It is thus that Christian experience is a book, of which the page we are turning over to-day, is unlike all that have filled the volume before.

To gain these results, a man must in some degree live apart. He must leave the beaten track, and converse less with earth than heaven. There are meditations which the common talk and worldly reading of our busy day do not prompt and cannot represent. They are beyond the scope of science, and unwhispered in the halls of letters and the galleries of art. But as little should we seek them in the cell of the ascetic. True love and true humility, which are the nurses of such a progeny, are closely connected with familiar converse with our kind. Best thoughts are those which spring up under the shower of tears that falls over the ills of distressed fellow-creatures. Jesus Christ is still present by his Spirit where broken hearts are to be bound up. The house of mourning and the house of prayer are the places where the heart is made better.

Preaching, Remarks struck out in Talk with J. A. A.—1. Almost all extemporaneous preachers have this fault; they talk about the way in which they are preaching-Thus: "After a few preliminary remarks, I shall proceed to," &c.; or "What I lay down shall take the form of general principles." "I come with hesitation," &c. "I shall be more brief on this point." "You will observe that in this discussion I do so and so." Avoid all such observations. More generally still, avoid all that brings the speaker's personality before the hearer. A better model than our honoured father in this there could not be.

2. Whenever I write down heads, from which to preach extempore, I always find myself disappointed, by not having as much to say under each as I thought; but whenever I premeditate a subject, and take my pen to write on it, I always find myself disappointed in a way exactly opposite.

3. Addison says truly, there is this difference between him and me. I am more warm and ornate when I do not write; he, when he does. 4. As men who strut in walking, sometimes find it difficult to get out of it, and step in the ordinary way, so in writing men get into a measured, rhythmical, ornamental flow of diction, and find it hard, even when the subject demands it, to come down to the pedestrian style. Hence a great argument for simplicity. What a wonderful simplicity in Goethe! It is his characteristic in regard to style. Even Voltaire, simple as his structure of sentence always lies, has a mannerism: so has Macaulay. The reader comes to look for a certain pungent apodosis. In Goethe, nothing leads you to expect any particular bringing up of the period, or antithesis of the thought.

THE

CHRISTIAN AMBASSADOR

ART. I.-THE WILL SEEKING ITS LAW. Translated from the French of the Rev. A. Vinet, by J. McP.; being one of a series of Essays which appeared in a periodical entitled Le Semeur, and subsequently collected and published in one volume under the title of " Essaies de Philosophie Morale et de Morale Religieuse." Vinet has been designated the Chalmers of France. At the present time when many with great show of learning are labouring to establish reason as the ultimate court of appeal in all moral questions, we conceive that this admirable essay will not be regarded, at least by our more thoughtful readers, as inopportune.

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have met with two facts equally remarkable: the absolute priority of consciousness in relation to idea, and instinct which inclines all men to regulate their opinions and their conduct by ideas; instinct which itself is a sense the most primitive and elementary of all.

But afterwards we discovered how difficult it is for man to find an idea or a rule which shall be something else than himself, and, when I say himself, I do not mean the individual only, but man collectively, humanity; and when I say humanity, I mean humanity with its moral instincts, with the notion of duty, and the exigencies of conscience. This I, however vast it is, invested with its must noble parts, is still the 1, another thing than idea, less than the rule that man invokes without knowing or naming it. The law presented with these circumstances is not always what humanity offers for a rule to humanity; and if it were possible to conceive a man in whom all the attributes of humanity were personified, a model man, man par excellence, this man would not consent to accept himself for a rule-he would seek one outside of and above himself.

This man would do what humanity has done in all times and under all the circumstances of human life. Before enumerating VOL. III.-No. 3.-NEW SERIES.

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them let us answer this question: What business had man to search for an idea or a rule? Did he not carry one in himself? Had he not conscience?

There are two answers to give. In the actual state of the human being, that is to say, taking him as high in his history as it is possible to ascend, we certainly find in him moral sentiments, a general notion of right and wrong; but in applying them we see it varying from age to age, from nation to nation, and almost from man to man. These divergencies demand a uniform and sovereign rule. Man is urged by his conscience itself to seek it elsewhere than in his conscience, which does not furnish it to him.

This is not all. Conscience. is next neighbour to the I, that is to say, to all our affections and to all our interests. By right, it is the guardian lodged within us, at our expense, to watch our actions and to render an account of them; but we wrest it, we suborn it; we engage it in our interests; we oblige it to sit with as at our table; we smooth down its wrinkled forehead, and make it empty with us the cup of stupefaction; it identifies itself with our passions; it weds them; forgetting the part it has to play, it makes our business its own. At intervals only it remembers it has other business. Conscience could rule us when it was quite distinct from ourselves, and when we did not venture to connect the notion of duty with the service of passion. But humanity was not long in discovering that conscience, now neglected, anon suborned, rarely obeyed, was most frequently but a simple property, more costly than profitable, and that it was necessary to seek elsewhere than in ourselves for redress.

