stowed upon the ceremonies of the new dispensation. Always, he is occupied with ideas and practical duties. Though he himself in earlier days received the baptism of John, he administered the rite to none; whether, like Paul, deeming it secondary, or like the Friends, useless, we cannot be positive. Only the least historical of the Gospels allows him in any way to give it his sanction in his own ministry.

"This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me." But for the practice of the early Church we might suppose that Jesus meant to crave especial remembrance in the yearly passover supper. Possibly he did, and the disciples misunderstood him. The most human and beautiful meaning, however, is just that which the custom of the primitive Church implies. In their daily or weekly social gatherings the bread of which all partook suggested him, from whom the new life of all was felt to be derived, and the wine commemorated that divine self-sacrifice of which his martyr blood was the emblem.

Had Jesus proposed a perpetual ordinance, he must have been more definite. Who can dwell upon the scene, and not feel that the one thing longed for was sympathy with him in his sacrifice- the communion of the disciples through the common fellowship of the Martyr master? Who does not see that the form must be pliable to the spirit, and that to obey truly the teacher, any given ceremony must be modified or abandoned in humble subservience to its idea and intention?

If a formal rite would not have been repulsive to Jesus, it was at least wholly unanticipated, and if he to-day should return to the earth, and look in upon his professed followers, the sacrifice of the Mass might more grieve but not more surprise him, than the Protestant Sacrament of the Communion.

ENLIGHTENMENTS.

BY JAIRUS.

INDEPENDENCE.—I would have all good people consider well this poetic tradition of a man who knew his own business:

"There was an old man had a poker.

He painted his face with red ochre.

When folk said, 'You 're a Guy,'

He made no reply,

But knocked them all down with his poker."

Whatever shall be the verdict which men of moderation, of good worldly sense, tempered with a Christian returning-of-good-for-evil may render, I

am disposed to be so much of a heathen myself, as to cry-Bravo! old man with a poker and face of red ochre. Thou didst assert thine independence. Whose business but your own, that you used red ochre ?

BELIEF. The first progressive word is this I start with. It must be that Jesus had some such idea, when he said, "He that believeth not shall be damned." I quite agree to that. The trouble with the world is, it does not believe enough? Poor, unbelieving world! That's the truth of the matter. It believes a few things-terribly. But it don't believe things enough. It shouts, Infidel, to all the truest believers. Yea, it shouts itself hoarse. Shout away! I shout back to you - BLESSED be that infidelity which believes so much it casts out fear!

WELL ENOUGH. —"Let well enough alone." Why? Because it is well enough? Because there is nothing better? Are all things just as you would have them, if you could have all things as you want them? Are all things Right? "No." Then why don't you right them, or try? "Better bear the ills we have than fly to others we know not of." Had you? Well then, bear away. But one thing I know; you're cowardly; you don't believe. And I say unto you, just as Jesus did, because you don't believe you shall be damned—until you do. Now a man must believe that there are no ills to fly to which are not better than those he has; of course, I mean, if his purpose is not to seek ills but goods. In trying to know more and do better, there must be all manner of help and furtherance extended by the wise God's plan. Don't be so afraid, O trembling world! Oh, you shall be shocked, and shocked, and shocked! until you come up to the help of the Lord in a believing, decent way. That's true!

REFORM.-Society is never ready for reform, let it tell the story. It has but one motto: "Let well enough alone." A sad well enough, if it were well enough. But society is ready, always ready for reform; needs it, waits for it, must have it, or perish. It never likes it, of course, as a sick man never likes medicine. But then, there is no escape: GOD will, have it so. Indeed, he has so fashioned the soul of man that it can keep its self-respect only on such condition. But then, again, it does seem as though most people in the world would not only lose self-respect, but even forget they ever had any, unless they were lashed up to the work of finding it. The majority of people are not reformers in the true, full sense of the term; not joyous, happy, willing, whole-souled workers; workers with faith: faith in the untried future. The gain we must expect lies in this direction. It is the self-moving life which does not want to be driven; which loves to carry its cross up Calvary hill, or any other. How much better to acquiesce in the Eternal Will, and good-naturedly, and with enthusiasm, help on reform, and on, and evermore on, than to be so surly and snappish; telling God, if not in so many spoken words from your mouth, in your actions which speak louder than words, - "What miserable, good for nothing work you have set us about. Please let us alone, won't you?" Oh, for shame!

