New Church Almanac and Year-Book, Bearing of the New Revision of the

London Missionary and Tract Society of Temperance, 88

New Church in Poland, Sweden, and Baker, Mr. F., to Miss Mary Haseler,

If the ability to read the two books-the book of Nature and the book of Revelation-is a distinguishing characteristic of man, as compared with the whole animal creation around him, no less so is his ability to look into the past and the future. Animals live in the present. It seems indeed as if they had some knowledge of the past and care for the future. Animals have memory, but the things impressed on it are never called up by reflection, and when excited by the recurrence of similar circumstances or the appearance of the same places or objects, the remembrance is simply the awakening of a slumbering impression, attended by the same unreasoning feeling as that which attended their first reception. The horse, one of the most intelligent of the brute creation, shows this unmistakably. The sight of an object which has scared him in his youth will ever afterwards make him frantic, however unreasonable his terror may be. But if there is no sign of reflection on the past, there seems universally some care for the future. Birds build nests and beasts seek out lairs for their future progeny, while the ant and the bee lay up stores for the winter. But these activities are as purely instinctive as their other actions. They are not the result of fore-thought hut of fore-feeling. All animals, after their kind, act in the same way under the same circumstances. They have in fact no calculations to make, and therefore no conclusions to draw. They take no thought for the morrow. Living

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in the present, they do what their present feelings impel them to do, and what their present instincts guide them in doing. It is not, however, our purpose to enter into the subject of the difference between human and animal nature, but only to notice it for the purpose of pointing a moral. Our capacities fit us for looking into the past and the future; our nature and our needs compel us to do so. Reason, as the logical faculty, draws conclusions from the past for the use of the future. It would have no function if it concerned itself only with the present. It has a present, but it cannot disconnect the present from the past and the future. Without the past it would have no data, without the future it would form no conclusion. If it began and ended with the present it would not be reason, it would be instinct. In man's nature there is, so to speak, as there is in the Scriptures which were written through him and for him, both an historical and prophetical element, and the prophetical is founded on the historical. Regarded as Divine, the prophetical in Scripture is founded on the historical. God's future economy is shaped by man's past history. The promise of man's redemption is based upon the fact of his fall, and the nature of the remedy is determined by that of the disease. The predicted states of the Church's advancement are also evolutional, they are growths, not creations; for though the death of one may be necessary for the existence of another, that which follows has its germ in that which precedes. So is it with all the states of human life. One grows out of another; yet, not like the successive states of vegetable and animal life, which are processes of nature, without consciousness or will. Reason has something to do with all the states of human life. It cognises them. It aids or retards, alters or modifies them. It draws lessons from the past for the present and the future. These lessons may indeed be either good or bad, Man cannot help forming plans for the future, and he brings his acquired knowledge and past experience to guide him in the prosecution of them; but his reason enables him to form a judgment of their character and their remote consequences as well as present results, and to change or modify them accordingly. Our very nature compels us to take in the past and the future in all we think and do, even when the present seems to engage our undivided attention. For if we could only imagine the past and the future to be for us entirely obliterated, we would cease to be human. Not only would our human knowledge be abolished, but our human desires and hopes would die. But while our nature compels us to look into the past and the future, our needs