six more were greatly improved. The building at Cole contains, in addition to commodious school-rooms, a comfortable office for the Superintendent, and a storage room for books, apparatus, etc. More than 4000 free text-books were placed in the hands of pupils, and 1300 wire-bound noiseless slates were supplied. The slates are the best I have ever seen, having been ruled to order at the factory. One hundred new pupils' desks and four teachers' desks have also been provided, while more than a hundred old ones have been repaired and varnished. There have been purchased, besides the full supply of school materials, seventeen 12-inch school globes, two cases of maps, and five reading charts. The Directors have done exceedingly well considering the length of time they have been in office-little more than four months. MILTON-Supt. Goho: The Board has organized another school in a rented building. We are still crowded, and a new school-house is almost a necessity. The new text-book law has gone into operation without trouble, and appears to be satisfactory to everybody. NEW BRIGHTON-Supt. Richey: We have increased our teaching force by two teachers since last year, and still our schools are very full. We have had an increase over last year of 113 pupils, which, I believe, is due to free text-books and supplies. Our people speak in the highest terms of praise of free books and supplies. In fact we are all very much pleased that our schools are free. I can see no reason why this year should not be the most prosperous in the history of our schools. NEWPORT TWP. (Luzerne Co.)-Supt. Dewey: Special efforts are being made to secure better attendance. Never before has our percentage of attendance reached 97. The School Board renewed the subscription for The School Journal for each member. An interesting and profitable Institute was held. The teachers begin their work with renewed vigor, and their interest is unabated. NORRISTOWN-Supt. Gotwals: The School Board purchased three "Teachers' Anatomical Aids," for use in the schools. The following additions were made to the Supplementary Reading: Wright's Nature Series, Dole's American Citizen, and Civics for Young Americans. There will be no written examination held in January, 1894, for promotion of pupils, as heretofore, but pupils will be promoted February 1, on the recommendation of teachers and superintendent. PHOENIXVILLE-Supt. Leister: Our term of nine and one-half months commenced September 4th, with 26 teachers, including the special music teacher. It is greatly to the credit of our Board that they have remodeled the old Church street building, containing only four rooms actually fit for school use, so as to change it to one of eight large rooms, besides a Directors' room. The style of architecture is Norman. It is furnished with the best natural slate blackboard, water and gas in every room, and the Smead sys tem of heating, ventilating, and dry closets. Editor Roberts, of The Messenger, says: 'Phoenixville now has four school buildings of which she is proud. Indeed, there are few towns of its size and ability that can make a better showing. We can point to our schools with pride, and justly so." SCRANTON Supt. Phillips: The enrollment this opening month is 842 more than for the corresponding month last year. The increase of attendance has necessitated the employment of five additional teachers. The outlook for the year's work was never more favorable. We are laying special emphasis upon the teaching of penmanship, which is almost a lost art in the schoolroom. We begin with muscular exercises the first year in school, and continue the work throughout the whole course. We are using what we call the "Natural Movement Method," and I believe a revolution in the art of writing is at hand, It is a comfort to know that every child now can be supplied with the necessary equipments for every exercise under the free book system, instead of losing weeks, as has sometimes happened, before an entire room was ready for work, because the requisite books or other material were not furnished the child. It might also be mentioned that under a late law of the Board, every teacher who graduates from our High School and then graduates from a Normal School or our Training School, receives $4 a month additional. SOUTH EASTON-Supt. Shull: We opened school with an enrollment of 1122, of whom eleven per cent. belonged to the High School, 28 per cent. of the High School pupils are seniors-almost double the number of any preceding year. One of the indications of a prosperous year is the fact that the directors made fifty-one visits during the month. STEELTON-Supt. McGinnes: All the teachers of last term were re-elected. The resignation of the high school teachers to enter Princeton College, and the establishment of two needed sohools necessitated the only changes that have been made in the corps. We now have 34 schools, 36 teachers, and 1654 pupils. TITUSVILLE-Supt. Crawford: Our High School is running one session per day-8:45 a. m. to 2 p. m.-with 30 minutes for lunch. It seems to work well. We will use the High School auditorium for the first time as the lecture room of the Titusville Centre of University Extension recently organized here. Our first course is on English Poets of the Revolutionary Age, by W. Clarke Robinson. All our High School pupils who attain a certain grade in the study of Literature are admitted free to each lecture. YORK-Supt. Wanner: Our enrollment for September is 373 more than for the corresponding month last year,-a greater increase than can be attributed to the growth of the city in population. It is in part a result of the operation of the "Free Text-Book law." Would you do with your gains, I had but a thousand a you had but a thousand a year! year! R. I scarcely can tell what you mean, Gaffer Green, But as other folks die, I suppose so must I [Ruff? G. What! and give up your thousand a year, Robin R. There's