.

console the mind. How stable are the foundations on which the soul rests, O inconceivable God! as we raise our feeble thoughts to Thee. As the perception of order is our highest attainment, so this attainment's instinctive consequence, the impulse of faith toward the Ordainer, the Inconceivable, is the most exalted and enduring that sways the soul. Man's thought and intelligence are evoked by, and respond to, the thought and intelligence in nature. There is a law in the mind correlated to the laws which rule the changes and forms of life and matter, and so we distinguish the true from the false. A steam-engine or a sword suggest to us ideas of design or purpose, good or evil, in its maker; so do the laws of matter and mind. Those sacred emblems stir into life ideas, binding us in understanding and affection to Him of Whose will these emblems are the eternal expression. Utility or rational goodness is the highest and ultimate motive for action or inaction; and this law of our reason is the visible law of the Divine Reason, and the deep foundation of our hope. And so utility and rational goodness is one of the practical and beautiful forms of the piety of reason. Through the influence of utility we have seen raised and protected the rank and the rights of women. For its sake men have been redeemed from slavery, and to the same cause we trace the force of the obligation to provide for the orphan, the disabled, and the poor. On utility is founded the judicial equality of all men. It has created the idea of right between nations, and taught that peace, not war, is the normal state of man. These true marks of progress, these victories over evil, are neither due to the doctrines of Moses, nor Jesus, nor Paul. They are the practical issues of man's ordained delight in utility, his rational love of goodness." This is very different from the fearfully sweeping doctrine, as expressed in the Shorter, but too long Catechisms, that "all mankind, by their fall, lost communion with God, are under His wrath and curse, made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever." "But," says Campbell, "while utility and truth binds into one great family the race of man, Jesus and Paul would tear them asunder by

the frightful question of believer or unbeliever, the saved or the damned" (with the exception, I may add, of the presumed and very fortunate elect). "Amid the good and evil of life," he says, "through this all-directing principle of proportion or order, we recognise the harmony of our intelligence with intelligence self-existent and eternal; and we name this principle of order the Gospel, and of this Gospel alone the ancient hymn sung of the heavens is true. There is no speech nor language where this Gospel's all-directing voice is not heard, and whether at Athens or Jerusalem its words are the same, believed always, everywhere, and by all. The mason, adjusting his plummet as he raises his wall, takes this gospel as his guide. The carpenter fashions his ship, the engineer frames his engine by its precepts. By the rules of this gospel, the mariner finds a pathway on the sea, and guiding footsteps across the great ocean. The ploughman or the artisan, the true thinker, speaker, or actor in science, morals, religion, is led by this gospel. To hear its voice, to feel its power, and with ability to make its truths. our rule, is the Almighty Ordainer's high and sacred gift to the children of reason. Men have gone in search of God as a something having the same relation to the universe that the carpenter has to a chair, or the mechanician to a watch, persuaded that a deity having some relation to nature must exist. But we cannot rest in so narrow an analogy. We seek a divinity greater, truer, than such analogies suggest. We cannot rest in a mechanic god, subordinate to proportion. The events amid which we live seem indications of greater truths dimly visible to reason. We stand before truths to which man's present mental powers appear unequal, and those truths point to other and yet higher truths, as addressed to beings destined to an ever-rising and unfaltering progress. We have sought God in creeds and dogmas, and found Him not. In the ever-varying forms and course of Nature-in the Divine Order which rules over all-in the emotions of our own souls, in these alone are we sure that we track the footsteps and follow the voice of the Father; for, inadequate as the analogy is, it is at once the most beautiful, the oldest, and most widespread of all religious names

-more ancient than Adam, more expressive than Lord; yet, in this we rest not, but here it is our peace. . . Now, in this immutability of order, or fixedness of proportion, the most palpable of all facts, there rests in its simplest form, but on its firmest basis, the perception of God,-alike by our senses and our intellect. The world,-life,-down to its veriest atom, is involved in this proportioned fixedness, palpable, and irresistible. Awed by its grandeur, men name it Fate, Destiny, Eternal Providence, for in this fixedness our mind perceives, our eyes behold, and our hands touch the ever-abiding presence of God, the All-wise, the Ordainer. To this principle of Proportion, Order, Providence, those palpable facts of God's presence, our whole nature responds in emotions of dependence, hope, resignation, or all that we name Religion. But, so long as men believe that their relations to God resembles the relations of one human being to another, so long will their religion be degraded into superstition. The Supreme Ordainer hath neither adversary nor opponent. But all religions have hitherto represented their gods as subordinate, or opposed to this fixedness or order of being, which in fear and distrust has been named Fate, Destiny. Jesus, represented as God incarnate, weeping over the coming fate of Jerusalem, gives His authority to this great error. Fallible men form, each after his own image, a mental idol with mind and feelings like their own, and name that idol, God; and this false and subordinate image represent to them His purposes and character. But God, the Ordainer, is present to us in Fate and Destiny. The Religion founded on this sublime truth is neither above nor opposed to Nature and Reason, but springs from them, and has no mystery except what arises from the inconceivable grandeur of its object. In this religion, every fact and its law which men recognise in their daily work and life, becomes a divine truth, giving a clearer sense of their own high calling, and exciting ever-increasing trust in the Almighty Ordainer.

