Part 16

Last year, the C. L. S. C. interest showed a great increase. In 1883, the number of C. L. S. C. members who clasped hands around the camp-fire was twenty. In 1884, it was nearly ninety, and if we could count those who joined before the close of the Assembly it would reach a hundred. We look for twice as many on Tuesday evening, June 30, when we expect to be entertained with stereopticon pictures of “Sights and Insights at Chautauqua” by the Rev. O. S. Baketel, of New Hampshire, and at the close of the lecture, march in procession to the camp-fire, and sing and talk together. We expect also a great day on July 1st, which is given to the “Grand Army of the Republic.” Perhaps no other State went into the war with quite the enthusiasm of Kansas; certainly no other has as large a proportion of veterans settled within its borders. Every year the Assembly recognizes these old heroes, and “Old Soldiers’ Day” always draws a multitude. We shall have a concert of war songs in the morning, and a lecture by General O. O. Howard, U. S. A., in the afternoon, when the Governor of Kansas is expected to preside.

No gathering in Kansas is complete without a Temperance meeting, for Kansas is the banner State in constitutional prohibition. Let it be said, all stories to the contrary notwithstanding, that there is no defection in the ranks of the prohibition army, and no retreat. The cause is as strong as ever, and no one thinks of rescinding or re-submitting the Amendment. We hold “Temperance Day” on July 2, when Dr. Philip Krohn and Col. Geo. W. Bain will speak, and various conferences on different aspects of the work will be held.

The Ottawa Assembly extends a welcome to all Chautauquans who may enter its gates, and gives its assurance that they will find themselves at home.

MOUNTAIN LAKE PARK, MARYLAND.

This delightful summer resort is situated on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, in Garrett County, Maryland. It is 2,800 feet above sea level, in the midst of sublime scenery. The place itself is enough to attract all lovers of the true, the beautiful, and the good, but besides the feast for the eyes and lungs, there is a feast of reason and a flow of soul prepared to profit, entertain, and inspire the hosts who gather to the Assembly.

The principal lecturers are Prof. H. L. Baugher, D.D., of Pennsylvania College; the Rev. G. W. Miller, D.D., of Philadelphia; the Rev. C. P. Marsden, D.D., of St. Louis; the Rev. Z. Warner, D.D., of Parkersburg, West Virginia; the Rev. N. L. Reynolds, of Mt. Pleasant, Pa.; the Rev. J. B. Van Meter, D.D., of Baltimore; J. B. Phipps, Esq., Secretary of Maryland Sunday-school Union and author of pictorial designs for the Berean Lesson Periodicals.

“Thorough Normal Work” is the motto of Mountain Lake Park Assemblies. The Assembly Normal Union course of study will be pursued during the session, and diplomas awarded on Normal Union day, August 19th.

The C. L. S. C. Department was organized two years ago, and Monday, August 17th, has been set apart to this interest. A lecture on “Self-help” will be delivered by the Rev. J. T. Judd, A.M., of Lewisburg, Pa., president of the circle, with special C. L. S. C. exercises. Round-tables, vesper services, class unions, and camp-fires will be enjoyed during the Assembly session.

New Testament Greek will be made a specialty. The Rev. C. E. Young, of Baltimore, instructor.

Geology will receive the attention of the Rev. N. L. Reynolds, who inspires enthusiasm in this noble study.

Elocution classes will be formed as last year, and Amateur Photography will be the pleasant recreation of lovers of the art.

The Assembly meets August 6th and closes August 19th. For further information address the Rev. W. Maslin Frysinger, D.D., Baltimore, Md., or the Rev. Jesse B. Young, Harrisburg, Pa.

ROUND LAKE, NEW YORK.

The management of the Round Lake, N. Y., Sunday-school Assembly sends greetings to its hosts of old friends and to many others whom it hopes to make warm friends in the near future. The last year was one of the best in its history. Numbers, meetings, speakers, work and workers, influence and the divine blessing, all combined, made it a power for good, wide-felt and lasting. It is the aim to make the coming Assembly better than ever. They have planned on the same generous breadth and scope of the last season, and are confident their work will merit approval.

