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universe that they cannot be a surprise on the Almighty, nor an unforeseen calamity. The mighty tempter of man, whom we believe to be a subtle fallen archangel, manifested by that temptation how greatly he had fallen in choosing evil for his good. Freedom brings in responsibility, casts out necessity; its essence includes power of choice, and capacity to bring in evil. Man possesses powers of the same nature, but less in degree. If we set in contrast light and darkness, good and evil; good becomes higher good by trial, evil greater evil by refusal of the good; truth is manifested as separate from a lie, and the righteous is displayed as opposed to the unrighteous. Thus the height and depth of truth and right are seen. We begin to know that a parenthesis of rebellion will, some time or other, oppose the Divine rule. If you say " But for sin I might be happy as a glorious seraph, enjoy an overflow of blessing, have deep insight of Divine goodness: and why should not this good be given at once, instead of coming by slow process and at the price of misery for millions?" we reply-"The highest and best gift to created beings is freedom: freedom involves choice, responsibility, the attainment of the highest possible good in wisdom, in happiness, in power; but it involves the possibility of transgression. Shall no free existences be created? nothing able by choice to say 'Lord, we are Thine and Thou art ours!' This would be sin's most awful triumph! fatal in the casting down of moral perfection and goodness! perverse in exchange of liberty, motive, reason, for blind and inevitable fate!" Can we conceive a more awful triumph of evil, than that it, while yet unborn, should tie the hands of the Almighty from the noblest exercise of creative wisdom, and imprison His infinite riches of goodness? Shall no reasonable souls spring to life, to love and adore their Creator, lest the dark power of evil should tempt them? If you say "The experiment is made at the cost of His creatures, His own children; " the reply is—" Nay, God has in Christ taken upon Himself our sins, our sorrows, our death, our punishment: there is now, therefore, no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus." "If thou shalt confess with

thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved' (Rom. viii. 1, x. 9). You, a man, can do that; a child can do it. Be not your own self-murderer, and then charge

your suicide on God. The very devils will condemn such folly.1

Every stroke of God, as a rectifier, is for the enlargement of love, wisdom, and joy. When we have attained that point whence we view the Divine plan as a whole, we shall find the power of God has not gone beyond His wisdom, nor wisdom exceeded goodness.

Allowing that wisdom permits the entrance of evil, and forbids the exercise of physical power in its destruction; that evil is the abuse of freedom granted to angels and men ; evil is not an arbitrary thing on God's part. Divine Omnipotence means not the power of dispensing with moral growth, the exercise of free creature's intelligent and loving co-operation. Evil is a veiling and an unveiling, the disciplinary means of receiving power to ascend beyond the former height. Trials are as those tempests on the sea which purify the whole earth, and make mariners skilfully bold. Men are not victims to "the ruffian violence of an impure reprobate ethereal race." The poet may write— "Video meliora proboque,

Deteriora sequor,"

and the saint exclaim-" The good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do;" nevertheless, God gives victory to the valiant. Who can tell what may happen "when their irremovable sorrow finds beneath it a still lower depth of Divine compassion, and the sinful creature, in its most forlorn estate, and in its utter shame, encounters the amazing vision of tender, condescending, infinite love?" 2

The origin of sin by abuse of freedom, in the fact of provision against its existence and provision for its destruction, drives out chance and fate from the world. We are highly endowed intelligent creatures, connected with transactions which concern many worlds. The living God has ordered that we shall have the power of life in ourselves, and be free. We are free: not a man lives but knows that his freedom counts for something. Our state of probation appears to be a process to render evil impossible hereafter. The physical struggle is not so much pitiless and embittered, "Difficulties of Belief," pp. 66, 67: Prof. Thomas Rawson Birks. Ibid. p. 239.

1

:

Sin's Career is Limited.

