fix the date of the most trivial incident, without assuming an eternity in which it lies. Of Space and Time in which you have never been present, and never will be, you feel the profoundest certainty; and finite as you are, you are assured of their infinitude. If you experiment on light, you presume that your eye is true; if on your eye, that the light is real. There would be no wonder in the gliding heavens or the rolling sea, but for the hidden Power behind for which you look you know not why, and of which you try to speak though no sense discerns it and only thought will have it to be there. Should you in a passion have struck a guiltless child, there rushes a compunction on your heart, which takes for granted that you have abused a trust, and being free to do the better have yielded to the intrinsically worse. Whoever refuses to rest upon these natural assumptions and tries to turn them from inspirations into inferences, only bewilders himself with scepticisms and contradictions; exaggerates his knowledge or his ignorance; and from overvaulting ambition of science leaps sheer into nescience. It is just the deepest, the most solemn, and the holiest objects of thought, that are apprehended by this path of trust; and when you perversely verge to either side, and will have either more or less than this, they swoon away from the dazed or the darkened eye. Those who tell me too much about God; who speak as if they knew his

motive and his plan in everything; who are never at a loss to name the reason of every structure and show the tender mercy of every event; who praise the cleverness of the Eternal economy and patronise it as a master-piece of forensic ingenuity; who carry themselves through the solemn glades of Providence with the springy step and jaunty air of a familiar; do but drive me by the very definiteness of their assurance into an indefinite agony of doubt, and impel me to cry, "Ask of me less, and I shall give you all." And, on the other hand, when I commune with those who have nothing to tell me about God; who treat the transient as the only real, and dismiss the Eternal as a negation and a dream; who pretend to lift the veil from nature and show us that there is No One there; who see on the brow of heaven no trace of thought, and in the beauty of a saint only the working of a vital chemistry, and in the historical development of humanity a mere frondescence from the circulating sap of civilization ; when, without once appealing to my faith, they account for everything except this clinging faith itself;—this little residual exception spoils all their work; and, in proportion to their success in bewildering my understanding, plunges me into the mood of enthusiasm as an escape from an empty despair. Trust is the natural attitude of the soul towards things diviner than herself; and cannot be pushed aside by the rude pretensions either of knowledge or of ignorance,

without the loss of her balance and the subversion of

her peace.

(Trust arises from the mind's instinctive feeling after fixed realities, after the substance of every shadow, the base of all appearance, the everlasting amid change. All that we learn by Sense or Consciousness is fleeting and relative: what we see is the shooting light; what we hear, the momentary sound; what we feel in ourselves is the passing thought that rises and is gone. Even when the fact holds on, it is only to vanish at a later date; and the more evanescent displays itself on a theatre which is a little less: the human thought, which is the work of a moment, belongs to a life, which is only for years; and this single life is an element in the history of humanity whose time-piece goes by centuries; and our race itself fills but a chapter in the physical records of this planet; which again is part of a system having an elder nativity; though still the solar cycle is but an incident in the courses of the stellar light. Observe and scrutinize as we may, this is all that Sense can find, the more transient within the less, wheel within wheel; the widest, as compared with the least, being only the more comprehensive phenomenon. But it is not given us to judge by sense alone. In a mere flowing of phenomena without a fountain and without a bed, in facts ever on the migratory wing beating no omnipresent air and guided by no thought

upon their path, it is impossible for us to find rest; and higher powers than sense supply us with permanent objects, eternal realities, to be the source and the theatre of every change; realities invisible, yet needful to sustain the visible; silent, yet the birthplace of speech; exhibited in no demonstration because the postulate of all. Thus, we have assurance of a continuous soul within us, to which our passing states of feeling belong; of material substance as the seat, and a Divine mind as the enduring spring, of all physical appearance. It is because these great objects are given, that they cannot be found; and to go out in quest of them is for Reason to play Hide and Seek with itself. To accept them with simple faith, and never give the lie to the faculties revealing them, constitutes the proper Religion of the Intellect.

Trust, however, can be exercised only towards a Person. It is a belief in Good, from a source competent to Evil; and to no power but a living Mind, is that alternative, or indeed any alternative, possible. Blind force, whatever it be, can take but one direction, and turn up the results of its own necessity: it wields no preference, and leaves room for no contingency; and did we stand face to face with nothing else than this, we might indeed attain to certitude; or, from ignorance, remain in doubt; but we could feel no trust: for that is more than a mere mental expectation; it is a moral repose. You may expect a prize from the turn

of a lottery; but it would be absurd to say that you trust the wheel. Reliance upon natural laws, and conformity to them, is not trust; and though prudently proper, has as little to do with religion as playing at billiards, or rowing a boat. Nor has human conceit produced a more deplorable burlesque of faith and worship, than the scientific gospel of physiological self-interest, when preached as the whole duty of man. It corresponds with the attempt, in human affairs, to find a substitute for that confidence in one another's fidelity of will, which, after all, is the ultimate base of all our social life, which secures all our securities, and is the hidden ground of all our laws. As well might you disband the sentiments of honour that you might govern the world by attorneys, as exchange man's communion with the living Lord of conscience for dread of the legal writs and hovering police of the Universe. Cease to corrupt the ancient phrases of piety by telling me to reverence the natural laws "; I am not an idolater, to worship what is below me: the laws cannot love me: they are blind as a bust, and cannot look into me: they do not know that I have found them and do not care whether I obey them : they bring me suffering and are not sorry; or relief, and feel no joy they whirl and grind away, weaving my fortune if I am circumspect and sharp; or, if my heedless cloak should touch their shaft, picking me up and crushing every bone. No: these things for their

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