form in which our nature can manifest itself. There is in it a synthesis of affection and of will.

From these differences it is plain that in passing to the affections, taken as a whole, we enter another region and group, where we find elements that are wholly new. We come to that in the intelligent world which answers to heat and electricity and magnetism in the physical world, or rather to the one agent of which these may be but the varied manifestations. Heretofore, all has been appropriation, and has looked towards self. Here self is not forgotten in the arrangements of God, but must be by us. The desire that enters into love retains its power of good to us as a desire, but by thus entering loses its capability of being abused into selfishness. As an appropriating desire it is wholly lost. In becoming a desire for the good of others, it becomes disinterested. Of this, the possibility, as I have said, has been doubted by some. They do not believe that a son, knowing that he should inherit a large estate on the death of his father, dependent on his assiduity, could attend upon and cheer him through his final sickness purely from affection. They are in the same position as the heathen, who cannot conceive that the missionaries should come with the simple object of doing them good, whereas the whole glory of the missionary work is in its unselfishness. When that departs, it is shorn of the locks of its strength, and becomes like any other cause. But in this structure and action of affection we simply find the paradox of our Saviour that he who would find his life must lose it. That is not peculiar to his religion. It has its basis in our nature. It is the condition on which any higher life of the affections is to be found. It is by losing all thought of himself that a man finds his own higher self. The ultimate happiness and good for

man is something more than the happiness from desire, as found in affection. That is there the inferior and weaker element. It is from a union in sympathy, of which desire knows nothing, from a mutual love; it is in a glow, and ardor, and exultation ineffable in view of the high powers and qualities of other beings to whom we are united by an unalterable affection, an affection springing from the very depths of our rational and voluntary nature, and through which we find relationship and kindred dearer than any other. Here again the Saviour understood our nature, and hence condensed all the natural relationships into one to express that of moral affinity. "For whosoever," said he, "shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." The blessedness from a sympathy and love where there is perfect moral complacency, who can estimate? Who can estimate the repercussion and multiplication of joy when each one shall not only have joy in himself, but shall also rejoice with all that do rejoice? How shall the whole principle and method of selfishness be reversed, when, instead of looking on his own things, every man shall look also on the things of others, not with envy or jealousy, but with the greater delight as the gifts and endowments are greater, and shall feel that he owns them all in a far higher sense than he who can enjoy it owns the landscape!

In affection it is the union in sympathy that is the electric element, and this may pervade society as if it were a living organism, and so that whatever is felt by one shall be felt by all. From what we see of the power of sympathy in large bodies of men, in nations engaged in a common cause, where there is yet much selfishness, and the means of communication are imperfect, we may imagine what it would be if there were no selfishness and the

means of communication were complete. With these conditions, the "joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth" would follow, of course.

Not only do the affections, as has been said, point towards society, but they are the only social element. The appetites and the desires both appropriate. They are not, in their own nature, and of necessity, selfish; but they have a primary reference to self, and become selfish when they so act as to encroach upon the sphere of the faculties above them. If a man so indulge his appetites as to encroach upon his desires, if the love of eating overmaster and dwarf the desire for knowledge, there is selfishness as well as sensuality in the act, because the man dwarfs his higher nature, and so unfits himself for the good he might do to others. So, too, though the desires, acting within their own sphere, are merely manifestations of our nature having reference to self, but not selfish; yet if they encroach upon the sphere of the affections, they immediately become selfish, and it is one of the common and prominent forms of selfishness for them to do this. With only appetite and desire, the whole object of man would be appropriation to himself, and he would use his fellowmen as things, simply for his own convenience. Men would care no more for each other than the player does for his nine-pins. Association there might be, but no society; and the association would have about it no charm, no beauty, no warmth, nothing disinterested or noble. But let now the affections come in; let friendship, and gratitude, and pity; let sympathy and love in its various forms, as conjugal, filial, and fraternal affection, appear, and they make a new world. They are like the angels from heaven descending among men. They come, and mere forms, and conventionalisms, and hypocrisies and overreachings, give

place, and disappear like birds of night before the light of day.

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That the affections are the only social element, it is desirable to notice, because it shows us precisely what we are to cultivate to make society perfect; and also how it is chiefly liable to be corrupted, or rather perverted. This is by the coming in of the desires where the affections ought to rule. The affections, as I have said, cannot be interested. A true friendship cannot be so, and hence its beauty, beauty scarcely paralleled on earth. But if we suppose those acts which seemed to be prompted by friendship, to be really prompted, not by affection going out towards the person, but by the desire of some benefit from him, the beauty will vanish in a moment, and contempt and detestation will take the place of complacency and admiration. In married life, and in all preliminaries to it, there is beauty as the affection is pure, not only from sensuality, but from all desire of property, or of any incidental advantage. There is an expression employed by some, — that of using one's friends, that was always offensive to me. The displacement in society of affection by desire is bad enough, but the shameless avowal of it is worse. Here is a chief ground of the hypocrisy noticed in connection with the desire of esteem. Nothing can be more annoying or chilling than to be in a community where there is a universal tendency to gratify some form of desire under the profession and appearance of affection, and especially to boast of success in this as an evidence of smartness and of a knowledge of human nature. This it is that gives to fashionable life, when the people who are in it understand each other, as they generally do, its heartlessness, and lays it open to the shafts of satire. Let its polished but meagre conventionalisms be filled out with a hearty affection, and

it would be like the resurrection and free motion of a corpse that had simply been galvanized. The same is true in all the relations of life. The corruption is, that appetite and desire, and so sensuality and selfishness, have usurped the place of the affections; and the great thing needed in society is that these should assume their due prominence, and rule in their own sphere.

In what has been said hitherto no distinction has been made between the natural and the moral affections. That distinction we must now draw, for in strictness it is only the natural affections that should be spoken of here.

The character of an affection is determined by its origin and its object. The natural affections are those that spring up impulsively as do the appetites and the desires, and are such as we share in kind with the animals. They do not spring from the moral nature, and have no regard to the moral character of their object. They have, therefore, no moral character in themselves, but, like the appetites and the desires, are purely instrumental, and are good and evil solely as they are controlled. They are good in their place, and for the purpose for which they were intended, but are not morally good, and do not become so by being brought under moral control. The moral affections spring from the moral nature; and it is upon moral beings, as such, that they rest.

This distinction seems plain, but may, perhaps, be made more so by a reference to the language of the Scriptures. In them the term "Heart" is used to signify the affections, but not the natural affections. In the expression, "My son, give me thy heart," we feel at once that, while the affections are meant, there is yet an entire exclusion of anything like the natural affections. That expression carries us at once into a region that is wholly moral and free,