ST. AUGUSTINE'S CITY OF GOD. BY GEO. B CHEEVER, D.D. WANDERING once in the region of the Kennebec, I fell upon an old volume of "Pious Breathings," being the "Meditations of Saint Augustine; his Treatise of the Love of God; Soliloquies and Manual, to which are added Select Contemplations from Saint Anselm and Saint Bernard, made English by George Stanhope, D.D., Dean of Canterbury, and Chaplain in Ordinary to Her Majesty, the fifth edition, in 1720." Interested in all of the book, I was particularly charmed with the twenty-fifth chapter, entitled "The Pious Soul's Desire of Heaven," which, it is not at all improbable, may have been in the original the source of some of the old hymns upon the Celestial City, which are so beautiful, and may be taken as the key note of that grand harmony which pervades his celebrated work, the "City of God." Be that as it may, the meditation is such lofty devotional poetry, though in prose, that a transcript of it cannot be without interest; and if, to vary its form, it be reproduced in unpretending verse, whereof the excellency of the devotional material will make up for the roughness of its form, it may be forgiven. "O heavenly Jerusalem !" exclaims St. Augustine; "our common Mother, the Holy City of God! Thou beautiful Spouse of Christ! My soul hath loved thee exceedingly, and all my faculties are ravished with thy charms. O what graces, what glory, what noble state appears in every part of thee! Most exquisite is thy form, and thou alone art beauty without blemish. Rejoice and dance for joy, O daughter of my King! for thy Lord himself, fairer than all the sons of men, hath pleasure in thy beauty. "But what is thy Beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest among women? My Beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my Beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth; I sought him and found him, I held him fast, and will not let him go, till he bring me into his House, into the secret places of his Tabernacles. O glorious Metropolis! there shalt thou fill me with the plentiful communication of thy pleasures, so that I shall never hunger, neither thirst any more. "O how happy will my soul perceive itself, when it shall be admitted to see thy glory, thy beauty! to view the gates, the walls, the streets, the stately buildings, the splendor of thy inhabitants, and the triumphant pomp of thy King en. throned in the midst of thee! For thy walls are of precious stones, and thy gates of pearl, and thy streets of pure gold, continually resounding with loud Hallelujahs. Thy houses are founded upon hewn square stones, carried up with sapphire, covered in with gold, and no unclean person can enter into thee, no manner of pollution abide within thy borders. "Sweet and charming are thy delights, O Holy Mother of us all! Subject to none of those vicissitudes and interruptions which abate our pleasures here below. No successions of night and day, no intervals of darkness, no difference of seasons in their several courses. Nor is the light derived from artificial helps, or natural luminaries the same as ours; no lamps nor candles, no shining of the moon nor stars, but God of God, and Light of Light, even the Sun of Righteousness shines in thee, and the white Immaculate Lamb; He it is that enlightens thee with the full lustre of his majesty and beauty. Thy Light of Glory, and all thy happiness, is the incessant contemplation of this Divine King; for this King of Kings is in the midst of thee, and all his hosts are ministering round about him continually. "There are the melodious choirs of Angels; there the sweet fellowship and company of the Heavenly inhabitants; there the joyful pomp of all those triumphant souls who from their sore trials and travels through this vale of tears, at last return victorious to their native country. There the goodly fellowship of Prophets, whose eyes God opened to take a prospect of far-distant mysteries. There the twelve leaders of the Christian armies, the blessed Apostles; there the noble army of the Martyrs; there the College of the Confessors; there the holy men and women, who, in the days of the flesh, were mortified to the pleasures of sin and the world. There the virgins and youths, whose blooming virtues put forth early fruits, and ripened in piety far exceeding the proportion of their years. There the sheep and lambs who have escaped the ravening wolves, and all the snares laid for their destruction. There all rejoice in their proper mansions; THE HOLY CITY. and though each differ from other in degrees of glory, yet all agree in bliss and joy, diffused to all in common; and the happiness of every one is esteemed each man's own. "For there Charity reigns in its utmost perfection, because God is there all in all; whom they continually beholding, continually admire, and praise and love, and praise without intermission, without end, without weariness, or distraction of thought. This is their constant, their delightful employmeut; and oh! how happy shall I be, how exquisitely, incessantly happy, if, when this body crumbles into dust, I shall be entertained with that celestial harmony, and hear the hymns of praise to their Eternal King, which troops of angels and saints