hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.-Charles Dickens.

RATIONAL FAITH.

Faith is the free exercise of the mind, resting only on the discernment of the truth; just as sight is the free exercise of the eye, resting only on the discernment of the light; and no man can possibly believe, in submission to authority, that which he does not discern to be true, any more than he can behold the sun at midnight in obedience to a positive command. A man may indeed be taught to keep his eyes shut, and by discipline and training, may be brought not only to say, but even to fancy, that he sees whatever he is told ought to be seen, distrusting his own natural perceptions. A man may also be trained to look only and always through lenses of a prescribed color and form, and to disuse and supersede his unassisted vision. So also may men, yea, nations and generations of men, be kept in more or less ignorance, distrust, and neglect of their own faculty of discerning what is true, and thus be made to surrender, or never to know, the right of private judgment; so that even those things which are most thoroughly believed by such men, are believed, not because they are conscious of their truth, but because they have the sanction of authority.—John Robertson.

THE FUTURE THAT AWAITS US.

We must also understand, that the words dark and light, which in this world of appearance we use metaphorically to express good and evil, must be understood literally when speaking of that other world where everything will be seen as

it is. Goodness is truth, and truth is light; and wickedness is falsehood, and falsehood is darkness, and so it will be seen to be. Those who have not the light of truth to guide them will wander darkly through this valley of the shadow of death; those in whom the light of goodness shines will dwell in the light, which is inherent in themselves. The former will be in the kingdom of darkness, the latter in the kingdom of light. All the records existing of the blessed spirits that have appeared, ancient or modern, exhibit them as robed in light, whilst their anger or sorrow is symbolized by their darkness. Now there appears to me nothing incomprehensible in this view of the future; on the contrary, it is the only one which I ever found myself capable of conceiving or reconciling with the justice and mercy of our Creator. He does not punish us, we punish ourselves; we have built up a heaven or a hell to our own liking, and we carry it with us. The fire that forever burns without consuming is the fiery evil in which we have chosen our part; and the heaven in which we shall dwell will be the heavenly peace which will dwell in us. We are our own judges

and our own chastisers.

But this self-pronounced sentence we are led to hope is not final, nor does it seem consistent with the love and mercy of God that it should be so. There must be few, indeed, who leave this earth fit for heaven; for although the immediate frame of mind in which dissolution takes place is probably very important, it is surely a pernicious error, encouraged by jail chaplains and philanthropists, that a late repentance and a few parting prayers can purify a soul sullied by years of wickedness. Would we at once receive such an one into our intimate communion and love? Should we not require time for the stains of vice to be washed away, and habits of virtue to be formed? Assuredly we should! And how can we imagine that the purity of heaven is to be sullied by that approximation that the purity of earth would forbid? It would be cruel to say, irrational to think, that this late repentence is of no avail; it is doubtless so far of avail that the straining upwards and the

heavenly aspirations of the parting soul are carried with it, so that when it is free, instead of choosing the darkness, it will flee to as much light as is in itself; and be ready, through the mercy of God and the ministering of brighter spirits, to receive

The question that will now naturally arise, and which I am bound to answer, is, how have these views been formed ? and what is the authority for them? And the answer I have to make will startle many minds, when I say they have been gathered from two sources; first, and chiefly, from the state in which those spirits appear to be, and sometimes avow themselves to be, who, after quitting the earth, return to it and make themselves visible to the living; and secondly, from the revelations of numerous somnambules of the highest order, which entirely conform in all cases, not only with the revelations of the dead, but with each other. I do not mean to imply, when I say this, that I consider the question finally settled, as to whether somnambules are really clear-seers or only visionaries; nor that I have by any means established the fact that the dead do actually sometimes return; but I am obliged to beg the question for the moment, since whether these sources be pure or impure, it is from them the information has been collected. It is true, that these views are extremely conformable with those entertained by Plato and his school of philosophers; and also with those of the mystics of a later age; but the latter certainly, and the former probably, built up their systems on the same foundation: and I am very far from using the term mystics in the opprobrious, or at least contemptuous tone, in which it has of late years been uttered in this country; for although abounding in errors, as regarded the concrete, and although their want of an inductive methodology led them constantly astray in the region of the real, they were sublime teachers in that of the ideal; and they seem to have been endowed with a wonderful insight into this veiled department of our nature.-Catharine Crowe.

THE REIGN OF LAW.

The Reign of Law-is this, then, the reign under which we live? Yes, in a sense it is. There is no denying it. The whole world around us, and the whole world within us, are ruled by Law. Our very spirits are subject to it-those spirits which yet seem so spiritual, so subtle, so free. How often in the darkness do they feel the restraining bounds within which they move, conditions out of which they cannot think! The perception of this is growing in the consciousness of men. It grows with the growth of knowledge; it is the delight, the reward, the goal of Science. From Science it passes into every domain of thought, and invades, amongst others, the Theology of the Church. And so we see the men of Theology coming out to a parley with the men of Science,—a white flag in their hands, and saying, "If you will let us alone, we will do the same by you. Keep to your own province, do not enter ours. The Reign of Law which you proclaim, we admit outside these walls, but not within them: let there be peace between us. But this will never do. There can be no such treaty dividing the domain of Truth. Every one Truth is connected with every other Truth in this great universe of God. The connection may be one of infinite subtlety, and apparent distance, running, as it were, underground for a long way, but always asserting itself at last, somewhere and at some time. No bargaining, no fencing off the ground, no form of process, 'will avail to bar this right of way. blessed power! Every truth, which is truth indeed, is charged with its own consequences, its own analogies, its own suggesThese will not be kept outside any artificial boundary; they will range over the whole field of thought, nor is there any corner of it from which they can be warned away.

tions.

Blessed right, enforced by

And therefore we must cast a sharp eye indeed on every form of words which professes to represent a scientific truth. If it be really true in one department of thought, the chances are that it will have its bearing on every other. And if it be

not true, but erroneous, its effect will be of a corresponding character; for there is a brotherhood of Error as close as the brotherhood of Truth. Therefore, to accept as a truth that which is not a truth, or to fail in distinguishing the sense in which a proposition may be true, from other senses in which it is not true, is an evil having consequences which are indeed incalculable. There are subjects on which one mistake of this kind will poison all the wells of truth, and affect with fatal error the whole circle of our thoughts.

It is against this danger that some men would erect a feeble barrier, by defending the position that Science and Religion may be, and ought to be, kept entirely separate: that they belong to wholly different spheres of thought, and that the ideas which prevail in the one province have no relation to those which prevail in the other. This is a doctrine offering many temptations to many minds. It is grateful to religious men who are afraid of being thought to be afraid of Science. To these, and to all who are troubled to reconcile what they have been taught to believe with what they have come to know, the doctrine affords a natural and convenient escape. There is but one objection to it—but that is the fatal objection—that it is not true. The spiritual world and the intellectual world are not separated after this fashion; and the notion that they are so separated does but encourage men to accept in each, ideas which will at last be found to be false in both. The truth is that there is no branch of human inquiry, however purely physical, which is no more than the word branch implies; none which is not connected through endless ramifications with every other, and especially that which is the root and centre of them all. If He who formed the mind be one with Him who is the Orderer of all things concerning which that mind is occupied, there can be no end to the points of contact between our different conceptions of them, of Him and of ourselves.

The instinct which impels us to seek for harmony in the truths of Science and the truths of Religion, is a higher instinct and a truer one than the disposition which leads us to evade