spectator, may think so; for he sees nothing but bare and knotted ramifications. Let him, how ever, tarry till the summer time, and then he will behold the leafage, and the flowering, and the fruitage, as alike the products of one hidden and buried root. So is it with Natural and other Theologies.

The religious student of Nature will ultimately escape from the heated atmosphere of the halls and the schools, and discern that true and broad religion is not the product of a particular place or a special priesthood. Ecclesiastical Theologies are at best but the vestments of real religion. They may change with the creed, the church, and the era. Some adopt one and others another vestment; some are dazzled with the showy embroidery of one garb, others are delighted with the simple purity of another. On one there is an array of fine needlework, of systematic network, of nice distinctions; in another there is a prevalent simplicity and a colourless uniformity. So it ever has been, and so probably it will long continue to be through the various ecclesiastical vicissitudes of Christendom. He who looks dispassionately upon the systems of his own day, as they pass before him, will perceive that they are all at

ence.

best but varied vestments, while he feels that there is a living and enduring personality beneath them all. If, indeed, these flowing vestments often hide rather than hallow the living personality, still the thoughtful observer will reflect that the garments may be put off while the personality remains. The disrobed religion is vital still, and most adorned when unadorned. It possesses a superhuman principle of existIt may be disguised, but it cannot be destroyed. It is vital above time, though it passes through time. It is powerful beyond place, though it exists for destined periods in numerous localities. Men may contend for long centuries to come, as they have contended for long centuries past, about its investiture— about embroideries, borders, symbols, emblems, and colours. Respecting these, men may combat with such animosity as to forget, the living thing, and even to slay each other in ecclesiastical zeal. Nevertheless they cannot slay the thing itself. It is a thought, a creation of the living God. He made it, like man, in His own image, and He planted it in the heart of man as His own reflection.

This is the essential, the everlasting religion to which Nature ministers with a holy and effi

cient ministry. To ecclesiastical vestments she has nothing to say; they belong to Art and to Fashion, and change with them. True, she may be forced to give a momentary countenance to them, but the fair flowers plucked from her bosom soon perish, even on the gaudiest altar, where they have no root and no nutriment.

He who thinks the devout contemplation and study of Nature, and the Sciences explaining Nature, to be one of the chief ends and one of the most glorious privileges of man's present existence, finds the two classes of persons already referred to equally indisposed to agree with him, the one thinking natural religion unnecessary, and even injurious, to revealed religion, and the other regarding revealed religion as unnecessary and as injurious to scientific pursuits. From the former class we hear the narrowest conceivable applications of great religious doctrines; from the latter, the most limited and exclusive applications of great scientific truths.

The Christian student of Nature sometimes finds a strong barrier raised against his endeavours to unfold science, in the one-sidedness of the views of contracted Christians, who affirm that the one great doctrine of Redemption by Jesus Christ is exclusively

sufficient for all the powers of the mind, and that it exercises and fills all its capacities apart from natural religion. They do not perceive how this exclusive view would narrow the goodness of God to one, albeit the greatest, act of His unfathomable love. They do not understand that the new relation of Sons of God in Christ Jesus, while it includes and exalts the old relation of Sons of God by nature, does not abolish it. The new creature cannot destroy the significance of the old, and the Creator always stands in a paternal relation to the created. Once this was the only relationship on earth; another is now added to it, but does not extinguish i.. Doubtless Redemption is the central truth of Revelation, but by no means the sole truth; and he who thinks that there is little else in this world and in all worlds worthy of investigation forgets that this and other worlds have existed for ages, with all their varied natural endowments, and all their successive forms of lite, in as entire dependence upon the Creator and the Provider as they now exist; and that they have illustrated, and do still illustrate, the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, in a manner which exalts to the highest our conceptions of the Deity. To behold the

sun of our system is indeed a good and a pleasant thing; but to gaze so fixedly and long upon our sun as to become dazzled, and afterwards incapable of beholding any star in the amply and broadly-illuminated sky, is not the method of gaining a knowledge of the wonderful and boundless glories of the whole heavens; while to acquire a knowledge of some of the innumerable and independent stars by no means detracts from the splendour and magnitude of the sun of our system.

I conceive the Ministry of Nature to be a corrective of-isolated and narrow views of the Divine character, and of the dealings of the Deity with man. While imprisoned within the bars of circumscribed creeds, and fettered by illiberal and sentential interpretations of Holy Writ, the character of God in relation to man too often appears utterly inconsistent and contradictory, and in such cases no alterative in psychical therapeutics is so effective as an excursion into the broad domains of natural knowledge. There Nature becomes medicinal even to the saving and strengthening of Faith. Are we habituated to regard God's action towards us individually as hard and severe? Do we see ourselves only environed by an iron