innumerable are ever singing in full concert! How happy myself to bear a part with them, and pay the same tribute to my God and Saviour, the Author and Captain of my salvation! To behold his face in glory, and to be made partaker of those gracious promises, of which he hath given me the comfortable hope, when saying to his Father, 'I will that they whom thou hast given me, he with me where I am, that they may behold the glory which I had with thee before the world was! And again, supporting his disciples against the tribulations which they should encounter here below, 'If any man love me, let him follow me, and where I am, there shall also my servant be!' And in another place, 'He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself unto him!" Thus far the meditations of the holy Augustine. He was a man of great mind and deep piety-a most remarkable creation of the grace of God, at a time when the whole church of Christ was beginning to be corrupted from the simplicity of the New Testament Christianity. It will vary the beautiful meditation, if it does not improve it, to put it into a new form. The New Testament descriptions of the glories of the New Jerusalem are so ravishingly beautiful, yet so simple, that we have but little else to do, but to turn the expressions into metre, leaving them in their simplicity, and they seem to flow as naturally in the form of poetry as of prose. THE HOLY CITY. O HEAVENLY Jerusalem! When shall I come to taste thy bliss, Thy joys when shall I sing? O blessed Mother of us all, My soul longs after thee! When will my Captain take me up, Thy stately grace to see? O, sweet and charming thy delights, No dimly-burning lamps, nor stars, But God thy Light, and the White Lamb, O noon most sacred, sweet, and bright, Of those celestial choirs, That stand around the throne, and burn With Love's seraphic fires! There Love reigns in its utmost bliss, For God is all in all, They love and praise, nor ever cease, Nor feel distracting thrall; They shining do appear; Their songs float o'er thy Jasper walls All ravishingly clear! How happy shall I be, O Lord! There the melodious Angel bands The exiles do return from earth Home to their native day! O Prophets taught of old! In glorious array; The Holy Virgins, in white robes, O glorious Metropolis! Thou Holy Mother dear! O Mother dear, Jerusalem! My soul longs after thee; 311 KINDNESS TO ANIMALS. BY REV, JOHN MITCHELL, AUTHOR OF MY MOTHER." Ir is the belief of some, that man's fall extended to the brutes-that, as man renounced his allegiance to God, so they threw off theirs to man, and became vicious and untractable to us; and not only so, but dissolved all bonds among themselves, and became mutually ferocious and distrustful. This opinion is avowed by Charlotte Elizabeth, in her admirable little book on "Kindness to Animals," and by others. What arguments are advanced to sustain it, I am not distinctly aware. Perhaps it is an inference from the apparent tractableness of the brutes origi. nally, when God brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. But to find in Adam's sin a direct moral cause for the dispositions and behavior of the brutes seems to me an extension of the Assembly's Catechism which is hardly admissible. I cannot think that they either " sinned in" or "fell with" Adam "in his first transgression." I do not imagine that beasts of prey became such in consequence of the fall; or that the lion's paws, the shark's teeth, the vulture's beak and claws, and all the peculiarities of creatures carnivorous, piscivorous, vermivorous, &c., had no appropriate and intended use prior to the exodus from Eden. Their original and proper natures were, as I suppose, essentially what they now are-in kind certainly, if not also in degree. There may, however, have been a physical consequence of the fall, which has extended itself to the brutes. Since the ground is cursed for man's sake, and the earth thereby rendered a less agreeable habitation for them, as well as for us, than it would have been had man continued holy, it may be that the ferocious beasts have been made more fierce, and the weak ones more timid by the change; and that so their uncomfortable relations with each other, and their untowardness to us, may have been aggravated. So far as moral causes operate to make them what they are, those causes are not to be looked for in the eating of the forbidden fruit, directly, but in the actual treatment which the brutes receive from man. Goads, traps, and guns are enough to make them shy of us. The effect of gentleness on animals, in our treatment of them, was the subject of my rambling thoughts when I took my pen-having reference specially to animals of the domestic kind. If the subject has already been discussed a thousand times, it has not been thereby rendered irksome; for where benevolence is concerned, and a pleasing study opened to us, the interest is per manent. Man was, and is, the constituted lord of the brutes. They are therefore, by the Creator, so far impressed with fear of him, as to render them susceptible of being subjected by him. But I imagine that their perception of man's ungentleness, in his tones, looks, and gestures, and especially their experience of his treatment