"Why, then, is it said that, concerning God and His ways to man, the highest faculties can discern little more than the meanest? This may be true of men who pretend to define and explain, by dreams, visions, miracles, the being, nature, and attri

butes of the Eternal. It may be true that Archimedes and a naked savage are upon a level respecting such knowledge, and the nature of its acquirement. But aspirations towards the beautiful and good, our sense of responsibility toward each other, the desire to better our life, are facts and indications of God's presence as distinct as is the refraction of light or the gravitation of matter. And so each new truth, each rational scheme of human well-being, is a disclosure of God's ways to man, in which the highest faculties do of necessity discern more than the meanest. It is to men the most highly endowed that we owe the faith-giving discovery, that the observed facts of the planetary motions are the rational expression of geometrical truths, or in other words, that the laws which fix the orderly succession of our thoughts are akin to the laws which determine the orderly relation of the solar worlds to each other. To other men similarly endowed was disclosed the fact, that the utility, goodness, beauty which delight our souls, are in harmony with the capabilities and tendencies of nature and life, and with our capacities of knowing. And thus again is confirmed the truth that it is to the highest faculties that the highest discoveries of God's ways are given, that the true temple is for ever open, the true revelation for ever in progress. Of all the varied origins of religion, the most simple, the most affecting, is the sense of hope and repose which follows the disclosure of an Ordering Intelligence, All-wise, Almighty, to guide and redeem." (Regarding this great truth, the grand old Bible says correctly, "there is no Saviour but God.") "It is in this fact of experience, religion yields the sweetest, dearest feeling of its truth. But we see the divine sentiment misled, because disjoined from the principles of Proportion, Law, Order,-the true and rational evidence of God's eternal rule. What is more fitted to cheer and sustain us than this truth, that the Almighty is at once the origin of the moral and intellectual aspirations of the soul, and the furnisher, through our senses and reason, of the facts that are to guide us in pursuing the objects of these aspirations. And seeing this, we think those right who say that no one can set a boundary to man's knowledge of himself and the world, or limit his rational hope and repose."

I am afraid my sincere love and adoration of all that I believe to be true has enticed me to extend these quotations too far, but as they run parallel both with my subject, and design of spreading what I conscientiously believe to be truth, the opportunity is hailed of inserting another thinker's words, groping after the same object; and it is desirous to impress upon the mind this great fact, that it has been the highest intellects that have been the first to discover what are now known to be the scientific and immutable laws by which man can discern the infinite order and design of God, the Ordainer; and it is quite in harmony to believe that there are other spheres of existence, where still higher intelligence is destined to lessen the distance between the Ordaining reason and its rational child, the human soul. And as the page is before me, I shall again use Campbell's words instead of my own. "Never, in your darkest hour, relinquish the hope that there are waiting to be unfolded true and sure indications of another life than this, and that the world's Divine Order is in accord with the moral aspirations, the desires, the highest, dearest affections of the soul. All that is greatest in nature or our own being join to affirm that this instinctive and rational hope in immortality is related to a future life as truly as each existence which now is stands related to an existence that is to be." . . . That there is a supreme reason that will yet explain the arrangement of being and human destiny, and open to our thoughts yet more noble conceptions of what we reverently term God, and that the human race shall yet, either here or hereafter, be able to perceive the lines of Divine Order that incloses this apparent disorder, the general Good that remains constant amid the confusion of the parts; that we shall yet see the imperfect in its ultimate form of the perfect, and realize Plato's sublime thought, that "God, that Eternal Good is the origin, and the purpose and end of all." I may here remark that Pope has also embodied this same idea in verse :

"All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal Good."