II.

Thus ever looks the stricken dwelling
Whence loveliness is called away;
Why, it is past all human telling,-
"T was ever as to-day.

But thoughts that make the bowed heart glad,
"T was plain, the sorrowing parents had,
Though the house wore the look so sad,
That gives kind souls the tender warning
That souls within it sit in mourning,
And bids them, pride's concealments scorning,
Speak from the heart to father, mother,
Meek sister and full-hearted brother,
And not one spark of feeling smother,
Sure that what speaks from heart to heart
Will win its way, and do its part,

To soothe the pain of grief's keen dart;
For though the whole domain was fair,
And beauty revelled everywhere,

The fairest spot in all the bound
Was that dear garden burial-ground.

III.

Close by the graves a lakelet spread;
Two swans upon the waters sailed;
Queen-like careered each bright-eyed head,
The wings seemed white robes trailed.
But still, though beautiful and bright,
With native royalty bedight,

The birds were not prepared for flight;
Nor could they to their march sublime
And rippling water's bell-like chime

With a majestic song keep time:
Only when plumed for their last day,

As if about to soar away,

Their wings will move in flight-like play;

And, warbling from each organ throat,

Rich music on the air will float,

Each breath of song a requiem note.

So speaks the mythic voice of old,
In which full many a truth is told;
Full oft in fables old we read

Evangels that we little heed.

IV.

We see our children at their play,
We hear their winning voices blend,
And, dreaming, think their life's bright day
Will never have an end.

But sorrow comes, and holds in thrall
The playfulness of hearth and hall;
And mirth-light darkens with his pall.
Then from his home, with loving hand,
To where we in amazement stand,
The golden sceptre of command
Our Father stretches o'er the gloom,
And bids us see beyond the tomb
Our darlings all their life resume.
We see their flight, and hear their song

Sweet as swan-music, clear and long,

And while the fainting heart grows strong,
Into our ears in accents plain

Sinks the rich burden of the strain:

"We go, God-guided, ye know whither;
Wait but a while, then follow hither."

WORDSWORTH.

BLEST bard! who bathed in seas of light,
And played with gems of truth,

Who roamed through fields of beauty bright,
Crowned with immortal youth!

VOL. XXIII.

9

DR. HUNTINGTON ON THE TRINITY.

We have endeavored to give our readers, in another department of the Magazine, a view of Dr. Huntington's argument in favor of the tripersonality of the object of Christian worship. Many of them will read the volume itself, and see the argument in its whole breadth and fulness. The main points are the following.

The doctrine of the Trinity, or rather Tripersonality, for that is the form which it assumes in his statement, and the two terms are by no means synonymous, has with trifling exceptions been held by Christian believers ever and everywhere. Though truth is not determined by majorities, yet it is hardly credible that the great Head of the Church, who promised to be with it always, would suffer it to embrace a delusion so wide-spread, and running through all the ages. To suppose this is painful, not to say irreverent towards the Providence that has ever led and watched the true Christian Israel.

This doctrine, or the system of which it forms a part, is essential to render Christianity practically an efficient and vital power in the world and in the human soul. Leave this out, and man fails to see the extent of sin and its terrible evil; piety wastes, the Church declines, enthusiasm is chilled, prayer loses its efficacy, and the world reaps an easy harvest. Restore it, and the Church becomes aggressive; the sinner is convinced and finds peace in believing, and devotion revives again.

This doctrine, and the system to which it belongs, give unity to the Bible, and make all its disclosures and utterances fall into one majestic and consistent plan. From Genesis to the Apocalypse, the great themes of Incarnation and Redemption are all-harmonizing and make all difficulties of exegesis to vanish, while to the Anti-Trinitarian they are insurmountable, or require unnatural or labored explanations.

These three heads seem to us to sum up the argument, which in the Sermon is, drawn out in various detail, and with great rhetorical skill. This doctrine of threeness in the Divine Nature has been the almost universally accepted one through all the ages of faith: it is necessary in order to make Christianity an efficient, working, and renewing power; and it makes the Bible a consistent and symmetrical whole. These tests, if they would bear examination, would certainly be conclusive. To present them fairly and plainly, rather than to controvert them, is our purpose now. But as this is not our view of the Christian history, economy, and revelation, and as the whole subject goes to the very life and essence of Christianity, and the deeps of the Christian experience, we ask the company of our readers while we take them, not into another controversy about the Trinity, but to some points of observation, from which in a light somewhat different this great field of truth may lie before us.

I. It is a pretty sure indication of corruption in theology when its service requires of us to wrest language from its legitimate use, and employ it in the Church as Talleyrand did in the State, to conceal or to obscure thought rather than reveal it. Dr. Huntington does not consciously do this, but any system of tripersonality must. Everybody has an idea, till it is dissipated by metaphysics, of what a person is. A person is an individual being, having his own separate selfconsciousness; and to be personally known to us, he must be revealed to us in living form. To say that God exists in three persons is to say that there are three self-conscious beings, and the conception is produced instantly in the mind of three Gods. You may protest that you are not using language in its common acceptation; but what does the protest avail, if you go right on and assign to the three persons such offices and functions as inevitably beget the notion of three self-conscious actors in the believer's mind? Is it the words on your lips, or is it the inmost thought of your heart, that God regards in worship? We may say "one God"

with the mouth all day and all night, and yet if the attitude of the soul within is towards three Persons each with an "independent self-consciousness," and each having Divine attributes, then the motions of the mouth are as empty sounds, while the act of the soul is an unblest idolatry.

The doctrine of threeness in the Divine Nature is held now, and has been held from remote ages, by those who do not divide the Divine Personality. We never can know anything of God, except so far as he becomes humanized to our human conceptions. This seems plain. Man is his image and partakes of his nature. All that we say of God, his mercy, his justice, his holiness, his goodness, mean nothing to us, except so far forth as there is something in our own being that answers to those great ideas. Just so likewise of his unity, his threeness, and his personality. There is ground for these in our own nature, or we could not even receive a revelation respecting them. Man's nature is triune. He is love, intellect, and active power: heart, head, hand; —as Sir William Hamilton puts it in his clear and masterly analysis, feeling, cognition, and conation: the sole ground in man whence he can arise to the august conception of the Divine Threeness,-the eternal Love, the eternal Wisdom or Word, and their eternal processions of Power. We may strain after something about God when there is nothing in man to receive it: it will not even fall within the laws of thought; we only beat the air and hear the "clatter" of our own intellectual machinery. That God is Love, Wisdom, and Power, all existing in one self-conscious being or person, creating man for feeling, knowing, and doing, comes at once into our faith that puts us in communion with the Supreme in just the degree that we will suffer him to mould us into his own glorious image.

II. It is the concession of candid Trinitarians that the Tripersonality is not found expressly in the New Testament, but was "developed" afterwards by the Christian Church. "This doctrine does not strictly belong to the fundamental