Doubtless it would be pleasant and profitable leisurely to meditate on the necessary connection of man's mental nature with the outward world, whence man was to derive his ideas and delights, in sympathy with other natures. We might endeavour to conceive how a perfect mind would elaborate in thought a theory of the universe, with a divine spirit of philosophy breathing new religious feeling with every new apprehension of truth. But we have no reason to conclude that any created intellect is equal to the discovery of truth without instruction. It is true that science, in the present day, is busy in acquiring a knowledge of the properties of things, and in applying them to practical and useful purposes, thus far, as it were, restoring man's dominion over nature. But science, at her best, is very ignorant of anything beyond appearances, and can explain nothing of the real causes of phenomena. Now, truth means something besides appearances; and if science and philosophy know and assert anything beyond anything of the reason why and how-it is not from insight, but because something of intelligence has been superadded, derived not from inference but from revelation - such as the unity of the Power which called the universe into existence and upholds it. Science talks of forces inherent in substances, and when asked to account for them, can only refer to Will residing somewhere. That means a Personal Originator, a sole Being, without beginning, selfcontained and everlasting, whose existence is not a discovery of science but a revelation made to meet the demands of reason, and yet, perhaps, never found by unassisted intellect. There is a pleasure in pursuing knowledge for its own sake, without seeing how the knowledge may apply to useful purposes. It is a gratification to curiosity, if nothing more. Thus, he who took delight in cutting a cone into all possible sections might not see the relation of those sections to all geometry. It was enough for him, perhaps, to discover that the five figures or sections -the triangle, the circle, the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola-were in the cone, without discovering the uses to which mathematicians apply them, and how astronomy shows the three last figures ruling in the movements of the celestial mechanism. But the highest enjoyment of reason is to discover the mind and meaning in all possibilities, and to trace the application of fixed principles to the working of the universe. How poor the pride of Laplace when he excluded the idea of God from his hypothesis! Those who study to discern the mode of divine operation doubtless find a pleasure worthy of their labour. When Euclid reasoned on the properties and relations of linear forms he must have felt a high pleasure in the consciousness that all mathematical reasoning must conform to his demonstrations. But unless he went further than to love this knowledge for its own sake, his pleasure was but that of gratified intellectual pride. To know truth alone is a barren joy. If the knowledge of truth of any kind bring not the mind to the Author of the truth, it is nothing worth. Truth, whether natural or spiritual, avails to elevate the man only as it proves to him the relationship of his own mind to the Person who made the human mind capable of perceiving His mode of operation, and of working with Him by obeying Him. Now, a lone man, sole heritor of earth, with no instructor, would have been a poor orphan indeed, and little fitted to make discoveries of the meaning of things and the purpose of his own existence. But the first man was the son and heir of God, and we are constrained to believe that the Father personally instructed him in all that was necessary to the satisfaction and happiness of his heart and reason. The eye in smiles may wander round, Caught by earth's shadows as they fleet; Save him who made it, meet. KEBLE. 220 CHAPTER XIX. MORAL LAW. AMONG the earliest necessities of man as a moral agent, would be the knowledge of the nature of moral law. Any law known to be from God is a moral law, because it demands obedience from reverence to His unerring authority as man's Maker. There must have been, therefore, in some early period of man's history some arbitrary law imposed on him, demanding entire confidence but yet involving a penalty in its breach. This was necessary for the exercise of man's moral faculties under sense of responsibility, as a free agent in relation to a positive and unquestionable authority. Beyond that purpose of exercising free will in respect to God, we need not now enquire into its nature. Of course that law meant self-control, something desirable but not to be done, yet without the sacrifice of enjoyment, only with the exercise of a perfect faith in the wisdom and love that enjoined its observance. Before any such injunction could have had value as a teaching test, the moral influences pertaining to the love of approbation, love of knowledge, love of power, love of self, and that higher reflex of self-love-affection for another as the complement of a man's own being-must necessarily have been experienced. As humanity is not complete but in the union as in one flesh of man and woman, so the test by which the nature of parental authority as requiring perfect obedience as from a child, not knowing why, but in reliance on proved love, must have been imposed on the united nature that was to become parental. The life-union of man and woman in a common interest, implies the previous acquirement of language as the vehicle of thought and feeling. The imposition of a law that we must suppose orally expressed, also implies a language as its vehicle. This possession of language by man will demand our consideration as we proceed, but as we have now the first arbitrary moral law and its effects before us, it will be well first to reflect on its operation. The possibility of obeying or disobeying the first command of God must determine the course of human destiny. The divergence in perpetuity between right and wrong is seen in any small act of will as much as in all history; the divergence begins at a point anywhere, but where does it end? It is the point at which the self-will turns away on its own centre under a force that operates for ever, unless some other force meet and overpower it. A direction taken at variance with the Divine will runs on in the same line as long as thought exists, and can know no turning unless Divine interference produce repentance and so recovery. In thinking of law and faith, we are thinking of that which distinguishes man from brutes, that is reason and |