letters." Agricola himself, when on a visit to Hegius, was so pleased with an exercise which young Erasmus had done, that after putting a few questions to him, and having looked at the shape of his head and at his eyes, he dismissed him, saying, "You will be a great man." While he was still at Deventer, Margarita and Gerard died; and parentless, and deprived of his patrimony, which his trustees managed to appropriate to themselves, Erasmus was cast upon the world homeless and friendless, and in the greatest poverty. After spending some time in the service of the Bishop of Cambray, though not before he had been betrayed into the cloisters, he entered the University of Paris. His college experience was not the pleasantest. Here is a reminiscence of it. "Thirty years since, I lived in a college at Paris, named from vinegar (Montaceto)." "I do not wonder," says the interlocutor, "that it was so sour, with so much theological disputation in it; the very wells, they say, run with theology." Erasmus "You say true; I indeed brought nothing away from it but a constitution full of unhealthy humours, and plenty of vermin. What with hard beds, scanty food, rigid vigils and labours, in the first year of my experience, I saw many youths of great gifts, of the highest hopes and promise, some who actually died, some doomed for life to blindness, to madness, to leprosy. Of these I was acquainted with some, and no one was exempt from the danger. Was not that the extreme of cruelty? . . Nor was this the discipline only of the poorer scholars; he (the President) received not a few sons of opulent parents, whose generous spirits he broke down. To restrain wanton youth by reason and moderation, is the office of a father but in the depth of a hard winter, to give hungry youths a bit of dry bread, to send them to the well for water, and that fetid and unwholesome, or frost-bound! I have myself known many who contracted maladies which they did not shake off as long as they lived. The sleeping rooms were on the ground floor, with mouldy plaster walls, and close to filthy and pestilential latrines." His own poverty was so great he tells us, that he was unable to procure either books or clothes. It is curious to observe, however, the preference he gives to the former. "When I get some money," he says, "I shall buy some Greek books, and then some clothes." His college days ended, Erasmus soon rose to fame. More than once he visited England, where he lectured on Greek, received a pension from Lord Mountjoy, and became the intimate friend of Grocyn, Linacer, Colet, Sir Thomas More, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. When asked how he was pleased with England, he wrote, "If you will believe me, nothing ever delighted me so much. I have found the climate most agreeable and most beautiful, and so much. civility, so much learning, and that not trite and trivial, but profound and accurate, so much familiarity with the ancient writers, Latin and Greek, that except for the sake of seeing it, I hardly care to visit Italy. When I hear Colet, I seem to hear Plato. Who would not admire Grocyn's vast range of knowledge? What can be more subtile, more deep, more fine, than the judgment of Linacer? Did Nature ever frame a disposition more gentle, more sweet, more happy, than that of Thomas More?" When he visited Italy, his fame had preceded him, and he was received with open arms by all the great scholars and patrons of the Italian Renaissance. At Venice he printed his Adagia, a collection of strange recondite sayings scattered about in the classic writers, which soon bore his fame to every corner of Christendom. For a time, after many wanderings, he settled down at Basle with his friend Frobenius, the printer, where he superintended the publication of many of his numerous works. Much against his will, he entered the lists against Luther and Hütten, and became at last the best hated, and probably the most miserable man in Europe. His death took place at Basle, 12th July, 1536, in the cathedral of which place he was interred. "Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it," is a saying with which most are familiar. For the monks who invented it, it is tolerably good; but I do not know that it is exactly true. The egg had been laid long before Erasmus, the zeit-geist had done not a little to foster it long before he saw the light, and at the time of his birth, the New Learning had long been brooding over it with warm and quickening energy. Erasmus and not Luther may be said to have hatched the egg. When Luther appeared, the "cockatrice" of which the monks speak, may be said to have been fully fledged, and in need, as Luther to his sorrow soon found, of curbing and direction. But be that as it may, the influence of Erasmus in bringing on the Reformation was immense. Without him, Luther would have been, as Mr. Froude somewhere says, impossible. The popularity of his Adagia, Colloquies and Praise of Folly, was unparalleled. When the sale of the Colloquies was proscribed, a bold printer in Paris is said to have struck off 20,000 copies; a fact which would seem to argue that there was a demand for them almost equalling the demand for the most popular books in the present time. No works ever had so great an effect. They shook the Church of Rome to its foundation, spreading terror and dismay through