ble objects are in their names. But too many of our speculators in spiritual science have halted in just this nebulous region of puerile if not criminal confusion, where evil is good and good evil about as men choose so to regard them; where what a man believes is the least important question which can be put concerning him; where the chief discovery of the explorers is, that nothing can be or need be fixed with any definiteness or assurance as to the connections of man with God, time with eternity, conduct with future recompense. Talk of the mysteries of the Christian revelation! Here is a mystification which defies all competition. We can scarcely subject it to any analysis. It has hardly substance sufficient in it to be handled. "Shall I strike at it with my partisan?" "Do if it will not stand." ""Tis here!"""Tis here!" ""Tis gone!"

We concede that genuine goodness is sure of its reward; that truth is always a safe guide. But what is truth; and what is goodness? Something, we again affirm, fixed, positive, ascertainable as is the composition of a tree or a flower. They follow strictly in this the analogies of the entire creation of God. But, fixed and ascertainable, with relation to what index or test of decision? Here comes in the bearing of our moral theories and spiritual sympathies upon our religious faith. The Epicurean had his religion. Its creed was; "I believe in indiscriminate enjoyment; I worship Pleasure." With this ideal of life running through his judgments of what is good, excellent, desirable, he could not rise beyond this grade of doctrine. His god must be of the family of a Bacchus or a Venus. So the radically defective ethics of the old pagans, as of the modern, shut them off from Jehovah's love, in thraldom to a motley multitude of debasing idols.

"Their gods! what were their gods?

There's Mars, all bloody-haired; and Hercules,
Whose soul was in his sinews; Pluto, blacker
Than his own hell; Vulcan, who shook his horns
At every limp he took! Great Bacchus rode

Upon a barrel; and in a cockleshell

Neptune kept state. Then Mercury was a thief;
Juno a shrew; Pallas-a prude at best;

And Venus walked the clouds in search of lovers!
Only great Jove, the lord and thunderer
Sate in the circle of his starry power,
And frowned I will' to all."

What chance was here for God and his commandments, for Christ and his precepts? These are facts and principles ever working in one direction; they are moving in exactly the contrary. When may they come together, and cement an alliance of the holy and unholy? If, again, virtue be whatever is useful, and this to be determined by the current maxims of thrift and good fortune, the religion of such a morality can be only an idolatry of self, a deification of worldly success. Its temple is the court of Mammon. At no point can it make a junction with the benevolent, the lofty and pure integrity of God. It can never understand the gain of that godliness which denies itself to follow Christ; which takes joyfully the spoiling of its goods for the gospel's sake; which becomes poor that it may be rich; which humbles itself that it may be exalted. Here are antagonistic qualities that will no more coalesce than oil will mingle with water. What is good to one is not good to both. They have no common basis of union. Is beauty goodness? Is truth the harmony of natural objects, the symmetry of forms, the due blending and shading of colors? Is holiness the fine appreciation, the fervid admiration of lovely things in nature and art; of pleasant thoughts, and elevated pursuits, and generous sentiments? Is the æsthetic sense the moral sense? And is its verdict the highest sentence of the right and the wrong? Is the world of matter and of man, under this expositor, the first and the last revelation of doctrine and duty to the human spirit?

So not a few contend, and frame a religion to its prescription. It gives, for this, a thin but elegantly ornamental speculation about the meaning and the method of this life and the next. Its god is a fairy-like being delighting mostly in shadowy woods, and sequestered mountains, and glens and paths of romantic loveliness; in fretted roofs, and columned aisles, and solemn chants of cathedral sanctuaries; caring far more for a tastefully embellished worship than for obedience to a righteous law; ever ready to accept the pretty sentimentalities of devotion as a sufficient equivalent for a service of sincere holiness. With an amiable charity it will see little in man but the brighter side of his better feelings, impulses, acts. Despite his sordid selfishness, and brutish grovelings, and horrid crimes, man is to

its eye a sort of glorified existence, an almost god in disguise, rich in latent virtues which only wait an opportunity to reveal themselves. Virtue is anything which wears a chivalrous, dashing front, a soft and delicate and melting mood, no matter with what interludes of stormier and guiltier passion. It precisely reverses the real condition of man, making goodness the natural groundwork of his character, and depravity its accidental and surface appendage. Heroes are plenty on its calendar; and heroes are all saints, whether Paul or Luther or Robert Burns, or any one who has displayed genius and magnanimity however misled by sin. It has no sight for aught which might inspire alarm concerning man's future destiny. What a beautiful going to sleep is death to the weary of life; how balmy its dew to the fevered brow; how refreshing its deepening twilight to the aching eye; how soft the grave-rest to the worn out body; how inviting the immortal years to the buoyant, jubilant spirit which has only to live on as it has lived here, only with all the pleasures wonderfully enlarged, and the ills and pains reduced to a most desirable unimportance. To die is indeed to meet God; but such a winning, wooing, smiling God; and such a paradise of entrancing sights and sounds to captivate, and enrapture, and educate the taste; who need fear to die, to cross over Jordan to a Canaan so indiscriminately inviting? And what a bigoted theology must that be, which still will talk of