T

A SIGN OF THE TIMES.

HE Address of Rev. E. H. SEARS, of Wayland, before the Alumni of the Divinity School, in July last, merits a distinct recognition, and a better notice than it got in the daily papers at the time. It was not merely "able,”. as the gentlemanly reporter said, — it was even great, and wonderful of its kind. By which is implied that it was a "kind" of address, to please a "kind" of men who are apt to constitute themselves into the body-guard of Christianity. That is, the men who assume to be, and to act on every occasion, as its chosen defenders and champions, and who bristle all over with points of antagonism to what they are pleased to call Naturalism, or the "Spirit of the Age," forgetting that that spirit as expressed in civilization is not unchristian, and that it has been their highest boast and office on former occasions, to proclaim "Christianity the religion of nature." No matter—if this Naturism can be made to serve a purpose, or to point a moral it must be held up in the most partial, and therefore, ludicrous light, its radical evil, its destructiveness shown, and its "utter impotence to build up" [the church ?] must be exhibited, in order to destroy confidence in its method and results; and so give men a chance, at least, to believe in the divine and saving efficacy of Christianity.

While admitting the truths contained in this remarkable address, it is necessary to enter and record our protest against the assumption, that the author was entirely right in measuring Nature by himself, and saying what she can, or cannot do, as an influence on literature, or as a power in religious thought. What this or that man thinks is nothing to Nature, unless it can be shown that Nature uses him to think, and that this thinking nature is wrong. Science, which is only a form of the human understanding, is necessarily un-religious, since it detaches man from Nature, and Nature from God. The scientific view of nature is therefore wrong, because it is incomplete. It requires to be balanced and offset by the moral-æsthetic, or poetic view which gives the other a fairer side of Nature. Beauty it is, which comprehends that law, "whose seat is the bosom of God, and her voice the harmony of the world." The world as looked at through the eyes of a great poet, is not the world of science-as this latter, is not the common prose world of men and women; yet it takes the highest effort of religious genius to express what common men feel. Their instincts travel the same way with the Metaphysical spirit, which takes the "high a priori road," over transcendental ideas. The divine aspect and symbolism of nature, its theology, so to speak, is only seen by the poet or prophet. Small chance has theology, when it comes to the retort or crucible.

The method of science is by analysis, and decomposition; and neither man, God, nor the devil, if there be one, will gain aught by such a process, save degradation or annihilation. Had the lecturer said that science in natura, leads to pure nihilism, but that nature in religione leads to God, he would have conveyed a far truer idea than he did by representing her as purely destructive of religious ideas and institutions; hence nature, by in

