It is quite clear that the Melitans were in a stage beyond this. It is a step when men rise from the worship of lifeless things to that of animals; another when they rise to worship human qualities for they vre nearest the Divine. Perhaps a step higher still, when, like the early Romans, they worship a Principle like Destiny, separate from all shape. They were in the stage of worshipping what is human.

2. But, in this worship of the human, we have to distinguish that it was the adoration of the marvellous, not the reverence for the Good. It was not Paul's character to which they yielded homage. It was only to the wonderful mystery of, as they supposed, his miraculous escape. So, too, at Lystra. It was the mir acle which they chiefly saw.

All that would pass away when they knew that he was a man of like passions with themselves; or when they were informed that it was a Providential escape, which might have happened to any ordinary man. When the savage sees the flash of European fire-arms, he kneels as to a god; but when he has learned its use, his new religion is gone.. When the Americans first saw the winged ships of Spain, they thought that the deities spoke in thunder; but when they discov ered the secret of their humanity, the worship ceased. And thus science is every day converting the religion of mere wonder into Atheism. The mere worship of the mysterious has a limited existence. As you teach laws, you undermine that religion. Men cease to tremble. The Laplander would no longer be awed by the eclipse, if he knew how to calculate it with unerring accuracy. The savage's dread of lightning, as the bolt of God, is over when he sees the philosopher

draw it from the clouds, and experimentalize on it in his laboratory. The awe created by a pestilence is passed, when it is found to be strictly under the guid ance of natural laws. And the Romanist, or the semiRomanist, whose religion is chiefly a sense of the mysterious, the solemn, the awful, and whose flesh creeps when he sees a miracle in the consecration of the sacraments, ends, as is well known, in infidelity, when enlightenment and reason have struck the ground of false reverence from beneath his feet.

It is upon this indisputable basis that the mightiest system of modern Atheism has been built. The great founder of that system divides all human history into three periods. The first, in which the supernatural is believed in, and a personal Agent is believed in as the cause of all phenomena. The second, in which metaphysical abstractions are assumed as Causes. The third, the Positive stage, in which nothing is expected but the knowledge of sequences by Experience; the Absolute, that lies beneath all phenomena, being for ever unknowable, and a God, if there be a God, undiscoverable by the intellect of man.

This conclusion is irrefragable. Granted that the only basis of religion is awe, a worship of the mar vellous,— then, verily, there remains nothing for the human race to end in but blank and ghastly Athe ism.

Therefore has the Redeemer's Advent taught a deeper truth to man. The Apostle Paul spoke almost slightingly of the marvellous. "Covet earnestly the best gifts: yet show I unto you a more excellent way. Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or

a tinkling cymbal." Love is diviner than all wondrous powers.

So, too, the Son of God came into this world depreciating the merely mysterious. "An evil and adul terous generation seeketh after a sign. No sign shall be given to it."-"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe." Nay, His own miracles themselves, so far as the merely wondrous in them was concerned, He was willing, on one occasion at least, to place on the same level with the real or supposed ones of Exorcists among themselves. "If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?" It was not the power, nor the supernatural in them, which proved them divine. It was their peculiar character, their benevolence, their goodness, their love, which manifested Deity.

Herein lies the vast fallacy of the French sceptic. The worship of the supernatural must legitimately end in Atheism as science progresses. Yes, all science removes the Cause of causes further and further back from human ken, so that the baffled intellect is compelled to confess at last we cannot find it. But "the world by wisdom knew not God." There is a power in the soul, quite separate from the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvellous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above the reach of the Atheism of Science. It does not rest on the Wonderful, but on the Eternal Wisdom and Goodness of God. The Revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a Mystery. No Science can sweep away the Everlasting Love which the heart feels, and which the intellect does not even pretend to judge or recognize. And he is safe from the inevita

ble decay which attends the mere barbarian worship who has felt, that as Faith is the strongest power in the mind of man, so is Love the Divinest principle in the bosom of God: in other words, who adores God known in Christ, rather than trembles before the Unknown, whose homage is yielded to Divine Character rather than Divine Power.

XIV.

[Preached December 15, 1849.]

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SPIRITUAL HARVEST.

GAL. vi. 7, 8. "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.'

THERE is a close analogy between the world of nature and the world of spirit. They bear the impress of the same hand; and hence the principles of nature and its laws are the types and shadows of the Invisible. Just as two books, though on different subjects, proceeding from the same pen, manifest indications of the thought of one mind, so the worlds visible and invisible are two books, written by the same finger, and governed by the same Idea. Or, rather, they are but one Book, separated into two only by the narrow range of our ken. For it is impossible to study the universe at all without perceiv ing that it is one system. Begin with what science you will, as soon as you get beyond the rudiments, you are constrained to associate it with another.

You cannot study agriculture long without finding that it absorbs into itself meteorology and chemistry; sciences run into one another till you get the "con(241)

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