wrong; and he who detects in his own life much of iniquity, resembling children starting in their sleep, is full of terror.

In conformity with this, I deem the possession of riches chiefly valuable . . . . . as liberating us from the temptation of cheating or deceiving against our will, or departing hence in dread, because we owe either sacrifice to God or money to man."

To be sure, if the old gentleman attached any idea of merit to such simple acts of righting wrong, his theology, as might be expected from a heathen, was not altogether "evangelical;" but the fact he bears witness to, the intense convictions of a future state, which are apt to beset the mind as it nears the brink of the grave, is most significant, and one is ready to say, "There spoke human nature."

Of such a feeling - so general I cannot but make much, though it may be little available with a captious disputant; and, in truth, in the case of any general feeling, even though reason had less to say for it than she has, it is impossible not to suspect that we are listening to an oracle, which issues from a deeper fountain than mere logic can fully explore.

For what else, after all, can we infer from the prevalence, not to say universality, of such feelings, but that human nature is so constituted that it cannot but so feel?

Hence, at all events, we may conclude, even if the feeling be a delusion, that it is in vain to argue against it; and that it is true wisdom, if we are to "follow nature," and not spend life in vain attempts to stifle her, to act accordingly. We may say to a man who denies or doubts of a "future state" much as we may say to the atheist. To the latter it may be said: Well, supposing there is no God, still, if we are to trust at all to induction from the phenomena of all humanity in all ages and nations, mankind will believe there is one: therefore, if wise, you will cease to argue against it; for you will only lose your breath. If there be no God, man has somehow, it seems, been so constituted that he cannot but arrive at the opposite conviction. The like may be said to those adventurous speculators who assure us that all notions of moral differences—of a right and a wrong—are a delusion. If we

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can trust the philosophy of induction at all, as to what men will generally feel and think, from what they have generally felt and thought, such philosophers had better "save their breath to cool their porridge." In short, much the same may be said in reply to any other paradox diametrically opposed to convictions which, right or wrong, are founded in the constitution of our nature, and which, if men were wise, would bring many a long-winded dispute to a summary termination. Whether they arrive at truth or error, men have nothing else from which to philosophise than the constitution of their minds and faculties, and you may as well bay the moon as strive to alter the convictions normally founded on them. If wrong, the error arises from the constitution of humanity, and must still be supposed a truth. Hence the practical absurdity of all reasoning against the convictions of a material world; or to prove that our primary intuitions are all false. If they are, philosophy cannot mend them.

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Finally, therefore, from the all but universal feeling that there is a future state, I quite think men are constituted thus to feel, and consequently it is at least waste time to argue against it; and then as to the fact whether there be one, since I do not believe that God who so constituted us is a liar, I at least believe that there is one. But, if you want clear proof, I know of no other way than proving Christianity, and sending hopeful, but dubious, Nature to the school of Revelation.

I have just come to the dignity of "spectacles," and am writing with them for the first time. I little thought, a few

years ago, when I used to read with such ease the smallest print, that I should ever feel the want of these supplementary eyes; but finding, for some time, that my book was gradually receding from me inch by inch, I began to fear that I should soon have to fix it to the end of a stick, if I went on much longer; or that it would get away from me altogether. The fact is, the lens has lost a little of its convexity, and to spectacles of moderate power I have therefore reluctantly come.

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On this I am induced to make this profound reflection: How easily might the comfort of life be marred by the mal-construction of a single sense; and what a plague would life itself be if all of them were mal-constructed together! If, for example, such pranks were played with us, as (were Atheism true) we might expect; if we were the victims of indefinite monstrosity — such lusus naturæ as to prove that nature was in truth more fond of 'play" than "work ;" if we found, as we well might, a ridiculous failure in her "nisus"—her "endeavour ". as our Atheists, with contradictory metaphor, call her blind work (faith! she would need spectacles worse than I do), what a predicament we should all be in! As to the rubbish, that unintelligent "Law," according to some, "Chance," according to others (it does not matter a pin which, both being blind as newborn kittens), has unconsciously tumbled things into the only possible "conditions of existence," so that if things were otherwise, things could not go why it is rubbish; for even if we could conceive exquisite order and adaptation the result of blind agency, it is still utterly false, so far as we can judge, to say that the conditions of our well-being are also the conditions of our being. Man might have been an indefinitely different and very miserable creature, and yet have existed. If any such beings, on such an hypothesis, could have appeared at all, they might have been very execrable monsters varieties of Caliban, and yet have lived. The socalled "lusus" we do now and then see, might have been strangely multiplied and diversified, and yet the poor beast, Man, have groped, and crawled, and hobbled, and blundered through his threescore years and ten to a most welcome grave. Half mankind might have