ference, Christless and Godless, both in effect and cause. We admit no such nature in our theology. It comes too near the doctrine of total depravity. All such is spiritual defect in man, not religious effect of Nature. Call it infidelity if you will, it is not natural. The natural method in theology is the true one, and not more radical than conservative. Nature is always good and true to herself, and few are found worthy to interpret her. Not hers the vain sciolism, the upstart criticism, or philosophy which denies to man the highest natural endowment—a moral and religious nature. Call it-the criticism—as it was called, not nature, but nature-ism—a vile word for a viler thing. Nature, be sure, hates all isms, as she hates the devil. Who talks of "dividing the whole, and throwing away the upper and better half?" The charge of sectionalism is one which the true Naturist repels with indignation, and it is, possibly, more averse to a transcendentalist than to any other. He gives the widest scope and interpretation to the word "nature,"— not as Mr. Sears does, who employs it in various senses, viz: as simple nature, then a way of thinking, a tendency of thought, a phase and fashion of philosophy, the ism of somebody and even that wretched man of straw, which is knocked down so cleverly. The idea of nature is that of one whole thing, the sum total of all created things, the world, the universe. It properly includes what some regard as divine and supernatural. "The universe is the only miracle, and in it is contained all that is miraculous." So said St. Augustine, who was a Christian. He would rather that Christianity should come in the circle of nature, than that nature should appear quietly ignoring Christianity. Which is the ism here? But this is the ground of complaint, the precise charge brought by Mr. Sears against the Naturists; that they are incompetent to judge of Christianity, which, we suppose, is a "super-natureism,”—at any rate, an order of truth above natural law; consequently, above and beyond the reach and apprehension of the lawyers, and divines, philosophers, and men of science, the high priests of Nature, who know only her laws, and her religion, and are very, very wrong to claim Christianity as any part of it. But they do no more than Christians, who boast that "Christianity is the religion of Nature." That men who read only the natural law, should be less versed in the moral law than those who make that their exclusive study, is natural; but he is nearer the truth, who insists that the natural law is moral; and that no truth, no law was promulgated from the moral Mount of Christianity which is not thundered back from the law of nature. In truth, that law is neither pagan nor Christian. Not out of Nature springs the light she is read by: but she is what you are; and in what spirit you come, that she appears; for Nature "wears the colors of the spirit." Given Christ, and she makes Christians of us all. Nature stands up for God. But this Naturism is going to the devil. It is Rationalism, the spirit of the Critical Philosophy, or whatever represents the progress of revolutionary opinions within the Church, in alliance with the high and mighty powers of knowledge in the world, at work, resolving the religions of earth-Christianity among them into their primitive elements, into natural phenomena. Worse than

that, the ground of religion itself, appeared to be gradually giving way in man; his reason, his conscience, along with the Bible, the historical Jesus, the Christ, and his authority, appeared entirely natural or phenomenal, that is, visionary. God, the Soul, Immortality, were seen but as the "baseless fabric of a vision." There was a great landslide of religious ideas, leaving the soul bare, and comfortless. Naked as it came into the world, it would go out. Immortality and Regeneration were not for it in a state of nature they were supernatural ideas, which, put into certain mills of logic, and ground into fine dust of philosophy, were, forthwith, blown away by winds of criticism, and made nothing of-a kind of patent annihilator, Christ and Christianity were projected by the "spirit of the age," and were nothing now but sumus et umbra, mental shadow, and smoke, or haze over the landscape of a transcendental philosophy. Nothing was sacred or safe from the attack of this skeptical and profane spirit; it was just only in its impartial destructiveness, a universal destroyer. All religious and Christian traditions, creeds and systems, fled away from before the face of this awful critic, and, like the heavens and the earth in the vision of St. John, there was found no place for them. If it chased the devil off the earth, it did the same also to God. If it showed the absurdity of a local hell, so likewise of a local heaven, a local deity, a "throne," and a "Judgment Day." It denied the immortality of the soul and scouted the idea of a resurrection from the dead. Our bodies, indeed, might be planted and sprout into pansies, or rise and float as purple clouds in the evening sky. And that was the only resurrection possible to a materialist or spiritualist, an atheist, a pantheist, or a transcendentalist, who could never get any higher than the clouds, on his way to heaven.

Immortality, he (Sears,) thought, was not given in nature; or if it was given, it died a natural death. As to being conscious of immortality, that was talking nonsense; and consciously, or unconsciously, Theodore Parker lied about it. That is, he told a falsehood of ignorance knowingly; since, how could a man be conscious of his future life? This, as we understand, is Sears's version of Parker's belief in immortality. But what is Mr. Sears' own belief, and how does he hold, and authenticate this doctrine of immortality? Does he believe it because somebody has told him, or because, in rare moments perhaps, he feels, is conscious of his immortality? Does he deny this feeling to be native and original with him, or will he say that once for all, it got deposited in the brain and heart of Christ, and that he believed it vicariously for the race? Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I am." Must we believe in pre-existence, too, and for the same reason, i. e., Jesus believed it. Which is talking nonsense, to say as Parker did, he was conscious of immortality, or to say as Jesus did, that he existed before he was born? Mr. Sears says truly enough, that we are not conscious of our future lives; but the past, to a certain extent, guarantees the future, and knowing ourselves in the past, we affirm on general principles, that what has been and is, will continue to be. The being we are conscious of, is the same being of whom we have recollection and forethought; and if we