so that in a month a spoonful of the fungus is precipitated in the vessel, and each particle of it is capable of producing the same effect, and of reproducing its own image in an indefinite manner. It is a homely image of the power of that heavenly leaven which is God's presence in the human soul. It grows with its own working. It converts the water of humanity into the wine of heaven; it is infinitely divisible and transferrible, and cannot be exhausted, nor any limit put to its working.

There is a great truth and a great fascination in this extreme view of man's knowledge of God, through the sympathetic interpretation of his own nature. But it has one enormous danger in it, which makes it hardly less perilous than the other extreme, and indeed soon drives those that attempt to rest in it back to the first position. The error is this: it makes man the starting-point and centre of the universe, around whom turns the panorama of existence: God himself being only the greatest, and, alas! the most distant, object that sweeps into his view. Man is the fixture, the solid staple, in the rock; God, angels, moral and religious opinions, Christ, Christianity, are mere links hanging by this hook, and if they do not match it, or if they more than match it, they are to be hammered into shape, clipped of their superfluous matter, and allowed to come into the chain only as far as they will lie easily and harmoniously in its coil. God comes thus to owe his very existence to man's consent. His dealings with his creature are regulated by that creature himself, who presently, unless largely endowed with natural piety, loses alike his awe and his obedience towards a speculative Deity, a gigantic reflection of his own image on the misty horizon. It is as when the earth was deemed the centre of the planetary and stellar universe, all the motions of stars and celestial orbs being supposed tributary to her ruling sphere. What but pride, conceit, narrowness, and irreverence can come from such a swollen sense of man's place and importance? And how shallow are likely to be the swift, precipitate conclusions in regard to the ever open questions which, in our finite ignorance, it is only presumption in us to shut! Such

a question is the existence of moral evil. Because man, judging by his own nature and feelings, cannot see how he could justly create a moral being who should have liberty to sin, and bring such consequences of sin upon himself, as to convert his existence into a sorrow and a curse; he straightway concludes that God cannot do it. It is a logical conclusion from his assumption that his own nature is the perfect image of God's; and having arrived at this point, he proceeds in the face and eyes of the most solemn facts and the most instinctive protests, to deny the very existence of evil, nay, the very existence of liberty. There is no moral evil. It is an hallucination of the senses; a mere earthly shadow passing over the unclouded stars! God has no knowledge of it; does not even know what we mean by it, or sympathize with our feelings about it. Our remorse, so far as he is concerned, is . all superfluous; our solicitude thrown away! Conscience is a human convenience; sin, an earth-born, conventional inconvenience, which is checked by a sentiment of disapprobation highly useful to society. Liberty of action is a fiction which Divine Necessity permits us to indulge ourselves in the conceit of enjoying; but there is no such thing in reality.

To talk of revelation in its historical and ordinary sense to such proud philosophers, is merely to excite their scorn and ridicule. A revelation to a being who has God in his own nature, in the only form in which he can ever know any thing of him, and probably in the only form in which he exists at all, — if indeed his existence is not, radically viewed, simply our existence; God coming to consciousness as some German thinkers have it, in man alone! Christ, a living Saviour, still animating his disciples from his heavenly throne, comforting and guarding them with actual and direct communications according to his promises, - how absurd and incredible the thought! And thus, every plain and intelligible idea, every instinctive, spontaneous thought and feeling, level to human wants and weaknesses, all that for thousands of years has passed for reverence and piety toward God; all that for eighteen hundred years has passed for Christianity, is brushed away like the cobwebs of a June morning; and a grand,

impersonal, transcendental, human impertinence, which patronizes Christianity and humors the idea of a personal God and a heavenly Father, are offered us in the place of the holy, tender, solemn, and awful faith communicated by the inspired and crucified Son of God. We should be ashamed to express, or to feel, any fear of the spread of such folly. It is too flat a denial of the very nature it professes to derive itself from. Our nature is the image of God; but our logical reasonings and deductions from parts of it are not entitled to any such name as the reflections of his being. If there be one thing which is true of human nature, it is the impossibility of bringing its parts, its witness, its testimony (at the present stage of its development), into a congruous and complete harmony. It is full of seeming inconsistencies and incoherencies. Like external nature about it, it is in process of building. We know no more what it shall be than the gigantic and amorphous . inhabitants of the cooling globe knew, when the deep covered the whole earth, what this planet was to become. Our nature is full of open questions: it has within it experiences, all of which are real and indisputable, and which seem to contradict each other. Shall we say they do contradict each other because they seem to? Shall we say, because moral evil, of which we are as certain as of our being, seems to contradict the goodness of God, of which we are equally certain, that it does contradict it? Or shall we modestly affirm both facts, and humbly wait a later and higher intelligence to reconcile what is beyond our present powers?

