practical casuistry, just as systems of military art may essentially help in practical warfare. Its method, to be effectual, must, in the first place, enumerate and classify the divers rules of human duty, or, what amounts to the same thing, enumerate and classify human duties in such way as best to subserve the proper design of casuistical teaching which is to resolve questions of duty arising under conflicting rules.

It must in the next place set forth the principles which will help to determine the relative weight of authority belonging to these different rules in their application to practice. These determining principles are such as these:

First, the intrinsic subordination of one rule to another. The rule of paternal duty is thus in itself superior to the rule of neighborly duty. All other things being equal, when a man can relieve a similar want of but one he is bound to assist his own child in preference to a neighbor, or a neighbor's child. The laws of the physical nature are in like manner subordinate to those that respect the moral nature of man.

Secondly, the immediate sources of authority are, relatively to one another, of divers grades. If nothing else come into the case, this consideration of source may determine the duty. Beginning with the absolute sovereign,-the supreme ruler, whose authority when derived immediately from him must be held to govern in preference to all other authority whatever, we have divers grades of subordinate authority, superiors of different ranks. The rule of the State is in itself considered superior to the rule of the family, the rule of the father to the rule of the teacher, in a sphere equally open to each. The State naturally controls the time and service of a child, within the proper limits of State authority, in opposition to the will of the parent; and the parent's will must be regarded as paramount in controlling conditions of study in hours which might, except for the conflict, be deemed as properly under the teacher's control. On the other hand, in its own province, each authority, however subordinate in other respects, is supreme. The London schoolmaster who scrupulously abstained in the school-room from all the customary acts of homage to his sovereign when visiting his school, but immediately on their leaving the room fell upon his knees and kissed his majesty's

hand in token of his subjection, rightly discriminated the relations of authority. In his own school-room he was sovereign, and no one, not even the king himself, must seem ever to overpower his administration.

Thirdly, a clear and definite rule is of preferable consideration to one that is obscure and doubtful.

Fourthly, the rule is to be preferred which is safer for the conscience; that is, the rule which favors law rather than freedom. This principle grounds itself in the imperfection of men, who are habitually disposed to err on the side of selfindulgence, to overstep limits and assume liberty not their own. Generally, thus, it is safer to follow the more restrictive than the more permissive of two conflicting rules.

Fifthly, the action which more promotes and develops selfculture and strengthens right principle is to be taken in preference of two actions prescribed by conflicting rules.

Sixthly, that action or course which more promotes the well being of men is to be preferred. Or, more generally, when rules conflict, the more beneficent act is to be preferred since such is the end-beneficence of all morality.

Seventhly, that act or course is to be preferred which moves more directly to its end in goodness or which is more in the current of providential appointment and rule. Circuitousness, indirection, obliquity, is to be shunned so far as may be in morals.

A complete system of casuistry, presenting in order those principles which are to be regarded in determining the selection in the case of two or more conflicting rules, may aid the individual conscience materially in resolving its doubts; and especially if copiously illustrated in examples taken from experience.

VL Casuistry must throughout recognize the disciplinary character of the moral administration over man on earth.

We must believe that the final end in the allowance of conflicting rules of duty is the discipline of the human spirit. The uses of this feature of the divine administration here are too important and too obvious to allow any doubt on this point. It makes men vigilant and circumspect; it quickens and fosters the sense of dependence and thus keeps humble and confiding; it affords a measure of one's moral strength and

progress. A true casuistry must every where govern itself by a consideration of this disciplinary end in the allowance of that conflict of rules which is the only occasion of its coming to be. In divers respects, this consideration will modify its form and teaching. It will so help in the resolution of the doubts of conscience as not to make it a mere drudge and slave of rules; but rather to animate and strengthen it by giving opportunity for vigorous exertion. It will recognize the fact that sometimes the doubt may wisely, for disciplinary ends be prolonged; that patient waiting for light may be the duty of the hour. It will recognize the truth that casuistry is for each individual conscience, for its training and guidance; and that consequently the decisions of this individual conscience may be widely diverse from those of the public conscience; that the duty for one may not be the duty for another in the same circumstances of conflicting rules. Casuistry must accordingly recognize gradations in moral progress and development. The weak, infantile conscience may demand one resolution of the doubt; the mature in principle, quite another. Most imperative in respect to this disciplinary end to be regarded in casuistry is the precept of the apostle, not to receive the weak in the faith "to doubtful disputations"-to discriminations of doubts-; that is for the purpose of resolving for it at once all its scruples, leaving nothing to be resolved by time and progress in moral strength.