every monastery in Christendom. Yet Erasmus was neither a Reformer of the Evangelical type, nor a favourite in the Roman Church. On the one hand he hated the ignorance, sloth, and vice, which he saw in the latter; on the other, he was not of the stuff of which either heroes or martyrs are made. He was too cold, too passionless; perhaps also he was too clear-sighted, and too much troubled with the malady of thought; certain it is, he saw faults on both sides, and could agree with neither. Erasmus, in fact, was a sample of that comparatively rare class of men who have too clear a perception of the difference between essentials and non-essentials, to be led away by any struggle for the latter, and who prefer the calm and tranquil ways of Providence, to the noisier ways of men. Probably we may call him an apostle of sweetness and light. "Give light," he used to say, "and the darkness will disappear of itself;" and to give light was the principal aim of his life. "It is my desire," he wrote, "in publishing the New Testament, to lead back that cold disputer of words, styled Theology, to its real fountain. Would to God that this work may bear as much fruit to Christianity, as it has cost me toil and application." The monks charged him with presuming to correct the Holy Ghost; but this work which had cost him so much toil and application, was one of the brightest lights, and, in fact, the brightest that ever dawned upon Europe. To the paganism ofthe Italian Renaissance Erasmus was strongly opposed. "The most exalted aim in the revival of philosophical studies," he wrote, "will be to obtain a knowledge of the pure and simple Christianity of the Bible." On the other hand he used to say, "If the corrupt morals of the court of Rome call for a prompt and vigorous remedy, that is no business of mine, nor of those who are like me." Still what he was always demanding was right conduct. Wrong conduct and the popular theologians of the day, next perhaps to the monks, were the objects of his fiercest hate. "Let us have done with theological refinements,” he writes. "A man is not damned because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one or two principles. Has he the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question." life. "Let each man amend first his own wicked When he has done that, and will amend his neighbour, let him put on Christian charity, which is severe enough when severity is needed." And here again, and as the last of his sayings I will transcribe, is one which may be as apposite now as when it was written: "Our souls are so fashioned and moulded that they are sooner captivated by appearances than by real truths; of which, if any one would demand an example, he may find a very familiar one in churches, where, if what is delivered from the pulpit be a grave, solid, rational discourse, all the congregation grow weary and fall asleep, till their patience be released ; whereas, if the preacher-pardon the impropriety of the word, the prater I would have said-be zealous, in his thumps of the cushion, antic gestures, and spend his glass in telling pleasant stories, his beloved shall stand them up, tuck their hair behind their ears, and be very devoutly attentive." * MUSIC is one of the fairest of God's gifts to man! Satan hates Music, because it drives away temptation and evil thoughts. The note makes the words alive. It is the best refreshment to a troubled soul - the heart, as you listen, recovers its peace. It is a discipline, too, for it softens us, and makes us temperate and reasonable. I would allow no man to be a schoolmaster who cannot sing nor would I let him preach either. I place Music next to Theology. I can see why David and all the saints put their divinest thoughts into song.-Luther. * That is, his hour-glass, the sand of which served as a clock, to measure the length of the sermon. Good old Cotton Mather, a famous old American divine, used when his glass had run out to turn it, and say to his audience -"And now, my brethren, let us have another glass." ADDRESS To the Civic and Masonic Processions, IN GLASGOW CATHEDRAL. By the REV. W. W. TULLOCH, B.D., GRAND CHAPLAIN. On the occasion of Laying the Foundation-Stone of the New Municipal Buildings, 6th October, 1883. BRETHREN-Though owing to some misunderstanding, I only learned a few days ago, and through the 'public newspapers, that I was expected to address to you a few words upon this most interesting and memorable occasion, I hold it a high honour and a great privilege to be able to do so. It is fitting upon a day on which you lay the foundation-stone of a building in which the municipal affairs of this great city in the coming years are to be administered, and measures passed which will touch its very heart, that you, its present rulers and representatives, should assemble yourselves in this holy and beautiful house, in which your fathers have for ages praised God-in this time-honoured temple, which through all these changing years has kept a silent but most eloquent vigil over its fortunes. It is fitting, I say, that in a house dedicated to the service of Almighty God, you should acknowledge the truth of the great fact-"Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain." It is well, too, on a day of public rejoicing and holiday, that some little time should thus publicly be set apart