gained. So that if a complicated machine, such as a chronometer, or a Corliss engine, or silk manufactory, or a modern printing press displays an organized system as the result of patient thought and repeated experiments of skill, then the action of the animal body-being far more complicated, doing a diversified and contrary work, at the same time manufacturing its products while repairing its waste and healing its own breakages-shows subtlety and completeness of system beyond which no flight of imagination can travel.

PROOFS OF ORGANISM IN NATURE INEXHAUSTIBLE.

In these several illustrations the unity or system in the works of Nature are by no means exhausted. We can turn in no direction without seeing similar examples which might be shown to be equally conclusive in favor of the view that there is system running through the whole. For each part by being a constituent of the whole, must both bear its share in the work and receive its needed aid. The most minute organization could neither be independent with reference to the several members of the larger system including it, nor fall out of its place without a break in the continuity. At first sight this seems absurd and contradictory to our common experience. We see creatures, both animate and inanimate, produced and destroyed without seemingly making the least difference to the course of nature.

WASTE IN NATURE NOT REAL, THOUGH APPARENT. The bird is killed in wantonness by the sportsman; the fish is caught for amusement and thrown out upon the sand to struggle and yield up its life in convulsive throes; the robber waylays the traveller, takes his money; and, on the principle that “ dead men tell no tales," takes his life; leaving his body for food to hyenas and his bones to bleach in the desert gulch where no eye will ever look upon them. The fishing smack is wrecked by the passing steamer; the miserable toilers go down into the watery depths while the majestic vessel moves on, too careless or too inhuman to stop her course and attempt an atonement for the

wreck which her carelessness has made the waves close calmly over the drowning men; and, except for the distress at Provincetown in the fisherman's darkened cottage-nature would make no sign. But we deceive ourselves in all such cases. In the ex

haustless fecundity of nature she seems able to make good her losses. Our attention is diverted from what we have seen, but now see no more, to that which is before us at present. Close reflection, however, will prove to us that in the accounting which nature makes, every loss as well as every gain must be entered in order to make a correct balance-sheet. In her bookkeeping, like the accounts of a correct banking system, the smallest item must be as scrupulously enumerated and accounted for as the largest; the cent as certainly as the million dollars. There could be no whole without the parts which constitute it. The genus has its species; these in turn their subalterns until we arrive at the individual, the atom; and this, however small the division of matter be carried in order to reach it, has a foothold in the universe which no power but that which created it can either destroy or displace.

NO EFFORT IN VAIN AND NO FORCE LOST IF NATURE BE AN ORGANIZED SYSTEM.

This thought gives comfort to the humble mind, to the one who though striving to do good work sometimes feels that his ef forts are too insignificant to make any impression on the great world; and therefore he is spending his strength for naught. Perhaps to the majority of men this thought gives no trouble, because they have no misgivings as to the importance of their place in the world. For egotism is quite as marked in the narrow-minded who has never been beyond the confines of his own hamlet, as in the world's conqueror. But, to that man who has faith in an Omniscient Presence who appointed him his destiny and place which may always be made an important one by filling it; or to the man of science who can see that no individual or element, however small relatively, but has its indispensable appointment to each of these there is the unshaken

assurance that all parts belong to a system, which for its completion requires the atom just as truly as the world.

ORGANIC THOUGHT THE COUNTERPART OF ORGANIC MATERIAL. The objective also has its correlation in the subjective. The organ would have no significance without the power which works through its instrumentality. The machine is made with reference to the power which shall wield it; or more properly the power and the machine are coördinated by a higher principle, which arranged both of these factors with reference to each other's action. There is an unmistakable correspondence between these, which Leibnitz called "Preëstablished Harmony," which causes these two systems to move pari passu because they are actuated by unity of purpose. Descartes represented these coördinates as working together through "occasional causes." This was an unfortunate and misleading phrase; since it appears to signify that the causes operated now and then, the ordinary meaning of "occasional "; while the intention of the author was to assert that these causes operated on the occasion of any phenomenal action. But the thought is the same by whatever name we choose to designate the coördination between physical action through material organs, and the metaphysical or spiritual energy, which either institutes these, as was done by creative energy, or discovers and comprehends them, which is the problem of knowledge. The phrase used by Schleiermacher, who saw as deeply into the roots of things as any thinker, expressed the physical and spiritual coördination by a most happy turn: "The content of thought should correspond to the content of nature." This is the goal of science toward which the mind is ever striving, but which, like the progress of the asymptotic curve toward the straight line, can reach it only at infinity. But the process of knowing and the thing to be known are getting nearer by constant approach. Therefore, since the comprehension of the intellect is ever with increasing firmness grasping hold of external nature, there is an infallible evidence that they are coördinates of an organized system. The ego is constantly getting in touch with the non ego because they were adopted by infinite wisdom for each other.

AGNOSTICISM IN PRACTICE BELIES ITS OWN THEORY.

This every man of every faith admits in practice, though he may deny it in theory; for a consistent agnostic would be a lusus naturæ. Hence it follows as the condition of knowledge that there must be a double system, one over against the other; and the constitution and relations of these to each other is the ultimate object of quest. The two counterparts must be alike, else there would be no striving of the one after what the other possesses nor ability of the latter to satisfy the quest. But Nature unlocks her door to the "Open, Sesame!" of him who interrogates her in accordance with her laws, and whose mind is receptive enough to admit without prejudice the facts just as they are disclosed; and who in turn has sagacity enough to build them up into a system which is coördinate with reality.

CONCLUSION: MAN BEING A PART OF ORGANIZED NATURE IS CAPABLE OF COMPREHENDING IT.

To the man of eager desire for knowledge, whose mind is as fair and truthful as external Nature; in a word whose intellect has been so purged from prejudice and error that it has become a constituent part of that subject which he is investigating, there is room for unending progress, with assurance that he is standing on unshaken basis. To him all nature in every part of her kingdom, whether material or spiritual, past, present or to come, all alike seems to be a part of an organized system; and therefore as he is himself a part thereof he possesses an intellect fitted for its comprehension.

II.

ENGLISH VERSIONS OF THE DIES IRÆ.

BY THOS. C. PORTER, D.D., LL.D.

Amongst the famous hymns that have come down to us from the Middle Ages the highest place has been awarded to the "Dies iræ " of Thomas de Celano, a Franciscan monk of Italy, who died about the year 1255. A host of eminent divines and laymen in Germany, England and America, Protestants as well as Roman Catholics, have with one accord chanted its praises during the last half century, and the interest awakened has given rise to a multitude of versions in these countries. Their number in the German language is said to be at least 100, and in the English, over 235. Of the latter, Dr. Schaff, in his "Literature and Poetry," names 150, and indicates, by asterisks prefixed, 12 of them, which he considers the best. To the list he adds the following critical estimate: "One good translation is worth a hundred poor ones and will outlive them. Many were still-born or not born at all. But the ever-increasing number is a proof of the popularity and untranslatableness of the 'Dies iræ,' the greatest religious lyric of all ages."

The bringing over of a lyrical poem of the first rank into another language is indeed a difficult task, if the aim be, as it should, not a translation or a paraphrase merely, but a reproduction, that shall bear as strong a likeness to the original as possible. For the attainment of such a result the metrical form must be preserved. It is an essential element and cannot be abandoned without loss. Dr. Neale, who followed this rule in his other hymns from the Latin, when he took up the "De Contemptu Mundi" of Bernard of Cluni, found in its peculiar meter an insuperable barrier and therefore wisely created from its substance his "Celestial Country," which is in fact a new poem, equal,