Luminous the crown, and holy, When each gem is set with care.” Adelaide Anne Procter, One by One. Traces of the Spiritual and its Laws mingle with all that we know of the commerce between our body, our life, and our intelligence. Life-power acts directly upon dead matter, or food, which we take into our system; and, at a certain stage, it is quickened into life. Mental power acts on, or is acted on by sensation, and thought is aroused. This action of spiritual law in the natural world is akin to that Divine act by which the breath of life was breathed into the dust of the earth. The operation is threefold: that of the outer senses, carrying impressions within; that of the inner faculties, by which sensation, thought, emotion, do their work; that of preestablished harmony, by which whatsoever is without, and all that we have within, so accord that man and the universe are in relation and agreement. The agreement is a result of adaptation; and the adaptation is for determining further effects, present and future. Thus we know of the spiritual working in the natural. This triple commerce, not to the same extent in inanimate and soulless creatures, prevails everywhere; for as the things which are in nature are but effects, the things that are, and their activity, are a response to all that is in space, and to all that is and has been in time. The suns, stars, all the worlds in the sky, are not so rounded off from space that they only touch now at this point, and then at that, as they roll. They act and are acted upon in every part and on every side. Things without are a response to things within, as something done, or as giving information. Will, put forth in power by skill, accounts for all human work; and molecular movement, the product of Eternal Power, obeying outward propulsion, is the basis of vibration, sensation, thought; and in a moment, we know not how, the great gulf is crossed between matter and spirit. Spiritual law pervades the natural world. There is everywhere a reasonable relation. Our mind is as a photographic plate, on which are the archetypes of all that we mean to do. In the universal Mind, whence comes our own mind, are the potencies which furnish space, and adorn the rolling ages with beautiful pictures of manifold existence. The wind waxing loud, or whispering low; the ocean whose billows rage, or gently play; the influences of the stars, wonderful as those of Pleiades ; the Strength of our heart, and our Portion for ever; come from Him whom we know of as "Life touching our lips with immortality." "Sanctuaries, inaccessible to fear, Are in the heart of men while yet below: As are among the Soul's eternal things." Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Part of a Sonnet to Death. On sea and land we make steam, the softest thing, do the hardest work. We send messages, with lightning speed, across the earth. By an iron plate we take up the complicated aerial vibrations, produced by our talk; and a thousand miles away, by another iron plate, we awake those vibrations into articulate speech. The waves of light, the action of gravity, the energies or movements of magnetism and electricity, effect results far more startling than all that man performs; make weak things to be strong, dead things to live, and things unreasonable. to become intelligent. By this intelligibleness, we are able to regard all visible things as symbols of higher truths and powers; thus the commonest become wonderful, and we ascend from them to the great supernature. Our soul, like an æolian harp, changes even the wind, as it passes over, into strains of melody. Earth and moon, suns and planets, so hang and move in space, that the physical energy, the sustaining and moving factor, represents mathematical formula which the intelligence of man has discovered to be of the highest mental order. Nature is by a Supernature: the Natural is the Supernatural articulated. "If the wide world rings In mock of this belief, to me it brings And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Thee only God! and Thou shalt not despise Samuel Taylor Coleridge, To Nature. That sense of solidity which we have concerning nature; the glance we obtain of all-pervading law, which gives to every change the beauty of a transfiguration ; is by that running of the Supernatural into the Natural which defines science, and outlines the beautiful forms of religious truth. It is possible to possess this knowledge, and not to use it. Men not only sleep, they may be mad or drunk; and their energies, not being applied according to virtue, lose intelligence, and miss the great good of being blessed and happy. "Far does the man all other men excell, Who, from his wisdom, thinks in all things well, Wisely considering, to himself a friend, Hesiod, Op. et Di. To him who watches Nature, and discerns that every old form is of partial repetition, and so in part, though old, has new meaning, figures from the invisible continually flit across the stage of life. Not only does the unseen become fashioned into shape; the spiritual forms a physical model of itself; and thus the Supernatural causes the things of Nature to present an alphabet of language which intelligence reads concerning more wonderful and higher realities. Nature, so lit up by Higher Nature, is filled with splendour; and is a scene of grand transactions preparing for yet grander in the future. Inevitable doubt has, during the ages, made not less havoc of asserted science, than of superstitions. The crystallizing touch of higher truths, obtained by philosophy, is now interpenetrating every natural interpretation of things; and showing that science of the one side is not correct, nor comprehensive, unless the spiritual side is viewed with the heights and depths thereto belonging. We want no new standpoint; but, for science, more science; for religion, more religion. It is with the whole of nature, as it is with the parts, organic and inorganic, "Whatsoever amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without." The Eternal, the Unknown, the Supernatural, the Lord God, is in all things, and by Him all things consist. "The faculty, tasked to perceive Him, has gained the great below clenched by the great above." "All the world is God's own field, Fruit unto His praise to yield; Then the full corn shall appear.' Alford. Knowing that the supernatural lies around us, giving to our conscience the sense of immortal realities, the essence of all that is visible; we pass to those greater and more wonderful intellectual transactions by which, as if moved by electrical process, we ascend from lower grades of nature to higher grades. Mental influence, passing from mind to mind, in many known ways, makes power in one language enter other languages; and turns arithmetical symbols into the grander designations, used in algebra and mathematics. That same mental power is in the true, the strong, the brave. It makes the slow of speech to wax eloquent; the timid to be emulous of great deeds; causes exceptional states of body and mind. Not only dream-states, when things are seen, and words are said, which come from a past that seemed long dead; but those superexaltations which pass into the miraculous and the prophetic. St. Paul declared well-known realities when he wrote of spiritual gifts: the word of wisdom, of knowledge, of faith, of healing, of working miracles, prophesying, discerning of spirits, revealing and interpreting (1 Cor. xii. 8-10, 28-30). He classified them for regulation of their H |