nature, and suited to its place. And so, he arranges the atom, he shelters the bud, he guides the instinctive creature, he appeals to the free and self-conscious man: he pities the fallen, he helps the weak, he rebukes the faithless, quits the impenitent, loves the true and willing, and abides with the saint. Yet, with every variety of administration, all is embraced in one vast system of rule; and though the links of being are few that visibly hang from heaven, there is not one dissevered from the rest, or lost from the ascending juncture that reaches from nothingness to God. The very infant here on earth has its patron-angel in the heaven above. There is no room in this universe for the least contempt or pride; but only for a gentle and a reverent heart; seeing that all things have an upward look: if they be not great, they belong unto a greater, and sustain a less; and read to every open mind a blessed lesson of holiness and trust.

Again, every Christian disciple must feel an assurance, quite characteristic of the source of his religion, of the Holiness of God. Accepting as the type of Him, within the limits of humanity, a sanctity like Christ's, constant not of necessity but of choice, giving a law to others, yet serving one himself, we cannot but rely on his entire separation from moral evil, except to plead with its slaves, rebuke them, and recover them. The Father and Inspirer of that tempted and suffering Son of man was not, with all the infinitude of his

nature and the supremacy of his Rule, raised above the primitive and paramount distinctions of right and wrong, and placed in priority to the mysterious and immutable differences of good and ill; which are indeed potentially anterior to all things, and outlast them all. He did not create, but recognise them; and in that recognition did but unfold and express the inherent attributes and affections of his own nature. There are those who, in an overstrained and truly fatal attempt to glorify him as the cause of all, will tell you that he is the Absolute Source of the moral differences whose authority we feel; that, prior to his volition, there was no excellence in the true, the just, the merciful; no harm in the false, the unjust, the cruel; nor anything to choose between them; and that whatever, in the exercise of his autocratic monarchy, he resolved to order and forbid, thereby became the good and evil of the universe. Nothing, in this view, has an obligation in itself; everything is to be done because it is enjoined; and had the mandates from on high been precisely the reverse of what they are, and what are now the temptations of Hell had the upper hand of the laws of heaven, it would have been our duty to revere whatever we now abhor, and bow the knee to a Satanic God. If this be so, then the great Father himself finds nothing to approve and disapprove, but all things and thoughts are intrinsically indifferent to him he follows no divine love, perceives no eternal

beauty, expresses no sense of perfection, in the activity of which the worlds of matter and the souls of men are born. Not Reason, not Affection, not Moral Sentiment, can be assigned as supplying the preconceptions which he put forth; but irrational, unloving, objectless Self-will. And then, having determined a system to be so and not otherwise (which however would have been equally right, had it been otherwise and not so), what is called, by a shocking misnomer, his "holiness," consists in a mere persistency without swerving in that which has been adopted without reason. This, alas! is what comes of overflying, with wings of vain philosophy, the blessed level of Christian simplicity and repose; of quitting the green homesteads of a human and a heartfelt faith for the trackless air of speculation clear and cold, and amid the naked rocks and unmelting snows of the lonely intellect, losing sight of the slopes of Nazareth and the villages of Galilee. Surely nothing can well be conceived more at variance with the meek purity, the quiet trust, the reverent yet unfearing spirit of Christ, and with the secret faith which these imply, than this doctrine of Sovereign Will as unlike the native truth, as the hard lines of thought, and stern gaze of temper on Calvin's face, to the clear deep eye, and look of loving sorrow in the upturned countenance of Christ. Listen to the tone. of his most pathetic yet divinest hours. When he knelt within Gethsemane, did he bow before the Father,

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as before One having the right of property in him, and lie still to be crushed by irresistible decree? When he said, "The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it," did he mean only that there was no help for it, as Infinite Power was against him ?—or, that the bitterness might be forgot, and the death embraced as life, when administered by One who pursued the purest and sublimest ends, and made the faithful perfect through suffering? Did Jesus learn anything to be right, by knowing it to be the Divine Will? or did he not rather know the Divine Will, by his consciousness of what was right? For my own part, I can form no intelligible conception of his inspiration, if not as the spontaneous and mystic uprising within him of thoughts of duty and affection, so selfevidencing, so incontrovertible, so divine, that they came to him as the whispered mind, and from him as the spoken oracle, of God.

For, after all the laboured attempts of theologians to make a spiritual revelation accessible by paths that are physical and external, there neither is, nor can be, any other index to the Will of God, than the handwriting of truth and conscience within us: we are to read this that we may interpret him, and have not to interpret him ere we can read this. All who presume to take the converse of this rule, and seek for something more rational than reason, more right than rectitude, more binding than duty, are sure to be betrayed into

questionable things, and to wander from the appointed ways of human life, by deserting their true and only guides, and seeking fanciful signs of Divine direction. Implicit trust in the moral intuitions in which the pure of heart for ever see their God, is the true discipleship, the genuine imitation of Christ, by which, with him, we adore and bless the providence of life as absolutely Holy. No faintest breath of moral evil ever stains the vision of the Father on which the Man of sorrows keeps his eye. In his discourses, in his struggles, in his prayers, there is no trace of God in the character of Tempter, as prompter of the evil heart, but only as the Inspirer of the good. And this is the more remarkable, because not only in the Hebrew Scriptures which disciplined the early mind of Christ, but in the narrative of his ministry by his own followers, in their comments on his history, in their missionary labours and public proclamation of his fate, we find this controlling agency of God, doing evil that good may come, openly appealed to and avowed. When Jesus " When Jesus" was despised and rejected of men," so sad a lot was brought on him, as we are assured by John,* "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of Esaias the prophet, 'He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart, that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.' The scene itself of Calvary, Peter, with more

* John xii. 40.