for the performance of divine service. It has fallen to my lot-would it had fallen into the older and better hands of one more identified with your civic life than I am-to conduct this service in discharge of my duties as senior chaplain of the Province of Glasgow, one of the divisions into which the craft of Masonry is divided in this country-a craft to which, as a man and a minister, I am proud to belong—when I think of its past history, its present position and the future it has before it, if it be loyal and true to the great moral principles upon which it is established-Love of God and love of the brethren. If, after the manner of some, we look back into the long-ago past, which fable has made its own, and has illuminated with its fanciful and picturesque rays, we may delight ourselves by tracing the roots of our well organised and beautiful system of government and symbolic ritual, far back in the soil of the early world. We can imagine our ancestors working in the solemn recesses of Eastern quarries, and by skilful measurement, by delicate adjustment, by cunning workmanship, by marvellous imitation of the flowers of the field, and the exquisite beauty which distinguishes the handicraft of the Great Architect of the Universe, preparing the stones for the Temple of Solomon. We can watch them put one upon another, and see the Temple reared without sound of axe or hammer "Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprang." We may be well content, however, to go back to the time when to be a cunning craftsman was to be one of the foremost men of the time-the chosen companion of princes-the neces sary appendage of royal courts. At a time when craftsmen banded themselves together, and took a real pride in their work, and in the dignity and importance of their vocation, it is pleasing for us to think that a variety of circumstances combined to give prominence and influence to those who were skilled in the hewing and setting of stones. As great Cathedrals and Churches and important public buildings sprang up in different parts of the world, the services of the most skilful were anxiously sought after, and Masons from many quarters flocked to take part in the work. To enable them to find employment, and to claim the hospitality of their brother Masons was our craft formed, and our symbolic ritual instituted. As a body we now exist for the practice of moral and social virtue. Our distinguishing characteristic is charity, in its most extended sense, and the precepts which we inculcate are brotherly love, relief, and truth. It must ever be our endeavour, under the symbolism we employ, and the pleasant meetings we have together, never to forget that we exist to propagate a morality about which there can be no question, and a charity about which there can be no dispute. If our practice be anything like our profession, if we honestly endeavour to act upon the principles we swear to hold by the love of God and the love of our brother—then Masonry must be a real blessing to a community, and be in some measure at least, an addition to the forces that make for the order, the truthfulness, the purity, and the charity of every neighbourhood. It is for the developing of these forces that you, here assembled in your different professions and capacities, are also working; and may God's blessing rest upon every effort you make after the enlightenment and the welfare of this great community. It is for this end also that the building, to lay the foundation-stone of which we are soon to be assembled, is erected, in order that the affairs of this city may be duly administered, and in which laws will be passed and measures undertaken for its moral and social weal. May the edifice now to be built be productive of all the benefits anticipated by those who have originated it. "Let Thy work, O God, appear unto Thy servants, and Thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us-and establish Thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish Thou it." One may still see upon some old houses, carved on the lintel, the opening words of the Latin version of the 127th Psalm-Nisi Dominus Frustra. Its inscription is indicative of the great fact that without God's presence and blessing no home can be happy, no city truly prosperous, and no nation really great. Every page of the world's history declares how true this is, and one fallen nation after another is a dismal witness to the fact, that the nation and kingdom that will not serve God shall utterly perish. On the recognition of this truth will depend the future of this city we love so well-on the recognition of it by its every inhabitant. A city is not made Christian and moral by any municipal, political, or ecclesiastical machinery, but only by its inhabitants being Christian and moral, by their being pure in heart and life, and selfsacrificing and charitable in action, by each one being faithful, to his vocation, and having an exalted idea of his calling, by giving himself away through his occupation, however humble that occupation may be, for the good of others, by recognising the fact that each life to be fruitful, to be in any degree of benefit to the city, must be lived after the example of the Son of Man, who "came not to be ministered unto, but to minister." In proportion as this is so, will this city and all our cities |