A great many people fear that if we break away from the supernatural, we break away from reiigion. No: we only break away from superstition.

Among the believers of all revealed religions there are some base, some noble, some irreligious. As an eminent author has justly remarked, the shortness of time has furnished as many arguments to the debauchee as to the devotee. That scheme which says a man must repent in order to be saved, says also that one may repent at any time-on a sick bed and in old age; and that in repentance all sins will be washed away. On this theory, therefore, many people conclude to take their fill of sin in their healthy years, hoping to find time to repent in their old age or on the bed of death. A belief in Natural Religion will do more to prevent iniquity than any other, because nature cannot be improved. Her penalties are sure : they are sufficient and only sufficient. cannot be escaped, nature metes to all. this, they will be careful not to violate nature's laws.

Exact justice, which When people believe

Watts says, and he utters the spirit of Christendom, “Blind unbelief is sure to err." All that is true, but more, also is true. "Blind belief is sure to err." Hundreds of people, through a lingering superstition of the power of faith, cling to old notions and doctrines as though there were merit in believing, and they will therefore believe to the last moment. There is no merit in belief. We ought to believe just so far as there is reason, and no farther. An honest doubter is as acceptable to God as an honest believer; the merit is in the honesty, not in the doubt nor belief. In Natural Religion, faith without evidence is sin. We believe in faith; we cherish it; but no farther than we find a rock foundation on which it may rest.

The great obstacle which stands in the way of Protestants is the prejudice that there can be no imperfection in the Bible. They refuse to hear anything except what is taught from its pages or said in its defense. The great requirement of the present, is to get our hearts open, and our ears open, so as to learn all there is to learn in the world. All that helps truth helps religion. Nat

ural religion accepts a cheerful face and believes in a cheerful heart. Sorrow is inevitable with imperfection, but in order to be religious, it is not necessary to artificially increase it. Man is the only laughing animal, and a good laugh is as acceptable to God as a good cry. Both have their uses. The long-faced, austere, ascetic Christianity is not natural. The pain that comes is to be bravely borne, but we are not to seek it. Seek the sunshine-make life as pleasant and joyous as it can be

made.

Take good care of human nature, and you take good care of religion. Out of the best human hearts grows the best religion, as largest crops grow from the finest soil. Cultivate,. make rich, make broad, make sympathetic, make true and noble the souls of men, and you are sure to grow the noblest religion. Human nature in its healthy development bring forth good.—Herman Bisbee, Wisconsin.

IMMORTALITY IN THE LIGHT OF Science.

The earliest and most durable records of humanity are records of spiritual impulses, hopes, faiths,--gropings of the human mind to adjust its relations, speculatively and practically, with some mysterious Power believed to rule the universe, reachings out and up of the finite into the infinite. But all the facts on this side of human experience these scientists ignore. They confine their attention to physical phenomena, and do not consider the phenomena of faith, reverence, worship. And yet these latter phenomena, whatever their origin, make up half of the recorded history of mankind, and present the facts that bear most intimately on this question of immortality. That surely can be no complete science which ignores them. And there is another class of phenomena, which, however much scientific men may now deride them, and however much of fraud and charlatanism may be mixed up with them, will persist, I believe, in forcing themselves upon human attention until science shall give them a just investigation and recogni

tion. I refer to the phenomena of mesmerism, clairvoyance, animal magnetism, along with which whatever is well authenticated in “Spiritualism" is to be placed. What shall we say of that bond between two lives, hundreds of miles apart in space, which, like an electric wire, gives instantaneous intelligence of the experience of the one to the other? Of this we have wellauthenticated instances, and among persons not easily deluded and not addicted to implicit acceptance of every new thing that appears. Science may treat these reports all alike with incredulity and contempt (as many of them deserve to be treated); but then life, as science confesses, is riddle upon riddle, and its secrets are not yet all guessed. And I believe it will be found in the end that this class of phenomena to which I now refer, and which are so closely related to the mysterious connection that exists between mind and body, will, when investigated and classified, have an important bearing on the revelation of things pertaining to the future that are now inscrutable to reason.

