as-lights of the present day, we may form some slight
conception of the pigmy race of ancestors from which they sprung.

Meantime, during these years of progress and prosperity, while Time was
tracing its finger-marks upon the walls of men's houses, and writing its
lessons on their hearts and minds, there stood, in the centre of the old
market-place, a little silent symbol of the religious feeling of the
passing ages,--the market-cross, and oratory within the little octagonal
structure, whose external corners bore upon all of them the emblem of
hope and salvation--the crucifix. In its earliest days, its oratory was
tenanted by a priest, supported by the alms of the busy market-folks, who
could find means, in the midst of all their worldly callings, to pay some
tribute in time and money to religion. And was it such a very foolish
practice of our ignorant old forefathers, thus to bring the sanctuary
into the very midst of the business of life?--was it a great proof of
childish simplicity, to seek to sanctify the scenes of merchandize by the
presence and teaching of Christianity? Is it indeed needful that the
elements of our nature, spirit, soul, and body, should be rent asunder,
and fed and nurtured in distinct and separate schools, until each one of
us becomes almost conscious of two separate existences--the Sabbath-day
life, within the church or meeting walls, and the week-day business life
abroad in the world? Or shall the union be pronounced more beautiful and
consonant with the laws of harmony, that carries the world into the
sanctuary, and desecrates the house of God by the presence of sordid
passions, crusted round the heart by daily exercise in the great marts of
commerce, or in the intercourse of political or even social life, that
not the one day's rest in seven, spent in listening to some favourite
theologian's intellectual teachings of doctrinal truths, or controversial
dogmas, can suffice to rub off, to purify, or make clean? A market-cross
and priest may not be the remedies for this disease of later times, but
they were outer symbols of the reality needed--Christianity, to be
carried out into the every-day actions of the world, mingling with the
dealings of man with man, master and workman, capitalist and
consumer,--that there may no longer exist those monstrous anomalies that
are to be met with in almost every phase of society in this Christian
land, among a people professing to be guided by the light of