22 ever acquired any property; and of these, 8 lost what they had gained."

Cease questioning about things that profit not; work tenfold more for regeneration of the degenerate in body and in life. They are a spectacle to secularists, sensualists, positivists, atheists. Original Sin is receiving awful physical and psychical proof. Evil done by a man lives in his children. Wicked thoughts, moral pollutions, selfish, godless minds, are open sepulchres. The connection between moral and material condition is a reality. Marks of sin on hands and feet, prints of vice on the face, the broken and misshapen limbs of transgression, seams and scars of lies from the scourge of villainy, the crookedness of falsehood and imposture, deform and disfigure polluted men. Imagine the spirit set free to traverse space, a prey to malignant powers which an evil life has made supreme. No merciless tyrant encloses his victim more helplessly and hopelessly, by chain and dungeon, than do retributive miseries. Fierce and mocking, they grapple with and bind the self-made slave; bear him, not from star to star, but from depth to depth of amazing woe.

Turn from the miseries of vice and doom of iniquity; they form but ugly pictures to hang on the walls of consciousness; our business is to adorn life with fairer scenes, to make our will right, and cause it to count for something in the world, by finding some supreme, some universal, some attainable good to strive for :

"Work, without hope, draws nectar in a sieve;

And life without an object cannot live.'

Hopefully striving, we shall not only rejoice in the possession of satisfying happiness, but attain the possibility of every virtue, and freedom to make our life a greater power. Not free in the sense that volitions originate without a cause; but free in the manner implied by our consciousness of responsibility; "voluntas libera tanto liberior quanto sanior, quanto divinæ voluntati subjectior;" determination by motive not being casual, but moral and rational; ourselves, by inner power, giving preponderance to this or to that. We feel that we help to produce and are responsible for use of freedom-which constitutes the grandeur of our nature. We can discipline strength, and point our aim discreetly. In

Higher-Life Weaving.

329

short, we may have a hero's heart, live in goodness, and when we die be better.

The difference between a bad and a good man is that the latter hates evil and loves right. Even Necessitarians possess a sense of right and wrong, and confess that good or evil ought to befall a man according to his conduct. Where is a difference, must be difference. Even conceding that a man is corrupt by birth, and so ill bred that he is sold to do evil; he must be kept in fear of punishment, made to feel punishment, and be governed by deterrent motives. Benefit of the offender and protection of those whom he would offend justify punishment.

We are not mere links in a chain of causation, nor mere grains in a mass of existence, nor is law an adamantine barrier. Receiving impressions from Nature and intelligently reacting upon Nature, we weave that which is beneficial into our life, shun the hurtful, make ourselves and work of good character. Reason made Socrates sublime, science adorned Galileo, faith in God made the prophets world-movers; the apostles, taught by Jesus, the best of all, attune the chords of our heart into harmony with the music of Heaven. Men can determine their own actions. Whatever a man's theories, he practically ignores and discredits the doctrine that volition is lawless.

We are now

"Upon the world's great altar stairs,

That lead through darkness up to God;"

see how men form or weaken, perfect or cause to perish, the faculty and function of God-consciousness in them. If we pray, use, enlarge this consciousness, we attain a sense of nearness to the Master Intellect-the Oversoul-the Father of our spirit. If we never pray, nor strive, consciousness of the Supreme, even if it have been formed, is weakened and may become altogether dead. The sanctification of our intellect erects an altar to God, presentation thereon of our thought and emotion and sacrifice, the going up of fervent desire from the heart, bring heavenly fire to kindle our spirit. If a man will not endeavour to obtain this fire, allows cold mental states to misrepresent-not represent God, and idols of the market or flashes of sensuality to spread their glamour, he will have no Divine presence in the garden

of his thoughts; no striving, as of Jacob with the angel; no talking with the Lord in the cool of the day.

Making endless advance in knowledge, some of us are almost at a standstill in moral goodness and spirituality. We stand, since the days of Christ, as if again in Paradise, with access to the Trees of Life and Knowledge. Many rehearse the old tragedy; whereas, the reverse parable of the trees should now be tried.

It is not enough to possess great knowledge. A scoffer can be intellectual; clever in one way, foolish in the best; he cannot, while a scoffer, be spiritual. He has a consciousness of God, not stronger than an exercise of ideality; he says “If you are content to make your soul a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary mechanical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality." Men, who thus speak, are in danger of so far losing the Divine gift as to become incapable of true worship. God is as a caged terror in their heart. Sins of the flesh, sins of temper and intellect, sins of spiritual wickedness, pervert men; like Satan, they speak lies-not from infirmity, as Peter; not from cowardice, as Jacob; but from desire of gain or of pleasure-Judas and Balaam stand forth.

Men of noble form adorn their natural and mental position with moral and spiritual beauty. They know that the entrance of a human being into the world by the common course of Nature manifests the power of God as did the Creation of Adam, the Translation of Enoch, the Ascent of Elijah. They live for the world to come. They say " Our intellectual and moral structure promises and renders necessary an after-stage of expansion. The natural is pierced and pervaded by the spiritual. There is a beauty transcending all beauty, concerning which even our dreams are not wholly false; a joy above all joy, which we hope to attain by a graciousness of God exceeding all other graciousness." These men-whether at the Bank, on 'Change, in the mart, by the forge, with the plough, or in the dust and smoke of battle-are well known, of sound understanding, they adorn and replenish the earth. They exult in the light and beauty of a promised new creation, regard the spirit's birth into the

1 Address, by President of the Midland Institute, at Birmingham. Reported in the Times, 2nd October, 1877.

Men of True Nobility.

331 world of matter as a means whereby the soul is made more personal, more exact, and possessor of joys which disembodied spirits cannot share. These joys break in upon them by anticipation, render things ever and ever new, reveal the universe in its meanings, beauties, glories, immensities, and God as All in all.

"The greatest serves-most great is he
Who makes no show for men to see,
But clothes him with humility.

God glads with gorgeous golden crown
The man whom his own heart casts down,
God doth not on the humble frown.

Who chiefest serves is chiefest blest,
The starry crown will surely rest
On those who souls from Satan wrest.

Lord, give the better crown to me--
Yet gold and stars I ask of Thee,
Saved souls and sweet humility."

Felix Melancthon.

STUDY XIX.

THE INVISIBLE.

"We have a visionary gleam;
Is it glory, or but a dream?"

THE Divine Narrative of Creation, whose special study leads to the conviction of Divine operation, proves that Religion, which embodied highest thought of the ages, widens and deepens with growing experience. The explanations, given of the universe, were not childish guesses by barbarous tribes, but are suitable for the infancy, and augment the grandeur of our intellect. The universe is one splendid unity, a glorious temple of the Almighty, and the present life is that wonderful stage on which, by due exercise of our freedom, we are fitted for an exalted future. The dogmas of our Faith, experimentally verified, shine with the light of a new world; and enables us, in everything we do, to better what is done.

The remaining Studies complete our subject.

It is asserted that the power of perceiving what is passing in the mind of another, of thought to read thought, may be voluntarily exalted; but acts generally by unconscious interpretation of indefinable indications; the assertion is not to be utterly rejected. In the best photographs is a peculiar delicacy, a spiritual relief which we recognise as a likeness of the inner man. Heinrich Zschokke, we are informed, was able to describe many particulars of an individual's past life. Nerve-force may exert itself from a distance and bring the brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with that of another. This power seems akin to the link which unites the invisible universe to our consciousness. There is in some of us a delicacy and acuteness of hearing -a subjective sensation producing ideas-that, when on