illustrate the ideas which were operative in the world at the time,
not to originate or formulate them."

This is a just estimate. Brilliant commonplace is not greatness, but
the man who is thoroughly commonplace in his conceptions, who
expresses well and forcibly what his hearers think, is the one to win
applause and popularity. Had Beecher been a great thinker, a church of
moderate size would have held his followers. But he was not and
thinkers knew it. The Rev. George L. Perin, of the Shawmut
Universalist Church, Boston, said of Beecher, "As we have tried to
analyze the influence of his address we have said to ourselves, 'There
was nothing new in that, for I have thought the same thing a thousand
times myself;' and yet at the same time everything _seemed_ new, and
we have gone away thinking better of ourselves because he taught us to
see what we were able to think but had not been able to express. He
had the remarkable faculty of dressing up the things that everybody
was thinking, and making us see that they were worth thinking. And
there was something contagious about his wonderful faith in human
nature. He believed in the divinity of man and made others believe in
it." In other words, he added much to the sentiment of his hearer, but
little to his thought. This was greatness of character and personal
power, but not intellectual greatness. Beecher was a great man, but
not a great thinker. The great thinker overwhelms his hearers with new
and strange thought. The multitude, fixed in habit, reject it all.
Clear and dispassionate thinkers feel that they cannot reject it, but
it is too new even to them to elicit their enthusiasm. They sympathize
with him only so far as they had previously cherished similar
thoughts.

Hence we see it is ordained that the teacher of great truths must
struggle against great opposition; and in proportion to his resistance
by his contemporaries is the grandeur of his reception by posterity;
in proportion to the power arrayed against him is the remoteness of
the century in which that power shall be extinct and his triumph
complete.

SPIRITUAL WONDERS.

SLATER'S WONDERFUL SPIRITUAL TESTS (described by a Brooklyn newspaper
correspondent).--"I have something to say to that gentlemen with the
black hair and high forehead," he continued, turning to another part
of the house; "you have a business engagement to-morrow morning at 10
o'clock with two men. I see you go up a flight of steps