though to arrange the machinery, and to set it agoing, often requires an impulse from intelligent benevolence. An experiment has been tried in a few of the Western Establishments, which is thought by those most conversant with them to work prosperously— the combination of manual labour with study; three hours a day being given to printing, cabinet-work, or farming. Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, which could receive a hundred young men, is the scene where this novel plan seems to have most prospered. But in Illinois, Indiana, and New York, plans nearly similar are pursued with varying success. Many reasons concur to make this a most suitable plan in a certain condition of society, especially for preparing missionaries and ministers for new and rough settlements. The very great majority of those to whom the gospel is to be preached, are not persons of refined manners, but such as earn their daily bread by daily toil. When a young man of good natural powers amongst them comes under strong religious impressions, and desires to become a teacher of his brethren, on the old plan of all study he is exposed to loss of health by a complete overturn of his early habits, and is probably, by his new pursuit, reduced to a state of dependence; whereas, on the manual labour plan, he secures three hours of exercise, and nearly, if not entirely, supports himself. His hours of study will be all the more vigorous that his hours of relaxation have been usefully employed; and his manners, he being a Christian, will not be in any degree roughened by such an engagement. If some of our own students had such means of aiding themselves, we should not have so many who begin their ministerial lives enfeebled by unrelaxed, and perhaps poorly fed years of study; neither would they enter on their rustic charges less honoured, or less suited to encounter country hardships. On Long Island I met with a missionary whose scene of toil had been for some years among the new settlers in Ohio. He talked of going from one preaching station to another on foot, leaping from one knob of solid ground to another in a morass, and of being wet through when he reached his post, with no prospect of dry raiment, except as the wet steamed up from his person before a huge fire. And when he asked if he could have some hot tea, the mistress disappeared in the wood, and presently returned with a lapful of herbs, which she infused in boiling water and gave him to drink. Her husband not having got home from the distant mill, she could not make him a cake; and, indeed, the shrunk, bald old man might have been painted for Shakspere's starving apothecary. Had his years of preparation been passed in the luxuries of College halls, he would have endured this very hard life much worse than he did. He spoke of having rejoiced to find a nook beside the blazing hearth of two active young men who welcomed him and his message, the description of whose menage is strange to those unused to the hardships encountered during the first season by settlers in the "Far West." Their large log dwelling had two doors opposed to each other near the end where was the fireplace. When they wished to replenish their wide hearth, they felled and stript a tree of its branches. They then yoked a horse to it, which drew it to the proper centre of the fireplace, where the chain was taken off, the horse making his way out by the other door, and the tree was left to be consumed at leisure with the help of its lopped branches. Some of the Home Missionaries endure equal privations and hardships with those who expose themselves on foreign shores and in savage islands, without the éclat and sympathy which accompany the foreign missionary, and without being so well provided for. Here was a specimen. One could not but look with reverence on the hoary-headed and weather-beaten man whose heart, full of the invisible treasure, could not rest unless he might, by many a toilsome effort, convey that treasure to the ignorant and famishing. But while a nation, extended and varied as America is, has much use for manual labour students, and while these are as well read in divinity, and having the first grand essential of being themselves regenerated men-are as competent teachers as others, it does not prevent those who have means and appliances from embracing a more extended range of study, or from exercising architectural taste and raising beautiful buildings at many of their seats of learning. Of these, the most beautiful-one wing of which is not yet finished-is the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. It has been erected by the bequeathed wealth of Mr Smithson, an Englishman, whose generous wish was to place a magnificent library, museum, gallery of paintings, geographical and chemical apparatus, together with a noble lecture-room within reach of the statesmen of the great Republic. The gold of the edifice is English, but the art American. Two chambers, which are finished and occupied, are said to be in the style of the Escurial, and are handsome and perfect in their beauty. Mr James Renwick, the rising architect, calls the order pure Norman-it does certainly not come within any of the old Greek orders of architecture, and if Norman be its name, it is very fine; the rich mellow lilac-brown of the stone, contrasting finely with the noble gray base and white superstructure of the Capitol, and the rather weather-stained marble of the Post-Office and the White House. The professors in all Colleges are appointed by trustees, whether they be endowed by their States or by private benevolence, and scholarships are frequent as they are at Oxford or Cambridge, and as bursaries are in Scotland. They are usually the result of private and Christian munificence. It would seem that all the world over, study and learning do not form the path to wealth, and those. |
