but a longing for renovation, and for escape from a state whose every phase is mere preparation for another equally transitory, to one in which permanence shall have become possible through perfection. Hence the great call of Christ to men, that call on which St. Augustine fixed essential expression of Christian hope, is accompanied by the promise of rest, and the death bequest of Christ to men is peace.

As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite, (variety,) so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite, energy. It is the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not.

Ruskin.

There is a defect in this gospel of conscience. The infinite perfections of God will be concentrated, so to speak, too much, in the notion of HIS WILL, and the powers which subserve its designs; and will in consequence be as much misapprehended as would be our nature by an observer assuming that we put forth all its life and phenomena on purpose. Indeed the exclusive and unbalanced ascendency of the moral faculty tempts a man to fancy this sort of existence the only right one for himself; to suspect every flow of unwatched feeling, and call himself to account for the burst of ringing laughter, or the surprise of sudden tears, and aim at an autocratic command of his own soul. It is not wonderful that his ideal of human character should reappear in his representation of the

divine.

The error deforms his faith as much as it tends

to stiffen and constrict his life.

The meaning which art detects in life and the world is not a purpose, but a sentiment; in its view the present attitudes and development of things are rather the outcoming of an inner feeling than the tools of a remoter end. To find room for this mode of conception, something must be added to the ethical representation of God. He must be regarded as not always and throughout engaged in processes of intention and volition, but as having, round this moral centre, an infinite atmosphere of creative thought and affection, which, like the native inspirations of a pure and sublime human soul, spontaneously flow out in forms of beauty and movements of rhythm, and a thousand aspects of divine expression. Religion demands the admission of this free element, and without it, will cease to speak home to men of susceptible genius and poetic nature, and must limit itself more and more to the fanatical minds that have too little regulation, and the moral that have too much. Westminster Review.

Works of science and history are the mediums in which men speak to us; works of poetry and art, that in which they speak from themselves. With these the heavenly dialects precisely correspond; being in fact the great originals, whereof these are but faint echoes. The outward objects of science and history, all the calculable happenings of the frame and order of things, are God's didactic address, in which he gives us the information we most

need about his ways. And that which awakens poetry and art, the invisible light that bathes the world — the nameless essence that fills it, the devout uplifted look of all things, is the personal effusion of God's spirit, by which the secret spreads of what he is. In the System of nature and life he teaches us his will; in the Beauty of nature and life, he meditates from himself. If we and all similar beings were away, the former would become unmeaning; and the busy movements, the mighty forces, the mechanical successions, the breathless haste of moments, the patient roll of ages, would seem to be superseded, and to be a mere senseless stir, were they not in sympathy with teeming life, and a discipline of countless minds. But, in our presence or our absence, the everlasting beauty would still remain; all that lay beneath the eternal eye would sleep in the serene light, and wait no leave from us. That is a thought which God has writ only for himself; a word of his that asks no audience. Yet he cares not to hide it from us; and he has made us so like himself, that a glance suffices to interpret, and to fill us with his blessed inspiration. Martineau.

The mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness of things seen and heard I call æsthesis; but the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of it I call theoria. For this, and this only, is the full comprehension and contemplation of the beautiful as a gift of God, a gift not necessary to our being, but added to, and elevating it; and twofold, first of the desire, and, secondly of the thing desired.

And, as it is necessary to the existence of an idea of beauty, that the sensual pleasure which may be its basis, should be accompanied first with joy, then with love. of the object, then with the perception of kindness in a superior Intelligence, finally with thankfulness and veneration towards that Intelligence itself; and as no idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea of beauty, until it be made up of these emotions, any more than we can be said to have an idea of a letter of which we perceive the perfume and the face-writing, without understanding the contents of it or intent of it; and as these emotions are in no way resultant from, nor obtainable by, any operation of the intellect, it is evident that the sensation of beauty is not sensual on the one hand, nor intellectual on the other, but is dependent on a pure, right, and open state of the heart, both for its truth and for its intensity, insomuch that even the right after action of the intellect upon facts of beauty so apprehended, is dependent on the acuteness of the heart feeling about them. Ruskin.

As a countenance is made beautiful by the soul's shining through it, so the world is beautiful by the shining through it of a God. Jacobi.

It has been said by Schiller, in his letters on Esthetic Culture, that the sense of beauty never furthered the performance of a single duty. And though this falsity is not wholly and in terms admitted, yet it seems to be partly and practically so in much of the doing and teaching even of

holy men, who, in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and raiment, and health, (which he gives to all inferior creatures,) they require us not to thank him for that glory of his works which he has permitted us alone to perceive; they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even; they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight. It seems to me, that the real sources of this bluntness in the feelings towards the splendor of the grass and the glory of the flower, are less to be found in ardor of occupation, in seriousness of compassion, or heavenliness of desire, than in the turning of the eye at intervals of rest too selfishly within; the want of power to shake off the anxieties of actual and near interest, and to leave results in God's hands; the scorn of all that does not seem immediately apt for our purposes, or open to our understanding, and, perhaps, something of pride, which desires rather to investigate than to feel. I believe that the root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian church has ever suffered, has been the effort of men to earn, rather than to receive, their salvation; and that the reason that preaching is so commonly ineffectual is, that it calls on men oftener to work for God, than to behold God working for them. If for every rebuke that we utter of men's vices, we put forth a claim upon their hearts; if for every assertion of God's demands from them, we could substitute a display of his