One other defect I have to note in the argument of those men of science who undertake positively to deny immortality. They frequently leave the calm, judicial tone of pure science, which simply reports facts and lets them fall, as it were, of their own gravity into system, and write like interested advocates of their hypothesis. They become partizan and dogmatic. Some of them are guilty of as pure dogmatism as are the theologians and ecclesiastics whom they treat with such disdain. When Büchner, for instance, warms into indignant eloquence over the tediousness and horror of the very conception of eternal existence, which he contrasts with the welcome repose of annihilation, we see that he has left the character of the student of science and put on the robes of the priest. The passage betrays that he is not writing from facts, but from a prepossessed opinion. So when, in opposition to the theory that the soul may have in its future life a body similar to its present, but more refined and ethereal, he declares that "the human body is composed of the most delicate and most perfect organs and cannot be conceived to become still finer and more perfect," we are reminded of

that theological dogmatism which undertakes to assert that this or that doctrine must answer the needs of men for all time, that a certain religious system is completely rounded and contains all possible truth, or that some historical character has given an example ultimate and absolute for all human attainment and can never in all the eternities be surpassed.

The primordial substance, force, power, whatever it is in essence, from which all things have been evolved, must have been, as we have already seen, germinal with intelligence ast well as with material energy and form. This fact in some shape is admitted by these scientists. Buchner allows a "formative principle in the organic and inorganic world." Dr. Carpenter, writing on the subject of vital force, discussing the question whether it is something apart from matter itself, says : 'What the germ really supplies is not the force, but the directive agency." Something of this kind has to be admitted in order to account for the fact that things are produced not by haphazard, but according to certain types; that one germ-cell for instance, develops into a bird, and another, not distinguishable from it, into a man. Even though the types have all come by the gradual action of "natural selection" from one type, that does not avoid the necessity of admitting a "formative principle" somewhere. This "formative principle," or "directive agency," may not be a separate entity from the matter in which it works. We need not necessarily conceive of it as a creative spirit or force apart from matter and acting upon it from the outside. Let it be inherently involved in the very existence of matter,—something inseparable from its original substance: still, it implies intelligence, purpose, volition. Matter and spirit may be one and indivisible, but both must be represented in the primary essence of the universe, since both have appeared in the phenomena of the universe. The scientific conception of them must be that they are equally eternal in essence. And the whole history of the universe, its varied evolutions, developments, manifestations of force, productions of organism, types of being, systems and creatures, may be scientifically repre

sented as the result of the mutual action of these two elements. The directive agency is working its way out of chaos into and through material forms, and rising constantly to higher manifestation of itself therein. In man it comes to self-conscious ness. Doubtless by the principle of correlation we may trace a thread of identity between the inanimate law of the inorganic world, the instinct of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, the semi-reason and volition of the higher species of the brute creation, and the self-conscious intelligence and free moral choice that belong to civilized man. These may all be regarded as phases and stages in the progress of the same formative principle. It may even be admitted that there are some glimmerings of self-conscious intelligence, and even perhaps of a moral sense, in animal races that are below man, and that were antecedent to him in the process of evolution. Still when the organism of man is reached after this long process of development, the elements of this primary formative principle expand and flower into vastly more wonderful phenomena,—into conscious reflection, moral perception and purpose, will and foresight; into self-sacrificing beneficence and love; into not merely perceptions of existing order and beauty and goodness, but abstract conceptions of an ideal Excellence beyond anything that sense or experience reveals; and, more than all, into a creative, intelligent energy, which is capable of taking up nature's thought and processes, and voluntarily carrying them forward, in a sense, to still higher completion. All these powers did not, it is true, suddenly appear in full fruition with the appearance of human beings on the planet. They, too have come by the slow gradation of development. have appeared in man as they have appeared in no race below or anterior to him. And they make man what no other order of beings on earth is, a rational observer and student of nature, and an intelligent, free co-worker with her forces. We may say, indeed, that with the human race a new form of force, a new development of vital energy, comes into the universe. It is the force of personality. Man has the ability to convert by

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