are doubtless slighting and slurring men of rare ability and public service. Some are doing Herculean work for the country who can not be seen till the dust and smoke of the struggle are passed by. Our preferences and prejudices and those political fogs, so common on the Potomac, will by and by be dissipated. Then these obscure and obscured men, and the great work they have been greatly doing, will become manifest to the people. When all our ancient bounds are reset, and our disturbed national foundations are readjusted, it will be found that we had statesmen and warriors without knowing them, because so heartily intent in doing their good work for the republic they could not take time to fill the public eye and ear. The great men are not all dead, and when they shall stand revealed by and by in the light of their works, our difficulty will be that we shall have more worthy heroes than crowns worthy of them.

We are not of those who believe that our branch of the human family has passed its climateric, because we have had the sixteenth century of letters, the seventeenth and eighteenth of civil progress and the nineteenth of science. Edwards will not prove to be the last theologian, or Webster's or Worcester's the last dictionary, or New England patents for reforms, morals and social ethics those that the last trump will break in on. We have finished nothing but a certain number of years. American society in all its interests is yet in as crude a state as the American continent. Our more recent novelties and glories in the practical sciences are to become antiquities; new patents are to make old ones obsolete; more alchemy and philosophers' stones are to go to the shelf of curiosities; more of the arcana of nature, now a long time puzzling the learned, are to go into our common schools as solved questions; and the answers to many civil and social questions are to go on the record as finalities. We are yet vastly to enlarge the aggregation of the abandoned and rejected, and by some of our most cherished treasures too. We must fill our quota for the fossil accumulations of the ages, learning and consenting to bury what is dead. In the mean time new issues in practical life, as between man and man, will press on us, crowding others aside as unpractical or no longer vital and possible. The last four years have taught us by hurrying processes that we must abandon many theories

and projects, and bury our old wills and works in a common grave, if we would keep up with the divine forward movement of things. We are fast learning that many an insuperabile saxum of the fathers can be rolled up in a permanent gain by the leverage of new providences. A finished religion and a system of immutable morality we must take, as the Scriptures authoritatively give and leave them, but we are to use them in new issues and by new methods. With the strength of the past we must do the work of the present, and if the skeleton of any lion has been turned into a bee-hive, we may, like Samson, eat of the honey as we go by, leaving the hive. Taxidermy will not meet the exigencies of the times. It may do for a few naturalists and the founders of museums to stuff and mount the lion's skin, and show the mane that has lost its motion, and the claws from which the strength is gone, and the socket from which the fiery eye has died out, but living men, times and issues have a greater claim on us.

ARTICLE VII.

SHORT SERMONS.

"Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not ?" Isa. Iv. 2.

THE great moving wheel of this world's activities is craving for a lost happiness. God looks down and sees,

1. The fact, infinite toil of body, fret of mind, and hanker of heart.

2. He protests against it. For,

(a) Gladness gained from earthly sources alone, is mixed with estrangement from him. "For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water."

(b) Such gladness is beneath the powers and capacities of our

nature.

(c) It does not really enter the heart, only plays on the outside. (d) It is gained at grievous cost, cost of body, brain, heart, soul, frequent defeat, certain dissatisfaction.

(e) It makes men more insatiate.

(f) It is what we do not need beyond a certain very close limit. The millionaire is no happier than any one of us.

(g) Such gladness is not stable.

(h) It has no link with our immortality.

(i) Thought of reckoning for a misspent life spoils it. A life given to earthly good is terribly misspent.

46

Philip saith unto him: Come and see." John i. 46.

CERTAIN of the Christian teachings, and those most vital, are not well discerned, often by intelligent, sharp-minded men. Yet they will have no blind, indolent assent. The faith they call for is a rational faith. Their appeal is, "Come and see"; make our acquaint

ance.

1. The persons to whom this prescription applies. The mystified man for one. The Gospel seems strange. Its themes are unlike his usual themes. They belong to a different order of realities. He is like a native of Japan set down in the streets of New York or Boston. His feeling cannot be removed by explanation or argu

ment.

The sceptical man too, the toughest case; and if the remedy avail with him, it can fail with none. He roams in a wilderness of doubts. If he feel the pressure of God's claims, some one doubt likely will haunt him like a demon. Perhaps he goes on to outright disbelief.

The trembling Christian man. He did once run well. His hope was bright. But something has hindered him. His mind is now

dark. He doubts and fears.

With all such the paradox is, "How can I believe what I do not understand? How can I embrace what I do not see? And how The answer is: "Come and see."

can I see?"
2. How does this remedy act?

