civilization. It is very difficult for any scholar, studying the facts without prejudice, to make the philosophy of religion by St. James coincide with that of St. Paul; or the conceptions of the church in the Apocalypse and in Galatians identical. We do not get the light of theological science in equal clearness, or in harmonious hues, from these fragments of the primitive thought of the church. But we do get the spirit through them all in uniform intensity. They give us truth of the eternal order; heat, and electric currents, and charges from the invisible world in equal measures. Of what consequence is it how ade_ quately or accordantly they convey the perceptions of the infinite reason in the mysteries of theology, if they flood us with the deeper truth of the infinite essence; if they are batteries for shedding the "powers of the world to come" on the torpid conscience, the disloyal or flaccid will, the corrupt imag ination, the withering heart; if they make us feel the holiness, the justice, the unsounded charity of God; if they restore the proportions of things to our moral vision, reducing this world to a speck within the soul's world, and curtained from it by a film that may break for us to-morrow?

Ah, how brutally these marvelous records have been treated under our theories of a minute and infallible intellectual inspiration! How men have crushed and cut them to make poetry, and precept, and vision, and mystic vagueness of utterance, and Oriental hyperbole, and hot rhetoric for an emergency, and well-weighed judgments, and lyric raptures, fit together like the puzzle-maps of wood with which children play, into an outlined map of eternal wisdom, consistent and complete!

It is not more reverent and wise to look at those chapters of fragmentary scrolls of an inspiration that breathed the forces, and not the science of the Infinite into the first generations of Christendom? Shall we not thus see them set around with the pure splendor of the Spirit, deeply tinged with different human temperaments, as types of the diverse genius which the gospel has sanctified in history?

*

*

*

And we have a right to say now, in the interest of vital

Christianity, that all theories of Christ rank and office, and all catechisms and creeds, are indifferent to the Spirit, so far as they belong to the speculative science of the Infinite, or to the philosophical interpretation of the Scripture. This is the great question: how near is the man to the Spirit of God? how closely does the Christ he believes in bring him to the Infinite? how richly does he interpret to him the character of the Almighty-his equity, his providence, his love? It is working truth, truth for redemption, truth that cleanses the passions, burns the clouded conscience, wrenches the cowardly will, and knocks at the heart with a sweet and serious pleading, in which the Spirit hides. A notional Trinity or a notional Unity it cares not for any more than it cares for your conception of how many strata are in the surface of the globe, or how the sun's light is connected with its substance. *

*

Is it the spiritual truth which looks through the creed that is the all-important element so far as the person is concerned. St. Paul determined to know no other formula than the Cross of Christ. But what did it mean to him? We have seen that it meant the breaking out of divine love toward all mankind; it meant the equal spiritual rights of all races; it meant a perfect moral providence, it meant the condemnation of Pharisaism as high treason to humanity; it meant the abolition of all covenant-grace; it meant that humility, charity, self-sacrifice is the law of the moral universe; it meant that men need no more pine here as prisoners, but could burst through faith "into the air of that supernatural life which God lives eternally." In a word, it meant just the opposite of the system into which the old school Calvanism has petrified the book of Romans.

The Cross of Christ is thus preached now, in the Trinitarian Church, by men like Bushnell, and Kingsley, and Maurice, and Robertson, and Stanley, and is interpreted thus by theolo gians like Jowett, and scholars like Bunsen; and it is the sign of the purest faith and most adequate conception of Christianity in our time.

*

*

*

It is the amount of quickening truth which our creed is

translucent that keeps us-just as it is the sweetness and depth of saintly beauty, and not the literal, historic or positive verity of the person or the scene that moves us in one of Raphael's groups.

*

*

*

I do not argue that truth of creed is unimportant. I do not say that a systematical and pure theology, an adequate intellectual interpretation of the office of Christ and the meaning of Christianity, is not a most desirable thing. But I say that unless a man values and uses his Christ or his creed as a medium of the Spirit, as a lense to condense the radiance of the everlasting world upon his soul, a perfect surface-belief is of no account.

*

*.

