would he not be bound to restrain an inclination to speak such things, even if he believed them?

Phaethon.-Surely, Socrates; for there would be far more chance that he alone was wrong, and the many right, than that the many were wrong and he alone right. He would therefore commit an insolent and conceited action, and, moreover, a cruel and shameless one; for he would certainly make miserable, if he were believed, the hearts of many virtuous persons who never harmed him, for no immediate or demonstrable purpose, except that of pleasing his own self-will. Kingsley.

There is a marked likeness between the virtue of man and the enlightenment of the globe he inhabits, - the same diminishing gradation in vigor up to the limits of their domains, the same essential separation from their contraries, - the same twilight at the meeting of the two; a something wider belt than the line where the world rolls into night, that strange twilight of the virtues; that dusky, debatable land, wherein zeal becomes impatience, and temperance becomes severity, and justice becomes cruelty, and faith superstition, and each and all vanish into gloom.

Nevertheless, with the greater number of them, though their dimness increases gradually, we may mark the moment of their sunset; and, happily, may turn the shadow back by the way by which it had gone down; but for one, the line of the horizon is irregular and undefined; and this, too, the very equator and girdle of them all - Truth; that only one of which there are no degrees, but breaks

and rents continually; that pillar of the earth, yet a cloudy pillar; that golden and narrow line, which the very powers and virtues that lean upon it bend, which policy and prudence conceal, which kindness and courtesy modify, which courage overshadows with his shield, imagination covers with her wings, and charity dims with her tears. How difficult must the maintenance of that authority be, which, while it has to restrain the hostility of all the worst principles of man, has also to restrain the disorders of his best which is continually assaulted by the one and betrayed by the other, and which regards with the same severity the lightest and the boldest violations of its law ! There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the estimate of wisdom; but truth forgives no insult, and endures no stain.

Ruskin.

The fundamental idea of Christendom may be described to be, The ascent through Conscience into communion with God. Other religions have lent their sanctions to morality, and announced the Divine commands to the human will; but only as the laws of an outward monarch, within whose sovereignty we lie, and who, ruling in virtue of his almightiness, has a right to obedience, ordain as he will. Other religions, again, have aimed at a union with God. But the conditions of this union, dictated by misleading conceptions of the Divine nature, have missed on every side the true level of human dignity and peace. Manichæism, deifying the antithesis of matter, takes the part

of ascetic suppression of the body. Plato, seeing in God the essence of thought, demands science and beauty, not less than goodness, as the needful notes of harmony with him, and appoints the approach to heaven by academic ways. The modern Quietists worshipping a Being too much the reflection of their own tenderness, have lost themselves in soft affections, relaxing to the nerves of duty, and unseemly in the face of eternal law. Christianity alone has neither crushed the soul by mere submission, like Mohammedanism, nor melted it away in the tides of infinite being, like Pantheistic faiths; but has saved the good of both, by establishing the union with God, though a free act of the individual soul.

The place assigned in Christianity to the moral sentiments and affections, has no parallel in any other religion. The whole faith is an unutterable sigh after an ideal perfection.

The profound sense of interior amity with God through faithfulness to our highest possibility, appears in the Christian Scriptures under two forms the positive and the negative, each the complement of the other. In the Gospel Jesus describes the aspiration after goodness as the native guidance of the soul. In the Epistles, Paul proclaims the sense of sin to be the contracted hindrance that bars the ascent. These representations are evidently but the two sides of the same doctrine, seen from the heavenly and from the earthly position. Whether we are told what the good heart will find, or what the guilty

must lose, the lesson equally recognizes the Divine authority of conscience.

If from the fundamental Christian sentiment, we descend to the scheme of Applied Morals, which it organized and inspired, the principle still vindicates itself in its results. The great problems of life are supplied from two sources, the Persons that may engage our affections, and the Pursuits that may invite our will. The light in which the personal relations are presented before the eye of Christendom, is undeniably benign and true. That every human soul has its sacred concerns and its divine communion is the simplest of thoughts; but so deep and moving, that where it is received and acknowledged it calls up angelic virtues; where it is insulted and denied, it lets slip avenging fiends. Wherever it is sincerely held, it secures that reverential feeling towards others, beneath whose spell the selfish passions sleep, and without which the precepts of courtesy and the definition of rights are an ineffectual form.

lence, and dependence its sting,

Power loses its inso

where their mutual

relation does not carry the whole individuality with it, but stops with the limits of social and political convenience, and lies under the restraining protection of a supreme equality before God.

It seems, then, that the essential sentiment of all Christian faith the communion through conscience with God - carries with it, not only noble personal aspirations, but also, towards others, affections of singular generosity and depth. The Westminster Review.

To seek our Divinity merely in Books and writings, is to seek the living among the dead; we do but in vain seek God many times in these, where his Truth too often is not so much enshrined as entombed.

That is not the best and truest knowledge of God which is wrought out by the labor and sweat of the brain, but that which is kindled within us by an heavenly warmth in our Hearts. When the Tree of Knowledge is not planted by the Tree of Life, and sucks not up sap from thence, it may be as well fruitful with evil as with good, and bring forth bitter fruit as well as sweet. If we would indeed have our Knowledge thrive and flourish, we must water the tender plants of it with Holiness. It is but a thin airy knowledge which is ushered in by Syllogisms and Demonstrations, but that which springs forth from true goodness, brings such a Divine light into the soul, as is more clear and convincing than any demonstration. The reason why, notwithstanding all our acute reasons and subtile disputes, Truth prevails no more in the world, is, we so often disjoin Truth and true Goodness, which in themselves can never be disunited. They grow both from the same Root, and live in one another. While we lodge any filthy vice in us, this will be perpetually twisting up itself into the thread of our finest-spun speculations; it will twine about our Judgments and Understandings, till it hath sucked out the life and spirit of them.

Jejune and barren Speculations may be hovering and fluttering up and down about Divinity, but they cannot