tion and torment. There is nothing to do with men, but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness. Task all the ingenuity of your mind to devise some other thing, but you never can find it. To all the haughtiness and wrath of men, I say however they may disdain the suggestion--the spirit of Jesus is the only help for you. To hate your adversary will not help you; to kill him will not help you; nothing within the compass of the universe can help you, but to love him. Oh! how wonderfully is man shut up to wisdom-barred, as I may say, and imprisoned and shut up to wisdom; and yet he will not learn it.

But let that love flow out upon all around you, and what could harm you? It would clothe you with an impenetrable, heaven-tempered armour. Or suppose, to do it justice, that it leaves you, all defencelessness, as it did Jesus; all vulnerableness, through delicacy, through tenderness, through sympathy, through pity; suppose that you suffer, as all must suffer; suppose that you be wounded, as gentleness only can be wounded; yet how would that love flow, with precious healing, through every wound! How many difficulties too, both within and without a man, would it relieve! How many dull minds would it rouse; how many depressed minds would it lift up! How many troubles, in society, would it compose; how many enmities would it soften; how many questions, answer! How many a knot of mystery and misunderstanding would be untied by one word spoken in simple and confiding truth of heart! How many a rough path would be made smooth, and crooked way be made strait! How many a solitary place would be made glad, if love were there; and how many a dark dwelling would be filled

with light! "In him was life, and the life was the light of men."

Once more: there was a sublime spirituality in the mind of Jesus, which must come into our life, to fill up the measure of its light. It is not enough in my view, to yield ourselves to the blessed bonds of love and selfrenunciation, in the immediate circles of our lives. Our minds must go into the infinite and immortal regions, to find sufficiency and satisfaction for the present hour. There must be a breadth of contemplation in which this world shrinks, I will not say to a point, but to the narrow span that it is. There must be aims, which reign over the events of life, and make us feel that we can resign all the advantages of life, yea, and life itself; and yet be "conquerors and more than conquerors through him who has loved us."

There is many a crisis in life when we need a faith like the martyr's to support us. There are hours in life like martyrdom-as full of bitter anguish, as full of utter earthly desolation; in which more than our sinews, in which we feel as if our very heart-strings were stretched and lacerated on the rack of affliction; in which life itself loses its value, and we ask to die; in whose dread struggle and agony, life might drop from us, and not be minded. Oh! then must our cry, like that of Jesus, go up to the pitying heavens for help, and nothing but the infinite and the immortal can help us. Calculate, then, all the gains of earth, and they are trash; all its pleasures, and they are vanity; all its hopes, and they are illusions; and then, when the world is sinking beneath us, must we seek the everlasting arms to bear us up, to bear us up to heaven. Thus was it with our great Example, and so must it be with us. "In him was life;" the life of self-renunciation, the life

of love, the life of spiritual

XVIII.

ON RELIGION, AS THE GREAT SENTIMENT OF LIFE

IF IN THIS LIFE ONLY WE HAVE HOPE, WE ARE OF ALL MEN MOST MISERABLE. I Cor. xv. 19.

THERE is a nation in modern times, of which it is constantly said that it has no religion; that in this life only has it hope. One is continually assured, not by foreigners alone, but in that very country-I need not say that I speak of France—that the people there have no religion, that the religious sentiment has become nearly extinct among them.*

Although there is, doubtless, some exaggeration in the statement, as would be very natural in a case so very extraordinary, and the rather as the representation of it comes from a people who are fond of appearing an extraordinary and wonderful people, and of striking the world with astonishment; yet there is still so much truth in the representation, and it is a thing so unheard of in the history of all nations, whether Heathen, Mahometan, or Christian, that one is naturally led to reflect upon the problem which the case presents for our consideration. Can a nation go on without religion? Can a people live devoid of every religious hope, without being of all people the most miserable? Can human nature bear such a state? This is the problem.

Such is the language which I heard fourteen years ago in France but I trust, it is becoming every day less applicable.

It is the more important to discuss this problem, because, the very spectacle of such a nation, has some tendency to unhinge the faith of the world. The thoughtless at least, the young perhaps, who are generally supposed to feel less than others, the necessity of this great principle, may be led to say with themselves, "is not religion after all, an error, a delusion, a superstition, with which mankind will yet be able to dispense?" A part of my reply to this question I propose to draw especially from the experience of the young. For I think, indeed, that instead of this being an age, when men, and the young especially, can afford to dispense with the aid and guidance of religion, it is an age which is witnessing an extraordinary development of sensibility, and is urging the need of piety beyond, perhaps beyond all former ages. The circumstances, as I conceive, which have led to this development, are the diffusion of knowledge, and the new social relationships introduced by free principles. But my subject, at present, does not permit me to enlarge upon these points.

Can the world, then, go on without religion? I will not inquire now whether human governments can go on. But can the human heart go on without religion? Can all its resistless energies, its swelling passions, its overburthening` affections, be borne without piety? Can it suffer changes, disappointments, bereavements, desolations; ay, or can it satisfactorily bear overwhelming joy, without religion? Can youth and manhood and age, can life and death, be passed through, without the great principle which reigns over all the periods of life, which triumphs over death, and is enthroned in the immortality of faith, of virtue, of truth, and of God?

* The very opinion of the French Auguste Comte.