God for freedom to worship him."

New England's best traits, then, are but her rightful inheritance;
traits "lineally descended" from her founders, softened and purified in
the transmitting many times, as in the case of their sectional loyalty.
"They seemed to shrink from trying to get to heaven by any other road
than that which their fathers travelled, lest they should miss them at
their journey's end."

And in these days, thank God! religious toleration is creeping over the
forbidding rock of New England theology, much as the delicate vines of
the May-flower crept over and beautified the hard, unyielding soil.

Thus New England stands, in her freedom, love of education, and all
those homely domestic traits which make her the comfortable, clever,
strong, and tender mother she is, while under and through and over all
her traits runs, like a strain of restful music, her great, all
powerful, far-reaching faith.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

A great stride of advancement has been taken in the cultivation of that
rarest of supernal graces, Christian charity, since the ancient
patriarchs of New England fell asleep. Occasionally opportunity is given
us of measuring "with the eye" the distance which has been travelled.
More than a hundred and fifty years ago Dr. Cotton Mather spoke of Rhode
Island as "the Gerizzim of New England, the common receptacle of the
convicts of Jerusalem and the outcasts of the land." The island itself,
as a portion of God's creation, he was willing to think worthy of all
praise. He seems to have felt regarding it as Bishop Heber felt about
India when he wrote his immortal missionary hymn:--

"And every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile."

"The island is, indeed, for the fertility of its soil, the temperateness
of its air, etc., the best garden of all the colony, and were it free
from serpents I would call it the Paradise of New England." As things
were, however, the good old man could only say regretfully, "_Bona
terra, mala gens_." He evidently fancied that the serpent was not a
native of the original home of human innocence, or else his special
affection for the people of Rhode Island led him to wish for them an
exemption from exposures which God had not thought necessary to the
safety and happiness of Adam. The serpent was an honorable member of the
animal community in Paradise before Ithuriel's "spear of heaven-tempered
steel" discovered Satan, in the shape of a toad, breathing in