The program already completed is full and rich and varied. On July 9th and 10th there will be a reunion of chaplains and soldiers. The meeting is most vigorously planned for. There will be a large gathering of the old soldiers; Col. G. A. Cantine will act as Grand Marshal. Gen. John A. Logan has been secured as speaker. The Sunday-school Assembly will hold a longer session this season than ever. Beginning July 14th, it will continue fourteen days, and each day will be packed with varied and most profitable exercises. They have a larger variety of specialties than formerly, viz.: French, German, Painting, Drawing, Clay Modeling, Oratory, Vocal Music, Kindergarten, Calisthenics, Phonography, etc., etc.

On C. L. S. C. day, Tuesday, July 21st, Dr. John H. Vincent, the originator of the Idea and developer of its plans and inspirer of its growing work, will be present and address the graduating class, who will pass the “golden gate” and from his hand receive their well-earned diplomas.

The following is a partial list of the lecturers: The Rev. J. H. Vincent, D.D., the Rev. John P. Newman, D.D., the Rev. H. A. Buttz, D.D., the Rev. S. W. Dike, A.M., the Rev. A. D. Vail, D.D., the Rev. Geo. L. Taylor, D.D., the Rev. I. J. Lansing, A.M., Prof. J. L. Corning, the Rev. D. H. Snowden, the Rev. C. C. McCabe, D.D., Senator James Arkell.

The Trustees, with great care and cost, have given special attention to every part of the grounds, draining, cleansing and beautifying, rendering the grounds, if possible, more healthful than ever.

Never was this “charming spot of nature and art” more beautiful and health-inspiring than to-day! Never was it more sought for as a FAMILY SUMMER HOME than this spring.

MONONA LAKE, WISCONSIN.

The Sunday-school Assembly at Monona Lake, Madison, Wisconsin for 1885, will hold its session from July 28th to August 7th. The specialties are: Music, Prof. Sherwin; Grand Chorus of 300 voices; Goshen Band and Orchestra; Sunday School Normal; Children’s Class. Some of the speakers are: Bishop R. S. Foster, Wallace Bruce, Miss L. M. Von Finkelstein, the Rev. George C. Lorimer, D.D., Prof. William I. Marshall, Prof. W. C. Richards, Ph.D., the Rev. O. C. McCulloch, D.D., the Rev. D. Read, D.D., the Rev. G. H. Ide, D.D., Meigs Sisters Vocal Quartette, C. F. Underhill reader.

WASECA, MINNESOTA.

The Assembly at Maplewood Park, Waseca, Minnesota, opens June 30th, and continues in session until July 10th.

Thursday, July 9th, will be Chautauqua day, and on that day a public recognition service of the graduating class will be held. There will be an address suitable to the occasion, and the recognition service as used at Chautauqua will be used here. In the evening there will be a camp-fire.

The names of Prof. H. B. Ridgeway, D.D., the Rev. Frank Bristol, Miss L. M. Von Finkelstein, the Rev. C. A. Van Huda, D.D., and the Rev. J. F. Chaffee, D.D., are found in the list of lecturers. No one has visited Maplewood Park without feeling that Nature has done her part in providing here a delightful retiring place for tired people and for those who are in danger of becoming so.

A dense grove rises forty or fifty feet above the lake. The lake itself is a beautiful sheet of water, around which is a magnificent carriage drive. All so quiet that the busy world seems shut out, while all Nature seems to say, “Come and rest.”

Besides, there are the attractions of the Assembly, calling the mind into new channels and awakening new thoughts and kindling new and noble desires for intellectual and moral improvement.

The time at which the meetings are to be held this year has been selected, with special reference to the convenience of the people.

Bro. Gillet, superintendent of the Assembly, never needs an introduction to the Northwest. He will make the occasion one of lasting good to the interests he represents.