(a) Obedience heals the moral eyesight. Secular science speaks to the head only. Head alone is enough to know that. The Christian themes address the heart also. There must be a heart in order to know these. And not only a heart but a sound heart. Suppose a being without a heart, but only head; he could not well discern the Christian teachings. Quite so with one who has a heart, but a heart diseased. An idiot can see trees and houses; but this does not help him to perceive a mental truth. No more does clearest intellect include the sight of moral and spiritual things. But obedience of what is already seen makes the heart sound and gives it vision.

(b) For something is known by every one of God and of his will. Those plain first things of God and duty which reason and conscience tell, not even the sceptic can deny unless he turn atheist and become a beast. Some sin he does confess. Let him heartily repent so far as he does see, and he will then see the full length and breadth of his sins, his need of an atoning Saviour, and a gracious Spirit, his dependence on mercy, and his desert of sin's doom. Just as simple repentance under the preaching of the Baptist prepared the Lord's way, so it is still.

(c) Compliance with known duty gives the mind breadth and candor. The party politician can not appreciate or understand the principles of his opponents. So with those who have not chosen the part of Christ. Let the heart obey, and a new temper and cast of thought ensue.

(d) Knowledge by personal trial. So soon as we come to Christ and receive his words, we find a perfect adaptation between them and our nature and needs. As soon as Christ is embraced he imparts a life and warmth to the heart that before was cold and dead.

ARTICLE VIII.

LITERARY NOTICES.

1.—Lectures on the Pantheistic Idea of an Impersonal-SubstanceDeity, as contrasted with the Christian Faith concerning Almighty God. By the Rev. MORGAN DIx, S. T. D., Rector of Trinity Church, New York. 12mo. pp. 109. New York: Hurd & Houghton. Boston: E. P. Dutton & Co.

1864.

DR. DIX has placed the Christian public under obligations to himself by these admirable lectures. Within the limits which he has given himself, he has done an excellent and very complete work in showing up the odious but subtle spirit of this old heresy. His style is direct and forcible, his ideas clearly cut and compactly fitted, his spirit fervent and reverent. The book does not contain a treatise or dissertation on this topic; but a half-dozen discourses addressed to his congregation; and they are specimens of pulpit address well worthy the study and imitation of preachers who would run molten metal into living moulds.

Dr. Dix traces the Pantheistic error from its ancient and eastern homes down through medieval to modern French, German and Anglo-Saxon developments. He shows its identity in these outgrowths,

and its fatal mischiefs. We will give two or three samples of his method of handling the almost intangible subject.

"The theory of Pantheism may be thus expressed: it asserts the unity and identity of substance, and denies to the finite any real existence apart from the infinite. . . . Of this substance every thing is formed.

The sea and the dry land, the mountain and the river, the bird and the beast, the flowers and the trees, the bodies and the souls of men, the skies, the stars, the suns, the world, the universe throughout, are all of one and the self same substance. It matters not what differences or what varieties there be in form, figure, properties or uses; all things at last are essentially one and the same. Unity and identity of substance. This is the pantheistic principle. Earth, air, fire, water, all at last, are The ground on which you walk is substantially the same as you that walk on it. The book in which you read is of the same substance as your mind which comprehends it. This pulpit in which I preach is of the same substance as I. All things one and the same. But, where is God? you ask. Ah, brethren, this one substance is God also. This substance is the only God." p. 21.

one.

This substance was eternal, without personal qualities, or powers or consciousness, or activity

....

"A vast, illimitable flood; a great, unfathomable deep, a hollow silence, a heavy unconsciousness, a condition mute, speechless, thoughtless. There was, from within, a tendency toward the surface. The great belly of blackness and unconscious horror, trembled as it were, and the abyss, for it seems no better, was in labor and would bring forth. . . . . The substance, working from within, threw itself out into visible phenomena. Thus, there came forth a sky; and thus by aggregation stole forth the planets and the stars. The earth was then a part of that eternal substance localized; a finite form of that infinite. And since that substance was God, therefore the earth was God. It was God made visible in the form of ground, and seas, and hills, and plains. The same is affirmed of all animals. They were forms thrown out from that inner germination, all of the same substance, and all parts of God, or realizations of God." pp. 23, 24.

We give one paragraph more to finish this self-evolving monstrosity of being and divinity. Its statement, in terms, is its best and utter refutation to any one who ought not to be in a lunatic asylum: we ask no pardon of Spinoza or Spencer. A part of this sub

stance has

'Suddenly perceived the fact expressed in the words, I exist, I am.' It saw that it was. It beheld in front of it the universe; it perceived itself to be therewith, face to face. It was conscious at length; the infinite substance thought, and reasoned, and took counsel with itself at last. This was, of course, God. It was God aiming at a higher development than any yet reached. It was God coming to the consciousness of him