of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their dead bodies that we might march over and take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis.

upon

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis, and this or the other man, with his sect, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure victory; but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible creeds, sank into the ditch and became a dead body, what was to be said? Withal it is an important fact in the nature of man that he tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes it as such. He will always do it, I suppose, in one or the other way; but it must be in some wider and wiser way than this. Are not all true men that live or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army; enlisted under Heaven's captaincy to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow each other, fight not against the enemy, but against ourselves, from mere difference of uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true and valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor's strong hammer, smiting down Jotuns, shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not against us. We are all under one Captain, soldiers of the same host.Thomas Carlyle.

WHAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERS SHOULD Do.

We no longer look on the different creeds of the world, as did the martyrs of old, as being absolutely true or absolutely false, the service of God himself or of the Devil himself.

We see them to be only steps upward in an infinite ascent; only the substitution for a lower of a higher but still all-imperfect ideal of the Holy One. Doubtless we are nearer the true judgment. Doubtless also it was well that of old, in the days of the stake and the rack, men should have seen these things

differently; for few indeed could have borne to die, clearly seeing their persecutors to be only partially mistaken in their own creed-the creed for which they were enduring torture and agony-only one of the thousand "little systems" of earth,—

a

"Which have their day and cease to be,"

broken light" from the inaccessible Sun of Truth. *

*

But we, in our day, have reached a different pass. We seem to have quitted the region of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, and have come to a land—

"Where it is always afternoon."

There is among the highest order of minds a disposition to accept finally a condition which may be designated as one of reverential skepticism. * * * A sort of direful fashion has set in to praise whatever seems vaguest in doctrine, and weakest in faith, as if therefore it were necessarily wisest and most philosophic. We look distrustfully on any one who has not dissolved away in some mental crucible all solid belief in a personal God, and a conscious immortality into certain fluid and gaseous ideas of eternities and immensities. We assume it contentedly as proven that the "limitations of rel gious thought" make it as hopeless for us to find a faith which will keep alive our souls, as an elixir vitæ to keep alive our bodies. We wander to and fro hopelessly through the wilderness of doubt; and if any come to tell us of a land flowing with milk and honey, the glory of all lands, which they have found beyond, we dismiss them with a complacent sigh, even if they bring back noblest fruits from their Canaan.

There is surely great error in this state of feeling. Though infallible knowledge is not for men-though we have neither faculties to receive it nor language to convey it—yet it is far indeed from established that our powers fall short of attaining such a share of knowledge of divine things as may suffice for the primary wants of our souls. We need such knowledge for the higher part of our nature, as much as we

need bread and clothing for the lower. It is the greatest want of the greatest creature: and if indeed it have no supply, then is the analogy of the universe broken off. There is a presumption of incalculable force that these cravings which arise in the profoundest depths of our souls, which we can never put away, and on which our moral health depends, are not to be forever denied their natural satisfaction, while the ravens are fed and the grass of the field drinks in the dew. We have indeed asked too much hitherto. We have cried like children for the moon of an unattainable infallibility. We have called for systems of theology dissecting the mysteries of our Maker's nature and attributes. But because these things are denied us, are we therefore to despair of knowing those fundamental truths which we must either gain, or else morally and spiritually die?

*

*

*

It is a simple induction from the order of the universe that the soul of man is not the only thing left without its food, its light, its guide, its soul-sufficing end and aim.

We must not, dare not, doubt that it will be to a larger, higher, purer truth the human race is being led onward, and that that truth is safer than all the well-tried errors of the past. The old Ragnarok, the "Twilight of the Gods," in which our heathen forefathers believed, may be coming now; but there will be a glorious sunrise afterward. The "ages of faith" are not behind us, but before us.

The task then of the religious teacher of our time is to prepare and strengthen men for the future; to give them such faith in God and reverence for his law, independently of traditional creeds, as shall avail them when these are overwhelmed. -Frances Power Cobbe.

LEIGH HUNT.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART.

God,-which is the name for the great First Cause of the Universe, for the power which has set it in motion, which adorns it with beauty, and which, in this our portion of it, and through the mystery of time and trouble, incites us to attain to the welfare and the joy which are therefore to be considered the purpose of final existence, here or hereafter,-God has written his religion in the heart, for growing wisdom to read perfectly, and time to make triumphant.

Without this First Divine Writing, and this power to outgrow barbarous misconceptions of it, no writing claiming to be divine, could be estimated, or understood. The human being would have no language to correspond with its meaning, no faculties to recognize whatever divineness it contained, or to reject what was mixed with it of unworthy. Decline its arbitration, when ascertained by the only final evidence of its correctness, that of a thorough harmony with itself, and there is no folly, cruelty, or impiety of belief, which the mind, however unwillingly, and to its ultimate confusion, shall not be led to take for religion. Admit the arbitration so ascertained, and such mistakes become impossible. Doctrines revolting to the heart are not made to endure, however mixed up they may be with lessons the most divine. They contain the seeds of their dissolution. They cannot even be thoroughly well taught. Something inconsistent, something quarrelsome, something dissatisfied with itself, or uncharitable to others, something uneasy, unlovely, or unpersuasive, will sooner or later disclose the incongruity, and leave the gentle and coherent wisdom to be found the only guide.

With a like necessity for relief from the otherwise imperfect conclusions of the understanding, mankind have been so constituted, that for the most part they cannot without uneasi

ness dissociate the ideas of order and design, of means taken and ends contemplated, of progressive humanity and a divine intention. They are conscious of a difference between mind and body, between the greatness of their intellectual aspirations and the smallness of their knowledge; and most of all, between their capacity for happiness and the amount of it which they realize and for all these reasons they desire a Giver and a Comforter, whom they thank in joy, and turn for support to in affliction, and feel to be the only fulfiller and security of that triumph over the visible and the mortal, which their nature has been made to desire.

Impressed more and more with a sense of the Great Beneficence, in proportion as we become intimate with his works, the holders of the Religion of the Heart believe, that part of his divine occupation is to work ends befitting his goodness, out of different forms of matter, and out of transient, qualified, and unmalignant evils; probably to the endless multiplication of heavens.

They believe, that in the world which they inhabit, its human beings are among the instruments with which the Great Beneficence visibly operates, to purposes of this nature; that is to say, with manifest change and advancement: and they are of opinion, that wherever a so-called divinely-inspired man has appeared, the inspiration has been justly attributed to his unusual participation of the beneficent impulse, in proportion as the lessons which he has taught have been effective, reasonable and lasting.

They are of opinion, that enough of these lessons have been given mankind to furnish them with right principles of conduct, mental and bodily; but that the particulars of conduct into which those principles should be carried out, are too commonly lost sight of in the supposed sufficiency of general precepts, perfect in spirit, but incessantly violated for want of reduction to such particulars. It is therefore their opinion, that this want ought to be zealously and constantly supplied; that health of mind and health of body are to be professedly