Mr. Patterson begun his ministry early in the spring. He found appointments for every Sabbath, and for many a week-day evening. Within a month he was engaged for a quarter of the time, to preach at Cambridge. Early in the autumn, the society at Girard losing their pastor, he was, much to his surprise and reluctance, called to its charge. Some hints of the busy work of the next two years, one may find in Mrs. Patterson's story of her "Lost Banker," published not long since in these pages. I would gladly linger over the record, as an example of missionary work. To Girard were given three Sunday mornings of each month; to Cambridge, twenty-six miles away, where he had organized a society, the fourth, with an evening service halfway on the return, at Edinboro'. The afternoons of the Sundays at Girard, were spent at Springfield, at Lockport, at Wellsburgh, with an extra evening service at Wrightsville. These were the regular appointments, with no end of week-evening lectures and sermons. All these "quarters" added, showed the work of two or three men. And the united salary did not reach four hundred dollars. The second year the arrangement was varied, but

covered no less work.

At the end of these two years, Rev. G. V. Maxham, formerly of Erie, then of Medford, Mass., wrote to his friend Patterson to come to Boston for Anniversary Week. He availed himself of the invitation to see the home of the modern heresies, and make the acquaintance of the fathers of the church. While here, he was invited to preach at Portsmouth, N. H., and did so, without knowing they were seeking a pastor. An invitation from the parish followed him home. He laid it before his Girard people; and their despair at the prospect of coping with Portsmouth, he mistook for a possible willingness that he should go.

He sent his resignation to Girard, and his acceptance to Portsmouth. Learning more freely the feeling of his people by their distress at the prospect of losing him, he promised to remain if his committee would gain the consent of the Portsmouth parish. But the reply came that the letter had only confirmed the

decision, and they declined to release him. And thus the field or labor changed from the lakeside villages to the city by the sea.

Mr. Patterson's ministry in Portsmouth covered eleven years. They were years of prosperity for parish and minister; though in the later part, clouded by the shadow of the war, and in some degree, rent by its factions. In these years, Mr. Patterson had become eminent, not only as a minister within and without the pale of his own church, but also as a citizen. He was an ardent lover of liberty, and like most ministers of his church, an abolitionist of the deepest dye. Of the famous underground railroad he had long been one of the most reliable conductors; and in this, whatever his attitude towards the constitution of his country, he was most loyal to his own constitution. When the war broke out he was a white flame of patriotism; and throughout the whole struggle, his religion meant union, and freedom to the slave. This had its natural effect on a congregation largely conservative. While he made war-speeches, and organized commissions and preached and prayed liberty, the timid slipped away to more quiet folds. But it would not have occurred to him to question the propriety of standing at his post, if he had stood there alone.

In the summer of 1864, he received a commission from the Governor of New Hampshire, as a sort of chaplain-at-large, to look after the welfare of the troops of the State. Laden with the charities of his city and the State, he spent three months at the front, mostly in the trenches before Petersburg. This summer's work wrote deep lines upon his life. He distributed more than twenty tons of supplies in the trenches, often with bullets whistling about him, a conspicuous mark for sharpshooters. With his own hands, he ministered to ten thousand sick and wounded men. Many a rebel shared in these ministrations, and hands that had drawn trigger against him were raised afterwards in blessing. Thus he satisfied the blood-thirstiness of which he had been accused.

Later, Mr. Patterson was a member of the State Legislature, and a nomination for the general Congress was strongly

urged upon him. His interest in the reconstruction of the government was strong; but the old feeling that his life was sealed to a different ministry prevailed, and he declined the nomination. Not being nominated he was not elceted, and is not that "Patterson from New Hampshire" who has figured conspicuously in the annals. of Congress since then.

In 1866, Mr. Patterson was called to succeed Dr. Bartholemew in the parish at Boston Highlands, where he still remains. Assuming charge of this, almost the largest parish of his denomination, he increased both the sphere of his usefulness and the burden of his labors, which have constantly been almost beyond his physical strength. But from repeated illness he has returned to the work of the Lord strengthened anew, and with growing promise of long years of usefulness before a life yet in its early maturity.

