its numerous and various departments, worth occupying or enjoying, for which you may not become eligible, and to which you may not successfully aspire, provided only, that you are true and faithful to yourselves. "Act well your part-there all the honor lies. But you must always remember, that or cowl? "The steep ascent must be with toil subdued; And pay the price of fame-labor, and care, and pain." "A double minded man," or a man of two souls, "is unstable in all his ways." You must betimes, but not before due consideration, select some calling, some pursuit, or business for life. Having decided upon that, you must prepare for it-keep it in your eye, and think of every thing that bears upon it. You must always resolve to be an honor to your calling or profession, rather than to seek honor from it. You must seek to be useful to mankind; not to your single self alone; but to the great family of man. You must feel that you are doing good service to yourself. No good, no generous, no noble man, can seek to build up his own fortune or fame upon the ruins of the fortune and fame of other men. There is room enough in the world for us all, were we multiplied by thousands, even in our own country and in our own day. But the place of true honor and of extensive influence, is a very responsible place; and without a highly cultivated conscientiousness, continued effort, and fixed purpose, faithfully to discharge its duties, cannot be honorably retained. To be an honor to an office, rather than to seek honor from it, is the true philosophy-the only lawful ambition. A faithful deacon is incomparably more honorable, before heaven and earth, than an unfaithful prelate; and a dutiful subject, than a dissolute and licentious King. In this community we have no noble blood, yet we have noble In other countries, indeed, they have noble blood, that oft men. "has run through scoundrels ever since the flood." We prefer the naked Arabian courser, to the richly caparisoned mule, though shining in the livery of an Eastern prince. It is not blood, but soul, that constitutes an American nobleman. And he that ranks high amongst such, must be something more than bones and sinews, or flesh and blood. He must be a man, which is much more than an ambitious demagogue, and, sometimes, more than even an officer of State. Still, the apex of this world's ambition, honor and glory, compared with the unseen and the future, is lower than the top of an ant-hill, compared with the summit of the Andes. Earth's pinnacles of glory, seen from the summit of true moral grandeur, are like the gently undulating hills and valleys at the foot of our Alleghenies, apparently of the same level, viewed from its loftiest peak, while the heights of Zion reach to the heaven of heavens, and endure to eternity. Apply, then, my young friends, to the eye of reason and truth, the telescope of faith and hope, and survey the area of your being in all its immensity, durability and grandeur-then choose that calling in life which has most of true honor and immortality in it, and pursue it with a generous competition, an untiring assiduity, and with a magnanimous and philanthropic aim. Then will life be a pleasing reality, and your pilgrimage through it replete with usefulness and honor. Your sun will shine with splendor-set in a clear and cloudless sky, and again rise full-orbed in a brighter heaven, and there continue to shine upon your destiny, with increasing glory, through the cycles of eternity. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT. 66 THE JEWISH ORIGIN OF THE CELEBRATED POPULAR LEGEND, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT." As the occupation and pleasures of childhood produce a powerful impression on the memory, it is probable that almost every reader, who has passed his infantile days in an English nursery, recollects the delight with which he repeated the puerile jingling legend"The House that Jack Built." Very few, however, are at all aware of the original form of its composition, or the peculiar subject it was designed to illustrate. And fewer still would suspect that it was only an accommodated and altered translation of an ancient parabolical hymn, sung by the Jews at the feast of the Passover, and commemorative of the principal events in the history of that people. Yet such is actually the fact. The original, in the Chaldee language, is now lying before me, and as it may not be uninteresting to the readers of the Congregational Magazine, I will here furnish them with a literal translation of it, and then add the interpretation, as given by P. N. Leberecht, Leipsic, 1731. The hymn itself is found in Sepher Haggadah, vol. 23. EXPLANATION OF THE LEGEND. The following is the interpretation : A kid, a kid. 1. The kid, which was one of the pure animals, denotes the temple. The father by whom it was purchased is the King David. SERIES IV.