*

Let us pray that we may yield our mind and will to the Spirit; that by its light we may see through our creeds into the all-important verities of the substantial world; that we may be instruments of Christian music, more than soldiers of Calvanistic or Unitarian camps; and that we may be lifted at last, by that Spirit, to that world where we shall experience the truth, that "whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away" before the charity that "never faileth,” which gives the "unity of the Spirit," and is "the fulfilling of the law."-T. Starr King.

A LESSON FROM NATURE.

Now I have one tree just by my study window, with which I have managed to become very intimate. We nod to each other every morning. In the long black days (just before spring), I could see my friend was looking disheartened enough,

It had great treasures of buds; but it seemed to fold them as a child folds a treasure in its clasped fingers, and all the while to be saying, "Well, I do think this spring will never come." But, I said, “Hold on, good tree, spring is surely coming. I saw her down on the Alabama line. persistent and determined to stay.

Here is the winter-fierce, Yonder, where I have been,

is the spring-soft, sunny, filling the woods with her white splendor; and I can see the blossoms pouring up this way, faster than I can run on my feet to tell you." And it was so. The warm days came at last; summer was victor; and my tree stood, tremulous in her beautiful green leaves, like a bride adorned for her wedding.

Why will not men take these things into their hearts, and be as full of faith in the meaning and purpose of their lives as of their flowers? Is man alone the neglected step-child? Are his fortunes alone misfortunes? Are we much worse than the lilies? Or is it not of all things true, that as man rises nearest of all on this earth to the image of the Infinite, so he is nearest of all on earth to the Providence that enfolds and blesses all? -Robert Collyer.

INSPIRATION PRESENT AND UNIVERSAL.

The Old dies that the New may sing of birth, maturity and victory. The Past, with its lengthened shadows, its defeats and triumphs, was well; so were frightful explosions in the old Plutonian period. Fossils in Silurian rocks are significant, as treasured histories of primeval life bespeaking higher organized existence.

*

*

*

Parchments are fixtures. While neither constitutions nor creeds grow, souls do. As well strive to fill our arteries with the blood of Jewish patriarchs and priests, as to appropriate their thoughts, commandments or religious experiences, forgetful of the living present, hoping thereby to have our spiritual life vitalized. The yesterdays are gone, let them go! The good of the Past preserved and reconstructed, Americans have to do with the to-days, and with a brightening Future whose crowning glories should be harmonial men and women, being laws unto themselves.

*

*

*

All those brave souls of the Past were helps, not masters or infallible guides. Wisdom did not die with them, and they must not talk to us authoritatively. Each should be his own

authority. God speaks to us as frequently and as fatherly as he did to Jewish seers. Seeing in every valley a Jordan, in every sectarian church a Dead Sea, in every aspirational heart a temple of worship, in every woodland eminence a mount of ascension, and in every child an embryo angel, what special need of Hebrew bounty styled "Revelation?" Inspiration is everywhere an in-breathing from the Infinite.-F. M. Peebles.

GODLINESS OF LABOR.

Why is it such a fatal thing when a country has men who throw discredit on labor? Wherever a theory prevails that work is degrading, great mischief ensues; not because a false ambition withdraws needful hands from employment, for there are many kinds of work that demand diversities of gifts. If a man lay down one tool to take up another, he may still be faithful to the commonwealth. And it is not because men work badly who work under the contempt of their fellows—although there is no labor so ill done as that which is meanly requited— but some kind of necessity, hunger, the climate, or the whip, will compel men to work in spite of human scorn; and the work will correspond with the necessity. In degrading labor, the mischief is done to mankind by degrading Providence—it is a practical infidelity to the great idea that God is a Creator. See how it operates. Work runs through the universe; it is the condition of permanence and growth. Mankind is not retarded so much by inefficiency as by the arrogance that will not imitate God, for a certain per cent. of inefficiency must always accompany so many births, being only another accident of malformation. But God, in prosecuting his divine schemes, allows for inefficiency, but not for infidelity; not for the arrogance that calls it an honor to do nothing. When one variety of work is thought degrading, all work becomes impaired.

It is a revolt of the whole working organization against the order of the world. Intellect itself is betrayed when it is anxious to make it appear that no vulgar labors occupy it. It