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the dread of something after death;" which still will clothe the transit to eternity and the judgment seat of Christ with terror to the worldling and the wicked; which still will reiterate and reëcho the solemn words; "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God"!

Sound morals and true piety are in no way opposed to the pursuit of pleasure, the just appreciation of the useful or the beautiful. They give the utmost scope for these, but they insist on judging these and all things by the standard of God's pure holiness, his revealed sentiments, character, acts. No earthborn scheme of morality is religion. Religion is morality regenerated; natural virtue infused with divine grace; the amiabilities, and integrities, and gracefulnesses of human hearts, penetrated, inspired, refined, controlled by the love of God made manifest in Christ, regained through Christ. Christianity is

man restored to God in peace and purity, and everlasting union through God's atoning Son. Its hymn of praise forever is this; "Giving thanks unto the Father, who hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son. In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins." Here are definite, constituting principles of a religious faith, solid, shapely as the foundations, the beams and pillars of a palace. By a personal introduction into this faith, an experimental knowledge of its power, we are in reconciliation with supreme holiness; we are on the substantial basis of a genuine, practical morality; we are at the true point of a perception of spiritual beauty; we are in harmony with a right and useful theory of life; we are fitted for a desirable death and a blissful eternity. These are the true sayings of God. They give us the religion of morality and the morality of religion. They are fixed quantities in the statement and solution of this grand problem of life and immortality. To reject them, is to call right wrong. To form a system of spiritual science without them, or with them nominally but so modified by opposing elements and alterative constructions as to destroy their proper force, is to put error for truth. A morality, a religion without these central powers is as much a falsehood as would be a steam-engine without a steam-generator; as would be a banking-house without a dollar in its vaults. Is a stone bread? Is a scorpion an egg? Yes; if spiritual facts and obligations and destinies are whatever men's fancies choose to have them, gossamer threads spun like spiders' webs from their own resources, instead of the unchangeable verities of God's holy word.

Things have a nature; and the nature of things controls their consequences. To call evil good does not make it good nor safe. To call darkness light does not make it light. To call bitter sweet does not make it sweet. To fashion a false god does not dethrone the true God. To discard gospel faith and salvation does not explode them as delusions. To look on dying as the pleasant gateway to certain rest and happiness does not make it this to an unregenerate sinner. Consequences are as, because they are in, their antecedents. Error ruins, truth

saves.

Darkness misleads, light guides. Holiness blesses, sin curses. This is the separation of things radical and universal, each to his own place, which runs through the moral world now; which will run on forever; shaping men's destinies according to their characters, as weighed and measured by God's impartial tests.

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How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!"-Ps. cxxxix. 17.

GOD is a thinking being. The manifestation of wisdom that we everywhere see in his works must be the result of intelligence. We thus have the clearest proof of his personality. Strange it is that there are men who look to no higher source than an unintelligent law-power in nature, for the varied productions of wisdom and omnipotence which are massed in order and rich profusion everywhere around us. Atheism never has been able to solve the problem of the universe, nor pantheism to tell us how intelligence has been evolved from unintelligent or dead matter.

If God's thoughts were precious to the Psalmist, there must in some way have been a disclosure of them to his mind by God. Two questions, therefore, are suggested by the text.

1. How are the thoughts of God disclosed to men?

(a) God's thoughts find expression in executive volitions, and are thus disclosed in his works. The plan of all God's works had been formed in his mind before they were brought forth by the fiat of omnipotence. We read the thoughts of God in every plant, bud, flower, insect and fossil of the earth, in the planets, stars and remotest nebulæ of the stellar universe, and in all the laws of nature.

Every new discovery in natural science discloses to us a thought of God which had ever before been hid in the mysteries of eternity. The revelation of his thoughts is thus continually going on, and flashing into our minds. Kepler thus apprehended the subject when on the discovery of one of the laws of planetary motion he exclaimed, "I think thy thoughts after thee, O God!"

(b) God's thoughts are made known to us in the Scriptures.