the world has ever known.  Tobacco, strong drink, and opium alternately lull and excite, soothe and elevate, but always destroy; yet they do not destroy our ascetic, for he knows them not.  He does not deplete himself by drugs, rivalry, strife or anger.  He believes in co-operation, not competition.  He works and prays.  He keeps a good digestion, an even pulse, a clear conscience; and as man’s true wants are very few, our subject grows rich and has not only ample supplies for himself, but is enabled to minister to others.  He is earth’s good Samaritan.  It was Tolstoy and his daughter who started soup-houses in Russia and kept famine at bay.  Your true monk never passed by on the other side; ah, no! the business of the old-time priest was to do good.  The Quaker is his best descendant—­he is the true philanthropist.

If jeered, hooted and finally oppressed, these protesters will form a clan or sect and adopt a distinctive garb and speech.  If persecuted, they will hold together, as cattle on the prairies huddle against the storm.  But if left alone the Law of Reversion to Type catches the second generation, and the young men and maidens secrete millinery, just as birds do a brilliant plumage, and the strange sect merges into and is lost in the mass.  The Jews did not say, Go to, we will be peculiar, but, as Mr. Zangwill has stated, they have remained a peculiar people simply because they have been proscribed.

The successful monk, grown rich and feeling secure, turns voluptuary and becomes the very thing that he renounced in his monastic vows.  Over-anxious bicyclists run into the object they wish to avoid.  We are attracted to the thing we despise; and we despise it because it attracts.  A recognition of this principle will make plain why so many temperance fanatics are really drunkards trying hard to keep sober.  In us all is the germ of the thing we hate; we become like the thing we hate; we are the thing we hate.  Ex-Quakers in Philadelphia, I am told, are very dressy people.  But before a woman becomes a genuine admitted non-Quaker, the rough, gray woolen dress shades off by almost imperceptible degrees into a dainty silken lilac, whose generous folds have a most peculiar and seductive rustle; the bonnet becomes smaller, and pertly assumes a becoming ruche, from under which steal forth daring, winsome ringlets; while at the neck, purest of cream-white kerchiefs jealously conceal the charms that a mere worldly woman might reveal.  Then the demi-monde, finding themselves neglected, bribe the dressmakers and adopt the costume.

Thus does civilization, like the cyclone, move in spirals.

* * * * *

In a sermon preached at the City Temple, June Eighteenth, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six, Doctor Joseph Parker said:  “There it was—­there! at Smithfield Market, a stone’s throw from here, that Ridley and Latimer were burned.  Over this spot the smoke of martyr fires hovered.  And I pray for a time when they will hover again.  Aye, that is what we need! the rack, the gallows, chains, dungeons, fagots!”