of them, so often positively cruel, and so seldom considerately kind, make them more afraid than they naturally would be, and more than is desirable. They are less docile in proportion as they are excessively or unnaturally afraid. Brutes, of every species, have an instinctive dread of some things; they have an acquired dread of other things. The roar of an approaching tornado sends the cattle out of the woods, lest the uprooted trees should crush them. Thunder sends dogs under the bed, or table, and fishes to the deepest of the water. The wolf's howl alarms the sheep. The hawk's cry, or shadow, causes the hen to call her brood under her wing. These are instances of instinctive fear. And, to a certain degree, brutes have an instinctive fear of man; but they have also an acquired fear of him. In the first instance in which a stone is picked up to be thrown at a cow, she pays no attention to it, apprehending nothing till she feels the sting of it; but after being driven to pasture a few times by an unfeeling boy, she winces as soon as she sees you stoop. When a horse feels the rowel thrust into his side, the most sensitive part of his body, or receives a blow or two from a Balaam's club, he thinks that one man, at least is ungentle, and his suspicion or dislike of one is naturally enough extendible to the species. A dog, caressed at one moment and kicked at the next, believes, with regard to one man, that he is KINDNESS TO ANIMALS. 313 boldened by one another. The hunter makes use of the tame bird, or animal, to decoy the wild. Where the leader of the flock goes, the rest will follow. The dog that claims your acquaintance in the street, brings his fellows about you to share in your attentions, though they would have shunned you but for him. either capricious or hypocritical; and though he || another to be afraid of man. They are also emhas the good sense and charity not to include all men in one and the same category, he prudently resolves within himself, that he will in future use some little caution, and study a character before he confides in it. These are instances of acquired fear-greater than the natural. Take another. A gentleman who valued himself on his power with horses, asked me to take a ride with him. He had inspired the horse with a mysterious dread of a low sibilant sound which he made over the tip of the tongue, of which he gave me a specimen. It was hardly audible, and yet it agitated the horse, as if a wild beast had been after him. "By continuing the sound," said he, "I could drive him to madness." But it was a dangerous trifling with the animal; for as a neighbor was driving him through a wood one day, a locust, in very good imitation of my friend, set up his hissing song from an overhanging branch, and startled him to that degree that he became unmanageable, running and breaking the carriage, and endangering the life of the rider. The horse was an old one, perfectly well broke, and gentle with the exception of this particular fear. One more instance I will mention, as it illustrates both the horse's capacity for learning, and his apprehension of the repetition of an injury once experienced, whether from a human or a dif ferent agent. The animal had learned to draw water for himself, catching the well-pole with his teeth, and drawing it down and up by hitches, as a man does who uses only one hand. On one occasion, having dipped the bucket and drawn it partly up, it being icy about the well, his feet slipped, he missed his catch at the pole, and the sweep came down and hit him on the head! The poor beast could not be induced to go nigh the well afterward. He had had enough of drawing water. Now if the brutes are impressed by the Creator with a certain fear of man, for useful ends, that fact indicates to us that we have to begin with them by gaining their confidence. Fear is their natural feeling; confidence an acquired one. If we begin, then, by abusing them, we shall aggravate their fear, and set them further off. And the confidence of animals once lost, is not easily regained; their suspicion once excited, it is difficult to lay it. Yet this is what we too often do, from the first of our dealing with them to the last. We maltreat them, and then wonder at their behavior toward us. And note, too, that fear in animals is sympathetic and contagious. The alarm which one manifests is caught by others; and thus they learn of one I do not question that it may be necessary sometimes to chastise the obviously conscious misbehavior of a beast, and sometimes to stimulate his indolence with the whip; but I believe that castigation, and especially severe castigation, is the exception, and not the rule; and that in the ninety-nine cases, even of refractoriness, gentleness and patience are the better method. I do not believe that the Creator has made the brutes to be ruled by cruelty and fear, rather than by kindness and confidence. He has made them susceptible of kindness, and intends their subjugation by that means. Their fear we can easily excite at any time, if needful; their confidence is what we want, in order to their docility and usefulness; and that the Creator has left to our gentleness to gain. These ideas accord with the character of God, and