humanity, are found, nevertheless, to harmonize with an extremely flexible and self-adjusting system of instrumentality; a system which, retaining under all circumstances certain leading and cognizable forms, may yet adapt itself to the special peculiarities of time, place, custom, habit, and political constitution, and may take an outward modification of form- here, for instance, by a healthy excitement, stimulating an active zeal; there, by enlightened instruction, regulating fervor in danger of running into fanaticism—from the peculiar moral atmosphere, the combination of outward influences, in the midst of which it grows."

The most conclusive proof of the supernatural origin of our religion is found in its naturalness, in its adaptation to our highest wants and noblest growth. It imparts to its possessor" that inner eye which is the bliss of solitude," and causes him to "hear the veiled gods walk at night through the hushed chambers of his listening soul." Intellect reigns supreme, associated with invincible faith, its living soul and quickening spirit. Throned in the august temple of universal truth, the votary yields to no error, and sinks before no obstacle; fortified as he is by God on high and his own true purpose, he is destined to conquer all enemies, and work out a resistless life through selfreliance and heavenly aid. He makes his body and all its senses subservient to the higher interests of the soul, and walks abroad under the everlasting firmament, rejoicing in the light which radiates every where in the placid regions of his choice, and becomes worthy, because willing, to commune with Jehovah, face to face. The mind thus emancipated from earth-born conventionalities, and made one with great nature, has its movements measured by the movements of the universe. Stationed on the Alps of divinest knowledge and holiest delight, the devout servant of God and man, watchful and free, beholds the effulgence of a brighter morn bursting on a world too long obscured by superstitious fear, and rejoices at the sight as an exiled angel would rejoice before the unfolding gates of heaven. These are the true disciples of Him who appeared on earth to

give liberty and naturalness to the human mind. They are beacon-lights, kindled to cheer and guide the benighted race. They resemble the mountains which the pure and tranquil dawn smiles on long before the rising of common day, and which, as they were the first to hail the rising sun, so, struggling against darkness early and late, they preserve far into night the lingering beams of his glory.

By emancipating the affections and intellect of man in his own person, and by providing for their natural growth, Jesus Christ rendered these attributes more intense and palpable to every human being. It is hard for man to become the absolute slave of custom, to efface completely from his brow the mark of his divine origin, and crush fully from his heart the dream and the daring of his immortal destiny. Yet is he often so abjectly subservient to the powers of darkness, that he needs some one who has partaken of his sorrows, but not of his guilt, to stand up with divine earnestness, and tell him how much hẹ has deflected from virtue's path, and how much energy, as well as happiness, by this rebellion he has lost. This was the mission of humanity's great model and sufferer, the immortal Nazarene. His infant slumbers, his juvenile toils, his manly experience, his public ministry, his conquest over hell and triumphant ascent to heaven, had a much more intimate connection with human history than theologians are wont to recognize. If we would follow in his footsteps, we must develop the entireness of our energies, as he did his, loving as well as learning, doing as well as believing, since knowledge and faith are valuable only so far as they conduce to vigorous thinking and beneficent deeds. When Jesus appeared, he found power and craft leagued together, and every where employed in grinding man in the dust. Priests claimed the privilege of exercising the twofold function of teacher and tyrant; and it was against fragmentizing the human soul that he was prepared to protest with the whole force of his life and all the eloquence of his warmest blood. It was this tenderness of Christ that touched all hearts, and drew the multitudes close around him, and made

his frank and courageous example, as well as his benignant words, an irresistible sermon which will speak to the remotest generations of mankind. All ingenuous spirits will see the adaptation, and verify in themselves the infinite worth, of that religion which unfolds the harmony of our physical nature as it ascends to the intellectual; the harmony of the intellectual as it ascends to the moral; the harmony of the moral as it ascends to the religious; and when it has unfolded all the harmony of the religious, causes its subject, by a spontaneous and glorious transition, to ascend to heaven as a son of God. While preparing for his public toils, our Lord moved about gently among the race he came to redeem, like “stillest streams watering fairest meadows;" but he every where made hearts feel his presence, and from first to last ruled only by the power of his love.