a place that is better than this, Robin Ruff, If you then had a thousand a year, Robin Ruff? G. Yes, as if he'd a thousand a year, Robin Ruff, If you then had a thousand a year? G. & R. Yes, as if he'd a thousand a year. IN PUBLIC INSTRUCTION ASSOCIATION. DECEMBER, 1893. THOSE DEEP WORDS, GRACE AND TRUTH. PHYSICAL AND MORAL WORLDS FULL OF THE CREATOR'S GOODNESS. N one of the Columbian buildings there are daily many curious eyes busy gazing at the locomotives or vast ships which can with such ease carry man across a continent or over an ocean. With a much greater pleasure we ought all to study that chariot that is to carry us at last from earth to the sky. In the chariot of grace we are all borne onward. It is not the whole of the truth to say we are thus borne to the sky, for by the same power we are borne along through these years. To saint and sinner each day is a journey begun and ended in God's grace. This is the royal chariot that bears man through vale and over mountain. It is often better to study words in their common usage than to study some formal theology. Some words are older than Calvinism and Arminianism, and will thus show us an idea as it came and went, budded and blossomed, long before our churches were born. Often theological terms are strained, and resemble those conventional paintings in which Peter the fisherman wore brocade robes and had in hand a gold key to the kingdom of Heaven. The charm of modern art lies in its effort to utter the truth. It does not attempt to tell all the truths in the world, but only those which contain some form of beauty. The truth of literature and art is never the whole of truth, but only that part of fact that may delight No. 6. and inspire. Theology in the church has often strained its art, and has given Peter robes and crown or has made a simple word tighten like an iron clamp; has made the human race the victim of some local rhetoric. By looking into old language we can see the word "grace" gathering up its stores of significance. There is a titled woman now visiting our nation who is carrying in her name some delightful traits which 2,500 years ago the Greeks and Latins admired in womanhood. The Greeks used the word "eulaleo" when they spoke of one who talked or smiled sweetly; and Horace in his twenty-second ode says a wild, hungry wolf fled from him once as if it were unwilling to attack a poet who was thinking only of a eu-Lalage-a human soul--sweetly speaking and "dulce ridentem." Thus passed the word slowly from Greece to Spain. Thus many of the terms of religion make long journeys; but go where they may, they carry with them always the truths and the sentiments which first gave them being. Their cause of existence goes with them. "Grace" comes to us back of the Greeks. "Krats," or karits, were the horses that drew the sun around the earth. Those prancing steeds made one trip a day, harnessed to a golden chariot. They were so silent, so generous toward all life, so rich, so brilliant, that soon the word "krats" began to stand for human beauty of form and then of mind. The divine horses which for the Aryans had moved in the blue sky, began to move in the human form or draw their chariot in the human heart. When a man or a woman had beauty of motion, he or she became grats-like, and soon when a mind was kind and peaceful it was like the beautiful "grats" in the heavens. time is not far back when society was so liberal in its moral views that priests might openly be drunkards, and great Protestants need have no forms of virtue. It is the problem of our age to combine grace and righteousness. Many of the men who are boasting of liberality possess much more of the article than the world needs. They are so broad in their views that they know little difference between vice and virtue. In the daily, abundant complaint against Presbyterian narrowness, that it can fight over words and can demand that the Columbian Fair be closed on Sunday, we must remember that the church has not yet reached the fatal broadness that flings open five thousand saloons on all the days of the week, and which makes gambling one of the regular mercantile pursuits. That is indeed a marvelous liberality which can permit young men to select the gambler's den as their early schoolhouse, five thousand open saloons here in Chicago as their form of Sunday-school. Perhaps we should better all prefer a bigotry that would close the saloons and the gambling dens. There is one beauty in Presbyter After centuries of such blending of the horses and humanity, the horses were unhitched from their chariot and their name, "grace,' was left for the human race alone. The Greeks and Latins took up the word as implying the sweet and silent beauty of the body and the soul. Then God began to move kindly among His children. He was benevolent. He was gentle as a sunbeam. At last, if man ever reached heaven, he was thus saved not by his own perfection, but by God's grace. There was to be a grace in man toward man, a grace of virtue and love; and there was also a grace in God. There was no iron in the matter; no awful decrees passed in eternity; no doom; no total depravity. Salvation was to take place in an empire of benev-ianism, and that lies in the fact that olence. The theological and ethical problem of to-day is to combine in some new manner the two ideas that man must not sin, must not live in vice, and the idea that God cannot but be benevolent. Quite a task it will prove to empty all of old orthodoxy of its terrors, and also empty sin of its hopes. Grace abounds, but it dare not. so abound as to offer any present or future happiness to crime and vice. The grace of God must find parallel grace in man. The human beauty must answer to the divine beauty, as face answers to face in a glass. Our age cannot any longer think of God as exulting over some dark decrees passed before the worlds were made, but our age must also be as far removed from the feeling that the banner of grace will wave alike here or hereafter over the righteous and the wicked hearts. There seems no escape from the idea that God's grace is not falling and will not fall alike upon those who love sin and those who love righteousness. Problem of the Age.