if we do but take his hand, he will lead us as the blind by a way that we know not; and we cannot go astray while he abides. In this spirit let us both act and move, and also stand and wait; though sorrowing, yet always rejoicing; as dying, and behold we live; in all things "yielding ourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead."

VI.

Obedience and Communion.

JOHN XV. 15.

"Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth ; but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father, I have made known unto you."

JOHN Xvii. 20, 21, part.

66 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us.

"SERVANTS," and "Friends"; the words describe the two relations in which the follower may stand to the leader, the believer to his prophet,-the worshipper to his God; and, in general, the lower being to the higher who directs him. The consciousness of dependence, producing submission, and the consciousness of resemblance, producing sympathy, are the two feelings which give rise at once to society and to religion; which aggregate men into groups animated by a common heart, and counteract the opposite force of individuality and mutual repulsion. Obedience and Communion, the one given by the distance between

souls, the other by their nearness, are the only forms in which an organising faith can manifest its energy. They have entered, with every variety of predominance and mixture, into the religions of the world; and whoever will look thoughtfully at their origin in his own nature will obtain no trifling test for appreciating the greatest agencies in history.

Obedience, it is evident, is an act of the Will. It is the business of a voluntary nature to give or to withhold it; and it is secured by whatever influences determine the movement of such a nature. Of these, the most obvious, though by no means the most powerful, are considerations of interest,-suggestions of hope and fear, appealing to that desire of happiness, or rather that recoil from suffering, which belongs to all sentient beings. Obedience yielded through such motives is simply the tribute of weakness to superior power; a sacrifice extorted by necessity; an acquiescence indifferently given to the decrees of an iron Fate or the laws of the divinest Providence. It involves indeed no resistance or complaint;-but also no joyful acceptance, no clasping of the thorny cross upon the heart: it is merely the neutral attitude of one who cannot help himself. No higher nature is needful for it than that of a sagacious animal; and perfect examples of it are seen in the horse or dog broken in to the service of his owner's will. Fitly is this submission characterised as blind; for it is paid, not to reason, but to force: it

discerns no ground of good, but only the rock of the inevitable it issues from no transparent affection, but from the opaque pressure of instinctive self-defence. This is, no doubt, the original type of all proper servitude; in which the servant engages to do his master's bidding, and ask no questions; to forego all rights of judgment and criticism, accepting another's decision in place of his own inclination, and obeying simply because it is commanded.

This however is a relation which cannot subsist between souls. It assumes that the superior being is the absolute source, the inferior the absolute subject, of the rule to be obeyed; that the two natures are different in kind, the one remaining at an interval outside the other, and impressing upon it thence a direction which else its own spontaneous movements would never take. This obedience of interest can be rendered only to a purely physical sovereignty, like that of Nature's inexorable laws; and those who render it can never turn round and say, 'you have no right to order this.' moment you let in something more than the relation of weakness to strength,—the moment you substitute the sway of spirit over spirit,—you feel that the one can no longer hold the solitude of an independent nature above the other, and coerce it unconditionally from without. The higher is no longer at liberty to impose, or the lower to receive, a rule at will: neither is without an antecedent inner law, confessed alike by both, and

VOL. II.

G

The

prescribing the constant conditions within which the greatest power must restrain the variations of its will, and the utmost weakness its disposition to obey. You can form no conception of a mind without this inner law, this felt authority of a better over a worse,— -this inextinguishable interval between right and wrong. It is the distinctive signature of Mind. It is the absence of this which allows the naturalist to proceed, in his classification of tribes and species, up as far as man; it is the presence of this which forbids his proceeding further, warns him that there his province ends,—and blends into one vast kindred the whole universe of souls, whether men or angels, Christ or God. However widely these may differ from each other, it is by difference not in kind, entitling any to autocratic ascendency over the rest; but in development, as the child from the parent, -the infant of days (it may be) from the Father of eternity. Nay, we might almost say that they differ little more than one and the same soul differs from itself at different times: for who is so thoughtless as not to have stood in awe before his own self-contradictions? What wider chasm separates hell from heaven than lies between the low and selfish mood, when mean passions win audience from us, and sluggish doubts hang idly on the heart, and fiendish fancies take all the wonder from the tales of crime;-and the high strength of resolution rising up to victory,—the grand calm of the accomplished sacrifice,-the sweet