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ACTIVITIES OF MATTER 1 POLYTHEISM.

T was the inherent, indwelling activities in matter that gave birth to Polytheism.

God

was everywhere so present, that each separate manifestation of his power was believed to be a god. Pagans could only explain the saliency and vitality of all created things, by attributing them to the volitions of a deity within. They could conceive no other cause for the ever-renewing life which they saw going on all around them, or for the succession of forms everywhere bursting into life. The upwelling of fountains against their own gravity, the creations of spring, the ripening of harvests, these, and countless kindred phenomena, were inexplicable to them, except upon the faith of an indwelling god.

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HOEVER does not look beyond the pon

derous bulk of the globe, and its seeming irregular and mutinous activities, sees nothing but what is equally visible to the eye of the brutes; but whoso looks beyond or beneath this bulk, and these seemingly insurrectionary forces, into the laws which curb or compel them, which bind or set them free, has lifted the veil, and beholds the inte

rior mechanism of things, and knows the secret springs by which the mysterious energies of nature leap into activity or subside into rest.

PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.

T is supposed that the ancients were ignorant

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of the law in hydraulics, by which water, in a tube, will rise as high as the fountain-head; and hence they carried their stupendous aqueducts horizontally, from hill-top to hill-top, upon lofty arches, with an incredible expenditure of labor and money. The knowledge of a single law, now familiar to every well-instructed school-boy, namely, that water seeks a level, and, if not obstructed, will find it, enables the poorest man of the present day to do what once demanded the wealth of an empire. The beautiful fragments of the ancient Roman aqueducts, which have survived the ravage of centuries, are often cited to attest the grandeur and power of their builders. To me, they are monuments, not of their power, but of their weakness.

HEN the ancients wished to tell what a

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powerful and labor-performing giant Bria

reus was, they described him as one having a hun

dred arms.

The Briareus of philosophy is a man

having a hundred ideas.

OD mocked at the learning of Job and of his

contemporaries by asking,

"Canst thou send

lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" Were the same question put to modern science, it would be devoutly and gratefully answered in the affirmative.

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LEXANDER THE GREAT could kill men, the easiest of all things, - but on the day when he wept for other worlds to conquer, he could not, with all the power of his subject nations, do so much for the comfort and the sustenance of mankind as is done every year at the flour-mills of Rochester, or the cotton-mills of Lowell.

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"KNOWLEDGE IS POWER."

HEN Lord Bacon uttered that often quoted and often misunderstood axiom, "Knowledge is power," he meant a knowledge of those laws of Nature, and of the conditions on which they may be summoned to action, or laid to rest.

He did not mean a knowledge that in the Greek language the earth is called yn; in the Latin, terra; in the German, erde; in the French, la terre; in the Italian, terra, &c.; but he meant a knowledge of the powers and laws, the vitality and skill, which its Author incorporated in the earth when He made it, and which only await our progress in knowledge to be transmuted into human power and blessedness.

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NATURE WOULD WORK FOR MAN.

BELIEVE it to have been a part of the Crea

tor's vast plan of beneficence to endue the earth with powers so mighty, so subtle, so swift, so various, so exhaustless, so obedient to law, as to supersede all human labor, excepting only so much as it is best for his own health that man should perform for himself. As this benevolent design of the Creator is more and more fulfilled, less and less shall the souls of men famish, in order that the wants of their bodies may be supplied. The mind shall no longer be a beggar asking alms of the body, in vain, because that also is a beggar. Hunger and toil shall cease to treat knowledge as a robber, coming to snatch away its bread. Cold shall not burn down the halls of refinement, the

repositories of learning, the galleries of art, the temple of religion, that it may sit down in their ashes to warm its shivering limbs.

CURE OF SUPERSTITION.

HE knowledge of Nature not only adds a myr

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iad fold to human power, but it preserves its possessor from myriads of dangers. Read such works as Brewster's "Natural Magic," or "Dick on the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," and see from what terrors and alarms the human mind has been freed by the progress of science. As wild beasts flee from a wilderness as civilization enters it, so the most loathsome and debasing superstia multitude that no man can number,

tions,

which once held possession of the human mind, have fled before the advance of knowledge.

IS PROVIDENCE INSCRUTABLE?

THEN the youthful, the lovely, and the excel

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lent are brought to an untimely grave; when the great benefactors of their race are cut down in the midst of their usefulness, an ignorant piety refers the calamity to the dispensations of an inscrutable Providence. It sees not that some law was violated, in punishment for which they perished.