acknowledge that (under God our heavenly Father, and under Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who redeemeth us out of all our troubles) you have been the means and instrument in His hand to save and deliver us." "When good works of pure charity are sown threehundred-fold thick, and that by a living hand, Lord, what a reaping-time or harvest there will be. Sir, you are eminently mindful of that gospel charge— 'Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; that they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate; laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come ;'—a foundation, not of grace unto justification by way of merit, but a foundation of degrees of glorification, when God will, in free mercy, distribute His gifts of glory, according to our improvement of our talents in the exercise of grace. gained ten talents shall have ten cities. "1

He that

Boyle devoted to missionary work in New England £300 a year, during his life, and by his will bequeathed to the same object £100. Several people of distinction were nominally connected with the scheme, but he was its moving spring, its primary power, its very life. Its meetings, which he commonly attended, for transacting its affairs, were held at the house of a worthy London alderman named Ashurst, of pious memory; and those who there assembled constituted the first board of Protestant

1 Birch's Life of Boyle, Appendix, pp. ccv.-ccvii. These three passages are the commencement of three distinct letters.

HIS THOUGHTS OF HEAVEN.

149

missions in this country. Boyle was also a director of the East India Company; and in a letter dated 1676 he urged upon his colleagues the duty of propagating Christianity in the East. He had, at his own cost, the Gospels and Acts translated into the language of the Malays, and undertook the whole expense of a Turkish New Testament, a burden of which the Company partly relieved him by undertaking half the cost.

The prospect of another state of existence most reasonably occupied a large space in the thoughts of this Christian philosopher. To be insensible or indifferent respecting the world to come, struck him as conduct utterly irrational. None of his chemical experiments, none of his investigations into the properties of matter, had ever disturbed his faith in the immortality of mind; and he lived year after year, with the assurance that a life unnumbered by the present revolutions of time would succeed the present. His meditations on the subject, in the light of the gospel, often rose to perfect rapture. If he dwelt, with a complacency natural to such a person, upon the intelligence, the intellectual improvement, and the immensely augmented knowledge of man in that future state of being, he also dwelt upon the perfect holiness, the likeness to God, and the fruition of the Divine favour, which, according to the promises of Scripture, will crown and glorify all the other bliss of heaven. "We shall be so taken up," he exclaims, "with the contemplation and fruition of that glorious object (in whose infinity all goods are included and dilated) that ages, numberless as the joys that beatific vision abounds with, will scarcely afford us leisure for a diversion to any other pleasures than those itself creates which are so

numerous and so entire, that we shall there desire nothing that we have not, except more tongues to sing more praises to Him; or, at least, a capacity to pay Him greater thanks for what we have. And even those desires, God's gracious acceptation will make, in being conceived, accomplished; for otherwise heaven's residents scarce know any other want than that of need to wish, the complete blessedness of their condition reducing them to a happy uselessness of wishes, by affording them a full prepossession of all the objects of desire. There time, like fire, having destroyed whatever it could prey on, shall at last die itself, and shall go out into eternity. There our felicity shall always be the same, yet ever new."

Supported by such views, this Christian philosopher fell asleep after a brief sickness, "the light of his mortal life going out for want of oil to feed the flame."

We have spoken of Boyle's extraordinary attachment to his sister, Lady Ranelagh. Truly it may be said of them, "They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." It is touching to learn that she died in London, two days before Christmas, 1691; and he died five days after.

M

JOHN LOCKE.

1632-1701.

ETAPHYSICS is rather an equivocal word. If we understand by physical existence all kinds of existence, whether in the department of matter or the department of mind, then the word would simply point to what is abstract in human thought, and would properly be confined to speculations upon principles and laws, essences and qualities, with similar recondite subjects of reflection. But commonly the word physics is confined to what is material in the universe of being -to those forms of nature which appeal to the sensesand therefore metaphysics is a term usually applied to that realm of thought into which the mind steps on crossing the limits of material things. Metaphysics, then, may be extended to a vast number of abstract subjects, about which many persons feel immense curiosity and interest; but it will certainly comprise the study of the human mind itself-that mysterious instrument by which all philosophical inquiries are carried on. Metaphysics, in the first acceptation of the word, was a favourite study with the ancient Greek philosophers. They were fond of abstractions, hunting after original principles and foundations of existence, prying into the essences of things. Nor did they

overlook metaphysics in the more limited meaning of the appellation; for "know thyself" was a dictum which pointed to a scientific as well as to a moral acquaintance with one's mind; and of Socrates it is said in the Memorabilia, "Man, and what related to man, were the only subjects on which he chose to employ his inquiries and his conversation."

Mental science, or the study of the mind with a view to estimate aright its capacities and faculties, would, of course, occupy more or less the attention of thoughtful men in subsequent ages. The schoolmen, in their diversified lucubrations, could not entirely overlook it; but it was not until after the restoration of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the mental constitution of human nature obtained the patient attention which it demands. Bacon, the author of all modern experimental science, may be regarded as really the author of it in relation to mind. as well as matter; and in some of his profound hints on the subject, "nothing is more remarkable than the precise and just ideas they display of the proper aim of this science." 1 Hobbes, too, may be reckoned amongst our early mental philosophers, in the strictest sense of the title; for he had much to say in his Leviathan, and his Human Nature, about the "thoughts of man," and "the original of them all which we call sense," "the faculties of the mind-cognitive, imaginative, conceptive and motive;" nor did he fail to point out the association of ideas. Descartes is esteemed another founder of experimental philosophy in relation to mind; for his fundamental idea-"I

1 1 Dugald Stewart, Prel. Diss. to Ency. Brit., p. 33.