We have considered the experience which in his early manhood Christ had of social oppression, and the trials he endured of personal self-reliance Let us now glance at the discipline he was made to feel under the seductions of power. From the account which the evangelists give of the fast, and the scene at the pinnacle of the temple, it is clear that the Savior did not wish to free himself from the sense of human weakness and dependence; that he would work no miracle for that purpose. Speaking of the still more remarkable temptation of universal dominion, Neander remarks, —

"We do not take the third temptation as implying literally that Satan proposed to Christ to fall down and do him homage, as the price of a transfer of dominion over all the kingdoms of the world: no extraordinary degree of piety would have been necessary to rebuke such a proposal as this. We consider it as involving the two following points, which must be taken together, viz., 1. The establishment of Messiah's dominion as an outward kingdom, with wordly splendors; and, 2. The worship of Satan in connection with it, which, though not fully expressed, is implied in the act which he demands, and which Christ treats as equivalent to worshipping him. Herein was the temptation,

that the Messiah should not develop his kingdom gradually, and in its pure spirituality from within, but should establish it at once, as an outward dominion; and that although this could not be accomplished without the use of an evil agency, the end would sanctify the means.

"We find here the principle, that to try to establish Messiah's kingdom as an outward, worldly dominion, is to wish to turn the kingdom of God into the kingdom of the devil; and to employ that fallen intelligence which pervades all human sovereignties, only in a different form, to found the reign of Christ. And in rejecting the temptation, Christ condemned every mode of secularizing his kingdom, as well as all the devil-worship which must result from attempting that kingdom in a worldly form. We here find the principle, that God's work is to be accomplished purely as his work and by his power, without foreign aid; so that it shall all be only a share of the worship rendered to him alone.

"We find, then, in the facts of the temptation the expression of that period that intervened between Christ's private life and his public ministry. These inward spiritual exercises bring out the self-determination which stamps itself upon all his subsequent outward actions. Yet we dare not suppose in him a choice, which, presupposing within him a point of tangency for evil, would involve the necessity of his comparing the evil with the good, and deciding between them. In the steadfast tendency of his inner life, rooted in submission to God, lay a decision which admitted of no such struggle. He had, in common with humanity, that natural weakness which may exist without selfishness, and the created will, mutable in its own nature; and only on this side was the struggle possible — such a struggle as man may have been liable to, before he gave seduction the power of temptation by its own actual sin. In all other respects, the outward seductions remained outward; they found no selfishness in him, as in other men, on which to seize, and thus become internal temptations, but, on the con

trary, only aided in revealing the complete unity of the divine and human, which formed the essence of his inner life.

"Nor is it possible for us to imagine these temptations originated within; to imagine that Christ, in contemplating the course of his future ministry, had an internal struggle to decide whether he should act according to his own will, or in self-denial and submission to the will of God. We have seen, from the third temptation, that, from the very beginning, he regarded the establishment of a worldly kingdom as inseparable from the worship of the devil; he could, therefore, have had no struggle to choose between such a kingdom, outward and worldly, and the true Messiah-kingdom, spiritual, and developed from within.

"Even the purest man, who has a great work to do for any age, must be affected more or less by the prevailing ideas and tendencies of that age. Unless he struggle against it, the spirit of the age will penetrate his own; his spiritual life and its products will be corrupted by the base admixture. Now, the whole spirit of the age of Christ held that Messiah's kingdom was to be of this world, and even John Baptist could not free himself from this conception. There was nothing within Christ on which the sinful spirit of the age could seize; the divine life within him had brought every thing temporal into harmony with itself; and, therefore, this tendency of the times to secularize the theocratic idea could take no hold of him. it was to press upon him from without: from the beginning, this tendency threatened to corrupt the idea and the development of the kingdom of God, and Christ's work had to be kept free from it; moreover, the nature of his own Messianic ministry could only be fully illustrated by contrast with this possible objective mode of action; to which, foreign as it was to his own spiritual tendencies, he was so frequently to be urged afterward by the prevailing spirit of the times."

But

From an early period in his sublunary course, our Redeemer "suffered, being tempted;" but with strong hope and patient endurance, he resisted the most crafty onsets of the foe.