The burden of these toilsome years is lightened, who shall say how much? by the constant presence and help of the gifted wife, who finds her work one with his. Eminent with her pen, and active in all good work, Mrs. Patterson has, through all these years, preached the gospel as effectually, perhaps, as he. If the doors for the entrance of women into the ministry had opened twenty years earlier, she might have preached it in the same way. Frequently, when he has been held from his work by sickness, she has stood in his place, and spoken the word of life to his people, to their edification and joy.

Added to the multitudinous duties of a city pastor, inside and outside his parish, Mr. Patterson holds responsible positions in the general church work, where his counsels are distinguished for the zeal that is inspired by love and tempered with wisdom. Without any especial "hobby" he has been found on the right side of all reforms.

So unbounded is his interest in every good cause, that his brethren, more tender than himself of his strength, say with a smile, "What he requires is not urging, but restraining."

In his pulpit ministrations Mr. Patterson is fervent rather than eloquent, with a style peculiarly his own. His sermons,

carefully written, are direct, rapid and incisive in style, full of earnestness, and always on fresh and timely topics. No service is simply perfunctory or official with him. Whatever he does is with his whole soul; and in this constant "ministry of the spirit" we find the most important secret of his success. His church is eminently a working church. And the zeal with which he inspires it, not only in the Sunday ministrations but in the conference room, the Sunday School and in all pastoral offices, savors of the cheerful enthusiasm of Methodism, rather than the more solemn and decorous usages of the church in which he was reared.

We have not found it natural to speak of our friend by his newly-discovered title of Doctor, although the authorities of the Portsmouth church, where he lately made the historical address at the celebration of its hundredth anniversary, made surreptitious use of the secret, on their programmes. It transpires that the degree of D. D., is the gift of an unsectarian institution at Springfield, Pennsylvania,which has frequently used its college privileges in this way. Early in his ministry the degree was proffered him and declined. A few years since it was conferred; but he has been chary of divulging the fact, from a doubt whether his divinity deserves doctoring, whether or not it may need it. His chief attention has been given to practical work rather than theological learning. And though sound in the faith of his church, and able in its defence, he is set for the dispensation of the "gospel of grace," rather than the wisdom of men.

The distinguishing traits of Mr. Patterson's character are such as easily waken the enthusiasm of friendship. His peiarly catholic spirit, his unselfishness, his sympathy, his sincerity, are as quickly recognized as himself; they are himself. his charity and tenderness are often beyond justice, his generosity beyond discretion, these are failings that lean to virtue's side. If Mr. Patterson had lived five hundred years ago he would have made a good knight-errant. No mailed hand so ready to break lance in every folorn cause and "right the ancient wrong' as his. Set in the less

N the early part of the eighteenth cen

Itury, in the village of Paquis, not very

far from the city of Geneva, there stood a shop devoted to the manufacture of printed calicoes. One Sunday a boy,-a mere child ten years old-was strolling about this shop with the happy abandon and aimless curiosity characteristic of his age. Little boys are never apt to make inviting studies for the artist or the moralist; they are too prone to uncleanliness, to greed, to slyness, to a general showing forth of that cloven foot which they have not yet been taught to hide. The boy now under view, formed no exception to this general rule. His life thus far had moved along at hap-hazard. Some years before his father had run away, leaving him an orphan. His training had been very poor and slight, and besides he was a dull boy, who seemed to have a knack of not understanding nor remembering the things which they tried to teach him.

And yet the little fellow had good manly stuff within him, as that Sabbath day in the calico-factory was about to prove. but we will let him tell the story in his own way.

"I was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot-press; their brightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers upon them, and I was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel, and gave it a half-quarter turn so adroitly that I had just the ends of my two longest fingers taken, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear the nails. I raised a piercing cry. Fazy instantly turned back the wheel and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of consternation he hastened to me, embraced me and besought me to cease my cries or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was touched by his. I instantly fell silent. We ran to the pond, where he helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I would not; and I kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the origin of the scar. I

was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for more than two months was unable to use my hand, but I persisted that a large stone had fallen and crushed it."

Now if this lad should prove in after years not to be so stupid as he seemed, if his apparent dullness should turn out to be only a sheath in which Nature was keeping, until the time of use, one of the keenest intellects that the world has ever seen, we can easily imagine what would naturally become of such a story as this. After the boy had become a famous man, he would, perhaps, in some moment of pardonable vanity, have recounted an incident which did so much honor to his heart. The story would have been snatched up by some eager and reverent Boswell, and been handed down to us as one of the few memorials of the great man's earlier days; many a biographer has lacked even as much material as this with which to throw light upon the real life and character of his hero in boyhood. Certainly such an incident, with a few others gathered up in the same way, would serve to shed a very soft and pleasant light about that chapter of dry dates and childish common-places with which almost every biography begins.

