parochial congregations, recipients, merely, of the Word, and too little concerned about endeavours to bring others within reach of its sound. Poorly attired, these are scared away by the gathering of better dressed worshippers; while many of them require a special, plainer, and more illustrative method of address. They need, moreover, to be invited and wrought upon by earnest persuasion to come in;' for they will not come of their own accord. The gospel must be brought to their homes ere it will gain a lodgment in their hearts. They need to be affectionately dealt with, by families, and even individually, to be plied by repeated visitation, to be assured of cordial and Christian sympathy. They must be made the objects of fervent, persevering prayer, if souls are to be saved from the destroyer, and the moral wilderness is to blossom as the rose.'

"But how, the question may well be started, is such a work as this to be accomplished? Where are the agents? Is it not, after all, no more than a chimera? The poor we shall always have; and is it not vain to dream of plucking these unfortunates from the mire of sensuality and the Slough of Despond? Let us, in reply, advert to a worse state of matters. Let us look upon a world full of vice and darkness-power and authority everywhere enlisted against the claims of Christianity-its Founder slain upon the cross-its advocates and heralds but a few fishermen of Galilee. It may, indeed, be alleged that those early messengers of Christ and Him crucified' were endowed with the power of working miracles, and were accredited by attestations from on high. But this we know to have been an exception to the ordinary course of the Divine procedure; and because of its exceptional nature we are not the less encouraged to go forward to the work of faith and the labour of love. Have we forgotten the wonders done of old? or the fact that, in our own land and elsewhere, among many of the islands of the Pacific, in the valleys of New Zealand, among the turf huts of Ireland, as well as amidst the homes of the cottager and the artisan,—the Word has had free course,' and been brought home to the conscience and the heart. The old parochial machinery of Scotland, with its manageable parishes, zealous ministry, and numerous working eldership, and its disciples, 'living epistles of Christ,' with, as an important adjunct, its Scriptural school, intended by our Reformers to have been erected in every parish, whether urban or rural, and without any barrier in the way of the poorest of the people frequenting the sanctuary; with such means sufficiently provided in our large towns, with-and destitute of this, all will be comparatively useless-the revival of a warm, genial, energetic, and enterprising piety among the members of the Church, its present shame and scandal will be removed; for it is a matter of reproach, and a source of weakness, that the public should behold unendowed congregations not only paying their minister and meeting the whole expense of ordinances, but, in addition, founding schools, establishing home missions, and erecting new places of worship in destitute localities; while, with all the money at the command of the members of our Church, many of them contribute less to the spread of the gospel, even at home, than would provide for but one of their sumptuous entertainments; so that hardly a single step has been taken, at least in the metropolis of Scotland, beyond the ancient landmarks. Not a few, indeed, of our places of worship, even in the Old Town, may be respectably occupied; but it is chiefly by those who already set a measure of value on religious ordinances, or who have not thrown off the restraints of early habits. But where are the poor, generally speaking, so far as she is concerned? What amount of trophies have been won from out of the populous court or the teeming thoroughfare? How many outcasts, in counection with our several congregations-in proportion to what might have been the case, had there been greater zeal, devotedness, and effort-have

VOL. XXIII.

Χ

been brought, 'clothed and in their right mind,' to sit at the feet of Jesus?

"The question arises, What shall be done to remedy this evil? Or must thousands of our fellow-immortals be allowed to drift into eternity, having it to plead that, whatever others might attempt, the endowed Church of their country failed to reach them with the voice of warning and exhortation, surrounded, as they were, by temptation, too often having ground to say, 'No man cared for my soul.' Other brethren are working in this field zealously and well. Shall we not seek to meet with them upon this common ground, on which denominational differences-disputes about external polity -may well be merged in the high endeavour to bring souls to Christ? Let us not talk of the idea as chimerical, for its solution has already been exemplified. But it is a work of patient labour, self-denial, and faith, in the case of those who take active part in it, and one, moreover, which demands liberal contributions from those who have the highest good of others at heart.

"Those of our congregations who have means and some portion of time at command (and it is wonderful how true Christians will find labour in the Lord's vineyard compatible with the discharge of week-day duty) should, if genuine Christians, consider themselves as called upon to act in a missionary capacity-urged to come forth to the help of the Lord against the mighty. Many may not have the tongue of the learned,' or ability to plead; but there is a charm, almost a magic power, in the efforts of love, against which few human hearts can remain altogether proof. Did not the paid merely, but the unpaid advocates of the gospel endeavour_to_act amongst the dense masses of our population with prudence and zeal, they might become more useful pioneers. Their occasional presence would light up the homes of the poor. Their well-considered help might be of the utmost consequence; and a way would be prepared for the reclaiming of many who are now outcasts, leading careless lives, which continuing unchanged, must conduce to a miserable and hopeless eternity."

