rches the people in that vicinity usually went.

"Well, not much to any."

"What are their religious views?"

"Well, not much of any."

"Well, my friend, may I inquire what are _your_ opinions on religious
subjects?"

"The man, yet reclining," said the Archbishop, "looked at me sleepily a
moment, and replied,--

"'My opinion is that them as made me will take care of me.'"

The Archbishop came off discouraged; but we assured him that the man
was far ahead of many specimens we had met. We never see an opossum in
Virginia--a fossil animal in most other places--but it seems the sign
of the moral stratification around. There are many varieties of
opossum in Virginia,--political and religious: Saturn, who devours his
offspring, has not come to Virginia yet.

Old formulas have, doubtless, to a great extent, lost their power there
also, but there is not vitality enough to create a higher form. For no
new church can ever be anywhere inaugurated in this world until the
period has come when its chief corner-stone can be Humanity. Till then
the old creeds in Virginia must wander like ghosts, haunting the old
ruins which their once exquisite churches have become. Nothing can be
more picturesque, nothing more sad, than these old churches,--every
brick in them imported from Old England, every prayer from the past
world and its past need: the high and wide pews where the rich sat
lifted some feet above the seats of the poor represent still the faith
in a God who subjects the weak to the strong. These old churches, rarely
rebuilt, are ready now to become rocks imbedding fossil creeds. In these
old aisles one walks, and the snake glides away on the pavement, and the
bat flutters in the high pulpit, whilst moss and ivy tenderly enshroud
the lonely walls; and over all is written the word DESOLATION. Symbol it
is of the desolation which caused it, even the trampled fanes and altars
of the human soul,--the temple of God, whose profanation the church has
suffered to go on unrebuked, till now both must crumble into the same
grave.

* * * * *

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is
found,--a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an
eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,--a certain degree of progress
from this extreme is called Civilization. It is a vague, complex name,
of many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition. Mr.