that Christianity, the religion from God, still agrees with this course of nature, in being supernatural and incomprehensible

to man.

And so also is it natural in moving forward in the very bosom of that kingdom through which it came into the world, establishing as a new creative principle and life of sanctifying power a new kingdom that is foreign to the world, and which will, in the course of time, become as universal upon earth as any other and being the highest and first of all, will rightly be eventually supreme.

So also is it natural in its growing so gradually and in a way peculiarly its own, differing from all other kingdoms, both those below man and human kingdoms established upon earth, such as governments. And naturally enough like all kingdoms it has a King great, good and glorious.

Christianity corresponds also with the general course of nature in having gradually dropped its extraordinarily miraculous exhibitions, after its proper establishment in the world. In itself it is still the standing miracle challenging our faith, the grand supersensuous mystery supernatural to man in his fallen state, yet working wonderfully in this very fallen nature; the proper continuation of the great mystery of the Incarnation from which the Church develops as the oak does from the acorn. In this sense or view the Church can never become natural as sinking into nature. But as God does not create immediately, but has laid the power of propagation into each kingdom of nature, so also does God not now immediately and in any externally miraculous way call men to Himself or regenerate them. These powers He has lodged in the organization of His Divine-human Church. As Christ's mystical body she possesses inhering life powers to propagate herself, like every natural kingdom, in a way peculiar to herself. Jesus Christ is not carnally born in every believer as He was at the first of His virgin mother. Every Christian is now spiritually born in the Church, the mother of us all, in whose mystical womb we became partakers of the Divine-human Saviour, who, as He assimilates us to His body, He imparts to us His own

life. The Holy Ghost is not poured out miraculously as at the first. But abiding in the Church, He pervades every member in true communion with her as the body of Christ.. Internally, in the organization of the Church, God works as miraculously and supernaturally as ever. But it is a matter of fact that externally no such miracles are wrought by the servants of the Church, as Christ and the Apostles wrought in the beginning, curing the sick and raising the dead. And in having dropped these external miraculous exhibitions, Christianity has conformed to the general order of nature as heretofore pointed out. The continuation differs necessarily from the beginning.

In conclusion. All nature being formed with the idea, purpose and actual work of redemption underlying it, each higher, ennobling and glorifying nature, not as fallen, but as made low, leads us to conclude, that the incarnation did not depend upon the fall of man. Much rather does the whole order of nature show that He would have become incarnate, so as to properly head, ennoble and glorify humanity. We cannot conceive that all nature from the lowest to the highest order should have been constructed upon such a redemptive plan as it was, when the incarnation and consequent glorification of man could only be such an after-thought of God, depending upon a false step or act of the creature. These types and shadows of redemption in the lower kingdoms of nature would certainly have been fulfilled had man not fallen.

But however adopted or planned, the incarnation is great and glorious, being full of goodness, mercy, love and truth. Oh, that all might yield to its holy, gentle influence, as exerted by the Church. Lord hasten the day when the Messiah, Prince of Life, and King of Glory, all knees bending, all hearts paying homage before Him, all tongues confessing and praising Him as the Lord God blessed for evermore, shall walk among the nations; that His Church then embracing the world sanctified, may, under His benign rule, keep glorious jubilee and worship Him world without end.

ART. IV. THE MISSION OF PHILOSOPHY.

BY ALEXANDER HARRIS, LANCASTER, PA.

RELIGION being a part of man's nature, the untutored savage is wont to feel and recognize God in the surrounding compass of nature. He experiences in his own inner being a feeling of dependence upon some superior essence; and at once he begins to inquire what this is, and where located. The sun and the stars being inaccessible to him, he attaches superior importance to these, and afterwards pays them the homage of his adoration. Myriads of other objects come in for recognition, as the habitations of the superior power which the uneducated man feels has an existence, but of which he has nought save conscious knowledge. The multitude of deities worshiped by the early Greeks in the days of Hesiod, we learn, from the writings of the poet himself, to have numbered thirty thousand; and so multitudinous were the objects of worship at a later period in the eternal city, that one was induced sarcastically to remark that in Rome the gods even surpassed the men in numbers.

