conception of God. We no longer think of Him as the Infinite self-will, who seems to have no higher end than to wield an irresistible might, and see all things bow before it ; — we think of Him as the infinite love and holiness, because He has an end beyond himself. He is the great educator of life in other beings, the educator of a divine life in a chosen band. There can be no pleasing Him but by the fulfilment of this end. He wants the divine life in us for our sakes, and no substitution will satisfy Him for the absence of this. The Prospective Review.

It would discover us to have very vile and low thoughts of God, if we did not judge it altogether unanswerable to His perfections, to design no further thing in creating this world, and placing such a creature as man in it, than only to please Himself for a while with such a spectacle, and then at last clear the stage, and shut up all again in an eternal silent darkness. John Howe.

We all speak much of the glory of God, and entertain a common belief that that's the only end for which we were all made; and I wish we were all more inwardly moved with a true and lively sense of it. There can be

to Himself, or

nothing else that either God could propound that we ought, if it be rightly understood. But we must not think that God, who is Infinite fulness, would seek for anything without Himself; He needs neither our happiness, nor our misery, to make Himself more illustrious by; but, being full in Himself, it was His good pleasure to communiIcate of His own fulness.

When He made the world, because there was nothing better than Himself, he shadowed forth Himself therein, and, as far as might be, was pleased to represent Himself, and manifest His own eternal glory and perfection in it.

God does then most glorify and exalt Himself in the most triumphant way that may be out of Himself, if I may so phrase it, when He most of all communicates Himself, and when He erects such monuments of His own majesty, wherein His own love and goodness may live and reign.

And we most of all glorify Him, when we partake most of Him; when our serious endeavors of a true assimilation to Him, and conformity to His image, declare that we think nothing better than He is; and are, therefore, most ambitious of being one with Him, by an universal resignation of ourselves to Him. Dr. John Smith.

All beings, so far as our knowledge goes, beside ourselves, sustain one uniform and unalterable relation towards God. What they were from the first, that they still are. They keep their original distance from God, which is incapable of either increase or diminution. The law of their being has been established once for all, and by that they unchangeably abide. There is a part, too, of man's nature which stands in the same immutable relation towards God. But, above this lower part, there is a sphere of action, into which God has infused a portion of His own free energy a sphere where will begins to operate -that new and mysterious power which affects human relations to God, and renders them fluctuating — which

can draw up the heart into the closest intimacy with its parent spirit, or throw it off to a distance in which the consciousness of the relation becomes almost extinct.

Will is the ruling power in man. His worth or worthlessness, as a moral agent, must be estimated from the habitual attitude of his will. Will, however, is not wholly lawless and unconfined. There are convictions of which man's mind cannot divest itself, and which his will more or less assumes in all its resolutions. It is through such convictions that the spirit of God has immediate access to the human soul. There is, first, the sense of an agency external to man's will, and mightier than it, in which the belief of a

sovereign mind a God - has its source. There is, secondly, the sense of the broad distinction between right and wrong as the subjects of a free choice, to be finally appropriated by the will. There is, thirdly, a sense of subjection to law of responsibility for voluntary acts to a higher power an apprehension of final retribution, corresponding to the moral order of the universe.

Such is the constitution of the nature which is fitted for communion with God - which has the promise, if it draw nigh to God, that God will draw nigh to it in return. And this response of God is discerned in a deeper and tenderer sense of His presence and operation as a living spiritfirst, in things fixed by immutable laws and foreign to ourselves and, secondly, within the sphere of our personal consciousness, in things dependent on our own will and effort.

Now, first, nature breaks the eternal silence, and finds

an interpreter in that highest poetry through which God reveals his hidden thoughts to the awakened soul. This is not a mere æsthetic feeling. It is something purer and loftier than the simple emotions of taste. Else the most picturesque eye would be the unfailing attendant of the devoutest heart; and the rarer the beauty of the external scene, the deeper would be the impression of the unseen God. But it is not so.

The devotional enjoyment of the visible works of God is a sentiment peculiar to Christianity and those prophetic influences which preceded it in the mind of the Hebrew race. We find nothing corresponding to it in the remains of classical literature. In the sacred odes of the Greeks, and in the descriptive poetry of the Romans, there is not a passage to remind us of the sublime bursts of pious feeling, kindled by the aspects of creation, which break forth continually in the Psalms and that wonderful poem of Job.

The old Polytheism was Nature in the plenitude of sensuous wealth, projecting the shadow of her gorgeous but coarse imagery on the pure expanse of the Infinite ; not the might and glory of the Infinite coming down on Nature with resistless influence, to chasten and spiritualize her wild energies, and humble them in reverent submission to the law of the Eternal. Our intensest convic

tion of the presence of God

our clearest persuasion that

He has drawn nigh to us the quiet and contemplative spectators of His works, or the passive recipients of outward influence, but in those

is not, however, when we are

higher exercises of faith which engage our wills, and put us on virtuous effort, and excite us to active coöperation with Him, when we seek Him and believe that we have found Him, in the glad appropriation of every duty, and the cheerful acceptance of every sacrifice, which He demands.

In every case, communion with God is not a simple gift of nature, but the reward and blessing of spiritual culture and devotedness. Our moral remoteness from God and the necessity of holiness to approach Him, is the great idea which pervades Scripture from beginning to end, and so broadly distinguishes it from the prevalent systems of philosophy..

There are, undoubtedly, great differences of original temperament. Some minds are spontaneously more devotional than others. But perseverance in uprightness from religious motives is sure, in the natural order of spiritual development, to issue in a deepened consciousness of God's immediate access to the soul to sustain and comfort it. This susceptibility of religious impression and spiritual insight varies also in races of men as well as in individuals. We find it in its highest form among the ancient Hebrews connected with the recognition of one God, and of His intimate relation to their moral condition. John James Tayler.

If we reflect but upon our own Souls, how manifestly do the species of Reason, Freedom, Perception, and the like, offer themselves to us, whereby we may know a