on,

had the eyes of bats or owls, and the other half the feet of oxen or the paws of kangaroos, or the locomotive powers of the sloth, or the legs of a crane; and a great many of them might have been without hands or feet at all, as some few are. Nay, for aught we know, intelligences, essentially like ours, might have been imprisoned under a donkey's hide or a lobster's shell; in which last case, as Sydney Smith said, "It is much to be feared that the monkeys would have made lobster sauce of us."

In this matter of eyes, how easily might the Great Optician who constructed them (or the no optician "Chance,” if it had constructed any eyes at all, could have done it too) have plagued us with such convexity of the organ, that, like the Stanhope lens, it would have revealed to us only what was brought into contact with it, and then in such unlucky perfection, as to make our own deformity as hideous as the Brobdignagians to the microscopic eye of Gulliver; or, on the other hand, given us such a distant focus, that we should be obliged to recede half a mile in order to read the hour by the parish clock.

It is melancholy to think that we never duly value our blessings till they are impaired or taken from us. "Another profound remark," you will say. Yet why is it trivial? only because we are a set of beasts. It would be profound to an angel-so profound, that he would regard it as inconceivable and incredible! Here have I been served by these good servants, my eyes, for forty years, and at last know their true value only-by looking through my spectacles! I have often used them unmercifully-have compelled them to play an everlasting game of focus-shifting and pupil-changing — enlarging and contracting-compressing and expanding bobbing about with the axis and fiddling with the iris, according to the distance of objects and the degree of light. I have made them stare at a small print half through the night, when they have declared that it is time they should draw their curtains and get a little nap; and the poor drudges have never so much as winked rebellion till now! I never felt how precious they were before.

And ah! must we not confess to the same sort of thoughtless

ingratitude in relation to yet higher blessings? Amidst "spiritual light,” in the blaze of knowledge, and the enjoyment of freedom, how little do we think of the words of Christ to His disciples, true of us as of them, "Blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear, the things which kings and prophets waited to see and hear," but neither saw nor heard. How differently should we feel, if we had been cast on times of ignorance and persecution; if, before we dared to peep into the tattered fragment of a Bible deposited in the most secret crypt we could find for it, we were forced to draw bar and bolt of our chamber door, not, as our Saviour said (or not for that only), that we might "be alone with God," but that we might be alone from man; and then, carefully shading the treacherous taper, and trembling at every sound, as if we were doing a guilty thing, drag from its hiding-place the Book of God, filch, as it were, in secret, the promises of eternal life, and, with the semblance of guilt and shame, steal into Heaven! —or, if like many of our forefathers, we were glad to meet for worship by the pale moon or the safer starlight; or, safer still, on a stormy night in some mountain glen, or by the woodside or in the forest glade; and so, amidst the desolations of the present life, listen with a tremulous joy to the promises of a better. I fancy, in such cases, we should more truly estimate the knowledge and freedom we possess.

But it is the same with everything; man is least grateful for all that is most precious, for the very reason that ought to endear it most, - because it is most common. What so inestimable as light, air, and water? They fetch no price in the market; no one will give anything for them; for they can be had for nothing. God has given them without measure; but ought they, from their very cheapness, to be received without even the " peppercorn rent' of grateful thought and love? Ah ! if it were possible for human tyranny to do as it has so often done with mental light, with knowledge, with freedom, to sequester the sun-beams, to inclose to individual uses the "fields of air"

to monopolise and dole out at famine price stream and fountain, — how well should we understand what was meant by such words. "Blessed are