worse evils seem arising out of their rest, evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood, though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also, a fear greater than of sword and sedition; that dependence on God may be forgotten, because the bread is given, and the water is sure, that gratitude to Him may cease, because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law, that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world, that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation, that innovation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark thoughts to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. Ruskin.

All science and all art may be divided into that which is subservient to life, and that which is the object of it. As subservient to life, or practical, their results are, in the common sense of the word, useful. As the object of life, or theoretic, they are, in the common sense, useless; and yet the step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist; and the step between practical and theoretic art is that between the bricklayer and the architect, between the plumber and the artist; and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to greater; so that

the so-called useless part of each profession does, by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind, assume the superior and more noble place.

Whatever part of any pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and admits of material uses, is ignoble, and whatsoever part is addressed to the mind only, is noble. Geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven than in teaching navigation; surgery better in investigating organization than in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in science adds something to its practical applicabilities; and that all the great phenomena of nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to further vision the Being and the glory of Him in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences and so much of material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desire as the imperfection of their nature may admit. ib.

He that serves God with the soul without the body, when both can be conjoined, doth the work of the Lord deceitfully. The body alone can never serve God without the conjunction and preceding act of the soul; and sometimes the soul without the body is imperfect and vain ; for in some actions there is a body and a spirit, a material and a spiritual part, and when the action hath the same

constitution that the man hath, without the act of both it is as imperfect as a dead man. Jeremy Taylor.

The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts. Without this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare. about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works. Those highly magnify Him, whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

Every essence, created or uncreated, hath its final cause, and some positive end, both of its essence and operation. This is the cause I grope after in the works of nature. On this hangs the providence of God. To raise so beauteous a structure as the world and the creatures thereof, was but His act; but their sundry and divided operations, with their predestinated ends, are from the treasury of His wisdom.

There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces. What reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants,

dromedaries, and camels. These, I confess, are the colossuses and majestic pieces of His hand. But in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematics; and the civility of these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their Maker. I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux. and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which, without further travel, I can do, in the cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labor at in a divided piece and endless volume. Sir Thomas Browne.

There are two Temples of God; the one the Universe, the other the Rational Soul. Dr. Henry More.

As the best eyes, and most able to behold the pure Light, do not unwillingly turn their backs on the Sun, to view his repeated Beauty in the delightful colours of the rainbow, so the perfectest minds and the most lively possest of the Divine Image, cannot but take contentment and pleasure in observing the glorious wisdom and goodness of God, so fairly drawn out, and skilfully variegated in the sundry objects of external nature. ib.

Nor does God abandon His work when He has called us into being, and prepared for us these sumptuous abodes. That law which His own will resumes He graves on the "fleshly tablet of our hearts," nay, welds indissolubly into the very substance of our inmost being. Over that primal germ of our moral nature His spirit forever broods; and ever present, ever active, strengthens and vivifies it. And jointly with His spirit within, works. His providence without. The woof He fixes wherein our free will may work its warp, is fitted with absolute precision to our moral wants. The trials, the encouragements, the punishments we require, all come to us with unerring exactitude. All the elements and all the creatures are God's ministers, and inevitably work in each individual case precisely as He has from all eternity foreseen that the innumerable contingencies of the lives of free intelligences would require them to work to forward the design of creation. We are each of us the centre of a stupendous machine, ever grinding its complicated wheels to evolve at last the virtue of our souls. An Essay on Intuitive Morals.

"If it is possible for any man, it was not, certainly, possible for a Greek, to feel himself connected by any real bonds with his fellow-creatures around him, while he felt himself utterly separated from any being above his fellowcreatures. But the sense of that isolation would affect different minds very differently. It drove the Epicurean to consider how he might make a world in which he should live comfortably, without distracting visions of the past and