THE ACCORDANCE OF CHRISTIANITY WITH THE NATURE OF MAN.

IN the three great domains of man's investigation-the physical, moral, and metaphysical-we are continually striving towards simplification. It would, indeed, almost appear that the only mission of the unfortunate creature, man, is to pull down the great toy-the world-to see if possible the original springs and pulleys, and then die in despair. Haüy strains after the original form of the crystal, and his spirit flew off in a hypothesis. Schwann gets to the cell, the protoplast of all organic life, and cannot get any further-he has only destroyed an amount of muscle. Faraday, with more destructiveness in his analysis, tears away at the toy, and thinks he has got at the secret by an assumption of spheres of power. He leaves energy and takes the concrete clean away. Leibnitz, in an analagous way, within the strange domain of his metaphysics, resolves all things into his monas which has no dimensions— only energy. Perhaps no man ever got further into the toy, if the objec tion be not, that he went farther than he can be followed"except by those morbid creatures who are cursed or blessed with the metaphysical bias. We use the alternative because we do not know whether they be

nearer to, or further away from a knowledge of God, than those who are contented with the world as they find it with all its wonders of design-whether for good or evil-its beauty and its deformity. But we are scarcely doubters,-analysis does not lead to God. It leads to nothing -a point without dimensions-a molecule which is neither something nor nothing a spirit which is merely attenuated matter—a matter which is only a kind of coarse or vulgar spirit. There the speculator ends, puffing away his life in a philosophical euthanasia. The practical thinker does not take down the watch and analyse the matter of the wheels to follow the force to its ultimate, with the vain hope of seeing how the hours-those cycles which are only the reductions of the planetary laws-are bound up in an energy which flies from him as he pursues it, clinging to every atom of the concrete, and nevergratifying his eyes with the sight of it as a spiritus purus. He only examines and understands, and by natural logic attributes the engine work to a mind; and in a way analogous he gets to a knowledge of God, not by alembics, microscopes, or telescopes, or a differential calculus, but by an imperative law which has no modes or figures of logic about it to obscure and mislead-only an energy which is irresistible, and an object which is sufficiently cognizable by the internal sense.

Returning to our subject, it is only where we carry our so called investigations too far that we find ourselves always ready to fall into atheism or pantheism. Nay, the beauty of design increases as we get nearer the simple. There is nothing more delightful than the theories of crystals, and cells, and logical figures. They are the protoplasts by which nature works up her great achievements, and we must follow as she builds, tracing the forms and colours of the gem, the structural beauties of the flower, the developments of animal life and the steps of the syllogism. Our admiration is raised by our progress again from the simple to the complex. We do not dwell sensuously on the beauty of the mere results. Our sense of the beautiful is not so much enhanced as changed by our feeling of wonder-the true source, as Ganganelli said— however mean it may appear, of all natural theology.

So, too, there are crystals, and cells in the domain of morals and religion. These moral crystals are great beauties in their own pure nature, nor are they less wonderful when laid open to us in their simplicity than their analogues in the physical world. The difficulty is to find them, for they are not to be produced by combinations of elements like the false diamonds of Crosse, or the artificial rubies of Ebelmann; neither when they are found are we, like Helvetius (de l'Esprit) to apply to them the blow pipe of a sceptical analysis, and fuse them into the dust of atheism or irreligion. It is, indeed, a strange power that gives us these moral gems. We find it in Aristotle more than in almost any other man. The possessor of it must be so much of a sceptic as to be able to clear away all the rubbish with which they have been encrusted by gradual accumulations ever since the fall, and yet so much of a dogmatist as to be able to hold fast by the inestimable jewel while he is charmed by the glory of its refulgence. How near David Hume was to this type. If he had read less of the academics and more of the

Bible; if he had been a Christian, no mind that during the Christian era has appeared to reconcile the great mission to man's aspirations, could have succeeded like his, so clear, so logical, yet so simple, in the very chaos and tourbillons of error.