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as an adjustment of endless variety, and a display of power exercised with skill. Satan, circumstances, motives, may persuade not compel. The body loaded with chains that we move not; sealed lips, we speak not; yet, in our conscience, with every moral power, we resent the insult. God, foreseeing the peril of freedom, not only rendered the peril conspicuous by type, by warning, by threat, excluding sin on the one side, and defining it on the other; but also met and rectified the prospective abuse of freedom by preparing celestial means, spiritual power to work repentance, moral change, and lead up to fulness of joy. Thus, the transgression of the first man, transmitted by natural inheritance, is made the ground of advance into higher knowledge and life. The son dies not for the father's sin, but, warned and sowing to the spirit, reaps life everlasting. Sin is always sin, and the wages of sin is death; yet if a man say—“ "I have erred, but mean to err no more," God Himself helps, comforts, saves that man; gives great and conquering power to him for righteousness. The second Adam outruns the old Adam to tell that the malice of him who assailed our race, and the weakness of him who betrayed our race, are but transitory clouds that darken the firmament. The miseries of time, the career of sin within a sphere of limited extent and duration, are as nothing in comparison with the infinite and eternal sway wherein, evil being overcome, holiness and bliss are supreme. Even now the tears of Nature glow with a beautiful bow of promise of power, of wisdom unfathomed, of love inexhaustible, by whose beneficent influence the Adamite and pre-Adamite fault will display the wisdom and establish the rule of a righteous King who follows us with encouragements and sways by goodness.

"Lord, grant me grace to cling to Thee,

In this presumptuous time,

When reason, by distorting, mars

Thy mysteries sublime,

When none will creep along the ground,

But all must soar or climb."

Poor Man's Quarterly Review.

"Non est ad astra mollis a terris via."

"Afflictiones flores sunt, quibus nectitur tua corona cœlestis."

STUDY XVII.

MAN: ORIGIN, NATURE, LANGUAGE, CIVILISATION.

"I cannot but believe that, if we would so regard the ills and sufferings of man as to endeavour to assuage them, we must deliver ourselves from notions, however plausible, and from theories, no matter how clever, which reduce him to the level of the beasts that perish."—Address in British Medical Association, Norwich, 1874. SIR J. RUSSELL REYNOLDS, M.D., F.R.S.

"Beata vita nisi amatur, non habetur."

THERE was an old superstition which saw in Nature the action of capricious deities; there is a modern superstition which sees nothing but the action of invariable law; both being regardless, or ignorant, that everything done in Nature manifests a knowing how to do.

Ancient seers ascribed even the gentlest, most constant, as also the mightiest works of Nature, to the operation of God. "The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath He established the heavens. By His knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew" (Prov. iii. 19, 20). "God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them" (Gen. i. 27). We do not, nor did the wise ancients, think that a likeness was moulded in plastic clay of the spiritual and invisible God. Ancient and modern thought regards the words and act as symbols expressive of some special operation in the creation of man, and of his separateness from all other creatures.

We have been curiously fashioned by natural forces into animal life; and by external operation and interior assimilation, enabled to bridge the gulf which separates earth-life from consciousness of Divinity. There is something tender in the words-" God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life." They endue the image with vitality, and awake it

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into consciousness by a kiss of love. They are the poetic simile of a Divine process, a loving symbol of Divine action, a contrast of God and man, spirit and flesh, soul and body, the sweet summing, réλos, of human creation.

Our never being able, of ourselves, to originate any form of mental activity; nor create genius, nor make one's self a great artist, a great poet, nor gain by practice that peculiar insight which characterises the original discoverer show that these are mental instincts or spiritual intuitions.1 What we can do is to call upon our will by "purposive selection," by attention, by direction, to train, utilise, and perfect natural gifts; therefore, spirit is placed within the body, to use thought and feeling for discipline of the whole man to enwrap the world's vastness, and in an atom discern a world minute.

Separated psychically and pneumatically from the brutes, it is wise and well to guide our mind aright; to pass from the Fiji, who delights in the shrieks of a human victim, to that higher self-pleasing which risks life in rescuing an enemy from drowning; and consecrates body, soul, spirit, to God. Sympathy and love and reverence are not selfish, though sacredly self-pleasing, any more than the work of Shakespeare's genius is the outgrowth of canine cleverness. Human emotion and intellect, imparted to the earth of which we were made, by upward growth soar toward Heaven; we think that our powers, not limited to the present conscious existence, will not end with it. Consciousness of good and evil, not being the product of one body, but the product of progress through the past, we infer that we do not end by-and-by. The leaves of our life-book containing chapters of former ages, have precious parables of further truth which we, as sons of reason, hold as proof that quickening of intelligence and extension of memory, by regulated advance, will lead to higher correspondence with the Eternal Spirit of the universe. Memory may possibly be plenary, no longer a place of sepulture for the remains of many generations, but a habitation of thought endued with the power of endless life (1 Cor. xiii. 12): for all we know demands a longer learning.

"Plenary Memory "2 will lead to higher processes of life,

"Mental Physiology," p. 25: Dr. W. B. Carpenter, F.R.S. 2 "The Physical Theory of Another Life," p. 79: Isaac Taylor.