Scotch woman who had known him in other days. Yet, this man had been born to fortune and to fame, for his father was a man of wealth and large attainments. But few, if any, young men have ever had better opportunities for obtaining eminent success. Nature had endowed this man with all her finest gifts. He was so brilliant of intellect as to be fitted to enter Princeton College at eleven years of age. His father had been president of that institution, and was one of the foremost men of his time, whether as educator, scholar, author, or preacher. His mother was the noblest daughter of the most renowned clergyman New England ever produced. His sister had, while living, been the wife of one of the chief justices of Connecticut, and this dying, forsaken old man had himself once been vice-president of the United States, and he might easily have been its president, honored and honorable in life and in death, if he had not despised the law of righteousness, and substituted intrigue and an iron will for moral principles wherewith to guide his life.

Do you ask how came he, who had been so nobly born, to make so fearful a mistake? He had stood one time at the parting of ways where God calls men, and another man had directed him wrong. It happened on this wise: When a student in college at the age of fifteen, his soul was greatly stirred by a religious revival then sweeping over the place, and the president of the college, to whom he went for advice in the hour of his soul's need, had called the religious fervor "fanaticism"; and, when still unsatisfied, some months later, he again sought instruction of another noted divine, similar advice was given him, and he believed them, and then Aaron Burr forsook the faith of his father and mother for the then popular and loose morality of Lord Chesterfield. It was the fruits of this apostasy that led men to distrust the most brilliant lawyer of his day, and caused his own political party to forsake him; and that then led him to seek to retrieve on the "field of honor" (!) his waning political fortunes by taking the life of his rival, Alexander Hamilton, at Weehawken, N. J., on that fatal early morning of July 7th, 1804. And then came in rapid succession his flight for

safety from the wrath of his fellow men; his lurid dreams of an empire, and his long six months' trial for treason, with his after years of wandering in Europe as an outcast among men; and then the years of final recklessness and licentiousness, to the end. Oh, if the finger posts had only pointed right when he stood an awakened lad before Drs. Witherspoon and Bellamy! And yet the man who was so loved by such a daughter as Theodosia Burr could not be wholly bad. Young man, Solomon was right when he declared that "righteousness tendeth to life"; and Paul but wrote nature's law when he said that Godliness "has promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come."

The Dignity of Labor.

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

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NE of the most important facts testified to by human experience in all civilized lands is this-that it is disgraceful

not to work. Men in every age of the world have scorned the idler. They have sought to instruct him by example of industry; they have admonished him by the proverbs of the wise; they have railed at him in song; sought to reform him by law, and yet, like the poor, he is ever with them. Indeed, the poor are mainly his offspring, and, but for him, they would almost disappear from the earth.

The drones in the hive of human industry must needs eat, and so the toilers must produce, not alone for themselves, but for these cumberers of the ground. If labor was not so bounteously rewarded the world would starve, for there is at no time enough food stored within the houses of the earth to support its people for two years without a harvest. Hence the toilers must not only delve, and plant, and reap year after year, whereby to feed and clothe themselves, but they are obliged also to provide for these parasites on the body politic. This class of gentry, whether clothed in purple and fine linen, or decorated with rags, are fond of saying that "the world owes them a living,"— an assertion utterly absurd, and wholly untrue. It is bad enough to be a "do-nothing," but why add falsehood to shame by claiming assets never possessed? It is a law of nature that "if any man will not work neither shall he eat." Paul the Apostle did not originate that law. It is imbedded in the very structure of the world.

How wonderfully rich our country is in its material resources! You might put the entire population of the world in our own fair land, and easily support them all, so bountifully has God provided for this land. Yet for hundreds of years a few thousand Indians owned it all, and well-nigh starved to death in it, would have starved but for the wild beasts and birds they killed. Why? They were idlers, and shirked honest work. How rich this world might be if there were no idlers in it! In 1892 the cash value of the work produced by the toilers in this country alone in that one year was seven and one-half billions of dollars. If now the millions of soldiers, policemen, keepers of prisons and reformatories, throughout all lands, who have to depend upon the toilers for their bread while they are taking care of the mischievous and vicious idlers, could be released to do honest work, and together with the idlers each earned his own living, this would be a world of wealth and comfort.

God designed that men should be rich. So he stored the world underneath with uncountable treasures of gold, silver, iron, tin, lead, and gems, and vast reservoirs of fuel, and stocked the soil with great wealth-producing power, and crowded the seas and air with immense material for making it. Yes, the Almighty is immensely wealthy himself, and he would have his children so. Sin, the sin of idleness, makes them poor. If Mother Eve had been busily at work so that she had no time to gossip with the serpent, she and her husband might have stayed in Eden, and lived in luxury, but as it was in the beginning, so now, "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," and, if you neglect work in Eden, you may have to do a worse and harder kind outside. There is one thing which men and women have inherited, and it seems to have struck in very deep, it is laziness. Surely, if you judge by the fruits of idleness, it must be a sin not to be doing some kind of honest work. What stores of wisdom, what nobility of knowledge, labor brings! And you cannot have it without labor, and hard labor, too. Learning is not an instinct, but an acquisition, and we shall never get beyond the need of having more and more

knowledge. Knowledge, like the Creator's works, is boundless in extent, and will continue while they endure. "Knowledge is power." Labor alone secures it. He who would excel must work for it, and by his labor he becomes dignified. If Michael, the Archangel, were sent from heaven to sweep the muddy streets of earth, the lowly work would not lower him, but how mightily he would elevate the task! How honorable thereafter street sweeping would be among the children of men! You have been given your work to do. It may be lowly. It may be uncongenial, but if it is for you to do, do it. Do it with your might. Do it the best you know how. By doing well the little, you will be fitted for the greater tasks and responsibilities of life; then the worker and the work alike become immortal.

By the light of torches in the early morning of March 9, 1791, an old man, eighty-eight years of age, was carried to his burial. He had been one of the most tireless workers this world has ever known. He literally defied death by his immense labor, and left the impress of his great personality in untold blessings upon the lives of more millions of men and women than any other one man has done since the days of Christ. He was the son of an English rector, whose life had been an unceasing struggle with poverty, who had been imprisoned for debt, and who died in debt, and so this boy was early inured to privation and toil. Twice the father's house had been set on fire at night by the rabble whom that father's faithfulness had offended, and the inmates by wading through flames had barely escaped with their lives. On the second occasion, this lad, then five years old, was forgotten in his chamber, and at the last moment, as the roof fell in, he was providentially rescued from the burning building by two of the neighbors. He was one of nineteen children, ten of whom lived to mature years. They constituted a most remarkable family. The celebrated commentator, Dr. Adam Clarke, says, "Such a family I have never read of, heard of, or known; nor, since the days of Abraham, has there ever been a family to which the human race has been more indebted. "John Wesley and his brother Charles were the