picture down; but, Come to the summit and look with me! Mediator or medium betwixt, and I myself not on speaking terms with God? I decline anything

seen.

between! We feel, touch and partake divinity. What is this doctrine of ghosts as apparitions? "Have you seen a ghost?" The nature of a ghost is not to be Not only is it not but it cannot be beheld. It is invisible, incapable of disclosure to sight. Who ever saw the Holy Ghost? Spectre and spirit are not one. It is the most cunning trick of materialism to take spiritualism for its name, though there be celestial forms and transformings without end.

But the mighty conductors of humanity never die. Napoleon, after his victories, hid himself in Paris, knowing his power would grow in the mystery of his being unseen. Josiah, the Jewish king, broke down the altars and burned the bones of idolatrous and adulterous women and priests. But, coming to the sepulchre of a true prophet, he said, "Let him alone; let no man move his bones!" Even in the ashes the honor inhered.

"Dear friend, for Jesus' sake, forbear!

To dig the dust enclosed here:

Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."

Stern was the Hebrew passion of revenge. Who of us would unbury and cast into the fire the bones of Arnold or Booth? What slaveholder but would thrill with a sacred awe at the sepulchre of John Brown? What holy water could consecrate the spot? What party in power would rake into the grave of Jackson or Lincoln,

or Greeley or Seward? Perhaps the theory of the bodily resurrection of Jesus was invented to prevent discovery and adoration of his remains. If a bone were extant, how it would be adored! It is the dignity of virtue that from a thread of its garment we cannot keep our worship and love. Exclaim against leadership? Yet we gravitate to our superior, as the satellite cannot escape the sun. We are not the soul, but only poor part of it, and must revolve about who is more. "Cut deeper," said the French soldier to the surgeon; "you will find Napoleon in my heart." Pity it was not a better idol; but some idol the votary with no vision must have. The ideal Christ no science or criticism can displace. A spiritual model, a moral enthusiasm is our deepest need. There is a part of our nature which no knowledge of facts or laws, only personal devotion, can satisfy and absorb.

"Only thou our leader be,

And we still will follow thee."

What walking cerebral prodigies and Dominie Samsons we should be, if to understand the construction of the world were our only aim, the whole being run to seed in our specialty of study, as sometimes a man seems to be only the other end of a microscope, or a gnome in a laboratory, or a worm in a book! But, as one says, Seeing is not believing. We cannot live without faith. It is not the providential individuals we follow, save as they are pointers to some polar star. As we follow in a race or voyage for the goal or port; as we follow Tyndall or Agassiz in an experiment or demonstration, so we copy some pattern of holiness and

truth; and no abstract thinker can escape the law. Call the record in question, prove the legend or declare the miracles impossible or unproved, and that you cannot verify the credible facts; still the divine idea, like a meteor plunging from the sky, is lodged in the human mind, buries itself in the heart, ploughs its way through history; and Strauss, that eye-opener for the literalists, and Rènan equally with Furness or Channing, do it reverence under utmost diversity of view. Myth or man, imagination or incarnation, it is immortal beauty that constrains our homage and obeisance; and over some mental constitutions a picture in the light of thought, whatever mystic pencil drew it, has more power than any canvas; for the real is not the circumstantial or statistical; it is the archetype or pattern in the mount, or plan and painting in the breast, after and according to which all is drawn and done. It is not the flesh and blood you, sitting beside me, that I love; but my dream of you, your possibility, or the at present angelic impossibility I know you will become; and he is but a pretended philosopher who holds this a bubble to prick, or nothing but smoke. It is blown with eternal breath, and rises from the far unquenchable fire. The artist takes not the gross expression in his portrait, but catches the shy, revealing look; and the hard urging on us of any definable historic individual as the only example, instead of this ideal, is profanity in the guise of piety. Desecrated by the British in 1775 and 1776 is the inscription on the marble tablet, in Boston, of the Old South Church. Does the theologian think he may violate a greater sanctuary and trample on a purer shrine, as with his invading dogmas he sub

It is

jects a child's liberty to think? Not only is our thought sacred: nothing sacred in the universe beside! God to us and God in us. You may call Feuerbach an atheist; but his affirmation that there are not two beings, but one, alike ours and God's, and no separate or separable divinity, is the sincere religion, which every sort of dualism denies.

We must have our thought of Jesus. Even he must submit to that solvent, which he has made more searching. If we find that his verbal portrait fills not, or anywise contravenes our conception of excellence, that he is not, as Pope says —

"That faultless monster which the world ne'er saw,”

then we must stand by our perception, though the fanes of nations and high altars of ages fall. The river of God, his perennial communication must have room, whatever be crowded out! Only your dam makes it rage and riot to ruin. Let it run, it will itself rear grace and safety for its banks! But it differentiates every moment its deeps. No son of God can be religious for another. Our religion must be a fresh procession of the Holy Ghost. Even the glacier shifts its particles in its course down the mighty gorge. Like a huge icicle it grows and moves. Even the atoms of the rock dance. The pyramids stand; but were not to Egypt what they are to us. Nothing can stay! Everything must go. The Spirit says, Behold I make all things new.

H

A

XI.

PERSONALITY.

NOBLE nature-worshipper says: I cannot deny it includes thee too in its pied and painted immensity. But, if I am included, it does not take much space! Your parlor or my pulpit will suffice as well as a continent or solar system. Diogenes were included so in his tub, and impertinent to ask Alexander to get out of his sunshine. Thomas Browne was guilty of extravagance:

"His eyes dismount the highest star."

Is the manager comprehended in the parts and properties of his theatre? Is the human actor taken in by the world which is all a stage? I imagine the Academy held not Plato, nor the palace Bonaparte, nor his closet Fenelon, nor the church Luther, nor the lectureroom the fine genius I quote. We part with spirit, lose immortality, and idolize place and time wherever we stoop to limits, or find in the elements our origin. We are capable of a devotion that mocks at accident, as did Shakespeare's love. Heine says, the old soldier. of Napoleon, thinking he had committed the unpardonable sin in presenting, by order, his bayonet to the