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Religion, for them it is inevitable that the Salt has lost its savour. Mighty and prevailing we cannot make ourselves, though the faith we profess is our highest thought, and we speak because we believe,but honest and long-suffering, shewing no false signals to the world, we can all be,-sitting patiently by what the spirit and the word commend to us as the Wells of Truth, though they seem cold as Death, till God himself comes down to stir the waters with no simulated Life, and to quicken all that is latent of their healing power. Let us, on the one side, have no cowardice, and no concealment, and no holding back of the hand from what it finds to do,and on the other, no eager and wasting restlessness, and no infidel despair. I hear and read much about our not fulfilling our Mission with which I have no kind of sympathy, which seems to me to partake more of human ambition than of divine obedience. If any man can do better let him do it—if he can speak better let him speak it—but let him not waste his breath or time in idle moanings about what he calls success, unless he means success in saving sinners,

-nor canker his own freshness and naturalness by judgment of his brethren. To all such I would say, -Shew us the way if you know it-give out the Light if you have it-let all men hear the word of Truth that is in you-let them gaze upon the face of a diviner Beneficence if it has dawned upon you— shew us that you really have what is fair and good, and we will follow you with blessings,—but if you

have none of these things, we will not regard your restlessness and discontent as a divine sign—if you are only impatient with what is, and will not wait for God to evolve what is better out of our simplicity and truth, you may see with a very keen and bare eye into the poverty of the Actual, but the serene beauty of what is Coming has not yet risen on your soul. Let us beware lest when we are wearying ourselves with what we call our want of success, we be impatient only that God has not given greater glory to ourselves.

Yet these are not enemies; for they have desired to tell us the Truth. They may be great Benefactors to us in disturbing our sloth or self-satisfaction -if these things cling to us, as assuredly they do— and yet the divine lesson may be in a direction which they do not suspect.

Let us be ever ready to yield ourselves to God to do with us what he wills, ready to receive from him what he is ready to give, to take the place in his Temple that he assigns us, serving in that place with absolute simplicity, waiting in hopeful faith,but not be too eager to flame among the pinnacles, if yet for his own purposes he wills us for a time to remain among the hidden stones. The Master himself was once pressed to take a short and brilliant way to outward success, and only answered, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.'

V.

THE SPIRITUAL UNITY OF GOD

REFLECTED IN CHRIST.

'Now the Lord is that spirit: and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord.'-2. COR. iii. 17, 18.

THE

`HE Evidences of Religion are not of a demonstrative character: they appeal to inward experience and sentiment and create Faith. It is apparent, were it only from the conflict of opinions, that the Character of God, the Futurity of Man, the Mediatorship of Christ, do not belong to the class of scientific or logical Truths. Neither can any spiritual conviction be produced solely by historical evidence for History is made up of Testimony, and Testimony relates to the Past, and cannot convey that present and personal consciousness of a living God which is of the essence of Faith. Personal Religion consists not in the knowledge of what God

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did, or of how he manifested himself, in times and lands remote, but in the feeling of what he is and does within each of our souls this day. Personal Religion is personal experience of God and testimony does not impart experience. But it puts us in possession of the experiences of others, and the experiences of others may be so kindred to our own that we are prepared and pre-disposed to receive and to assimilate them, so as to have what exists in us only as a feeble spark raised and developed by the intenser fire that God has kindled in mightier or more faithful natures. And thus History, though not the evidence of God, nor the evidence of Immortality, may yet convey to us a moral atmosphere from the kindred and sublimated experience of holier beings that passes like a warm breath of life over the soul, and quickens the latent fire to heat and flame.

And so with the other departments of Evidences, as they are called. Nothing sensible is of the nature of God: nothing sensible is like to God: but if God made the Human soul in the likeness of himself, and also made all visible nature to symbol some portion of his own attributes, then whenever our souls come into earnest contact with Nature, the material symbol of his Power or Love may so act upon a mind made in his image, as to raise in us the irresistible consciousness of a mighty and mysterious Spirit in some communion with our own,of something in our own nature akin to the Spirit

that made the universe,—and the God who is within us, and the God who is without us, be palpably revealed. It is not that our intellects draw this inference from Nature by any logical process, but that God has so formed and fashioned us after himself that Nature, being also full of him, casts our souls into these frames of sentiment, impresses this feeling upon us. We spiritually receive it; we do not logically deduce it. Nature, like a signet of God, imprints the Image and Superscription of the Almighty upon souls that his hand hath also prepared for the impression. The immediate evidences of God are all in the original constitution and direct experiences of our own souls; and only kindred manifestations of himself in his mirror of the universe, or breathed to us from the nobler souls of others, draw these internal signatures into fuller light, as heat develops heat. Reason itself is not so much an independent instrument by which we discover God, as it is a ray of God in us. It is God witnessing of himself, because he has given us of his own Spirit. 'What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have the Spirit of God, that we may know the things which are freely given us of God.' This is the instruction of St. Paul; and the old Hebrew mind knew it well. 'The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding.' Strange

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