terrible, as the gift of Him who knew and granted what was best." (Vol. V. pp. 225, 226.)

Precisely what religious idea is here intended to be conveyed, it may be difficult to divine. Possibly the writer had no very definite conception of what he would say, and might have been puzzled to reduce his pictorial words to the terms of a theological definition. It would hardly be fair to deny some poetical license amid so much poetry. The general drift of the whole work of this great thought-builder must determine the intention of particular ornamental parts of it. Nor have we any occasion to affirm (perhaps it may be prudent just here to say) the strict orthodoxy of this gentleman, who is a religious author only incidentally. Certainly the main tenor of his dissertations goes to show his belief that, only through the power of the Holy Spirit of Christ, the world's Redeemer, can victory or peace come to human souls. But, in what channels outside of the ranges of an inspired Scripture, he may deem that power to have savingly exerted itself in the dim ages of the world's earlier probation, he has not formally acquainted his readers; nor do we feel anxious to know, supposing that some latitude of opinion is admissible upon this point.

The closing pages of the section on the "Truth of Clouds," is one magnificent flash of splendor. The author is running one of his exhaustive parallels between Claude and Turner, in this high and difficult region of the art pictorial, where the former was thought to have distanced all possible rivalry. But Ruskin carries the aerial field for his countryman in a style of chivalric combat to which the tilting of the old tournaments was only a small array of brilliance. It is our last selection; sunset in tempest serene midnight sunrise on the Alps; all of them Turnerian paintings. Mark the closing turn of thought, from the painter's to the preacher's commission; pictures should speak also for God:

"As the sun sinks, you shall see the stormdrift for an instant from off the hills, leaving their broad sides smoking, and loaded yet with snow-white, torn, steam-like rags of capricious vapor, now gone, now gathered again: while the smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball beside you, and as if you could reach

it, plunges through the rushing wind and rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no more, dyeing all the air about it with blood. Has Claude given this? And then you shall hear the fainting tempest die in the hollow of the night, and you shall see a green halo kindling on the summit of the eastern hills, brighter — brighter yet, till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted up among the barred clouds, step by step, line by line; star after star she quenches with her kindling light, setting in their stead an army of pale, penetrable, fleecy wreaths in the heavens, to give light upon the earth, which move together hand in hand, company by company, troop by troop, so measured in their unity of motion, that the whole heaven seems to roll with them, and the earth to reel under them. Ask Claude or his brethren, for that. And then wait yet for an hour, until the east again becomes purple, and the heaving mountains rolling against it in darkness, like waves of a wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of its burning; watch the white glaciers in their winding paths about the mountains, like mighty serpents with scales of fire; watch the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling downwards, chasm by chasm, each in itself a new morning; their long avalanches cast down in keen streams brighter than the lightning, sending each his tribute of driven snow, like altar-smoke, up to the heaven; the rose-light of their silent domes flushing that heaven about them and above them, piercing with purer light through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting a new glory on every wreath as it passes by, until the whole heaven-one scarlet canopy is interwoven with a roof of waving flame, and tossing, vault beyond vault, as with the drifted wings of many companies of angels; and then, when you can look no more for gladness, and when you are bowed down with fear and love of the Maker and Doer of this, tell me who has best delivered this His message unto men." (Vol. I. pp. 260, 261.)

We have looked, with wishful eye, again and again at the last two chapters of the fourth volume, and at our waning space if it might suffice to transfer to our pages even a barest specimen of their treasures. They are entitled, "The Mountain Gloom," and "The Mountain Glory." It would be difficult to find a nobler triumph of English prose, inspired with the truest poetic feeling, rich in most appreciative criticism of art and nature, and infused throughout with a religious power which bears on the writer as in the chariot of Elijah. Three pictures are framed into this grand setting which are as ten

derly pathetic, as they are sublimely impressive — each suggested by the mountain scenery which the artist is rendering. They are the Death of Aaron on Mount Hor; the Death of Moses on Mount Nebo; and the Transfiguration on Mount Hermon. Pensively, and lovingly, and exultingly, the incidents are drawn with pencil dipped in the heart's warm sympathy, and the full light of Christian redemption shining over the whole delineation. But our limit is reached. We can only thus indicate where other spoils may be gathered by any who have not found the paths to this "land of Ophir." We have strung our beads on a different plan to that of the Athenian maidens who thread here and there a golden zechin into their necklaces of tiny sea-shells. We claim the reader's thanks for multiplying the zechins, and reducing, as much as practicable, the shells.

