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ever to fairer scenes, ever to loftier heights, adding knowledge to knowledge, and wisdom to wisdom, as we ascend from glory to glory, from heaven to heaven; until like S. Paul, we behold that which cannot be uttered

"... l'eterna luce

Chi vista sola sempre amore accende."

DANTE, Paradiso, canto v.

It is our privilege now to prepare for that wonderful state in which these high things will be subjects of daily experience, and the secret things of God be articulated. Oh for that wisdom to know how God is everywhere— wholly everywhere, that Present where can be neither past nor future; how Revelation and Miracle are words and works to teach of Him who, apart from time, creates time; who, without beginning, forms all duration and succession; who, having no antecedent and no consequent, creates all consequents!

THOUGHT XXII.

HUMAN-WISE.

"Whatever it may be for which man feels his combination of love; trust and awe, carried to the highest limits of which his nature is capable; this, and nothing else, is the object of his highest worship."-EDWin A. ABBOTT, D.D.

"Comparatio enim terrenorum ad Deum nulla est; sed infirmitas nostræ intelligentiæ cogit species quandam ex inferioribus, tanquam superiorum indices quærere; ut rerum familiarium consuetudine admovente, ex sensus nostri conscientia ad insoliti sensus opinionem educeremur."-HILARY, De Trin., i. 19.

SOME of the irreligious, happily, are wearied with the miseries of their dismal science. They break in upon physical studies by some nobler inquiries, and find the interruption no hindrance. They act upon Lord Bacon's direction—“Let not a man force a habit upon himself with a perpetual continuance: but with some intermission. For both the pause reinforceth the new onset; and if a man that is not perfect be ever in practice, he shall as well practise his errors as his abilities." These honest inquirers are told by those less in earnest "To speak of God as were He a Person is anthropomorphic; and to believe in miracles renders nature imperfect, as if it needed adjustment."

Such language produces a deterrent effect even upon.

intelligent persons. We, therefore, show that our opponents, refusing true anthropomorphism, fall into the low and wrong.

False anthropomorphism likens nature to a building, or to a tree, or to a machine; as if nature's work, God's work, was not higher, better, more than any of these. To be rid of a divine beginning, it asserts-" There never was a beginning, only transformations of motion," expressed in Greek—" γένεσις οὐδὲν ἄλλο, εἰ μὴ ἀλλοίωσις popas," as if this were not babble mainly. The miseries of men and groanings of creation, noxious animals and all evil things, are paraded with the intent that sacredness be taken from the pathos of our life, and awe from our silent death. "Such a desire, expressed by the Epicurean poet, Lucretius, may have been an enthusiasm against superstition, and an honest zeal against idols, though even then the remedy was worse than the disease; and it were better to believe all the fables in the Talmud than that this universal frame is without a Divine Mind; and they that so believe, or pretend so to believe, now that the gospel has been preached, are surely without excuse?" We cannot even see the summer gloaming steal over the moorland, nor receive light from the pleasant skies when the air holds a solemn stillness, without in some degree getting pious profit, if we face them solemnly.

The low sort of anthropomorphism, takes the outer form, the material organism, and counts it the whole. man; forgets or denies the inner principle-from which the outer grew; is unmindful of the mystic personwhich extracted the material person from outer substances; takes that clothing which life assumes in pro

gress from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to beast of the field, from beast of the field to man, as were that clothing and the putting of it on-life itself. The professors of this system do not discern the difference between the plastic principle and plastic materials; between the invisible building power and the house it builds; they confound the thousands of muscular fibres, thousands of nervous fibres, thousands of blood-vessels, thousands of operations in lungs, heart, brain, spinal cord, with the essentiality of a human being.

No wonder that the God of such a system is no God, is nothing apart from the world; as man, so they represent, is nothing apart from the body. They liken God -not to a Ruler, but to the forces of matter-to matter itself; not to a Person, our highest possible conception of being and existence, but to space in which matter moves. This is low indeed.

By way of amendment, they put forth an amusing dogma. "There is somewhere in the world a maximum finite brain, a highest finite intelligence-or else several, all equal." This is the clearest and sublimest of all their verities "there is somewhere at this present moment in our planet, or in some other habitable orb, the very highest intelligence and will in the universe; but it is impossible to know who he is, and he most assuredly cannot know that the crown is on his head." So they construct a non-natural man, drop out all they account weakness, insert all that they deem strong. This magnified man they worship. Shall we Christians be ashamed of the true God-man, Christ, who was, is, and ever will be first? Is not Christ better than their greatest biologist, and most prodigious physicist ?

True anthropomorphism does not make a graven image of matter, erect it in space, move it with force, and say to men, "Behold thy god! see how he moves within his habitation." Those who hold true doctrine, know that materialism, whether it appear in the old Egyptian form, so that men worship a beetle; or in sensuous modern glorifying of "La Madre Natura ;” is a degrading idolatry. The worship of Cybele, Ceres, Rhea, Ops, Vesta, Bona Mater, Magna Mater, Tellus, Demeter, was the most debasing of all pagan worship. True anthropomorphism, as opposed to this, is a good thing. All true science, as anthropomorphic. We know nature by means of our own nature, and it cannot be otherwise. Things are not known as they are in themselves, but as represented to us by our senses. We know the Divine Nature, not in itself, but through analogous qualities in the creature. The one Absolute Existence, to which philosophy aspires, is represented by our consciousness, by our moral and religious feelings, as a Personal God. In what other way do our opponents know, or not know of Him, than in analogy of the human with the Divine Nature? "Dieu se définit par la substance de l'être" (Lacordaire, "Prem. Conf. de Toulouse"). Surely they have some craving after God; it is the craving of humanity, the world-wide consciousness of relationship between Heaven and Earth. We do right to erect in our heart an image of the Divine Person -not of the ancients' best Parian, nor of ivory, nor of gold, nor of the materialist's coarser grit, on a pedestal; but a spiritual image of truth, justice, wisdom, love, might. This image of the Wonderful renders our whole body a temple-the spirit an inner shrine—and the silent