A prominent divine has lately said:  “I believe the Young Men’s Christian Association to be the greatest religious fact of the nineteenth century.”

What has been effected by this fact?  Thousands of young men in all parts of the world have been brought to Jesus Christ.  It has been the training-school for Moody, Whittle, and hosts of laymen who are to-day proclaiming the simple Gospel.  It has organized great evangelistic movements both here and abroad.  It formed the Christian Commission, which not only relieved the wants of the body during our war, but sent hundreds of Christ’s missionaries to the hospitals and battle-fields.  It has gloriously manifested the unity of Christ’s true church.  It stands to-day an organic body, instinct with one life, spreading its limbs through the world, active, alert, ready at any moment to respond to the call of the church, and enables it to present an unbroken front to superstition and infidelity, which already rear their brazen heads against Christ and his church, and will soon be in open rebellion and actual warfare, and which Christ at his coming will forever destroy.

[NOTE.—­Through the kindness of Messrs. Harper and Brothers, of New York, we present to our readers the two portraits in this article.  For the cuts of the buildings we are indebted to the Chicago Watchman, mention of which is made above.—­R.S., Jr.]

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GEORGE FULLER.

BY SIDNEY DICKINSON.

The death of George Fuller has removed a strong and original figure from the activity of American art, and added a weighty name to its history.  To speak of him now, while his work is fresh in the public mind, is a labor of some peril; so easy is it, when the sense of loss is keen, to make mistakes in judgment, and to allow the friendly spirit to prevail over the judicial, in an estimation of him as a man and a painter.  Yet he has gone in and out before us long enough to make a study of him profitable, and to give us, even now, some occasion for an opinion as to the place he is likely to occupy in the annals of our native art.  Mr. Fuller held a peculiar position in American painting, and one which seems likely to remain hereafter unfilled.  He followed no one, and had no followers; his art was the outgrowth of personal temperament and experience, rather than the result of teaching, and although he studied others, he was himself his only master.  In other men whose names are prominent in our art, we seem to see the direction of an outside influence.  Stuart and Copley confessed to the teaching of the English school of their day—­a school brilliant but formal, and holding close guiding-reins over its disciples; Benjamin West became denationalized, so far as his art was concerned; Allston showed the impression of England, Italy, and Flanders, all at once, in his refined and thoughtful style, and Hunt manifested in every stroke of his brilliant brush the learned and facile methods that are in vogue in the