ARTICLE III.

THE HOLY SPIRIT IN TROUBLOUS TIMES.

Is religion true; in other words, are we under the moral government of God, agreeably to our instinct sense, or as taught traditionally, or as a consequent search into our moral nature and final causes instructs us, and as analogy confirms? Is the world fallen from original righteousness, and does it lose the sense of these realities except as it is awakened by Divine revelations and miraculous interpositions, as the revelations declare, and as experience and history give us practical assurance? Is it the universal tendency of the fallen world to deny, conceal, or obscure the evidences and doctrines both of natural and revealed religion, and to increase in wickedness in proportion to the increase of its supernatural enlightenment, as we learn from the successive judgments of heaven upon the guilty nations, and from the yet unfulfilled prophecies of Scripture? Is it experimentally certain, in regard even to regenerate men, as we must infer from their conduct and confessions in all periods, that without the renewing

or restraining agency of God they would decline into any supposable degree of wickedness from which recovery would be impossible? Is there a Holy Ghost proceeding forth from the Father and the Son, whose office it is to renew sinful men at God's good pleasure, and to preserve renewed men from final apostasy, as the Scriptures plainly declare; - and is the work of the Spirit wholly gratuitous, as the Scripture also affirms, and as it must be if the above hypotheses are true? Then it clearly becomes us to think, and reason, and live accordingly, for no different or contrary thoughts, reasonings, or conduct of ours could possibly alter God's recorded plan of government, or our personal relations to it. God's truth could not be affected by our lie.

But these hypotheses are true; for they are but another form of expressing the literal facts of natural and revealed religion. If they are not true nothing could be known for truth by the moral instinct, experience, or revelation; language would be a false guide, and the visible universe itself and the Maker of it would be resolved into an idea. If natural and revealed religion consisting in these facts, and the natural and logical inferences which flow from them, are not Divine institutes, there is no alternative, in the last reduction, but atheism,-the crude and sensuous atheism of the past, or the refined pantheistic atheism that is now steaming up over the Christian world.

They are therefore true. We stand upon them as principia, assured by God, known and settled, and acted on by the Church in all periods. We make them the basis of our following remarks on the theme in which they are all, as above, concluded: viz. the work of the Holy Spirit, and its peculiar necessity in "troublous times."

All the dispensations of God to mankind are distinct, but related and necessary to each other. The same God-Father, Son, and Holy Ghost-is in, and by, and through them all, but with diversities of operation. During the Old Testament age the Holy Spirit, invisible, was, as ever, the producer and sustainer of the Divine life in men, through the eternal Son; but the Divine presence visible and manifest was sometimes requisite to rouse the faculties of the stupid world, and produce a more sensible conviction of a moral government over

it. Since the Apostolic age we have no conclusive evidence of a theophany. Ours is strictly a dispensation of the Holy Spirit. Formal manifestations of God will occur only at its close, when Jesus Christ will be revealed from heaven in glory and majesty, to end the probation of earth, and set up a new and more exalted economy. Meanwhile the Spirit is sent or withdrawn as God, in his incomprehensible wisdom, pleases. In the absence of the Spirit man is left to himself, to the guidance of his own reason and the sustenance of his own strength; to elucidate the natural system of the world, and to interpret the revelations, by his own philosophies; to regulate his affairs by his own policy, and produce all practical results by his own mechanism. It is a breaking up of the connection between God and man, the nat.. il and the supernatural, so that the law of cause and effect becomes our highest law, the production of natural happiness our highest rule, and the attainment of it our highest end. But, inasmuch as true wisdom is to be found only in the necessary relations of the natural and supernatural, and true virtue only in a loving agreement with them, and true happiness only in that true virtue, the consequence of such absence of the Spirit is falsehood, sin, and misery. It insures the perishing of our hopes at death, and "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power when he shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire."

I. We observe our need of the Holy Spirit subjectively; that is, a necessity consisting in our nature as it is.

That we may be better understood, let it be observed, beforehand, why we say that natural and revealed religion, — the body of Divine truths as first revealed, or as republished in the Holy Scriptures, is necessary: viz. because it could not otherwise be known, and a moral government could not be carried on, inasmuch as there would be no rule or standard of moral judgments. Man is clearly incompetent; for whatever may be supposed to have been true of him in his original and normal state, it is not now true:

1. That man has intuitional knowledge of his relations and duties to God and to his fellow-man, or the course of the Divine government, in the present constitution and state of