MAINE CHAUTAUQUA UNION.

Arrangements are being made by the officers of the Maine Chautauqua Union for a grand meeting at Fryeburg, to begin July 27th, 1885, and to continue one week. The grounds at Martha’s Grove are being put in order and beautified by Mrs. Nutter, the prime mover in this matter, and everything will be done for the comfort and enjoyment of all Chautauquans who visit this lovely spot. There is soon to be erected on the grounds a “Hall in the Grove,” after the style of the one at Chautauqua.

The program for this season is an attractive one and will consist of illustrated lectures, vocal and instrumental music, essays and readings. Some part of each day is to be devoted to the Round-Table, question box, discussions and reports of circles. As a result of our meeting last year, circles have sprung up all over the State. In Portland alone, there are _three hundred_ Chautauquans where there were only _nine_ last year.

EDITOR’S OUTLOOK.

VICTOR HUGO.

The greatest of the French writers of this century has passed away from earth, after eighty-three years of a life which was, like Carlyle’s, full of work to the very end. Victor Hugo’s greatness is difficult to measure at this hour; we are too near to know whether this is an Alp or only a hill. That it has attracted the attention, the admiration, the homage of mankind for half a century would seem to mean that this was one of the three or four great lives of the nineteenth century. Victor Hugo came of a union of aristocratic and plebeian blood. His father’s tribe had been of the nobles since 1531; his mother was the daughter of a seafaring race. The current sketches of his father omit the most dramatic incident of Colonel Hugo’s career. We refer to his long chase and final capture of Fra Diavalo—the brigand hero of the opera which bears his name. In the whole history of brigandage in South Italy, there is no more exciting and romantic story than that of his hunt and capture of the “Friar-Devil” by the father of Victor Hugo. In the blood of the poet the plebeian mother triumphed at length over the Monarchist father, and Victor Hugo’s pen has rendered the Republicanism of France more valuable service than his father’s sword gave to the Napoleonic crown.

His genius was fortunate in the poverty which compelled him to work for bread, and the banishment which in 1853 threw him into exile, and again forced him to take up the severe literary labor which brought forth “Les Miserables” in 1862. This son of the aristocracy might have lived a life with out fruit if he had not abandoned the ideals of his father for those popular sympathies which made him the most dangerous enemy of Napoleon III. The change in his views came slowly. He was a Royalist under Louis Phillippe, and that king created him a peer of France in 1845. It was not until 1849 that he changed his political attitude, and he was then forty-seven years of age—so that he divided his life pretty evenly between the aristocratic and popular causes. His works show the influence of his political thoughts, and the differences between the earlier and later are very marked. The earlier works gave him the ears of the great world; the later won him the hearts of the people. Whether in prose or in verse, all that he ever wrote was poetry. His later prose is a collection of poems of human aspirations. It is idle to seek in them any system, they are emotion rather than thought; but the emotion is the throbbing of the universal human heart. He believed in God and in man. He rejected the religion of his people less under the stress of conviction than through the force of his hostility to the organized human world in which he saw men suffering. It was not his office to resolve the riddles of human pain; it was his to gather men’s tears into God’s bottle. It may be called a one-sided life; but it was on that side where great lives are too seldom found. It may be said that emotion is blind, passionate, dangerous, as Frenchmen have abundantly proved; but it is still true that the emotion which rouses men from lethargy is necessary to beneficent change, and that even though the wail of human misery must go up forever, we must honor the great souls who seek solutions of the mystery of evil in a happier ordering of human society. We need not become socialists to reverence Victor Hugo’s socialistic philanthropy. Its aim was high, and it has its great uses. Though only God’s bottle be large enough to hold the tears of his children, it is a noble poetry which considers the sorrows of the earth and seeks to pour the sunshine or hope into the low valleys of humanity. Hugo’s way may be the wrong way—probably it is—but it is good for men to hold fast the hope that there is _some_ way through the sea to the promised land. There is a desert beyond the sea; but somehow we shall cross the desert into the Canaan of humanity.

