an approach to conception of such a Being, and we are not responsible to any Being, whoever and whatever he may be, of whom we cannot know anything. We are to think of God as transcending all thought, yet dwelling in our thought; as without parts and passions, yet as manifested in our every limb, and abiding in all our affections. We are to worship this God, not only with the silent, secret, mysterious homage of the inner man; but also with those external, decorous, reverential observances, which, giving outward and visible form to the acts of the spirit, constitute true worship. To plead as an excuse for failing in this due homage, by body and soul, that the Wonderful Being whom we all acknowledge, whom our knowledge lights us to, and our emotions lead us to, must not be thought of as a Person, but rather be reduced to a vacuity-a sort of aureity without the gold, thought without mind, principle without person, so that by means of this incomprehensible nothing we attain to something higher than personality and intelligence-may, indeed, assert a transcendental difference, but eliminates everything essential from worship, and takes even the possibility of reasonableness from piety.

Those who insist that God is eternally and infinitely so far above us that all intellectual and emotional exercise on the high theme is but an insult to Godhead, are in danger of losing that soundness of mind by which alone right judgment is formed, for it is impossible continually to seek that from which they are ever thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of either knowing or finding; and, ceasing to exercise themselves in these high efforts, they become incapable of making them. Nor is that all: a transcendental Being, infinitely above intelligence and emotion, is a pure negation, and all argument concerning Him is based on the delusion that nothing can be more rationally realized than something; but to regard the Unseen Reality as the absence of everything we can imagine, whether bad or good, is unnatural, irrational, and unbecoming. "Unnatural," because human instinct universally yearns after a future life and knowledge of God. "Irrational," for we are able to understand well enough many things about God; and that the Divine

Unknown yet Known.

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Being is eternal, unchangeable, immaterial, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, is a far more reasonable belief than the gratuitous assumption that He is unlike everything that all the manifestations of Him would lead us to expect. "Unbecoming," for it divests Deity of all that appeals either to intellect or emotion; and, so far from elevating, degrades Him to an eternal motion, an inscrutable power, neither to be loved nor feared. To say " The Ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived by us, because He is in every respect greater than can be conceived;" and then to tell us -"Matter, motion, force, are better symbols of the Unknown Reality than are our highest conceptions of supreme will, goodness, wisdom," is not to forsake personality for something higher, but to give a dreary beetle-view of God. Deity is something more than the universe. He cannot be identified with Nature, and yet He is no absentee God, sitting idle and Calle outside His world, but dwells in it as His star-domed city; without Him not a sparrow falls to the ground, while through every star and grass-blade, but mostly through man's soul, beams the glory of His presence.

Of course, it can be objected that, however sublime may be the idea of a Personal God and Creator, we can do no more than assign to Him exalted human attributes. If the objector means that by Person we understand an infinitely intelligent, thinking Being; and that by Creator we mean that this Person is everywhere present, pervading the material universe indeed, but distinct from it, and superior to it; if he says that we look into nature for physical signals of an everliving will, and read the universe as an autobiography of an Infinite Spirit, repeating Himself in miniature within our spirit; this represents our views with sufficient clearness. Personality is not used in any sense of limitation, but as the mysterious. aspect of the Dynamis, the omnipresent Energy, to whose eternal decrees we submit, and on whose constancy we implicitly rely. We decline to call Him Power, or Matter, or Motion. The Name of the great "I Am" has ever been in essence unpronounceable, but we say, "God is Spirit," and × we are kept from attributing human or material attributes to Him by the unsolvable mystery being formulated as a

Trinity in unity; and there is a likeness in this mystery of Three in One, or that other mystery of three-past, present, future, which are but one "Now," to the Supreme. In those shapings of our thoughts, formulated in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which are for ever striving after higher and purer ideality, we are guarded against imputing the feebleness of man to God.

Revelation of the Godhead.

1. If we say that the universe is the autobiography of an infinite Spirit, then nature is a revelation of the Supernatural, whom we adore as the eternal, life-giving Principle (Ps. xix. 1, Rom. i. 20): “a power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, of which all phenomena, as presented in consciousness, are manifestations, but which we can only know through these manifestations." Here is a formula legitimately obtained by the employment of scientific methods, as the last result of a subjective analysis on the one hand, and of an objective analysis on the other hand.1

Unity of science being the reflection of the unity of the Reason and Intelligence pervading nature, our own reason and intelligence being part of nature, are also a miniature autobiography of the Infinite Spirit within our finite spirit. Mind, the thinker and investigator, is a seer concerning the presence of the living God in the world. Thus, the revelation of the Almighty to man is twofold: external, in the phenomena of nature; internal, by the consciousness which takes knowledge of those phenomena or manifestations.

