vegetable growth, that the harvests are the richest and the most abundant. So there is an influence from heaven resting upon men, and operating in them no less beneficently than the light and heat of the sun upon field and forest. We may not be able to explain how this influence comes, or to describe the mode of its operation; yet we may be conscious of its presence, conscious of the moral light which it gives, and of the spiritual beauty which it awakens in the soul. We may not be able to tell exactly how much is imparted by it, or whether it produces its effects simply by quickening the powers of intellect, and arousing the emotional nature. Mayhap a spiritual effect is produced upon the heart directly by this influence; or may be it works its effects by quickening the moral and intellectual powers. This much we know, the heart must be in a right condition to receive the influence, else little or no effect will be produced; the heart will remain unfruitful in rightcousness, and its emotions undevout in tone. There are deep dells or recesses in lofty mountain ranges in which the snows of winter remain nearly or quite through the year; so there may be hearts in such a moral condition that the Holy Spirit cannot well reach them: whence a wintry desolation of heart is perpetually suffered, a summer of the soul never being enjoyed. There are lands suffering from such an over-abundance of water that they remain cold and unfruitful, though the rays of the sun fall directly upon them. Likewise there are natures so filled with selfishness and worldly loves, that they remain religi ously cold and barren, though the Holy Spirit is shedding a select influence upon other hearts, making them fruitful in righteousness, nay, producing a summer of the soul in which the bloom of purity and the fruitage of holiness ever

abound.

Men must co-operate with the Holy Spirit to secure the best and happiest results. The vernal rains may descend, the summer showers may fall, and the sun shine with warmth in his beams, yet the neglected field will not rejoice in summer's beauty, nor invite the husbandman to reap the golden harvest in autumn. Sun and rain and dew will all have been in vain, and have united their triple influence to no purpose on such a field. So the human heart may possess all the elements of religious life and moral fruitful

ness, and a holy influence may rest upon it with heavenly refreshing, yet that heart continue barren and unblest. Men must cultivate their religious natures; they must open their hearts to receive the heavenly influence, and it will not be withheld. Men are not compelled by the Author of their being to be immoral or irreligious, but they must make a diligent use of the means of grace; they must cultivate religious feeling, emotion, and aspiration; then the Holy Spirit will be breathed upon them, and they shall enjoy the conscious approval of heaven.

W. R. F.

ART. XVII.

Law versus Force.

THE attention of the reader is asked in this paper to a consideration of the subject of Law in Nature in relation to Forces of Nature.

The word Force is used to signify an energy or principle, while the term Law applies to the method of its operation, and the conditions of manifestation. Before we can understand the operation of every natural law, we must have a practical knowledge of the forces of nature in connection. with which the law is manifested; otherwise we shall fail in our attempts to grasp the central facts of being.

When we take an intellectual survey of the immense extent, the endless variety, and the marvellous order and beauty of the universe with which science makes us acquainted, the first impression made upon our wondering faculties is of a vast combination of material substances and subtile forces; the former being recognized by the senses, while the latter are to be apprehended only by the intellect. The substances we see by the eye; the forces we see only in idea; while the laws governing their relation can be traced only by the understanding in the realm of pure thought. Here we have nature in three aspects, each one appealing to a distinct power, or class of powers, in us.

Many persons live and die without ever rising above the low level of the senses. They never get beyond the sensuous stage of mental growth. They believe in what they can see, touch, or hear. All beyond is impenetrable mystery and darkness to their feeble powers. Others live in a world clearly seeing that all these varied facts of Nature are the result of unseen forces, and that every outward object or phenomenon is the expression of some concealed cause or power. A few gifted minds have been able to catch a still higher and more satisfactory view of things; and in their clear-seeing idea, have had distinct and adequate conceptions of the One Law, obedient to which, all these concealed forces act, and in accordance with which, all their shining array of facts and substances, in the whole realm of nature, is marshalled. Pagans and Jews, Christians and naturalists, have all recognized this one Central Power of all things, and in forms more or less accurate, and with a belief thereof more or less philosophical, have endeavored to state their best thoughts concerning it. Some have rested in the abstraction of law in nature, as the deists; some have stumbled over a gross sensualism of thought into pantheism; some have been so bewildered by the vastness and mystery of natural phenomena, that they have supposed all was chaos, the universe without any central governing principle, without any God, and so have come to the fearful conviction of atheism; while many have had clear insights enough to take hold of the one vital, elemental Cause of all things,

'Being whom we call God and know no more."

and have referred all things to Him-centering in Him, as the Supreme Deity, the cause of all the diversified facts and ever-shifting phenomena of the whole world of matter, to which science conducts us. It is here that the Christian world rests its belief of God and nature. And we need not further delay to remark, in passing, that this Christian belief will be the basis of all the ideas suggested in whatever may be said of natural Forces or Laws; for, as the poet says so truly,

"God is in all, else all were a cloud."