It is, therefore, as a poet of the sorrows and aspirations of our race that we shall most profitably think of Victor Hugo. He was somewhat too French in spirit to be a poet of mankind; he was too egotistic to be on the heights of his human song; he would have been greater if his knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth had been deeper, and his imitation of him perfect in the measure of his great capacity; he would have left something unsaid which wounded men whose purpose was as high as his own, if he had been more Christian and less Hugoist. But why do we ask all things of all men? Victor Hugo did a great work in his own great way. A dangerous socialism has temporarily profited by his denunciations of society, but in the end of the account it will probably appear that he has advanced Christian socialism by the uplift he has given to human aspirations. Men are not so willing to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt, not so much in danger of leaving the bones of the whole race in the desert, more anxious to move on to their promised land.

THE REVISED OLD TESTAMENT.

It required fifty years of the Elizabethan age to introduce that revision of the English Bible which has so long been the standard edition of the Holy Scriptures in our tongue. It would be strange if the revision of that standard Bible which has just been completed were to come into immediate and general use. The New Testament revision met with a harsh reception from the critics of conservative temper; and it certainly has some defects, though the _sense_ of the original is more obvious, to use the mildest term, in the new than in the older revision. The revised Old Testament has consumed fourteen years of the labor of the English and American committees, and the most obvious fact is that it is a more conservative piece of work than the revised New Testament. The committees probably profited by the buffetings of their New Testament revision brethren; but they had a simpler task, since they had not to settle the text of the original Hebrew, whereas the Greek text of the New Testament is still a battle ground of criticism. After all, however, the two revisions constitute one “revised Bible,” and must stand or fall together. The general judgment may probably run to the effect that the New Testament is revised too much and the Old too little. There is a special defect, however, in the New Testament English—it is not idiomatic, and it is not always intelligible. There is a rumor that it will be re-revised into harmony with the conservatism which characterizes the new Old Testament. It is not to be overlooked that there are various demands made upon a revision. Those who most earnestly desire one have in view a more plain and understandable text for popular use. Wycliffe’s great thought, “a Bible understonden of the people,” is their desire. But the literary demands upon the revisers exclude intelligibility by the people as a governing rule. This group of demands defies the skill of any revision committee. They ask for improvements; but they object to any changes. The Bible as an Elizabethan classic is their admiration and they seem not to be willing that the people should have any other Bible. There would seem to be ample room for both revisions; let the literary people have their English of 1611, while the people have English of this century. We are not yet, however, sufficiently advanced in the thinking which revision requires to qualify even the critics among us to distinguish between a classic text for scholars and a plain text for the millions. A modern English Bible will come by and by; we can afford to wait, and meanwhile to study the fruits of the labors of a Revision Committee loaded down with a great weight of conservative environments. For it is not the classicist alone who stands guard over the old English text; conservative theologians regard that old text as too sacred to be modernized, and distrust modernizing as involving changes in the moral and religious influence of the Bible upon mankind. The intelligibility of the Bible is not, to such thinkers, a leading requisite; reverence for its mysteries ranks all other considerations. We are probably outgrowing this view of Holy Scripture; but it is an opinion strong enough yet to keep utterly dead English locutions in the revised Old Testament of 1885. This conservatism is much stronger in England than in this country; the American Committee desired to substitute modern for obsolete words.

That any changes have been made under such respectable and imposing auspices is a great gain to Christian knowledge. The thing is done; the grand old text has been subjected to a revision. It is quite possible that we are entering an age of biblical revision; and it should be remembered that the Bible of 1611 closed an age of revision. It was the last in a series of revisions, each of which contributed to the perfection of the English text. We can not be content with an English Bible which employs _which_ for _who_, _wist_ for _knew_, _earing_ for _plowing_ and _ouches_ for _settings_. The American Committee was thoroughly right in desiring to use modern words in these and other cases. If any revision is to stand, it must contain such modifications of the old text. A satisfactory English text can not be attained so long as the English Christians insist upon retaining archaic forms of such insignificance as the foregoing; there must be an agreement to make an English text on Wycliffe’s principle of popular intelligibleness, before a revision can be of very high utility. The present revision breaks the ice; we have begun; some time or other we shall go on to the logical conclusion of the movement—a modern English Bible for all who use our mighty speech. The assent of the conservative to a single change concedes the principle of revision; his assent to many changes prepares the way for all that are necessary to the modernizing of the Book of Books.