The condition of man, at the period of which we speak, was of the most degrading character; superstition as an incubus weighed upon all his mental aspirations, and the gloomiest forebodings were part and parcel of his daily being. The philosophic lumination of ages that came to the rescue and broke the manacles of mythic imposture can in no sense be characterized but as an illumination of divine resplendence sent from the throne of the eternal, ever-existing mind, which has created and governs for the best all individual existence. The first grand achievement of philosophy, therefore, was its education of the ancient intellect up to an approximate knowledge of the true God, and its preparation for the reception of the true faith.

The method of the ancient philosophers, in dividing their instruction into an esoteric and an exoteric kind, was required in

order to meet the adaptabilities of mankind. In the infancy of the race nothing save the mythologic creeds of an early superstition, in which were portrayed the vengeance of the gods upon the iniquities of a Tantalus and an Ixion, would have served to repress the passions and injustice of men and nations. The philosophic mind could laugh at the follies of the popular faith, but dare not impart to the illiterate the truths of a higher comprehension, as they were incapable of receiving them. Homer himself, the earliest of the Greek poets, is believed to have seen the truths of a purer theology, although the whole scope of his matchless poems rests upon the fictitious conceptions of mythic fancy. So at least is the master poet of antiquity interpreted by St. Cyril of Alexandria. The feuds of the Olympian deities, the guiles and deceptions of the king of gods and men, and the boisterous rage of Juno were but portraitures of the untutored Grecian fancy; but within the chambers of his own breast the inimitable author of the Iliad worshiped the one uncreated God, who was the first of all beings. The Orphic fragments also give early attestation of the belief of the educated mind of Greece in the existence of one unmade. deity, the original of all things. And although Orpheus names this self-existent deity Jupiter, it is by no means to be inferred that he attaches to him simply the ideas usually attributed to the mythologic god of this name, the son of Saturn; for he expressly names attributes due only to the uncreated ruler of the universe. At these early periods it is to be expected that the ideas of the most acute reasoners and philosophers would be very crude and unsettled. But the philosophic spirit of inquiry and reflection had already begun its work, and it remained for the following schools of Greek thought to make further advances.

From an apothegm of Thales, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, that "God is the oldest of all things," it may be inferred that the founder of the Ionic school of philosophy believed in one uncreated God. His contemporary, Pherecydes Syrus, seems to have entertained the same opinion. In the golden verses of the founder of the Italic school and in the fragments of Ocel

lus Lucanus, it is clearly gathered that Pythagoras believed in one supreme deity, although also speaking of inferior. His principal god, however, contained the whole of the subordinate ones. Thus was the common notion of the illiterate Pagans as to a multiplicity of deities exploded in the estimation of these philosophers, and of those who followed them. Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Parmenides and Empedocles are all upon record as accepting, in one form or other, of the unity of the godhead. Antisthenes, the head of the Cynic sect, declared that" although different nations and cities had objects of worship of their own deification; yet for all that but one God existed."

Up to the period of Socrates, the Grecian mind seemed as it were groping in a night of almost Egyptian darkness; but with the advent of this sage clearer rays of philosophic light burst upon the horizon of the thinking world. Besides attaining to a more accurate conception of one God, the creator of the universe, Socrates was the first, as Cicero avers, who drew philosophy from heaven and domesticated it in the habitations of men. Of this light of his race, Tertullian writes as follows: "Propterea damnatus est Socrates, quia Deos destruebat," i. e., that he suffered death from his preaching up a knowledge of one God. In his discourse with Aristodemus, quoted by Xenophon, Socrates convinced him that the things of the world were not the production of chance, but the work of intellect and design. He also endeavored to convince him that our mind and understanding was derived from a vastly superior and transcendant mind, existing somewhere in the universe; and although this was invisible, nevertheless it must in all reason be accepted. "Is not," argued he, with his doubting friend, "your own soul, which rules over your body invisible, and by parity of reasoning might you infer that you do nothing by mind and understanding, but all by chance, as well as to conclude that all things in the world are done without a ruler?" And notwithstanding the clear attestation of Socrates to a belief in one supreme and universal numen, it is still clear that he by no means rejected all the inferior gods of the Pagan system, as has been