with his precepts. And they accord with facts. The best used animals are the best behaved. The spirit and docility of the Arab's horse are not more proverbial than the owner's kindness to him. The finest stage horses in the world you may find on certain mail lines in England where they make no use of the whip; and the safest and least timid horses are those which are exempted from that barbarous and absurd practice of putting blinders to their eyes. Let the creature see that there is no danger, and he will imagine none. Or, if you are to forestall his fears by interfering with his senses, why not stop his ears also? The horse, like the hare and many other creatures, uses his ears to learn the approach of danger, as well as his eyes; and when his ears apprise him of danger from behind, he wants his eyes to see what it is that is coming, and whether. the danger be real or not. We may suppose, therefore, that, but for the occasion the driver himself has to make use of the animal's ears, in managing him, the same absurdity which blinds his eyes would stop up his ears also. I knew a man whose ox team was always in difficulty at the foot of a hill; and why? Be cause he was fretful and impatient with them, and anticipating that they would give back at a pinch, would begin to vociferate and whip beforehand at such a rate that the poor cattle were irritated and put into confusion. One would give a jerk, and then another, no two of them drawing together; and so the load was at a stand. "Dear me!" says the man, "how they act! Did anybody ever see such cattle?" Another man, neighbor to him, could, by a different method, command the utmost united effort of his oxen. A few gentle, encouraging words would induce them to put to their necks with hearty bovine good will, and with “a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether," the load was out of the slough. And then, instead of a continued whipping and bawling to keep them going, in case the road was still difficult, they were permitted to take breath a moment, before they proceeded. Indeed, I think that observation justifies me in saying that you may know much of the dispositions of individuals by the behavior of their animals. I have seen not only the unsteadiness, the violence, the savageness of some, and the gentleness and patience of others, in the management of their animals, produce their counterparts in them, but I have seen the very oddities of masters exhibited in the ludicrously eccentric, and otherwise unaccountable behavior of their beasts. richly repaid by her company and music. I ac. customed a flock of doves to feed freely out of my hand, and some of them would go so far as to strike me with their wings, if I affronted them. Crows are the shyest of creatures, and yet they may be tamed even to an annoying degree of familiarity. Hares and pheasants are naturally timid, and yet there are public parks in Europe where, under protection of the game laws, you will see scores of them running about, quite familiarly, among scores of people riding and promenading. The same may be said of the deer and the gazelle. The giraff has his home among the wildest and fiercest creatures of the torrid zone; yet, in the hands of man, with proper treatment, he becomes gentle and domestic. Bears have often been the playthings of children. Such is the power of gentleness and kindness with all sensitive things. I will not speak of the imprisoned creatures of the menagery. Theirs is the discipline of severity and fear; which, like the old human prison discipline, makes the subjects of it more fierce and sullen than they were while at large. Yet the keepers, with some mixture of gentleness, do wonders even with the lion and the tiger. Kindness overcomes the very instinct of animals, in making them willing to forget their proper haunts for the society of man. It makes them civil to each other, as well as to us, I have seen, at a friend's house, a cat and a dove taking their meals together; and such was the confidence of the bird, and the forbearance of the cat, that she would sometimes allow the bird to drive her away. You may have met with one of those little menageries carried about for show, called the "amicable family," in which a number of creatures naturally averse to each other's society, as the hawk and the sparrow, the cat and the mouse, have been taught to dwell toge This gentleness, of which we are speaking, produces its effects on the feathered and scaly races, as well as on quadrupeds, and on the undomestic, as well as on the domestic. You may teach a shoal of fishes in an artificial pond, and I presume in a natural one, to come about you, and look at you, and ask for food, and may induce them to eat out of your hand. Leave the bird's nest unmolested in the tree beneath your window, and she will come and refit, and occupy it for a series of years, and cheer you with her song. Never mind, if she takes a little of your small fruit for herself and young ones. If there were no other means of attracting the robin to my homestead but planting a cherry-tree expressly for her, I certainly would do it, and think myself "ther in harmony. HAPPY MOMENTS. We have all our happy moments-there are countless streams of bliss |