his way, a heavenly strength in the dusty conflict. Whatever may be urged against the power of prayer to modify external nature, its spiritual inward efficiency is known by the direct experience of millions. Whenever, at bitter cost to his own desires and pleasures, he has yet obeyed the higher law of the Holy One, he has heard in his heart the approving whisper of a Divine voice.

In the fortunes of kings and private citizens, in the rise and fall of states, in the fluctuations of races and the vicissitudes of society, in every case of conduct, there is shown, to use Matthew Arnold's favorite phrase," an Enduring Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." Reward and retribution this Power allots in strict conformity to obedience or disobedience of the Divine Commandment. Every student of history knows how strange oftentimes are these vindications of God's moral law. How curiously innocence is justified, evil unearthed! The engineer of vice hoist with his own petard, Haman hanged on his own gallows. How sublime are the verifications of an Almighty Friend which the records of the past, the fresh life of the present, afford! Witness the strength which the weakest, trusting in Him, have drawn to bear superhuman burdens, - the bursting of the rockiest heart, under the heavenly touch, into sweet blossoms of tenderness and charity! Behold the sereneness with which pain and anguish can be borne, the bright faith with which the mourner can stand

by the fresh-filled grave, the courage with which the champion of the right faces poverty, odium, perpetual annoyance, nay, goes to the stake or the gallows, assured of his vindication hereafter on earth and at once above. Whatever contradictions, anomalies, enigmas, the infinitely-varied phenomena of life can present to religion, the sacred Edipus, by one or the other of her two great truths, the existence of soul and the existence of God, can always present a solution.

What Whewell calls the consilience of inductions - the leaping together of numerous facts of different kinds from unconnected quarters to one point, every new discovery or hitherto troublesome exception taking at once a position in harmony — is here wonderfully exemplified. It is a characteristic of the theistic argument. In the exposition which we gave of the theistic induction, it will be remembered, line after line of inference converged

to the same point; and here, in the process of verification, we see the same thing afresh.

Now this consilience of inductions, says Whewell ("Novum Organum Renovatum," p. 88), " belongs only to the best established theories which the history of science contains." For example, it has been especially exemplified in the "Theories of Universal Gravitation" and the "Undulatory Theory of Light," and is considered as establishing them beyond all doubt. "No example can be pointed out," says Whewell," in which this consilience of inductions has given testimony in favor of an hypothesis afterwards discovered to be false."

Stronger verification, then, than this would hardly seem to be desired of religion by any one. Yet, if it is demanded, it has a further confirmation, that of prediction. "There is no more convincing proof," says Prof. Jevons, "of the soundness of scientific knowledge than that it thus confers the gift of foresight." "Prevision," says Auguste Comte, "is the test of true theory." The astronomer's predictions of the movements of the planets, the occurrence of eclipses, the return of comets, even, as in Leverrier's discovery of Neptune, the existence and movement of a hitherto unknown body, - afford the most conspicuous proof of the correctness of the Copernican system and the Newtonian laws. Even so have the prophets of old and the seers of God, in all time, through their comprehension of the great laws of moral gravitation, been able to foretell the course of states and the coming eclipses of individual and national glory. They have reckoned beforehand, according to the calculus of Divine Sovereignty, the setting of unholy stars, now proudly flaming in the zenith, and the triumphant rise of unsullied orbs, veiled then, though they were, in darkness, — and, lo! it has come to pass even as they have said. If all supernatural instruction or illumination be denied to the prophetic voices of ancient and modern times, then the amazing power of insight, which must be ascribed to normal spiritual vision, as developed by religion, testifies with equal significance to the truth of those great principles on which religion is based.

Thus has religion positive foundations of the same kind as science, and they may be built up in a genuine scientific order. Doubtless a sharp scientific critic would find objections to such an

inductive demonstration of religion. He would charge that these so-called inductions were not complete and exact, but imperfect, at best, only approximated perfection. He would say, “They are not simple colligations of facts, but they are theories built up and superimposed upon them. They are not cautious, exhaustive generlizations of co-existences; but they are hypotheses to which you have boldly leaped. And the verification you appeal to, though in much seeming to be given, is also in much wanting."

Now, these objections I should not altogether deny; but I should give to them this twofold answer, which ought fairly, it seems to me, to stop the mouth of the scientific objector, or of any objector who usually accepts, without hesitation, current scientific conclusions: First, in my previous paper it was shown in general that every one of these objections applied to science as well as to religion. Secondly, that in the positive presentation, in the present paper, not a single medium of proof is employed in regard to which it is not or cannot be shown that the very same argument, or its exact counterpart, is customarily and confidently employed by science. If one is to be rejected, then both should be rejected; if one is to be trusted, then both should be trusted.