-In these peculiar times there is as much of peril in the word "breadth" as there is of deformity in the word "narrow." The word "liberal" may mean the ruin of society. The Our while it can make some mistakes, it is Grace comes to the world of thought, not only from the Bible, but from the profane literature, and from the entire realm of nature. It had done mighty service in the outer world before it entered into the service of our religion. The classic lexicons consume more than three columns each in defining the term and in showing its use by all the great thinkers of antiquity. In the books of Calvinism it is seen more like a redwood tree in a greenhouse than like the giant forests in California and Oregon. In some of the old churches grace was a favor done to some one soul in a million, a favor which would not become visible until after death, but in the great outer world it was the decoration of every age and every eminent person. In Sophocles, in Xenophon, in Cicero, the word helps each author describe each noble character; it exalts the heart it touches; the one word makes speech turn into eulogy. The Mosaic Law.-St. John said: "The law came by Moses, but grace and truth through Jesus Christ." And yet there was a little grace in the Mosaic law. Moses ordered some grapes to be left on the vines that the poor might psss through the vineyard after the wine had been made and might find something for their hungry lips. Moses ordered some bundles of wheat to be left for the gleaners. He also commanded that no youths should make sport of the deaf or put any obstacle in the path of the blind; but there was so little of this benignity in that period that John does not pause to reckon it. He says, grace was born with Christ. And so it was, just as beauty was born in Athens, just as poetry came with Homer. The real truth is, Christ came because grace was already in the world; the richest thing it possessed. He wanted to make more visible to man the grand attribute of all rational life. Christ did not come to create, but only to reveal and transfigure. The infinite God had passed over the scene; Christ came to point out the early foot-prints of the Creator. Under the most orthodox view of Christ he must be seen as encompassing all the pagan world with this gentleness and beauty of God. If Christ made an atonement for human sin, it is not necessary the pagan world should know what lamb or dove had died for it. Many a As debt has been paid by some unknown friend. It indeed might give happiness to the heathen to know the heart that blessed them, but in the absence of this knowledge the grace of God none the less would surround all these millions. beauty is inwoven in all the scenes in pagan lands, as their foliage is as rich as that upon Christian hills, as the birds of Palestine had brilliant plumage and sweet song before Christ came, so before the days of Jesus and after him all paganism lay in the wide ocean of God's grace, because that grace does not follow the flag of the church but the banner of the Deity. This banner is not the flag of a time or a place; it waves over eternity. A Tendency Toward Greatness.-All things tend toward a generic greatness. The modern man is greater than the primitive man. The fruits of to-day surpass those the ancients gathered. The rose of Anacreon has hastened onward. Hav After philosophy had made a beginning, it rose up to Plato and Aristotle. ing died and having been reborn, it arose again to the height of Bacon and Newton. Literature began with the old Aryans and climbed upward to Athens. Having fallen and having been reborn it began at once to follow that upward path which we see mapped out in our century. Thus grace was always in our world, but Christ led it up to its own golden age. If roses and art, if fruit and philosophy, can hasten forward, shall we hang a millstone around the neck of grace? Is it not to grow in the passing centuries? Is it not to become more and more visible? Within many of the old English churches and cathedrals the flowers placed on the altar each day are small when compared with the ivy that climbs and wanders and masses itself on the outside. Gray could not have written his elegy within the holy walls. His thoughts would have been bounded. Outside of the church lay the more impressive scene. wider and deeper the ocean, the higher run its waves and the more solemn its music. Thus the grace of God grows and the bunch of blossoms on the church's altar is only an emblem of the June luxuriance on the outside. Under this growing grace, states are changing their laws, churches their creeds, and society its morals and its manners. The An evolution which makes nature come from itself excludes from the whole universe the reign of all forms of grace. We have nothing but power-the power of the sun and the ground. Of atheistic evolution this is the philosophy-that as the dry axle of a cart creaks, thus a bird sings. As the willow tree weeps, its tears trickling down in the night, thus man weeps. As the waves sparkle in the sun, so man laughs or smiles. As gold is formed in the fires of the earth, so the human brain, the eye, the ear, are made by the rays of the sun. There is no goodness or grace anywhere. only a rock that can move. He is only some dirt which the sun has made so warm that it can think. Oxygen has so long combined with hydrogen in man that at last he talks. Ozone has lain around him until he sings and reasons. As the barn-door hinges become oxidized until they creak, so man combines with water and rusts into operas and anthems. All animals will sing when they shall have been long exposed to the needful Man is |