ng fruits? That his tastes are so
cultivated, that all beautiful things speak to him, and bring him their
delights? That his understanding is opened, so that he walks through
every hall of knowledge, and gathers its treasures? That his moral
feelings are so developed and quickened, that he holds sweet commerce
with Heaven? Oh, no!--none of these things! He is cold and dead in heart
and mind and soul. Only his passions are alive; but--he is worth five
hundred thousand dollars!

"And we say a man is 'ruined.' Are his wife and children dead? Oh, no!
Have they had a quarrel, and are they separated from him? Oh, no! Has he
lost his reputation through crime? No. Is his reason gone? Oh, no! it's
as sound as ever. Is he struck through with disease? No. He has lost his
property, and he is ruined. The _man_ ruined? When shall we learn
that 'a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he
possesseth'"?

Mr. Beecher's God has the gentle and philanthropic qualities of Jesus
of Nazareth, with omnipotence added. Religious emotion comes out in his
prayers, sermons, and lectures, as the vegetative power of the earth in
the manifold plants and flowers of spring.

"The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide
world's joy. The lonely pine on the mountain-top waves its sombre
boughs, and cries, 'Thou art my sun!' And the little meadow-violet lifts
its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, 'Thou art my
sun!' And the grain in a thousand fields rustles in the wind, and makes
answer, 'Thou art my sun!'

"So God sits effulgent in heaven, not for a favored few, but for the
universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or low, than he may
not look up with childlike confidence and say, 'My Father! thou art
mine!'"

"When once the filial feeling is breathed into the heart, the soul
cannot be terrified by augustness, or justice, or any form of Divine
grandeur; for then, to such a one, _all the attributes of God are but so
many arms stretched abroad through the universe, to gather and to press
to his bosom those whom he loves. The greater he is, the gladder are
we_, so that he be our Father still.

"But, if one consciously turns away from God, or fears him, the nobler
and grander the representation be, the more terrible is his conception
of the Divine Adversary that frowns upon him. The God whom love beholds
rises upon the horizon like mountains which carry summer up their sides
to the v