nent a topic is Peace, in the Bible and in the experience of all good men! no other creed professes to furnish it. Peace is the upright condition of the soul, and religion alone brings the spirit to this state; and what truth save the spirit's counterpart,-what fact save one which had lain beside it since the dawn of eternity,could accomplish this? On the other hand, the inherent horror that belongs to wickedness,-the distress and inward combat of the erring spirit,-the strife of the dark soul that knows its darkness,-the blind battling of the remorseless lusts, the torturing tumult of the giant passions, that can no more be steady than the sea beneath a tempest,-the agony of that crime-fouled mind which has become as a sea to which thought is a simoom, and memory a sirocco,-all force upon the soul the consciousness that vice is sin. From the nethermost hell of Atheism comes the loudest roar of belief, and the last shriek of writhing despair is a piercing yell of adoration. In the condition of them that are without God in the world, the necessity of belief is the most clearly seen. The livery of sin is less ambiguous than that of virtue; the white garments of purity may be sometimes soiled, but the dark trappings of vice will never lose their duskiness. Behold the minister of infidelity,-not one whose acts are penal, here or after,-not one who dreads conviction, or is lashed by memory of wicked deeds, but who yet is wretched by the instinct of his spirit,-panting, dustdry,-ever striving, but seeking nothing,-restless, but not from desire,-degraded, though guiltless. Conscience seems to become another self within him, and to perplex his spirit with a double personality. If such a man admits to his troubled thoughts the great idea of God, the health of mind which will ensue belief, will show him that if God be not a fact, he is at least a truth. When we reflect that in a well-ordered universe, peace must characterise a condition of right relations in things and thoughts and actions, and that to the wicked,— whether in his breast are rankling ambition's barbed thoughts, or, whether stifled in lustful thoughts, he 6 6 breathes the atmosphere of hell,—there is no peace, we must conclude that such a system is false and unnatural. On the other hand, tranquillity and health always belong to goodness; to fix the thoughts on heaven unbinds the chafing bands of care and irritation, and draws out the thorn of anguish from the wounded heart. The approaches to virtue,' says Bolingbroke, are all comfortable,' and in the new purity religion breathes around, we find nothing strange or unnative; we feel that we have but regained what we had lost by birth. And surely that thought which thus restores, not gives anew, -cures, not changes,-which gives expansion to the cramped limbs and strength to the withered arm,—is charactered with all the might and majesty of heaven, and bears the marks of Him whose breath revives, whose garments heal. There be perhaps those who walk the earth and bear no souls; but those who have, carry with them proof of God. Why should man search abroad and around him for proof of that of which he carries the fullest revelation within himself. If those who deny that sin will be punished, were to explore their own feelings, they would find that sin necessarily punishes itself. All the great dogmas of Christianity, such, for example, as that of the inability of man to be operated upon by religious impressions, after a certain time, which the Scriptures call the sin against the Holy Ghost, are known by daily experience to those who study the passions. A psychological proof may also be rendered of the natural efficacy of all the means of grace which the Bible exhibits;-the purifying nature of repentant sorrow,-the relief and coolness and confidence inspired by prayer,-the strength of faith,-the elevation of hope,-the heavenly-mindedness of charity. Doubtless, through the promises of God these are rendered efficient means beyond their natural power; yet thus far at least may human knowledge approve the conduct of Almighty wisdom. Leaving these details, the great fact, always acknowledged, that piety alone confers happiness, seems to me proof of its divine de scent. By few has this opinion, connate with the Psalmist's sentiment, Thou art a place to hide me in,' been better worded than by the Italian poet, Flaminius. Ne tu beatum dixeris, optime Nec ille felix, qui valet omnium Non ille vulgi gaudet honoribus; Cœlestis ergo jam sapientia Plenus, periclis altior omnibus, Quiescit in Deo, furentum Terribili procul esse pastor." "To the argument that man finds peace and restoration in the thought of God and heaven," said Tyler, "it may be replied that the thought of God has originally created the evil which it is afterwards called in to heal. When the spirit hath been fancy-sickened by the 'fear of hell, it likes to be fancy-gladdened by the hope. of heaven. All inferences of deity drawn from feeling must assume the existence of spirit. I think that all phenomena both of mental perception and spiritual impression are easily to be explained on the system of materialism. That a field of matter, within the eye of man, should be endowed with a capacity of being impressed, like a mirror, with the vision of an external scene, which vision might be dormant or vivid according to the impulses communicated from the rest of the frame, is a postulate which requires no attributes for matter but those which daily experience perceives and admits. That these visions should be capable of being revivified in a combination produced by their juxtaposition, or their overlapping one another, is an assumption not more violent. Now, if you will mark the operations of your mind, you will find that thoughts are always sensible pictures; no idea, however abstract, occurs to man in any other form than as a picture of a physical and material scene. It is therefore no improbable conjecture that thought is nothing more than the combination of those pictures which the external world has imprinted upon some organ within the eye possessing the property of renewing these images on future occasions. That this is the actual process of thinking, will be seen upon attending to the operation for a few minutes, whereby it will be found that nothing but places and persons have occupied the mental observation; but a ready test of the truth of my remark exists in the fact that we cannot change the thought which is before the mind without changing the focus of sight, which will be indicated by a throb in the eye, and that we can keep thoughts out of the mind by keeping pictures in it, and that we cannot look distinctly at one object, and think of another. This theory readily explains the phenomenon of dreaming. It is notorious that men dream when they are not soundly asleep; the brain is then sluggish, not torpid; and attempting to call up the images that lie upon it, or to think, it merely produces a lagging succession of pictures, which, if it were active and awake, would be combined into thoughts. Thus the mental portion of our nature is the result of the reaction of the surrounding world upon our material frame, and that which is spiritual within us is the offspring of that which was once physical around us." I reply," But how much is there in our nature which we do not acquire! The intellect may be supposed of mundane growth, and all that goes to make up that moral picture-book, the mind, may have been imprinted by experience. But the heart has vitality and vigour of its own. Place a man in new and interesting circumstances, and his thoughts are what they always were but strange and mighty feelings are always flung forth from the abysses of his soul, full as the swelling tide of the Propontic-forceful as the volleyed waters of the Nile-spring: a nature, new even to himself, reveals itself; he is overmastered and swayed despite of himself; there is within him, what he can neither measure in the present, nor count on for the future. If there were naught in man but what he learns from the world, how could he impart to the world that supramundane interest; that vivifying hue and life, which makes the formal represent the spiritual, and matter sinks beneath its meaning. The poet looks on nature, until, beneath the vesturing glory wherein he robes the scene, the earthly melts into celestial, and the landscape dims into a formless mirror of the gazer's soul. To the feeling heart, the yellow morning, shadow-cold and still the eddying roar of purple noon; the crimson sunset's sleepy light; the cheerful evening, seraph-eyed, home-dear; the fading pallor of the lonely night-all are but natural hieroglyphics of passion. If man be but respiring matter, with no spark of the divine within him, explain to me the mystery of love; explain the dim memories and the infinite longings which a ray of beauty starts within him; explain the unbounded sense that quickens into life as we gaze along the orange splendours of the west, which wake an endless sigh that if full-drawn would rend the frame. Why does there rise and roll within the breast an ocean of excitement when we listen to music, behold the ensigns of |