But this lad happened to be Jean Jacques Rousseau. The story is one in the youthful career of the only man in history, who has ever dared to lay bare every secret of his life and heart, good or bad, before the world. No one else has ever had the same courage, the same magnificent disdain of everything but the truth, or what seemed to him the truth. Others have promised as much, but at some point in the narrative have shrunk back, and every one can see that the tale has been left incomplete. Other autobiographies are pieces of portrait-painting, where the artist has shown us what it pleased him to show. But the Confessions of Rousseau are a photograph. Nothing is kept back; if anything seems to be wanting, it is because our eyes are not sharp enough to see it. Every blotch, every deformity, every disease, however loathsome, is pictured by the remorseless sunlight of this man's purpose. All of us,

if we will, can know two lives perfectly, and but two. We can know all about our own and all about that of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Absolutely, no more.

The world, for the most part, has treated these confessions in a way which seems to us anything but honorable. Even the law, stern and exacting as it is, does not condemn the man who has "turned state's evidence." And Rousseau stands precisely in this position. He has turned state's evidence against that human nature which seems passably fair upon the surface, but which we all have reason to believe to be foul enough within. He has disclosed the bad secrets of the human heart, not by vague generalities, not by any pietistic clamor about the depravity of the race, not by any irrelevant hearsay testimony, but in the only way it could be honestly and effectually done-by a faithful exhibition of his own life. And yet the world insists upon judging him by this record. We say nothing about the evident unfairness of the judgment which has thus been passed. We do not insist upon the patent fact that men have dwelt only upon the darker shades of the picture which has been faithfully painted before them in all its colors-that they have feasted upon such stories as that of the stolen ribbon, and neglected others, like that of the calico factory, which throw altogether a different light upon the character of the young vagabond. All this is nothing to our purpose. Believe that the common judgment upon Rousseau has been without a bias, if it so pleaseth you. Our point is, that upon such a record, no one has the right to pass judgment at all.

this

The reasons are plain enough. When we attempt to judge Rousseau upon record, we are absolutely without any standard of comparison. If other great men were in the habit of betraying every bad secret of their own lives, of laying bare with pitiless hand every plague-spot upon their moral being-then, after reading the Confessions of Rousseau we should be able to decide how much worse or how much better the man was than his fellows. As it is, we are entirely in the dark. We have nothing to aid us but a vague suspicion that there are dark depths beneath the

fairest surfaces of life. The world, listening to Rousseau, is like a young priest, sitting for the first time in the confessional and listening to the tale of his first penitent. He would be a silly priest, if he thought the man breathing out his confession to be a sinner above all the others who had not yet unlocked their secrets.

We see, then, precisely how Rousseau's story is to be regarded and treated. It is a contribution to moral pathology, to our knowledge of the spiritual diseases that lurk beneath the decorous seeming of human life. As such, it is invaluable; there is nothing like it in the world. But to use these confessions against the man who made them to criminate him in the strength of these avowals of guilt made with a candor and freedom that other men use only when they are describing the crimes of their fellows-is simply contemptible. To judge Rousseau aright, to assign him his true moral position in comparison with other men of genius, we must set aside the greater part of the evidence he has given in. We should look upon his life through the same mists that kindly hide our secrets from the public gaze. What should we think of this man if like other men, he had confessed his sins in secret or have let them go unshrived and uncared for? The answer to that question is the only honest judgment upon Jean Jacques Rousseau.

It is something new in criticism, that a critic should avow his purpose to ignore the greater part of the facts that are known to him. But we have shown, we trust, good reason for it in the present case; at any rate it is precisely the course we purpose to adopt. We shall seek to eliminate from the story of Rousseau, everything that clearly smacks of the confessional. We shall fasten only upon the great patent facts of his life that might have been brought to light by the ordinary processes of biography, even if he had never made the world his confidant. Thus the man can be measured relatively to other men of genius, for all will stand in the same perspective. In that way we shall gain a clearer conception of Rousseau than by the common method, of bewildering one's self over the countless enigmas and inconsis