If there be any thing tedious, insufferable, and humiliating, it is the affectation of an absolute and final solution here below of the whole problem of our being and of God's being! All that vast and tender mystery in which we float is drained away as by some malign spirit, and we are left stranded on the barren sands of logic, and positive, finite knowledge! Safe in the vast, fathomless ocean of God's love and care, we sail by faith and not by sight, until some pilot who insists on hugging the shore of reality, steers us into soundings, and we feel our keel scraping the sands, or, more probably, bumping on the rocks. Does the bird feel more at home in his iron

cage than in the tree-top, swinging and swaying with the breeze? Is man any more content with a creed which he has put together with his reasoning faculties than with one that envelops him as the horizon that encloses his childhood's home? Gracious and blessed are the holy mysteries of the Christian faith; the unstatable nature of Christ, the ministry of the Comforter, the presence above us and yet with us, independent of us and yet native to us, of God's Spirit; the mystery of sin and pardon and redemption; the profound and awful mystery of evil; the authority of the Church; the unity and fellowship of believers with each other and with their Saviour, these are mysteries, not absurdities; simply above reason, not against it. For our part, they are dearer to us than life itself: they are our life. Without them the world would be a prison and existence a burden. They are the inspiration, support, and consolation, and they always have been, of the great body of Christian believers; and they will continue to be so. The pendulum of opinion will oscillate between an absolute dependence on revelation for all our knowledge of God, and an absolute dependence on intuition. We are, truth, dependent exclusively on neither: we need both, and we can allow each only such possession of us as is compatible with the presence of the other. Man is in the image of God, but God is still making him, and his chief instrument in the work is his divine Son. God's ways are known by us only so far as it is necessary to us to know them; but all that we do know are but parts of his ways. How faint is the whisper we have heard of him! who can stand before the thunder of his power? To pretend to understand even his moral being to perfection; to put our moral and spiritual nature into his throne, and reason from it as from absolute and complete knowledge, - is blasphemous presumption or silly conceit. Beyond the point of our limited faculties, " his ways are not as our ways, nor his thoughts as our thoughts." Let us adore what we cannot comprehend! Let us bow down and worship our Creator in the name of his holy child Jesus! Let us cling to the glorious, tender, humane revelation, which is the ladder let down from the gate of heaven, to lift us when our own

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wings would weary and give out ere we could reach it! The Church is at the very foot of this ladder; and all the sweet and holy associations, suggestions, and inspirations of an historic Christianity; all the mystic truths, and gleams of celestial light and love, that break out of our symbols and creeds, the precious inheritance from the Christian past, -are the angels ascending and descending, to assist our upward journey. This more than Jacob's ladder- this ladder of which Christ's cross and Christ's crook formed the beams and ties is our glorious heritage! Let us not despise it, nor neglect it, nor suffer it to be hidden away or stolen away! Let us use it ourselves with tender gratitude and fidelity, and do our part towards leading to it (for it can never perish nor move away) the feet of our children and our children's children.

ART. VII. MACHINERY AS A GOSPEL WORKER.

Catalogue and Journal of the Eleventh Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. September and October, 1869. 4to, pp. 60.

THE Eleventh Exhibition of the Charitable Mechanic Association held the past month in Boston was, beyond question, the most brilliant and successful that has ever taken place: an index of the highest point which mechanical invention in this country, thus far, has reached. Visiting it was a duty as well as pleasure which every one, whatever his own occupation might be, who would study his age, and know something of one of the greatest forces at work in modern society, ought to have performed. It was a museum, not of the past merely, the strange garments worn by our sires, the relics and abnormal formations picked up in ancient cities, and the wilds of nature, the armor and utensils which barbarous nations may have used, but of the living present, the triumphs of art and genius, the wonders which are now being accomplished in the combination of Nature's forces into struc