What is to be done? for man truly felt that his will, far from being enough to serve him as a rule, needed itself to be ruled and rectified; that his will in a word was not good. He went further; he understood that the whole matter did not lie there; that the question was not only the making of his will good, that the will is bad from the fact alone that it is made its own object, that in an absolute sense it belongs not to us to will, that our will is given to us only to do that of another, that it is in the interest of the latter we ought to will, in other words, that it is God who should will in us.

These considerations have not assumed among all people and among all men the precise form which we attempt to give them; for the reasons which determine humanity are not those of which it is most manifestly conscious. It does not express by a deal all it conceives, and it conceives much less than it feels. A comparison will make the thing plain. Whoever appropriates the use of a language reasons without suspecting it upon a number of very nice points, of which he could not give the least account. Will you say that he has not thus reasoned? Will you say that nothing has

passed in his mind? Will you not grant to him a rapid intuition. of things which you have but slowly analysed? Well, this is the image of humanity in the development of its moral and philosophic life. That is a language which it learns, but whose grammar it neither does nor ever will know.

Be that as it may, an irresistible impulse has constrained man, I say not the exceptional man, the thinker, or the mechanical man, but the man who fills the whole of the vast space between these two extreme points, to seek a will to which he might place his own in subjection. He did not long seek it. He found it in God, or if you prefer it, he named this will God. He immediately conceived of God as a governing will. The point in question was not to prove the existence of a first cause he never doubted it. He has never laboriously applied himself to the clothing of this naked cause with different properties which imply its causative nature, and the character of its effects. God has not been one moment to humanity an abstract being, an idea, but, from the beginning, a person; and of all that could characterise this person, nothing sooner nor more directly interested men than his will-his will, I say, in relation to theirs; the God of humanity has been from the first a moral God, morality personified. And what humanity has sought above all in the starry regions, whither the religious look is instinctively directed, is a lawgiver and a judge. Religion then has been from the first, and essentially, morality, and, in fact, is nothing else. Take away morality, that is to say, obedience, and nothing remains. We may continue to employ the word religion, but in that case we make it belie its origin and the sense which has at all times been given to it by the human conscience. M. Benjamin Constant shows us morality identifying itself increasingly with religion in proportion as civilisation progresses, and rectifying dogma by blending itself with it. It is, moreover, one of those things which are true at their commencement.* Religion, after having passed to the state of theory or of rites, has taken body and form by the accession of morality; but it has then only gone back to its starting point, to its primitive nature-only become re-inspired with the idea which gave it birth, only re-become religion. But it is certain that at its origin religion was a morality, and morality a religion. That does not imply, it is important to remark, that the duties of morality are arbitrary, that religion has no objective truth, and that, like a body of precepts, it comes to man entirely from without. The matter in question here is not to discover in fact the identity of religion and of morality. It is in this point of view that Kant says, "We cannot conceive of obligation without joining thereto the idea of another, who is GOD, and of his will." Here morality

* Vraies à leur date.

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becomes religion. And M. de Wette, in his work on Religion, says in a still more absolute manner, Religion is faith in the validity of the moral law, in the invisible world, in a perfect moral communion in eternity, the believing contemplation of the Architype of moral communion." Here religion is morality itself, with God for its object.

I know not whether some one will not feel offended at seeing here morality and religion in some sort identified. There is however no ground of offence, rather the contrary. The dignity of religion and its power coincide exactly with this unity, or if you prefer it, with this confusion. Religion without morality is of still less worth than a morality without religion. We must, far from dissembling it, announce it clearly and with uplifted voice, so as to arrest, among men, all attempts to bring into disrepute doctrinal truths by representing them as a gratuitous appendix, and an inconvenient excrescence of morality. Let it be known that there is not a fibre in religion, not an idea, not an article of faith, which is distinct from morality.

Man has therefore sought out in religion an idea or rule which he found not in himself, or which at least he did not find there authentic and unexceptionable. But O sad deception to which he must trust, if humanity ever trusted to nothing! Humanity bore witness to a truth, but that was all. She found not this will which she appeared to seek, other and higher than her own. She did not re-make her will to the image of that of the gods, but that of the gods to her own image. And realising everywhere the energetic and memorable saying of a prophet, "In my Sabbaths you found your own will.”* Her religion was but her own nature, her propensities, her moral state deified. Precisely the inverse of what was proposed was done. Accordance was found between the Divine will and the human will, but at the expense of the former, the human will having become law to the human will: Humana transtulerunt ad Deos, says Cicero; divina mallem ad nos. They transferred the human to the gods. I would rather transfer the divine to us.

Such have been at all times and in all countries human religions, human in an exclusive sense, for they have reflected only humanity. Certainly true religion ought to be human, and more so than all others; for God, by whom it is devised, knew man much better than man knew himself; but it is at the same time divine, while human religions are but human. They re-produce, with an ideal fidelity, the state of manners and society; they consecrate at once These words are the prophet's only by implication, and are based upon the French version, where we have "ne trouvant point ta volanté," not finding thy will. Similar also is the German of Luther, "noch darinnen erfunden werde, was dir gefællt," nor shalt thou find therein what pleases thee. The Hebrew admits such renderings as we have here as well as that of our own English version.