likeness, converting His Unity into a personality like our

own.

Trust, faith that the future would be as the past, we could not have, unless we recognised God—that is, Intelligence and Plan in Creation. It has taken millions of years to bring the world to its present state of perfection, to produce all its varied life and enjoyment; and unless that were designed, unless there were both Intelligence and Power to support that purpose, there would be no reason that we can see why one turn of the screw-one additional changeshould not make life again impossible in this world as in the beginning. All the possible combinations of our elements cannot have yet taken place, and one adverse combination might take us back to chaos. Let Nature but once be at fault in her arithmetic, and all life and enjoyment would again be at an end. And better thus, infinitely, than that one should continue to exist in endless suffering; that absolute evil should have been introduced into this world. Better blind chance, and the havoc it would make, than the life and immortality which Christianity, according to the orthodox creed, has brought to light, in the eternal enjoyment of the few and the endless misery of the many.

"What is man capable of discovering and comprehending concerning God?'-is not a barren speculation, but one of a practical and important nature.

"Dr. Johnson defines the substantive 'Worship' to mean 'Adoration; religious act of reverence;' 'to worship' is 'to adore; to honour or venerate with religious rites.' Again, 'to adore' is 'to worship with external homage.' Now, the external rites in which we embody our 'worship,' 'reverence,' or 'homage,' will obviously bear a relation to our motives in worshipping; and these will be influenced by our opinions of the character of the Being whom we adore. Tribes who ascribe the lower passions to their Deities institute immoral rites and ceremonies in honour of them. Those nations who regard God as cruel and revengeful, sacrifice animals and some of them men, to

appease Him. Others, who ascribe to Him self-esteem and love of approbation, (their own predominant qualities,) offer him praise and glorification, and try to please him by expressing their own consciousness, (generally with much exaggeration,) of abject meanness and unworthiness.

"If I am right in saying that although God has not given us faculties fitted to comprehend Himself, yet He has given us powers which enable us to understand His will in relation to ourselves and other beings over whom He has given us some degree of influence and control, and that in the order of nature, He has revealed duties which we are capable of performing, then we may reasonably consider whether the rites of our religious worship should partake of the character of attempts to please God as a Being possessing buman qualities, or be directed to do Him honour, reverence, and homage, by studying, expounding, and obeying His will as thus revealed to us. All existing forms of worship should be tried by their relation to what we can comprehend of the nature of God, and of His will. If without irreverence I might borrow an illustration from the relation between man and the lower animals, I should remark that it appears possible for one being to comprehend portions of the will of another, although he cannot conceive adequately the nature of that other. The dog, for instance, cannot comprehend the nature of the shepherd, but he can learn the shepherd's will to be, that he, the dog, should tend the sheep; and the dog, without attempting to know more of the shepherd's nature than this portion of his will, may obey it and preserve the flock. The horses which in our circuses are trained to dance, to fire pistols, to fetch tea-kettles, and to perform other surprising feats, do not comprehend the nature of the men who teach them to do these things, nor apparently do they understand the object or design of the actions themselves; but they seem to understand the will of the men, so far as it relates to the actions required of them, for they do the things they are taught. We should all agree that the dog sadly mis. took his own capacities and his relations to man, if instead of hearkening to the shepherd's voice, obeying his will, and guarding the flock, he turned a deaf ear to one and set the other at defiance, and commenced a grand speculation on the nature of his master, and his attributes. We should be still more astonished at the want of a due sense of his own deficiencies and position, if the dog, in the midst of his speculation on this, to him, incomprehensible subject, and of his neglect of duty, ever and anon turned up his eyes and raised his fore-paws to his master, and uttered indications of intense admiration and veneration for him, calling him a being possessed of every

faculty of canine consciousness in the highest state of perfection and in unlimited degree. And yet, ignorant and superstitious men do something analogous to this, when, instead of 'walking humbly' with God, studying His Institutions and obeying His will, they ascribe to him their own qualities, praise Him, and implore Him to protect them as His devoted worshippers; they all the while violating His laws. In the words of Dr. Fellowes ('The Religion of the Universe'), The only use which some religionists make of their understanding is to perplex it by inquiring into the nature of God. They leave the easy and feasible to attempt the impossible. They forsake the clear and simple to lose themselves in a region of clouds and darkness. For how can the finite hope to comprehend the infinite, the material the. spiritual, the temporal the eternal? God can be known only in His works. THERE His agency is seen. THERE His will may be traced; there His laws be developed. But, what His nature is, or how He exists, must ever be past finding out. It is enough for us to know that He exists; but how. He exists, it is vain, and indeed presumptuous to inquire.'"-(" Science and Religion," by George Combe.)

SECTION 1.

DEATH.

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,

Now green in youth, now withering on the ground;
Another race the following spring supplies,

They fall successive and successive rise;

So generations in their course decay,

So flourish these when those have passed away.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
And our little life is rounded by a sleep.

"Thus I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear," &c.

Ask what is death, and why? Are God and Nature, then, at strife! But first, can we answer the question, What is Life? Herbert Spencer says it is "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations ;" but these are only the conditions of its continued existence, and give no idea of what the "vital spark" is in itself. Schelling says, "Life is the tendency to individuation." I should say that Life is not only where the forces of nature are thus confined within definite limits, but also where they work towards a given object. But this again is only "its mode of action." But is not its mode of action all that we know of anything? Alas! we know not what Life is, whence it comes, or whither it goes. Whether, as Prof. Tyndall says, "not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the

noble forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself-emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena-were once latent in a fiery cloud;" or "whether, having waited until the proper conditions had set in, the fiat went forth, Let Life be," we do not know; but we do know that Life being here, Nature has made wonderful provision that the spark should not be blown out. An organic being is the result of all the forces and conditions which have been transmitted from frame to frame, each an improvement on the other, and nature has most bountifully provided that such improvements, the result of so much time and care, shall not be lost, but carried on. She brings forth at least fifty seeds for every one she is able to rear, and Life is kept at so high a pressure that there is not a plant or animal whose produce if left unchecked would not of itself soon cover the earth. "There is no exception to the rule," says Darwin, “that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, this earth would soon be covered with the progeny of a single pair." The rate of increase is geometrical. We have population always pressing on the means of subsistence, and this has been the mainspring of all progress and all order; for the most perfect order and arrangement exist in the mode in which life is kept within due bounds: the good and strong preserved, the weak destroyed, the object evidently being to keep the largest possible number in the greatest possible strength and vigour and capability of enjoyment-no respect being paid to our little individualities. In the scale of being, by a most systematic provision, we are all made comfortably* to fit into each other. The conversion of what is lower into what is higher is always

* Perhaps it may be thought that "comfortably" applies as little in this case as when the hangman said his gallows would hold three comfortably; but the pain of death has always been greatly exaggerated for theological purposes,