not a time come when he shall cease to be? - This failure of the understanding is compensated by a natural instinct, testifying clearly wherever its light has not been smothered by the queries of logic, or the vices or cares of the life. The belief, such as it is, rests on this: on no miraculous evidence, on no force of demonstration.

But it is generally supposed to rest on the authority of Christian tradition. It lies inert, pillowed on the creed or the common report, divorced from the soul, till it loses its vitality, and no longer appreciates its origin or proper force. In the hour of its trial, it makes hurried appeal to the understanding, and is challenged with a scrutiny it cannot bear. Who shall trust hearsay on so serious a matter? Who knows that "Jesus burst the tomb"? Or if he did, what does that prove for us, unless he be a mere man like us; and then would not the Church be wrong in its theory of his nature, and so, quite as likely be wrong in its tradition of his resurrection? — We are too much in earnest to be satisfied with mythology or sentimentality, and all prepossessions are shattered.

Then the instinct learns its own meaning, and native right. It grows with the call to meet the great need of that spiritual nature, whereof it is the voice. And we find ourselves believing as children who behold the face of their Father, and know it by its loving kindness, by its all-sufficiency to take away their fear. For we have been carried by the stern experience beneath the accidental and unreliable, the outside of life: we have felt our being touched to the quick: we are kneeling at its hallowed fountain heads, its eternal oracles.

Then the strong needs of our affections bring deeper assurance still. We cannot endure the destruction of that which is part of our own living self. The whole spiritual nature revolts at the suggestion that all this ripening sympathy, binding souls, not bodies, was for nothing, and must end in nothing. I suppose one grand purpose of death is to teach us a boundless faith in the affections. The pressure it brings to bear upon them unfolds their power to oversweep all outward separations and dissolutions. And so, if we would have impregnable certainty of Immortal Life, we shall find it in noble friendship, which dares to stake its possibilities of happiness on sympathy in generous aims, and so to confront the worst that death can do. It is sowing an inexpressible need, to reap an inexpressible assurance.

We are speaking now of an Immortal Life which means Progress, which points beyond death to new help for the weak, new disciplines for the erring, new light on the dark places of experience, new knowledge of the riches of God. Thoughtful persons say it is proved by the imperfection we see in this life, and the manifest infelicities and

inequalities of human condition here: they infer it alike from the large capacity and the small attainment of the Soul; alike from the incompleteness of what we are and the boundlessness of what we hope for. But what are these inferences when closely observed, but expressions of the natural necessity that is upon us to explain these strange phenomena of our life? From height and depth, from centre and circumference, comes the mighty need. It is the cry of our Nature, and its answer is Immortal Life.

This is need in no poor, unmanly, servile sense. All the currents of our being set thitherward, with a primal and eternal impulsion ; and we recognize their grand purpose as they roll. The testimony is the more thorough as we pursue more earnestly the aims that become us as immortals. In proportion to the dignity of our desires do we approach the sense of necessary existence. When we have once tasted the powers of true living, how can we let them go? How can life, so inexhaustible, so precious in its uses, possibly go to the dust? Felt within us, or seen without us, these spiritual values are the pure negation of death. Beside the fresh graves of their young heroes, can Americans believe in annihilation?

There is somewhat in the nature of Rectitude which awakens in its worshipper the sense of indestructible affinity and union. He stands on a rock which neither time nor change can move. He becomes a part of the absolute principles for which he lives. In so far as these are organized in his character, he lives in their eternity, not in his own mortal desires and fears. Every conviction partakes the Eternal Beauty of the Moral Order. How bald and trivial by comparison are the so-called "Evidences of a Future Life"! Here the moral need has flowered into a consciousness of immortal power. The soul is testifying of its inmost constitution. There comes no doubt to cloud its faith. Truth, Holiness, Love, Joy, and Immortal Life are one; as real as its own existence; since in them it properly exists, or finds the sense of existence. As reasoning has not proved these things, so Church, Bible, Christ are just as little the foundations of them. All good men and things are helpers: but this is a spiritual faith reached through spiritual organs.

What are all lofty standards and ideals but expressions of invincible moral needs? Do they not rule the soul as its natural sovereigns? To deny them is unfathomable shame and self-contempt. Men bow to their inward authority as a 'reed to the wind. Men stand up and speak in their name like trumpets of God. Every genuine affection springs from a longing that cannot be set aside. The larger the perception of duty, the intenser the sense of moral necessity, the "woe is me if I obey not," from which it proceeded. The social regenerations,

whether outflamings of pity and love, or reluctant obedience to overruling justice, come in the resistless tide of perpetual and organic forces. States are led to them neither by supernatural revelations nor by exceptional evidences: neither by miracle, infallible record, nor official mediator. They come because we are made for them; we accept them because they are natural steps in our social growth.

How do we know, we who see but in part, and that through many tears and much failure, that good shall come uppermost with us at last? Keep truth with your own spirit but a little while, and you will cease believing that you can take your goings into your own hands. Though you labor to the utmost of your force, you must lift up those hands, to feel after a Divine Necessity that hedges in your ways right and left, puts limits to your perils, and guards you where it leads. And in this need of a sovereign Destiny, is born the assurance that all shall be well. By and by we believe upon authority of sweet and wonderful experiences of divine care. Those lifted hands had followed nature, as the flower turns to the sun. Follow back your faith in the best issues of conduct to its source, you find it in the impossibility of doubting that a radical thirst, an absolute need, points unerringly to its own satisfaction.