We are led at once by these views of the disciplinary character of a true casuistry to our closing remark that casuistry must ever recognize the truth that it can never reach absolute perfection as a a system till the race of men also reach that perfection in which discipline shall have ceased and all conflict of rules have passed away. The relative authoritativeness of moral rules must in a disciplinary state of existence ever vary with the progress toward moral perfection; while at the same time the multiplicity of resolving principles will diminish, and conflicts of rule will be more and more determined with this progress to perfection. The light that now comes to the conscience from manifold self-radiant or reflecting luminaries will be more and more gathered into the one single beam radiating from the sovereign luminary, lighting up for the spirit now become single-eyed, the path of truth and duty.

ARTICLE VII.-NAME-WORDS IN THE VERNACULAR.

I MEAN proper nouns; words which have designated specific persons, and have passed from that use into common speech. If we could think of speech as a separate entity from written language, and then personify the two, they would take the attitude of friendly belligerents; and speech would appear to be making reprisals upon her queenly sister for former donations. It is speech who gives names. And whenever society, law or letters require a label for a specific individual, she has to furnish it, and so begins by naming families Baker, Carpenter, Brewer, &c., or White, Brown, Black, &c., according to their occupation, or some striking peculiarity. "Some travelers tell us," says Thoreau, "that an Indian had no name at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame." This is doubtless always the beginning of the process in primitive name-giving. At first a name is an individual definition. In course of time, and with the prodigious increase of individuals to be named, this might well become an exhausting process; and speech might look about her for means of indemnifying herself. It is easy to do so by taking back some of these appellatives and making them do duty again in the vernacular; reducing them, that is, from their official dignity to the common rank and file. If, for example, Macadam contrives a fine road, she makes him contribute his name as well as his brains to the process. If the Earl of Orrery has a scientific toy dedicated to him by a star-gazing friend, she demands his name for the honor, and แ orrery it must be. When such a monster as Burke furnishes murdered bodies for dissection, she brands it as the crime of "burking," and so insures to him the curse of a perpetual infamy.

If, to change the figure, we conceive of language under the similitude of a gallery of art, these name-words will be the portraits and statues in it. There is personality in them, like the life which beams from the portrait or is veiled in the statue. Here we shall find poets, admirals, inventors, gods and demigods enshrined together. Some of the portraits are of life-size,

as in "epicure; " some are but miniatures, like "magpie," "tomtit," "petrel." There are statues of gods, like those figured in the words "jovial," "martial," "volcano," "easter; demigods, as in "atlas," "titan," "herculean;" and saints, as in "valentine," "samphire," "tawdry;" while for statuettes we have such as "fairy," "vestal," "siren," "hobgoblin." It is the most extensive gallery known. It has been the work of old masters and young, and has been collecting for twenty centuries.

Let us examine its treasures. The first samples we should come to would be those in which the name is directly affixed to the object without change; as the Armstrong gun, Remington rifle, Minie ball, Argand burner, Drummond light, Mansard roof, Babbitt metal, Baldwin apple, Graham bread. Prominent natural objects are often so distinguished, as Hudson river, Bunker hill, Delaware bay-even to the stars, as Herschel and Leverrier. It is common to call a man's works by his name, whether hand work or head work. Thus, we do not read the plays of Shakspeare, the poems of Wordsworth, the essays of Carlyle we read Shakspeare, Wordsworth, Carlyle. We call a violin a genuine Amati. A painting is a Rubens, a Titian, a Turner, a Vandyke, a Murillo. The temperature is so many degrees Fahrenheit. A monstrous lie is a Munchausen. Such as these are in common use, and greatly enrich the defining power of the language. In many instances of this direct application, the thing which takes the name goes off with it, and leaves the man who furnished it forgotten. Joseph Ignace Guillotine has disappeared behind the terrible machine he introduced. The droll "silhouettes" in our magazines never remind us of the French minister of finance, whose dogged economy doomed his name to be affixed derisively to the cheapest of all portraits. We read of a "lazaretto" without thinking of Lazarus. "Music" does not recall the muses, nor does "museum," nor "mosaic." There are even traditions that the word "derrick" is all that now remains of one Theodorick, a hangman at Tyburn, who long since vanished from his ghastly stage.

Another class is made up of that immense number of names which have received a termination and now do duty as adjectives; Darwinian, Baconian, Machiavellian, Calvinistic, Coper