JAMES T. BIXBY.

THE SHOEMAKER OF GÖRLITZ.

"Jamie, yon man's crack't."

"Sandy, while's there's light comes through a crack."

THE little Silesian village of Alt Seidenberg has but one claim to escape omnivorous oblivion: a child was born there, whose name the world has not forgotten, nor seems likely to forget. It was three hundred years ago, just as the close of the third quarter of the sixteenth century was striking, that this soul

"Drew near from out the vast.

And struck its being into bounds."

That was the century of giants and gigantic works. Almost the first quarter had been spent in vast efforts of scholarship,the revival of the ancient literatures, and the formation of new. The second and third were eras of great religious agitation and growth, in which theology and the church gave shape to all men's thinking, and armed tongue and hand for civil strife throughout Europe. With the fourth quarter was coming a new period, when the strongest minds of Europe were to be busied with philosophy, the search into the ground of certainty and truth, rather than the dogmatic and polemic assertion of traditions and systems, the age of Bacon, Gassendi, Giordano, Bruno, Campanella, and of the subject of this paper, Jakob Böhme. This soul was to bear the impress of its age, and to face the age's problems, with the least possible propedeutic for the work. Upon it was laid the call to attempt to solve the mystery of the universe, with hardly any knowledge, save what Luther's German Bible furnished, of what other inspired souls had thought and said of that vast riddle. He looked upon life and its surroundings with his own clear gray eyes, and found them so wonderful, and suggested such strange explanations of their wonders, that the boldest radical must be startled at the audacity of his rejection of all our cherished prepossessions and our established forms of thought. In outer life he "was a simple and dutiful apprentice, took care of his domestic affairs, submitted to be silenced because he was only a layman, treated

every one with whom he came into contact submissively and graciously, indulged in no reproaches against those who pronounced him accursed and procured his banishment;" but his inner life was full of strange experiences, wonderful "beholdings," and daring thoughts, that have extorted praise often from the most unlikely quarters. Among those who confess his greatness, acknowledge indebtedness to him for help and suggestion, are numbered philosophers (Leibnitz, Henry More, Coleridge, Schelling, Hegel, Baader, C. H. Weisse, Feuerbach, and St. Martin), theologians (Spener, Arnold, William Law, Bengel, Etinger, Semler, Harms, Auberlen, F. C. Baur, and Bleek), and masters in literature (Henry Brooke, Fr. Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, de la Motte Fouque, Lichtenberg, Wolfgang Menzel, and C. F. D. Schubart). Every historian of philosophy pauses at his name as that of the one creative mind that Germany has to show between the generation of the reformers and that of Leibnitz and Kepler. Though his books display, on every page, his lack of culture, and the inadequacy of his expression to his thought, they have passed through seven editions in German, and are found in translations, partial or complete, in five of the principal languages of Europe. A vast literature, friendly and unfriendly, has grown up around his name, and has received additions during the past year.†

*

* Böhme's English scholars claim that "Sir Isaac Newton had plowed with Behmen's heifer." William Law writes to Dr. Cheyne, "When Sir Isaac Newton died, there were found among his papers large extracts out of J. Behmen's works, written with his own hand. This I have from undoubted authority. . . . My vouchers are names well known, and of great esteem with you. It is evidently plain that all that Sir Isaac has said of the universality, nature, and effects of attraction, of the three first laws of nature, was not only said, but proved, in its truest and deepest ground, by J. B., in his three first properties of eternal nature.”

† See Leibnitz's Nouveaux Essais, IV. cap. 19; Henry More's Philosophiæ Teutonica Censura; Coleridge's Works (Am. ed.), III. 249-54, 691-9, IV. 311, V. 61-2, 324–5, 526, VI. 293; Schelling's Uber d. Wesen d. menschlichen Freiheit (1806), and his Philosophie der Offenbarung I. 123 et seq; Hegel's Encyclopädie (Preface to Second Edition), and Geschichte der Philosophie, III. 300-27; Baader's Vorlesungen über peculative Dogmatik (especially Pt. V.); C. H. Weisse's Philosophie des Christenthums; Feuerbach's Geschichte der Philosophie, Pp. 150-214. Also P. J. Spener's Theologische Bedenken; Gottfried