him and to yourself. Show him that God is his providence and yours forever. But you will only prove yourself a willful and conceited bungler, unless you really sympathize with sinners as a sinner with a new heart. Then do not be afraid-Faith will remove the mountain. Believe you work with the power of God, and you will find that power is nothing but intention, and intention is action in the Omnipotent, and he means what you desire-salvation, therefore be strong in Him who is unfailing.

Above all things, do not be afraid of finding the handiwork of the Almighty in nature at variance with the word of His covenant with man, as expressed in the Bible. But do not take a step without His book. He does not contradict Himself, and therefore creation is nothing but a consecutive indication of his wisdom, power, and love, to minds capable of appreciating the language in which He has thus written His attributes. Because they regard not the works of the Lord, nor the operation of his hands, he shall destroy them and not build them up.-Ps. xxviii. 5.

All nature, physical and spiritual, is a theology to enlightened reason; but yet, for a perverted soul, in the profundity of its ignorance, to look for the revelation of life and immortality in the elements of earth, is to look for the living among the dead. Earth would be but the grave of our hopes, but for Him who spake with Mary at the sepulcher concerning the ascension to his Father and our Father. The Lord is risen, and our life is hid with Him; and through Him alone shall we find it. Yet, without Him was not any thing made that was made," consequently we may wisely worship and glorify Him while endeavoring to investigate and apply to our improvement some of the great facts of existence, and the interests of our natural relationships to each other as alike the creatures of His goodness.

Every mind has its select wonders, but existence itself is the grand mystery to all of us. It points from eternity to eternity, from the unbeginning to the unending. Man is the only being on earth that recognizes this mystery; none but he thinks, and therefore if there be any design in the creation of the human mind, the perception of this sublime subject must be intended for some end in relation to the wellbeing of that mind. As far as we can at present conceive, this end is only to direct us to a self-existent, all-productive Being, who intends to make Himself known to us, and therefore confers on us a disposition to inquire after Him, and in keeping with this disposition, and as necessary to its fulfillment, He imparts to us a desire for an existence never to terminate. Thus, in meditating on creation, thoughts will follow thoughts in higher and higher series, until man, from his intellectual elevation, gazing into the boundlessness that surrounds him, finds no rest for his spirit but upon the bosom of the Eternal.

The appreciation of our existence as intelligences related to the Everlasting is, then, the basis of all becoming effort to attain whatever belongs to the true dignity of man. If we know not our nobility, we shall not behave nobly. If we feel not our constituted capacity for greatness, we shall not desire to be great. If, in the strivings of our souls toward the light, we do not recognize our fitness for fellowship with heaven, we shall shrink back, and clothe ourselves fruitlessly in darkness, and, losing sight of the eternity in which we really live, shall in our misery find no time for mental improvement and moral progress. We may talk of life and enjoyment in our gloom, but it will be with a mortal taint upon our spirits, and our gayety will be like the delirium of persons smitten with the plague, turning the sounds of lamentation and the signs of death into laughter and madness. It is, indeed, but

too prevalently true that we are so busy in watching the phantasmagoria of successive fancies, that we rather seem to dream than to realize the objects that surround us. Even while we gaze, delusion takes the place of sight, and when we would seize what appears so substantial and so pleasing, we destroy even the shadow at which we grasp.

It is not until some unselfish real love, like a spirit from heaven, takes possession of our hearts, that we obtain the full and inmost consciousness of our individuality. In the fixed attachment of our souls with the feeling of an everlasting affinity to some other being, we begin to doubt of death by recognizing the true purpose of life, and in the ceaseless nature of love, with its possibilities of agony and bliss, we experience the full weight and burden of the awful mystery comprehended in the fact that we are and must be. We may long for knowledge, we may long for power, but it is love alone that appropriates and employs intelligence and energy, and until this felt capacity of loving becomes as one with our life, we find all teachings but as the play of sunshine and shadow on a troubled stream.

When we acquire this new kind of consciousness, our existence is no longer instinctive, imitative, sympathetic, physiological, and reflex, but spiritual, and in felt relation with the Divinity who originates all things but for the purpose of expressing himself as love, that we may trust him as our sufficient good. Then we

feel no longer little and limited, but capable of becoming expansive, vast, immovable, eternal, real as the heavens, and formed to regard the universe as a creation suited to ourselves, to elicit admiration, and satisfy our research, while awakening love within us as the response of our spirits to our God. Until this godlike animation enters into man, his morality, philosophy, and religion seem but as the speculations of vanity instead of the visions of truth, coming close in upon the soul like the

revelation of Heaven, still obscure to us because of its intolerable glory. Incomprehensible, thou must sustain us; thou must satisfy us from thyself with thy knowledge and thy charity. O Light, thou must illumine us, though now we look and are blind; soften thy glory to our vision, that we may see and worship.

By our aspirations we are heirs of the Everlasting, for we feel, when brought to reflect on our capacities and requirements, and to set our hearts upon attaining truth, that our fellowship with creatures is not enough for us; since they can not comprehend us nor completely sympathize with us, being able neither to look back upon the strugglings of our secret past, nor forward to our coming necessities, they can neither rectify our wishes nor supply our wants. They can explain nothing of the mysteries we would solve, they can only respond to us by questions like our own-Whence are we and why? The Being who made us thus largely necessitous, dependent, and inquisitive, must have made us for himself; and he must reveal himself in all his fullness as personally bound to us forever, as our originator and our end, in order that reason, looking abroad on his illuminated worlds, should be able sufficiently to hope, sufficiently to believe, sufficiently to love. It is the Infinite in power, the Infinite in love, the Infinite in will, the Infinite in means, that can alone fill us with ideas large enough to satisfy the longings of our souls after the good, the beautiful, the true, the immortal; for it is not an indefinite notion, but a growing idea which possesses the soul that seeks satisfaction in seeking to understand the relation of the Self-existent to his creature, man.

Since He has given us the understanding and the will to look to Him, it must be his intention to supply us out of his exuberance; he can not have directed our desires by his promises, in order to disappoint us; but rather that he may bestow more and more abun

dantly at each advance of our spirits toward Himself, in dependence upon his hand and thus on forever, world without end; for every good hope is a prophecy fulfilled already in the divine plan and purpose of our being. All things consist-nothing is but as a part of all-God's all. As we scarcely feel conscious of living in eternity until we look outwards and onwards, with the scrutiny of reason directing the eye into the blue ether, inquiring, Where does it terminate? and finding our only possible answer is, Nowhere; so, until we look into ourselves, we do not perceive what it is that discerns the everlasting, and is the everlasting. In the visible universe we see the works of Mind; these must be changed, in conformity to Divine thought— "As a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed;" but the constituting Mind itself is unalterable, and therefore essentially eternal; and the mind that apprehends must be akin to the mind that creates. We recognize in ourselves the reflection, at least, of the forming force of purpose and of understanding, and because of our inability to think in a godly manner, without desiring and expecting to think forever, we dare not, with respect to our own existence, say we see its termination. We can not determinately meditate on thoughts and say, for certainty, our end is in the grave. Reason boldly asserts that the possibility is otherwise; but our hearts go before our logic, and speak more positively still, for either our hopes or our fears take us beyond doubtfulness at once into the untried being of unavoidable futurity.

Why is this? Is it not because the life of man is the breath of God? When the Almighty had fashioned the dust into a form of beauty and majesty fit to be animated and actuated by a spirit that should assert its relationship to Himself, He imparted to the wondrous organism a principle of action and of thought, and man became a living soul. Thus life is not an inherent and