seems to have regarded as the vehicle of important truth, and has dressed it up in some of his finest poetry.

"Titan! to whose immortal eyes

The sorrows of mortality,

Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise:
What was thy pity's recompense?

A suffering, silent, but intense:

The rock, the vulture, and the chain:
All that the proud can feel of pain;

The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
That speaks but in its loneliness,-
And then is silent, lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Unless its voice be echoless."

All the errors, absurdities, and fables to which I have now alluded, have been sustained and illustrated in ancient and in modern times, with the whole power of the human understanding in its most improved condition. Eloquence, logic, learning, and wit, have been employed to make the worse appear the better reason, until the honest inquirer, who seeks for truth through the mazes of these controversies, finds himself completely bewildered and hopeless of arriving at any satisfactory result, were there no other difficulty to be encountered but the extent of the ground to be gone To crown the whole, the severest and most celebrated metaphysician of modern times affirms, that the truth cannot, in fact, be discovered by the mere use of the understanding in the ordinary sense of the term; and in proof of his assertion furnishes what he considers complete and unanswerable demonstrations on both sides, of all the great questions that most deeply interest the mind, at the head of which is the existence of God.

over.

From this chaos of controversy, doubt, confusion, imposture, and error, we turn to the Scriptures. Here, gentlemen, we find ourselves at once in a new atmosphere. The very first sentence removes all difficulty. What do I say? The light breaks upon us before the sentence is finished. The first half-sentence settles at once and forever, the great problem of the universe. IN THE BEGINNING

GOD. No metaphysics; no logic; no rhetoric ;-no tedious induc tion from particular facts; no labored demonstration à priori or à posteriori;—no display of learning; no appeal to authority;—but just the plain, simple, naked, unsophisticated truth: In the begin NING GOD.

With the utterance of this little word, an ocean of light and splendor bursts at once upon the universe, and penetrates its darkest recesses with living beams of hope and joy. Order, harmony, intelligent design for happiest ends, take the place of unintelligible chaos and wild confusion. A cheerful confidence in the wisdom and goodness of an All-Wise and Almighty Creator, is substituted for gloomy doubt, and blank despair. Evil still remains, but how different is its character! In a universe of chance and fate, it is a blind, irresistible power, like the destiny of ancient fable: treading under its giant feet with remorseless fury, the fairest flowers of the natural and moral creation. "In a godless universe," says Madame de Stael, "the fall of a sparrow would be a fit subject for endless and inconsolable sorrow." With an Almighty Father at the helm, evil, physical and moral, puts on the character of discipline. We cannot, it is true, penetrate the necessity of its existence, or the nature of the good which it is intended to effect. We are tempted at first to exclaim with the eloquent sophist of Geneva, "Benevolent Being! where, then, is thy Almighty Power? I behold evil on the earth." But what then? Does our limited intelligence comprehend the universe? Can the infant at his mother's breast understand why the honied stream is removed from his lips, and a bitter draught of medicine substituted for it? Does the little child realize why the kind father confines him in schools,-refuses him the indulgences which he thinks so delightful,-inflicts upon him, perhaps, a severe punishment for some, to him, unimaginable fault? To the child, the lapse of a few years makes all these mysteries clear; in the mean time, his confidence and love for his parents induce him to submit with undiminished cheerfulness, where he cannot understand. Shall the frail being of a day repose with less faith and hope upon the bosom of Omniscient and Omnipotent goodness? How beautiful is the language, in which a late English writer expresses the effect upon the inquiring mind, oppressed with

doubts and fears, of the introduction of an intelligent principle into the theory of the universe.

“Fore-shadows,—say, rather, fore-splendors,—of that truth, and beginning of truths fell mysteriously upon my soul. Sweeter than day-spring to the shipwrecked in Nova Zembla ;-ah! like a mother's voice to her little child, that strays bewildered, weeping in unknown tumults;-like soft streamings of celestial music to my too exasperated heart, came that Evangile :- the universe is not dead and demoniacal,-a charnel-house with spectres, but god-like, and my Father's.”

IN THE BEGINNING GOD. This little phrase, then, gentlemen, solves in one word, the problem of the universe. The same strain of thought runs through the whole volume; but if it ended here, the system of speculative wisdom would be perfect. It suffers no subtraction: it admits no addition. IN THE BEGINNING GOD.

