falling asunder by the eternal perfection of God. With the perpetuity of Piety is wrapped up, I deeply believe, the durability of Right; and the shock which overthrows the temple of worship scatters also the moral law in ruin on the ground, to testify, in beautiful but pathetic fragments, to a life now gone. Happily, the

spirit in man," and the "inspiration of God," that together built that life, can rebuild it, in fairer proportions and on a vaster scale. But still, if it is to be a school of goodness, it must also remain a sanctuary of devotion.

XXIII.

The offering of Art to Worship.

ISAIAH lii. 1.

"Awake, awake! put on thy strength, O Zion! put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem!"

WORSHIP is the free offering of ourselves to God; ever renewed, because ever imperfect. It expresses the consciousness that we are his by right, yet have not duly passed into his hand; that the soul has no true rest but in him, yet has wandered in strange flights until her wing is tired. It is her effort to return home, the surrender again of her narrow self-will, her prayer to be merged in a life diviner than her own. It is at once the lowliest and loftiest attitude of her nature: we never hide ourselves in ravine so deep; yet overhead we never see the stars so clear and high. The sense of saddest estrangement, yet the sense also of eternal affinity between us and God meet and mingle in the act; breaking into the strains, now penitential and now jubilant, that, to the critic's reason, may sound at variance but melt into harmony in the ear of a higher love.

This twofold aspect devotion must ever have, pale with weeping, flushed with joy; deploring the past, trusting for the future; ashamed of what it is, kindled by what is meant to be; shadow behind, and light before. Were we haunted by no presence of sin and want, we should only browse on the pasture of nature: were we stirred by no instinct of a holier kindred, we should not be drawn towards the life of God. In Christian worship,

through all its confessions of estrangement, there runs the undertone of near communion between the human spirit and the Divine. And if communion, then sympathy and resemblance too: for like only can commune with like when eye meets eye and knows it, there is the same fire alive in both: when affection answers to affection, there is a common language of intelligence between them; and something in us there must be,some possible love or thought or goodness,-akin to the Infinite Perfection and flowing forth to meet it. This it is, this best element of us,-which asserts its rights and struggles to its place in every expression of religion. Devotion instinctively tries to lay down whatever separates from God, and to pass wholly into what unites with him. It takes its stand on the felt common ground, the points of meeting, between the human and the Divine. Hence, from the type of their worship you may at once read off men's conceptions of God and their ideal of man. That which they exclude is to them the secular and undivine: that which they most

reverently preserve is their medium of contact between heaven and earth. Their poorer or richer idea of the holy and perfect life is reflected in the character of their devotions, speaks to the eye in the aspect of their sanctuaries, and to the ear in the voice of their praise. It may seem at first sight a mere external accident or matter of prudential choice, how far they admit Art into the expression of their Religion; but nothing is in truth more significant of the character of their faith and feeling. It was not simple reaction from Catholic excess that stripped Protestantism so bare, that drove all its beauty and grandeur into the interior of life, and left it externally without form or comeliness. It is not by chance alone that its two extremes, of Evangelical and of Rationalistic tendency, have carried the ugliness of Protestantism to the fullest extent, while the Church of England has saved a remnant of dignity for the eye, and created her rich anthem-music for the ear. These facts have a deep connexion with the very essence of differing devotions; and the whole question of religious art,-that still doubtful ground of Christian usage, runs up to a higher principle than can be found in the Puritanical tendency of one school or the dilettante affectations of another.

Christian worship, I have said, takes its stand on the common ground of the human nature and the Divine. It banishes the trivial things that are only ours: it foregoes the transcendent light that is only his: but at the

middle distance, where the two may meet, with the same love, the same thought, as medium of vision, there does devotion abide and rest. To ask then, whether the elements of beauty fitly enter into our worship of God, is to enquire, in what part of our nature do we meet him? through what range of affections does the communion extend? and where, on the other hand, begins the veil of darkness that hinders mutual approach? To these questions Protestantism has given two answers to which I will advert, a Moral and a Mystical. Many of us, it cannot be doubted, shape our belief into this form: God is a Wise Mind, from whom nothing is hid. He is a Holy Will, loving Faithfulness and Right. It is in our Reason and our Conscience that we bear his image, and commune with him as his children. Whilst these are pure and awake, we are not far from him, and his lineaments are on us, so far as the finite can reflect the infinite. The field of Truth for the Intellect, of Duty for the Will,-this is the soil given us to render fruitful; and by the scrupulous care we bestow upon its tillage are we and our life to be measured. To read the design, to comply with the law of heaven, to adopt the supreme aims, and walk by appointed rules, this is our only business here, our only discipline for the hereafter. For this service the grand requisites are mental activity and moral watchfulness, the quick eye of thought, the high tension of resolve; and he renders the most genuine worship who

VOL. II.

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