Almighty God to place him before us on the cross, might expect to find a similar figure-the figure of the cross-placed here and there all over the work of creation; as a religious spirit in better days than the present erected that cross on high, wherever a human foot might be arrested by it; and as the ancient Fathers detected it in the most hidden allusions of Scripture: Moses stretching out his hands to the Amalekites-his rod-the branch which he threw into the bitter waters-the wood of the ark -the tree of life. In every animal and material nature he would expect to discern the figure of a cross; and he would not be surprised to find that all mathematical figures were reducible to this element; or, as modern anatomists have suggested, that the whole animal world is framed upon this typea central column with lateral processes. It is one of the grand speculations of zoological science.

Neither, I think, would a man who weighed carefully the mysterious title of the Word, or λóyos, given to our Lord, permit himself to dream of language being an invention of man, a dead set of arbitrary symbols, mere sound without a corresponding spirit. He would look on it with the deepest reverence. He would never have fallen into those philological absurdities, which, by a secret sympathy, have always accompanied a materialising atheistic philosophy.

Neither should we have been deluged with so many idle theories of creation out of unity-creation of the world out of atoms- of societies out of individuals of language out of inarticulate sounds-of matter out of spirit, as in the Oriental philosophy — or of spirit out of matter, as in modern European schools; nor of arts and sciences out of insulated experiment, without antecedent revelation;-if men had deduced the law of creation from the facts of the creation of the Church and from the nature of the Creator,

and had remembered that that Creator is not merely one God, but "Three Persons in one substance."

So also it is a question of statistics, of infinite importance at this time, what proportion of the property of the country is necessary to maintain the poor, the clergy, and the temples of God. The table of the House of Commons is loaded every session with speculations and plans on this subject. Would it be fanciful to suppose that a tenth might probably be the amount? such a sum at the very least having been fixed and demanded by God himself. And may not all the fearful embarrassments arising from the irregular distribution of our wealth be attributable to this simple fact, that we have forgotten the doctrine of revelation on this subject, and not yet struck out a better from all our political economy?

The French Revolutionists felt that some proportion of rest was necessary for man. Ten is a convenient number, and they fixed one day in ten. They were compelled to return to a seventh, because human nature, it was found, could not labour for a longer time together.

You want a model to explain the organisation of the human body, or the theory of vegetation. In each we can only see a part; there are mysteries which evade inquiry; facts for which we can assign no reason. Have we not near us a body and a tree full formed, with all its organs more perfectly developed, written, as Plato would express it, in larger letters, and of which we know that both man's body and the tree are but the types and symbols? Should we have had so many empty speculations on the seat of life; so many attempts to ascertain the nature of the vital principle itself; so many false theories of generation and growth, of animal spirits, of the functions of the nerves, of their

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connexion with the brain, of the use or uselessness of separate organs-if a perfect ecclesiastical polity, modelled "after the pattern seen on the mount,' were traced out, with its unseen vital spirit animating every part-giving sight to the eyes, hearing to the ear, feeling to the senses; secreting and distributing its various spiritual gifts; "supplying every joint;" connecting every member by one common organ of feeling and of motion; imbibing hourly the materials from which its bulk is increased, and secretly carrying on the process by which the good is preserved and the bad rejected; multiplying itself not by atoms, but by slips and seeds containing a certain portion of the organisation of the parent stock; decaying, and ultimately dying, and yet even then destined to become a tabernacle and abode of spirit?

All this, I am well aware, will sound fanciful and mystical. Fanciful it is, if it has no foundation in reality. Mystical it must be, if it be true. But he who cannot trace one grand and deep system of analogy running through the whole of creation from the top to the bottom, is wholly incapable of comprehending it. He is unfit to look upon it. Until once more we are taught to read the book of the world in this way, it will remain to us a sealed volume. I am only contending for that process of taking known and universal principles to suggest explanations of things unknown, for which Newton is so much praised in astronomy-Goëthe in his theory of colours and of the metamorphosis of plants-Harvey in the circulation of the bloodNiebuhr in his elucidation of ancient historyevery great man in every great addition which he has made to the capital of human knowledge. But I do contend that the facts, placed in our hands by God himself, declaring his own attributes, the principles of his acting, the laws by which he has acted

in the most momentous of all his works,-that these are more likely to supply us with a key to the mysteries of his creation than any invented by man that theology is vitally connected with every branch of human knowledge; confessedly with the sciences of spirit-I add, likewise with the sciences of

matter.

CHAPTER XXIII.

It is easy, as Bishop Butler has observed before, to foresee the scorn, with which suggestions like the foregoing must be received in a day like the present, when men have so generally lost sight of that deep philosophy, which binds all things in the universe together by one pervading coherence, tracing little things in great, and great things in little, and reducing them all under high universal truths, without the possession of which the human intellect, actively aroused, cannot be satisfied. But without recurring to this view of the value of a metaphysical creed relating to the Divine Being, and sanctioned by Himself, there is another view shorter, and perhaps more intelligible to common apprehensions. Man's mind is a percipient organ-percipient of ideas. In itself it seems nothing, not even to possess consciousness. All its excellence depends on the truths which are written upon it. Like abstract matter, it is capable of receiving all forms, itself possessing none. And its excellence must depend on its assimilation to the nature of its Creator. Now God is the source and type of all good; and nothing can be good which does not reflect his image. And unless this image be reflected adequately in the creature; unless men and other spiritual beings form good conceptions of the attributes of God, God is not honoured by them. There is misrepresentation, falsity, error, blended with every act of religion, with every thought of God. We do not tolerate this ourselves in common life. That we