When we consider a little what is called the progress of society, we are often inclined to ask with Mr Disraeli, progress to what? We know better what the progress is from than what it is to. On questions purely theoretical, the world had a sounder heart hundreds of years ago than now. The practical reason is the great rising product of civilization. It is a twin brother who increases in strength, leaving his companion of the womb to the dominion of rickets, with wasting flesh, knobbed bones, knotted sinews, and an "auld farrant" wisdom which makes healthy people laugh. Every thing conspires to this result. The hunt after material wants is always on the increase, sensualism not only gets rhetorical but rational-rhetorical because the poet is essentially a sensualist-rational because a wish is the mother of practical logic. The good old theories of morals, religion, and metaphysics, come to have a dry macerated abstract appearance with no pabulum for-the big paunch of an advanced civilization. We daily see the old rational landınarks broken up. Reimar began with holy writ. The good old opinion that the bible was inspired, was touched with the kakodyle poison of progress, and every year since has witnessed farther applications by Strauss's, Newman's, and Macnaughton's, till even sensible people begin to spin their wish-born dialectics, and think they have a right to criticise very ancient and very reverent things. The old doctrine of the fall, too, with its fine venerable aspect and dramatic reality, used to be satisfactory to those who examined it with simplicity of heart. To the practical reason there is a myth in all things, and in none greater than in the Mosaic revelations. Just see how that book, "the testimony of the rocks," has been run after by the wise children of progress. If it has an unctuous rhetoric about it, a smack of the spices of figures of speech or thought, it is of small importance whether it sacrifices to God or Baal. They read with the "leaping eye" of delight how Lucifer, the son of the morning, having rebelled against God, is cast down upon the earth, at that primeval time a fiery hell. The arch-fiend witnesses creation going on under God's hand, race succeeds race, animal destroys animal, and as he slouches among the dense araucarian forests he wonders at that creative power, but he laughs, too, till the echoes resound through that ancient night when he sees the fierce creatures tear each other limb from limb, and devour each his brother created thing-created by God, whom the fiend now has reason to accuse of being the very direct cause of that very evil he himself glories in, and for a demonstration of which he is to be punished. No wonder that he grins with delight in his own fiendish way; but there is some wonder that the readers of this "paradise never won" should grin also. It may not be much to say that there could be no fall where innocence-in the midst of ravenous beasts-was impossible; that all our good old sacred notions are rooted up, that the corner stone of the Christian edifice is overturned and hurled into a ditch; but it is something to say, that the testimony

is credited and applauded as something new and very wonderful, without, too, a single attempt at either a natural or a revealed theodicæa to account for this terrible discrepancy between the testimony of dead matter, and the revelations of the living spirit.

It is some comfort to go back from the last mile-stone of this progress, to Mr Fry, who, though bodily of the present, is spiritually of the good old times. He has given us some essays' which are remarkable for that kind of simplicity, which can be arrived at, only by good thinkers. The book is a quaker in the Vanity Fair of our rhetorical literature, humble and gentle-humble in that it avoids all questions which are beyond human reach, and gentle in that it seeks for truth in the spirit of a true Christian philosopher. Mr Fry does not enter into the strife between Moses and the Geologists, nor into the higher question whether the bible scheme was worthy of God; but assuming that the doctrine of man's fall and redemption is true, he enquires whether, according to a reasonable expectation, we meet in human nature as known to us, any traces of that purity in which man was created, along with any evidences in the soul of a perversion of its functions. It is not pretended that there is any novelty in this argument. We are aware there is not, and we are aware also, that being one of analogy between things material and things spiritual it never can pretend to a probation. We may concede that "an instrument or a machine that has originally been designed with skill for any given end or process, will retain evidences of it to any skillful observer even if it may have undergone such injury or perversion as at present to answer that end or purpose inefficiently,"-without being able to admit that the fact of the conscience is an evidence of a perversion of man's nature. The cases are essentially different, in so much as we have no experience of any perfect human soul. We admit at once that it is a fair assumption, in the question that conscience, as a judicatory, is a fact in the nature of man. Hutchison and Butler are too much for Paley and Mandeville. We might as well say that there is no intuitive power of vision because our sense of sight requires, as Berkeley shewed, to be instructed by the movements of the hand, as that there is no connate faculty of distinguishing right from wrong because the internal judicatory requires to be instructed by an amount of experience. The mere fact, as insisted for by the old writers, such as De Vayer, that the judicatory may, in different countries award different judgments on minor matters involving taste, does not affect the case in any degree, and indeed, the good sense of mankind has settled this once vexed question for good and all. But the ulterior question, whether conscience is a sign of perversion of the original nature of the soul, is one of so much greater difficulty, that we are even met by a low theodicæa which insists for conscience being an evidence of a present existing dignity in man's nature. The place which Mr Fry occupies is therefore some where between the Calvinist and the mere moralist-" the springs of Calvin" and the "Drumly dubs of our own delving." To the one, he can say what the English gentleman said to Boston when he had heard him unfold the terrible doctrine of

Essays on the Accordance of Christianity with the Nature of Man. By Edward Fry. Constable & Co.