But knowledge is not every thing. We are not only intelligent, but active beings. A complete system of philosophy must include the essence of practical, as well as speculative wisdom. Satisfied upon the theory of the universe, I turn my views again homeward. I seek for a rule of practical conduct. What are my relations to the beings around me? How am I to act? What am I to do? Here, too, the schools are given up to inextricable doubt, disputation and confusion; and here again, the Scriptures interpose with another masterly solution, in a single word: Love.

Interrogate the doctors, and you find their answers as various as their names. All agree in this: that the object in life is happiness, but how shall I attain it? Wherein resides this long-sought summum bonum: this far-famed fair-and-good, of the Porch and the Academy? Zeno stretches the inquirer upon the rack, and endeavors to persuade him that he is happy, by convincing him that pain is not an evil. Epicurus unlocks the blooming gardens of sensual indulgence. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. "Wonder at nothing," says Horace,-" that is the only way by which a man can make or keep himself happy." The son of Ammon seeks for happiness in the "pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war," and weeps at last, that he has only one world to conquer. The student thinks that he has found it in his library. "When I am once

3

fairly seated before a fine old parchment," says the disciple in Goethe's Faust,--"all Paradise opens before me." But the master has already learned that, of making many books, there is no end; and that much study is a weariness of the flesh. And what says the sweet songster of Twickenham,--the charming pot of the Essay on Man :- he, whose life, according to a brother bard, was an even more endearing song than his writings; and who, if this eulogy be true, had a right to judge of that in which he himself excelled? Hear him address.ng his celebrated "guide, philosopher and friend!"

66 Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim;

Good! Pleasure! Ease! Content! whate'er thy name;
That something still that prompts the eternal sigu,

For which we bear to live or dare to die;

Which still around us yet beyond us lies,-
O'erlooked, seen double,-by the fool and wise.
Plant of celestial growth! if dropped below,
Say in what mortal soil thou deign'st to grow!
Fair opening to some court's propitious shrine,
Or deep with diamonds in the flaming mine?
Twined with the wreaths Parnassian laurels yield,
Or reaped with iron harvests of the field?

Where grows? Where grows it not? If vain the toil
We ought to blame the culture not the soil.

Fixed to no spot is happiness sincere ;
'Tis nowhere to be found or every where ;

'Tis nowhere to be bought, but always free,

And fled from monarchs, St. John, dwells with thee!"

Beautiful, brilliant, but, alas, too flattering eulogy! No, gentlemen! happiness never dwelt in that troubled boson where love of pleasure and ambition re gned supremely to the last. The guide, philosopher, a friend, whom our delightful, but too mistaken moralist has addressed in these beautiful verses, was never happy for a moment,-no, not even in that hour of triumph when he gave the law as prime minister of England over half the globe, when his eloque ce ruled in parliament,-when the seductive charm of his person and manner capti.ated all hearts in the saloon, and when the greatest wits and poets of England were

proud to share the retirement of his leisure hours, and exhausted their finest strains of eloquence and song in his praise. Still less was he happy, when the charming Minstrel of the "Essay on Man," composed under his instruction, and dedicated to him that celebrated poem; and when fallen from his high estate, attainted of treason, barely permitted, after years of exile and poverty, to breathe his native a r, and till his paternal acres, he destroyed the quiet which he might have enjoyed by unavailing efforts to grasp the glittering baubles, which in his brilliant youth he had so easily won and so early lost; and by efforts still less pardonable, and happily not less unavailing, to disturb the religious faith of his countrymen. No, gentlemen! happiness dwells not in the propitious shine of courts, nor yet in the flaming dep hs of the diamond mine. It is not to be conquered on the battle-field; nor is it gathered in, as the bard of Twickenham knew too well by his own experience, with the richest harvest of Parnassian laurels. But the error lies still deeper. Happiness is not, as it is here represented, "our being's end and aim." The object of life is improvement, progress, preparation for an infinite future. Happiness, so far as we enjoy it in this mingled state of being, is the indirect result of employing the proper means to effect these objects. Abandon then, gentlemen, the poet's treacherous guide, who was a wretched philosopher, and at best a very doubtful friend. Open the Scriptures, and you will there find that rule of practical conduct which he vainly sought to establish in so many beautiful, but too unsuccessful moral essays, revealed with unerring certainty in a sing e word: "I give unto you a new commandment, that ye LOVE ONE ANOTHER."

What says the beautiful and original writer whom I just now quoted?

"There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and find blessedness. Was it not to preach forth this same Higher, that sages and martyrs, the priest, and the poet, in all times have spoken and suffered, bearing testimony through life and through death, to the Godlike that is in man ; and that in the Godlike only he hath strength and freedom? On