MINISTERS' SONS—A GOOD SHOWING.
We should suppose that the old idea that ministers' sons generally turn out badly was an exploded one. If it is not it ought to be. The facts are that ministers' sons so generally turn out creditably that when a son of the manse does go astray the whole town hears of it. The Springfield Republican comes to the rescue of the abused ministers' sons. That journal has been studying De Candolle, the French scientist and skeptic, and the points made by the Frenchman are worth studying. De Candolle shows that science and learning owe great researches to the sons of the clergy. He builds a strong argument against the celibacy of the clergy on this ground, and says: "In clerical families their manner of life, their quiet regularity, their residence largely in the country, their counsels to their children, the absence of various causes of dissipation, the habitual vigilance of the father, and his domestic example of study, surpassing the advantages of other families, give all the greater force to the transmission of faculties appropriate to the cultivation of the sciences." De Candolle further says that "the sons of clerical families have actually surpassed during two hundred years, in their contributions to the roll of eminent scientists, the similar contributions of any other class of families, not excepting those that belong to the directly scientific professions—physicians, surgeons, and chemists." The learned author, says our contemporary, gives lists of distinguished and eminent scientists and scholars who were the sons of pastors—Agassiz, Baselius, Boerhaave, Encke, Euler, Linnæus, Olbers, and a host of others. Among historians and philosophers he names Hallam, Hobbes, Emerson, Sismondi, and others. The dispositions of sons to follow the callings of their fathers makes divinity conspicuously hereditary in such world-wide known theological luminaries and pulpiteers as Jonathan Edwards, Archbishop Whately, Robert Hall, Lightfoot, the Wesleys, Lowth, Stillingfleet, the Beechers and Spurgeons—a list that might be multiplied indefinitely. How many poets have been the fruit of clerical matrimony?—Young, Cowper, Thomson, Coleridge, Montgomery, Heber, Tennyson, Lowell, and many others of note. Look at the clerical contributions to intellectual philosophy in such distinguished sons as Dugald Stewart, Cudworth, Reid, Brown, Boyle, Abercrombie, and Bentham. Literature has been a wide field for ministers' sons to cultivate, as is evidenced by Swift, Lockhart, Macaulay, Sterne, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Bancroft, Emerson, Holmes, Kingsley, and Matthew Arnold. To architecture this class contributed Sir Christopher Wren; to art, Sir Joshua Reynolds; to heroism, Lord Nelson. The daughters of the clergy may not be overlooked—Mme. Trollope, Mrs. Barbauld, Jane Taylor, Elizabeth Carter, the Brontes, and Mrs. Stowe. All this is true, and in this matter exceptions only serve to prove the rule. When a minister's son does depart from the right way and his ill deeds become town talk, the world is prompt enough in adding, "And he a minister's son, too." And such a remark bears witness to a surprise excited by an unusual event. That the ranks of the Christian ministry are largely recruited from the families of the clergy is well-known to all who are familiar with the statistics of theological education.—Observer. WHENEVER you can find a man who stands by God, God will stand by him; if you honor him, he will honor you.