SUMMER HEALTH AND PLEASURE.

The summer is looked forward to with eager desire and it is dismissed without regret by the residents of the temperate zone. The explanation lies partly, if not mainly, in our defective adaptation of ourselves to the hot season. Charles Lamb once wrote, “The summer has set in with its usual severity.” The wit covers a truth; we adjust ourselves so imperfectly to the heated term that we suffer from the high temperature. The art of living must include devices and cautions through which we get the good and shun the evil of each season. Men are slowly learning that to “enjoy life” on this planet one must pay the same price as for liberty—“eternal vigilance.” The summer of the North ought to be our golden time of health and enjoyment. We have the whole of the atmosphere to breathe from—not bits of it let into artificially heated spaces. There is shade for the noonday heats, and the evenings and mornings for exercise and refreshment of muscular energy. But the hot hours are often dangerous and the atmosphere may be poisoned by our own neglect of decaying vegetables or animal matter. We must aim to keep clean and keep all things about us clean; food should be lighter than in winter (less heat-producing); exercise should avoid the hours of fervent heat; the occupations should take a more leisurely pace; the scene of life should, if possible, be shifted for some week or weeks so as to diversify our mental interests and break the dreary monotony of long days spent in one environment of body and soul. The word which describes the art of summer life is _moderation_; but moderation is not indolence, though there is a natural tendency to drop into the laziness which characterizes barbarian humanity in hot lands. To be healthy and happy one should resist the disposition to be idle. Neither health nor happiness come to lazy people in any desirable measure. The best forms of both depend on activity; but in summer it must be moderate and regular. If, then, one has constant occupation, he should cultivate moderation of interest and exertion, shun the blazing noontide, and take his food as well as his exercise in reduced doses. Too much food, care, exercitation, these are our northern summer dangers. Our civilization is yet very imperfect in this region of art. We have attained to food, clothing, shelter. We do not quite understand how to use them all wisely; but beyond these lie the adjustment of exertion, rest, air, water, electrical and chemical instruments of vitality, and the inner forces of our own being. Happiness is the result of a complex mass of conditions and instruments of life acting upon the spirit and reacted against by the spirit. Our knowledge grows; but while it is growing we have to take for our text moderation, and elaborate the sermon each man for himself.

The great opportunities of the year come to us in summer. Nature is all alive to please and instruct us—to give us the delights of the eye and the inspiration of study. The world has been dressed with infinite art, to afford us a holiday which shall be full of instruction. We need travel to widen our vision of God’s modern Edens dressed by human art. We need an active intelligence, to see and understand the Eden world of summer. But all depends upon our care of our bodies. Health is the condition of all summer pleasures. Is it not strange that we will spend months and years learning how to use lifeless tools, and yet will not spend needed time to learn the management of this vital tool by use of which all happiness comes to us? Let us all try this time to keep the instrument of life in tune for the music of the summer; to make of the season of highest opportunity all there is in it for ourselves. Starting with that selfish purpose, we shall soon find that we need social food, and that here also, “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Helping others to enjoyment is the healthiest of “health movements;” for no tonic is so spiritually exhilarating as the sight of other people’s happiness which we have made. The man who sends a child out of the city suffocation of summer time has a poor imagination if he can not enjoy the gambols of that child in the country meadows and groves as he never enjoyed a banquet in his own house. Doing as many generous actions as possible is one way to get both health and pleasure out of the summer.

SCIENCE AND PRACTICAL LIFE.