glorifying, as with the bright cloud of transfiguration, the summits of all created minds, and kindling them, above the cold mists of earthly thought, with light and fire divine. The spirituality which our fellowship with Christ leads us to ascribe to God is altogether peculiar; not metaphysical, but moral; not negative, but positive; not attended by any thinning away of the personal attributes of his nature, but rendering them more distinct and real and awful to the mind. It is not the mere denial of bodily form and material limitations to the Creator; though this also is not wanting in the incidental words of Christ,-"No man hath seen God at any time," "Ye have neither heard his voice nor seen his shape." It is not a mere local ubiquity, like that of a universal atmosphere: it was the Psalmist that found he could not flee from God's spirit: it was Christ that felt how that spirit would not flee from him; and between the extension of his Being through space, and the absence of space from his Being, between his diffusion among all things, and their concentration before him, lies much of the difference between a physical and a spiritual Theism. Nor does it consist in any cold distance from the material creation, any Platonic residence among ideas, apart from the warm earth and the common love of men, and approachable only by the moonlight track of philosophical contemplation. It separates him from nothing that he has made, and prevents not his putting a beauty and wonder into

the smallest of his works. The very grass, piercing the rough mould with its tender strength, he clothes with its spring green: the lily that toils not and cannot deck itself, he arrays with a glory that no self-adornment could approach: the bird that droops its wing and dies, falls not "without Him." The outward lot of men takes its order from his providing care: no silent ill, no grievous weight of life, no vexed thought of age, no little sorrow of the child, are foreign to the will of him by whom the hairs of the head are all numbered. The Christian truth, that "God is a Spirit," does nothing to exclude him from his lower works, or hinder us from discerning him in the glories of the earth and sky, and feeling that even through the inlets of sense he solicits entrance to the soul.

What then is the essential meaning of the Divine Spirituality in the religion of Christ? It implies simply this: that not all life is equal to him, though he regards all according to its nature: but he has disposed all things in ranks of infinite gradation; and as they rise in spirituality, he esteems them of higher worth, and knows them nearer to himself. It is not true, as some will tell you, that his supreme height spreads all below him, from the insect to the angel, at one level of insignificance, which it were nothing to him to create or to destroy, and in which the senseless atom is as great as the teeming world. It is not true, as some will say, that all objects in this

vast whole, are but parts of a stupendous machine, differing only as the little screw from the huge flywheel, in size but not in value, having in no case an excellence of their own, but serving only to receive and to transmit the power that begins with Alpha and goes off into Omega. The universe is not a collection of instruments, with nothing fit to be its own end;not a workshop of tools for the perpetual exercise of Divine skill in lonely self-revolution; but contains beings out of the circle of necessity and nature ;— beings qualified to be causes in themselves, to rule what is below and serve what is above, and live as the companions and the Sons of God. The balances of heaven, as well as the estimates of earth, have a scale by which all creatures have their measure taken and their Providential care apportioned. The raven that cries is of greater worth than the dumb grass; and "ye are better than the fowls,"- -"of more value than many sparrows." And so, from corpuscular order to growing life; from insentient life to craving instinct; from blind instinct to intending thought; from prudent thought to social love; from unregulated love to all-directing duty; from struggling duty to free harmony with heaven; are the ascending steps of a progression, not shaped by any dreams of ours, but inherent in the architecture of the universe, and built of the adamant of God. And he that elevates himself to the upper stage of this ascent touches the

personal similitude of the Supreme Mind; enters into sympathy with him; and escapes the dull distance where lower natures taste his goodness without dwelling with him as the All-good.

This coalescence of the Divine nature exclusively with what we know to be the highest elements of our own, his openness solely to our Reason, our Conscience, our earnest love of truth and right, is what I understand by the spirituality of God. It is a truth of the highest moment to our guidance in thought and action. It assures us that there are ways of life and forms of character from which the Divine Father is absolutely hidden, as the sun from midnight, with the whole denseness of the earth between. Only by the attributes we share with him, the qualities of a common nature, can we apprehend him in the least. If he be a Spirit, we mistake him by our passions as completely as we miss him by our eye; we lose him from our selfish heart as hopelessly as from our groping hand; we are shut out from him in the insincerities and doublings of a worldly mind, as in the outer darkness of the grave: the drowsy thought, the unloving heart, the temper full of care, the decrepit will, the understanding scared from its clear simplicity, are buried from him as in death, deep as Tophet from the light. Even the mind of moral prudence, however correct, does but reach the confines of the horizon whence he is seen; while an open reason and a guile

less love, a courageous conscience and a patient trust, stand within the mount of vision, and, "being awake, behold his glory." If he be a Spirit, then by acts of the spirit alone can he be approached and worshipped; by an earnest intentness of our highest faculties,the truthful and living surrender of the soul. And wherever and however this offering is rendered, he is purely and acceptably served. Be it in speech or in silence, in the chancel or the street, in daily duty or in special rite, the conscious devotion of our best powers to his Divine appointments makes us his. Forms and times and words, postures and sacraments, stand in no relation to him, and as mere approaches to him are simply nought; and only as the natural language, and embodied shapes, of our own spirit, whose sacred affections would sometimes speak in symbol as well as act in reality, can they have place among the disciples of a prophet like our own.

The truth that "God is a Spirit," thus understood, becomes one of the most comprehensive and fertile revelations of his nature. Everything is subordinated with him to spiritual ends. His power is at the disposal of his thought: his thought directed by his love: his love in harmony with his moral perfection. And while he rules all things with an equal hand, his impartiality consists, not in treating all creatures alike, whatever be their difference of rank; but in directing to each a discriminating regard, proportioned to its