who come out of great tribulation, with robes "washed white in the blood of the Lamb.”

We rest here in the third general theory of man which we announced, that transmitted dispositions and proclivities to evil, coming down a line of tainted ancestry, and gathering strength and volume the farther they descend, is a universal law of human descent. Objections, doubtless, may still be raised, such as that every soul is a fresh creation of God, and is therefore pure. Or, again, that the tide of corruption that comes from behind us and sweeps us away, destroys our moral responsibility. The first objection we do not think it worth while to entertain. It is fanciful and vague, and reasons not from facts that we know, but claims to set those facts aside from some imaginary psychology. To the other objection we are sufficiently sensitive, and we grant that it might be valid if the foregoing argument claimed to give the whole account of man. But it does not: and this objection will disappear in the light of any rational and faithful delineation of man's spiritual nature and capacities. We have described the disease, for it behooves us to know the worst, though it lead us among ruins that are mournful. We turn now to views that are auspicious and cheering.

PART II.

THE SPIRITUAL NATURE.

There is in heaven a light whose goodly shine
Makes the Creator visible to all

Created, that in seeing him alone

Have peace; and in its circuit spreads so far,
That the circumference, with enlarging zone,
Doth girdle in the worlds."- CARY'S DANTE.

"The SPEECH OF GOD which produces the works of creation is that immutable REASON from which they flow, and by which they are perfected, not an evanescent voice merely, but a living energy, reaching to the farthest extremities of nature and the most distant ages. In this manner God speaks to his holy angels, but to them audibly to us otherwise, on account of our grosser apprehension. But when we perceive through our internal ears some faint notices of this Divine Speech, we approach the angels." — AUGUSTINE, DE CIV. DEI, Lib. XVI. cap. 6.

6*

CHAPTER I.

THE HOLY SPIRIT.

"That which we find in ourselves is the substance and the life of all our knowledge. Without this latent presence of the I AM, all modes of existence in the external world would flit before us as colored shadows, with no greater depth, root, or fixture than the image of the rock hath in a gliding stream, or the rainbow in a fast-sailing rainstorm. The human mind is the compass, in which the laws and actuations of all outward essences are revealed as the dips and declinations."— COLERIDGE.

THE spiritual nature implies two things. A spiritual world which exists out of man, and a faculty in him to put him in connection with that world, and apprehend its objects. It implies the adaptation of one to the other. The physical nature includes the faculties of sensation: but the faculties of sensation imply their objects, — the world of sights and sounds and fragrance; of skies, fields, and waters; a world which puts the physical nature in connection with itself, and unfolds all the sensuous powers. Even so there is the same correlative fitness of the spiritual man to a spiritual world, or else the term spiritual nature, as applied to human beings, would be a term without a meaning.

Let us now approach the subject of the Divine nature so far forth as to deduce the doctrine of Divine influence. There are two sources of evidence

that lie open to us whereby this doctrine may come clear and living to our minds. There is a sure and safe analogy, and there are the vivid descriptions of revelation.

Man is created in the image of God, and so in man the Creator has abridged and copied out his own attributes. Were it not so, we could have no communion with the Eternal Father, any more than the beasts of the field or the clods of the valley. We could not even form any conception of the Divine nature, for we could get no ideas answering to the terms which describe it, and God would be unrevealed in the human and finite images which set him forth. For instance, if there be a trinity in God, there would also be a trinity in man, that likeness which a pencil of rays out of his own nature has made of itself and projected into time. And just so far as it fails of realization in the likeness and the copy will the words that describe it be words and nothing more. And so of the Holy Spirit. In man must we find the analogy that sets forth its nature, else the terms that describe it will be sounds that float idle upon the air.

We describe the human being from two points of view;-man as he is, and man as he is manifested in his doings;-man in his own person, and man in the spirit that is breathed out of it; in his intrinsic nature and in its daily and hourly outgoings; in his essential being, and in the functions it performs in the economy of life; in the powers that lie within him, and in the influence that goes out of him, and creates