What incomparable force of evidence! Can this gospel of an indispensable claim, this one condition on which life is worth possessing, or indeed anything better than a failure and fool's errand, deceive us? Could creed or report, could natural analogy or "supernatural" wonder begin to make the fact so plain? Take the nearest duty: labor for an idea: give your heart to a pure and helpful friendship: and see if you are not led into a yearning for overruling good, so deep that it bears its own assurance with it; an answer that waits for it

as the spring for the seed.

Who are they that insist the world must go on the old way, "truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne"; no wisdom ever got from experience; evil organic; wicked hates and tyrannies part of a natural order, and never to be expelled from Church, Market, Government, Home? If the "Evidences of Christianity" are what prove that a better future is coming, why is it that so many thousands who sat in the very shadow of rite and covenant, or on high seats in the hierarchies, and who are, according to all dogmatic probabilities, the very elect, have held liberty and justice the two impracticable things in this world, and all who predicted them fools, until revolution, as regenerative as it is terrible, has come to confound their unbelief? The "Evidences of Christianity" do not prove the "better future." To believe in that, one must dwell deep enough in his own being,

to know what it insists should be true in order that life may appear a reasonable and worthy gift of God. It is the answer that a true heart makes to the stern alternative, forced on it past escape :— Either give it up that there is a God and a Law of Justice overhead, or else trample the iniquities which deny them under the feet of your conviction. To face this emergency is the path to practical belief. Are we not seeing a Nation lifted into this assurance of a sublime Future, by being torn from her selfish slumbers and placed in the very jaws of that tremendous alternative? It was so easy to say "Slavery is doomed ";

easiest for those who had least desire that the doom should fall! But no man ever truly believed Slavery was doomed, till he saw clearly that his conscience would perish if he did not so believe. And no people ever can know that Slavery is doomed until they find by practical encounter with it that either it and all that comes of it must perish, to the last fibre of wicked prejudice, or their own civilization goes down to death. No man ever practically believed Intemperance or any social vice would be mastered, until it came to his conscience in this shape:- either this rot must be stayed, or the ship of moral and spiritual life is to sink. Whether in private or public reformation, the practical struggle must force the need into a mighty demand: then wakes the assurance of victory.

I do not overlook the faith in good that comes not by compulsion, but by pure force of fine spiritual instinct and religious genius, or as the bloom of an inherited moral vitality. I am speaking here of that form of conviction which is practical power in the hard battle with established evils. What I would emphasize in it is the might of that certainty which is revealed when the depths of our Nature are stirred and heaved into the disclosure of its essential demands.

But spontaneous or enforced, these certainties are proofs of the benignity and adequacy of the Spiritual Constitution. They rebuke the unbelief which resorts for explanation of what is best in human thought and faith to supernatural interference, to a superhuman Christ sent to supplement the natural incapacity of the Soul. Jesus and Christianity did but illustrate this indefeasible divineness of human nature. They were a fresh outflow of its native light and love: a historical result of its organic movement from the beginning: a response of its reserved powers to the mighty demands of the struggle with moral evils; its magnificent disproval of the dogmatic pretence that its spiritual force can ever become exhausted, or its faculties disabled from finding and following God. They yield, in one word, the precise negative and full refutation of the whole traditional dogma of the Churches concerning their origin and meaning. The same nat

ural forces that sufficed then, still suffice, and ever will: as familiar as eve and morn, as action and reaction, as hindrance and help. And the grand intuitions, ripening with the ages into clearer sight and larger power, still stand face to face with Eternal Truth.

"The Word is very nigh thee." He who believes that the fruit of good labors shall not perish; he who will sacrifice daily bread to save his honesty; he who will not be bought to do base service of any kind; who loves truth, helpfulness and holiness for their own sakes; follows instincts as true as that with which the child seeks its mother. It is Recognition; highest form of Intuitive, or Direct Seeing. It is the instinct of character, whereby the just person knows the just God who has made him for justice, and every true giver the Spirit who has formed the heart in the image of His Love. It is not wish, nor conjecture, nor argument, nor imagination that he sees by and relies on. It is the whole Spiritual Constitution, testifying of the law according to which it was organized, and made to live. His certainty can be weakened only by his falling away either from righteousness, or from liberty. Then, divided against itself, the soul may well be found calling its surest testimony a fancy or a snare, and proclaiming that there can be no guarantees but in "supernatural revelation." An ignoble life will spoil this testimony, one way; through the suppression of our affinities for truth and goodness. The traditional theologies will spoil the other way, through the suppression of our liberty. But neither the moral nor the intellectual perils can disprove the inherent adequacy of the Soul as the organ of Divine Life, nor invalidate its authority as the only guarantee of Religious Belief.

INTO the forest

I listless went,

To seek for nothing
Was my intent.

I thought to break it,
Then soft it spoke :
Shall I to wither,

Alas, be broke?

FOUND.

I saw 'mid shadows,
A floweret stand;
A star 't was shining;
An eye so bland.

With all its rootlets
I bore it where
The garden graces
A dwelling fair.

And there adorning

A quiet place,

It branches ever

And blooms apace. - From Goethe