The Teachings of the Spirit.
MR. Carlyle says, in his new work of "Teaching Religion:" "Piety to God, the nobleness that inspires a human soul to struggle heavenward, cannot be 'taught' by the most industrious preaching and drilling. No, alas! no. Only by far other methods—chiefly by silent, continual example, silently waiting for the favorable mood and moment, and aided then by a kind of miracle, well enough named 'the grace of God'—can that sacred contagion pass from soul into soul. How much beyond whole libraries of orthodox theology is, sometimes, the mute action, the unconscious look of a father, of a mother, who had in them 'devotedness, pious nobleness'—in whom the young soul, not unobservant, though not consciously observing, came at length to recognize it, to read it in this irrefragable manner; a seed planted thenceforth in the center of his holiest affections for evermore!"