2. These phenomena divide themselves into good and evil. There is a soul of goodness in things evil, and a heart of truth in things false; a taint of evil within the good, and a grain of falsity in our apprehension of every apparent truth. Our consciousness and actual experience show that this good and this evil germinate out of something apart from ourselves. No man's luck, so to speak, is pulled by only one string, nor do events happen simply because they are bad or good, "else all eggs would be addled or none at all." 1 "Cosmic Philosophy," vol. ii., p. 415. James Fiske.

Consciousness of Good and Evil.

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Life, and all things with which we are acquainted, have their congruities and incongruities. The definite view thus arrived at, is a result not based on one, but on all concrete experience, is an induction from universal consciousness, and ranks in certainty with the postulates of exact science.

3. This verity, growing out of contrariety, is the common foundation of those religious ideas concerning God, Good, Evil, Creation, which are almost, if not quite, universal. Ideas different, yet allied; neither accidental nor factitious; not superficial but deep-seated; not evolved, nor slowly accumulated and organised; but, however degraded or distorted or magnified, striking deep roots into our nature. They affect men's interpretations of the simplest mechanical accidents, the most complicated events in the histories of nations, the diverse habits of thought, the different orders of minds, the good or ill tone of feeling, and the daily conduct of life. To suppose that they are groundless, so shakes the foundations of human intelligence, that nothing can be relied on. That doctrines of good and evil are priestly inventions; that in every society, past and present, savage and refined, certain members of the community combined to delude the rest in one and the same way, is not tenable, nor does an artificial origin account for the natural facts. These natural facts are indeed the ground of intelligent consciousness as to good and evil; the foundation of the moral sentiment which responds to them, not the creations of that sentiment, and that sentiment is as normal as is any other faculty. Hence, religion resting upon our consciousness of good and evil, that consciousness being based on experience, has the authority of Divine revelation.

4. View this with more accuracy :—

Religion, everywhere present, and, with science, organising facts into the mass of human experience, are the weft and the warp of history. Both have their near and visible side, the Natural; the remote and eternal, the Supernatural. Each holds a truth, the needful complement of the other; and when our mind is capable of realising the utmost conceptions of both, discoveries will be on a grander scale. We find,

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'as the history of every age witnesses, there is an undeniable religious need that clings to human nature, a need of recognising a something above nature, and of fellowship with the same, which only asserts itself the more forcibly the longer it is repressed. The predominance of that worldly bent of mind which will acknowledge nothing above nature, does but call forth in the end a stronger reaction of the longing after the supernatural; the prevalence of an all-denying unbelief invariably excites a more intense desire to be able to believe." If this were discoverable only in an individual, or belonged only to one age or one race of men, it might be ascribed to imagination, or be the result of a peculiar mental tendency, but it is found in all alike. There is something in mankind that is not wholly satisfied with the objects of the senses, but recognises, or believes that it recognises, another world of spiritual beings with whom, for good or evil, he is related. This consciousness has been a source of wealth to all language and literature. "It would seem that the progress, indisputably invariable, cannot be explained by the hypothesis of a received tradition handed down from earlier races or imaginary superior beings, but is to be attributed to God's spirit working in man." We mean that when the vividness and intensity of the intellectual emotions surpassed the ordinary and extraordinary limits, they partook, or were enabled to partake, more and more of that supernatural on which the original consciousness is itself based. Hence, our consciousness of the supernatural, or revelation of it in the soul, seems a fundamental verity, and the origin must be sought higher in the stream of time than the goings forth of the rivulets of mythology, sought in man's essential nature, even in the original impulse to godlike productions.

5. Now enter that branch of operation called miraculous. It is not essentially more marvellous than the growth of tree from seed, but we do well to consider an objection. "Miracles, or the intervention of the Deity in human affairs, are, to the scientific thinker, à priori so improbable, that no amount of testimony suffices to make him entertain the 1" Neander's Church History," vol. i. p. 15. "God in History," vol. iii., p. 306. Bunsen.