-VOL. I. 38 The two pieces of money signify two shekels of silver. The tradition says, when David purchased the thrashing floor of Araunah, the Jebusite, (see 2 Sam. xxiv.) he asked a subscription of two shekels of silver from each tribe; so that all the tribes had a legal share in the temple. 2. The cat, who destroyed the kid, denotes the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. 3. The dog signifies Cyrus of the Persians. The tradition says that Cyrus, when an infant, was thrown into a forest to perish there; but Providence, who destined Cyrus to rebuild the temple, sent a bitch, and she fed him with her milk. Hence the symbolical name. 4. The staff indicates the Grecian empire under Alexander the Great. 5. The fire signifies the Syrians under Antiochus, justly surnamed by the Jews, "the Wicked," who destroyed many thousands of Israel with fire and sword. 6. The water betokens the Roman empire. 7. The ox is a symbol of the Saracens, who subdued Palestine and brought it under the Caliphate. 8. The Shochet, or butcher, that killed the ox, denotes "Messiah, the son of Joseph." The modern Jews, being unable to deny that Messiah must suffer, and unwilling to acknowledge that their Messiah was to be "despised and rejected of men," professes to have found two Messiahs in scripture-one who is to suffer, and one who is to be the conqueror of the world; hence 9. "The angel of death killed the Shochet," &c., &c. But this state of affairs will not remain so; for 10. The time will come when God will take signal vengeance on Satan, after whose overthrow the Jews are to be restored into their own land, and live under the government of their long-expected conquering Messiah.--Jewish Chronicle. THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY THE TRUE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-IMPROVEMENT. [Continued from p. 372.] THE fact that man was made capable of enjoying an immortal existence, is the grand key given to him that enables him to appre hend the import and importance of all that has been spoken to man, and done for him, by his Creator and moral Governor. This grand truth, though not clearly revealed in His former institutions, as it is in that institution which consummates his entire will to man, it was, nevertheless, implied in the Patriarchal and Mosaic institutions. And had it not been for the hope which this truth inspired into the minds of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and the saints of all ages, we never should have had such trials of men's spirits as are recorded in the 11th chapter of the Hebrews; nor should we have had that cloud of witnesses testifying to the mighty achievements of this principle in contest with the world, sin, and death. Its complete victory was seen in the translation of Enoch and of Elijah. If when, with such a revelation, we do not yet believe in our future being, we must believe in something still more difficult to apprehend; for to expect continued life, is according to our habit and our sense of probability; but not to believe this, we must believe in annihilation, but this we cannot, because we find no ground on which to proceed to such a conclusion, since there is no instance of such an event in all our knowledge; and therefore, we cannot suppose the Omnipotent engaged in blotting out his own work. What the heathen philosophers wanted, in order to satisfy them, or, at least, to impart to them a hope full of immortality, was a true knowledge of God and of man. Their systems of mythology were as bewildering and as dark as would be our mundane system, were the sun totally eclipsed. They were without an Omnipotent Being, and, therefore, had no grand central truth. They had no light or life in them. There was no Being as the source and centre of existence, no mind interested in all other minds, no unity of intelligence, no bond of reason, no parent of spirits, to whom they might come to dissipate their doubts. What was needed was a Logos, to demonstrate that the divinity was not an impersonation of the lusts and passions of the human heart, as displayed in the pride, ambition, and revenge of mighty chieftains and distinguished statesmen, who, by their blind votaries, were decreed as worthy of an apotheosis. Hence we find it to have been the practice amongst the most enlightened nations of heathendom, to deify their favorite passions, in the persons of their most distinguished men, who, after death, were elevated to the rank of gods. And as Bishop Warburton has justly remarked, "That the attributes and qualities assigned to their gods always corresponded with the nature and genius of the government of the country. If this was gentle, benign, and forgiving, goodness and mercy characterised the deity; but if severe, inexorable, captious, or unequal, the gods were then believed to be tyrants; and expiations, atonements, lustrations, bloody sacrifices, composed often of human victims, as well as animals, formed then the system of religious worship." Hence all that diversity of character ascribed to them by their worshippers. To regard with favor the petitions |