the tempest tells him of the strength God will give His people, and the returning gladsomeness when the storm has rolled away represents the blessing of their peace.

We seek a sign wrongfully, like the Jews, whenever we sayIf I had a voice from heaven to say this doubtful act is wrong I would forbear; but under the present uncertainty I venture uninquiring.

In the case of the Jews asking a sign and receiving only the declaration that if they destroyed the temple of His body He would raise it up in three days, we see their demand at once complied with and refused. Rejecting the gracious signs of His miracles, they were to receive, in the working out of their own hatred, a dreadful sign of the truth of His words. He would rise after they had slain Him, even as He said; and His blood would be on their heads. So, if men do not believe the promises and warnings of the Gospel, they find afterwards, in the hardening yoke of sin, in the evil consequences of transgression even in this life, sign in themselves that those warnings were no phantom terrors-no priestly invention, but a declaration of God's eternal laws of moral government-laws that might have been for, but are now against them.

We ask God to show us pity in our trouble-we should show Him patience. If the one is like Him, the other is becoming for us.

Ratiocination and rationality may sometimes exist in inverse

ratios.

'We love Him because He first loved us.' Here is a motivenot the only motive of love to God. It is not the first motive in elevation, but the first in time. No one who loves God will refuse to say this. Every lover of God must acknowledge that God has been beforehand with him. If He had not given me His son-His

Spirit-I had never loved Him. Had He not revealed Himself as my Saviour, I had seen nothing to awaken trust. I might have seen at times some glory in the divine perfections such as I imagined the attributes necessary to a Supreme Being. But it would not have been a glory for me. It would have been a light between which and me an impassable gulf was fixed. It would not have been a 'beauty that I should have desired.' But now, having hope of reconciliation-having peace with God-being a son-I can take up all that God has done and merge it in the ocean of what He is, and say I love that character, without present thought of myself; I contemplate God, the Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and am lost in admiration, adoration, rapture! But if I had not first recognised what He has done for us— -if gratitude had not laid the foundation of all, this higher stage had been for ever inaccessible. The beauties of wild rock and wood are unheeded by him who travels in peril of his life from fierce inhabitants. The thicket and the gorge, behind which an enemy may lurk, are not beautiful. Let the same traveller know that every peasant in those glens will have a greeting, every cottage a welcome for him, and he admires at his leisure what before did but remind him in vain of home and its warm safety. And so with higher things.

Surely those are wrong who (like Whately) deny that it is any argument in favour of the Christian religion to say that we feel it suits our wants. For so, it is objected, would the Arab say of Mahomet's creed. Yet some religion men must have. And the religion that satisfies most of the wants of which they are conscious will be accepted by them. Better that than nothing. Men will eat bread made of bark in lack of wheat. Better so than starve. But the modern inquirer can say—I see in the Christian religion that which best satisfies my wants out of all the religions known to us in the world. It is not a substitute for something better. It is the best known or conceived for this purpose. Here surely is an argument not to be lightly thrown away.

The fallacy of Emerson's Essay on Self-reliance consists in confounding our idiosyncrasy which we need not give up, with our sins, which we must. A thousand different characters, each developed according to a primary and righteous ideal, would each have a full right to existence—each be best in its place. But these same thousand characters recklessly pushing, absorbing, transgressing, exacting right and left, have not that right, and are varieties illegitimate, not legitimate—a chaos, not a cosmos.

SECTION IV.

Poetry.

MY

son went to Manchester in 1843, fresh from his classical studies in London. His taste disposed him to keep up those studies for some time afterwards. The Antony and the Disenchantment were both written in 1845, in the twentysecond year of his age, and they are now printed as serving in some measure to illustrate that stage of his culture. The writer was a great admirer of Comus, and the Antony is such a Masque as a classic poet might be supposed to have written on the shores of the Mediterranean two thousand years ago. It embodies the popular belief of those times. No modern reader must be expected to be interested in the story of this piece, but the poetry may not be the less real because lavished on a theme which was once a religious creed, but is so no longer.

During the last ten years of his life, the author wrote little or nothing in poetry. Circumstances, and especially the success of his prose writings, disposed him to restrict his efforts through that period almost entirely to prose. His critical faculty, as a judge of poetry, ripened greatly, but he ceased to attempt any realization of his own ideal in that form.

ANTONY. A MASQUE.

Time-Midnight.

NEMESIS appears above the city of Alexandria.

From your ever-falling fountains,

Where the moonbeams cannot rest,

From your emerald thrones, the mountains,
Where the storm in clouds is drest:

From your continents and islands,
By the fickle waves carest,
From your winter-haunted highlands,
From the cloud-homes of the blest;
Come, ye gods of earth and water,
Come, ye gods of wood and hill;
To the judgment, to the slaughter,
Bring the witness that shall kill.
For the weeping and the dying
Shall be many on the morrow,
In the city that is lying

In the slumber of its sorrow.

Enter BACCHUS.

On my golden-orbed throne,
With its starry glancing eyes,
Where all earth to me is shown
As I muse thereon alone,
I hear, and I arise.

O'er the rugged cloven peak,
Where I make the thunder speak,

And oft time, at dead of night

Do appear its crown of light;
I have sped upon the breath
Of a song of love and death,
That was sung by a bard of mine,
As he walked in a wailing wood-
I come at thy call, divine,
With words of evil and good.

Spare the hero, spare,

Dark spirit of the air ;

But my lot is in the urn
To condemn the false cold fair:

Now be just, arraigner stern.

'Neath the charm of my watching,

His restless life-ocean,

Loud sounding in sunlight

Shook earth with its motion.