But let us proceed, somewhat in rough outline, to con

sider what a world we are in; let us endeavor to rationally estimate what a wondrous combination of forces it presents to us for our study. Sweeping through the several departments of knowledge, what glittering wonders burst upon the vision of every thoughtful student of nature! Consider the material world alone; that part of nature that strikes the eye, or that we come into communion with through the avenue of the senses. What mysteries come within the grasp of the eye! See the varied and beautiful forms of matter of which the earth is composed. All these are governed by fixed, determinate forces which no eye has ever seen; forces, like gravitation, whose effects we see and are ourselves ever subject to, but which we have no faculty to apprehend, save only as we arrive at a knowledge of them by rational processes in the understanding. But as we consider the material world, we are met on every hand by the univeral elements of vastness, immensity, and mystery. What masses of heavy matter! Vast central suns, set in space like blossoming gems of starry light, to shine forever in the lily-garden of the skies; system rising on system, till the human mind staggers under the vastness and mystery of the idea, or it wanders off into the deep azure of the heavens, where astral systems move noiselessly forward in their orbits through the infinitude of space, slowly marking out the cycles of eternity upon the blank back-ground of immensity. Then, too, consider the viewless but potent agencies, and pervasive hidden fluids, like electricity, which have been unknown for ages, and which now are not understood, though well known, connecting this earth with its varieties of matter, its ever-changing combinations and relations of substances and forms to this vast All of nature, by laws that never have been broken, thus binding the whole cosmic universe into one harmonious unit, that, through the endless ages, shall know no change, although its order, its beauties and harmonies, have all been wrought out by the overruling providence amid an economy of ceaseless change.

What an immense number of forces, what an endless variety of forms, what a combination of energies must have existed in unison, and, by corelated action, must have been in simultaneous operation, in order for the various substances of the universe to have been built up into its present

order and symmetry! How true it is that a scientific survey and study of nature elevates the human mind, and enables it to rise above the low plain of sense into the clear and sunny realm of endless reality, subsisting amid an economy of constant change!

But we must discriminate between a force and a law in nature. The force is the energy, the power; while the law is the mode of its expression. By way of illustration, notice the fact of gravitation as one of the forces of nature. It is now known to all persons that there is a viewless, inpalpable energy in nature, which manifests itself in connection with matter. It is as independent of matter in which it inheres or by which it is manifested, as the light from this lamp is independent of the air through which its rays are transmitted. This force of gravitation seems to be a subtile energy so imponderable and viewless, that we have no faculty to feel it, by direct sensation, nor any power of cognizing it by any sense with which we have been endowed by creation. The beautiful rays of light which result from undulations of a universal light-fluid, we can see. No matter what substance occasions those delicate pulsating waves of this universally pervading ether, which is the cause of light, we are endowed with a wonderful faculty of inward perception, and an equally wonderful sensuous organ, or an optical, or light-seeing instrument, the eye, which enables us to come into direct relation with all pulsations and waves of this all-pervading fluid, which may be called the light-force or light-energy of nature. What beauties, what colors, what marvels of wonder, what forms of loveliness in nature and art transmit their inspirations to our inner world through these pulsations or waves of this all-pervading light-ether! Strike this one subtile fluid or imponderable energy out of the catalogue of nature's forces, and the whole universe would be shrouded in the blackness of darkness forever. Or, what would result in the same sad and to be dreaded thing, of which Byron's inimitable poem of Darkness is only an ideal picture, take from us the inward faculty which requires light in its ever varying and blending shades, through the eye, which is the outward organ of this inward faculty, and though this universal light-ether might exist, and bathe all things, in its impalpable baptism, and though stars and suns might set