own sakes can be the objects of no solemn love, of no moral reliance, but only of fear, of calculation, of helpless submission; and not till they are regarded as the finite usages of an infinite Mind, deep in holiness and beauty which they cannot adequately express, will any true devotion mingle with the thought. A person is higher than a thing; and if, while we are persons, the ultimate power of the universe is not, it is then we that are supreme; and if reverence be possible to us at all, it must seek its object, not in nature without, but in the self-conscious spirit within. This however is simply impossible: no man can venerate himself; and the mere fact that the human heart instinctively cries aloud for leave to worship and to trust, yet cannot do so without an outer and a higher being, irresistibly postulates the personal and living God. For who can conceive, that the affections should unhesitatingly rush into religion and seize it as their home; yet be doomed to meet there only a disconsolate emptiness? that they should practise on us an imposture without parallel in our lower nature? that our highest principles should be our greatest deceivers ?

Nor is it theologies alone that are concerned in repelling this absurdity. The same interpretation of life and the universe that gives birth to them is also the inspiring principle of poetry and art. To them all it is essential that a meaning, other than that of physical law, should lurk behind the veil of history

and nature and shine through. They all go to life and nature to seek there for something which the senses cannot apprehend or the sciences explain; for glances of thought which appeal to the loving eye; for ideal aims which gleam through the dross and dust of reality; for the spirit of a calm heaven and a dear God beneath the rush of change and the cold neutrality of nature. Were it only inferior men and our poorer faculties that felt this divine meaning in all things and pressed into it with secret sympathy and prayer, we might not shrink from suspicion of its possible delusion. But for ourselves we surely know that it is no dozing dream: it is when we are most awake that we behold this glory; and dull and drowsy hours bring the world back again to the common and unclean. And of other men we no less surely know that it is precisely the most largely gifted and most finely balanced, that are most profoundly aware of this expression of a divine life through all; and so cognisant are they of its mysteries, that when once they speak and interpret it for us, we also find it to be there. And though the vision of genius, momentary perhaps and dazzling as a burst of sudden sunshine from a breezy sky, falls far short of the clear constancy of religious insight, yet its nature is essentially the same, and its existence wholly unaccountable in a universe of mere material elaboration. It is not an insignificant fact, that even what is called imitative Art is

Reverence for Runthi

then only successful when it seizes first the whole idea of the scene or object it would represent, and from this works outward into the detail; and that whoever proceeds by the inverse process, and constructs his composition piecemeal by arranging the elements of form and colour, and expects that, the parts being right, the whole cannot be wrong, does but embalm the corpse of nature instead of giving back its life. This fact is intelligible, if the true artist, in going out from the inner heart to the outer manifestation, is on the real creative track and is following the vestiges of God;-if the universe be an ideal product coloured by an infinite feeling and shaped forth by an everlasting thought;— if, being the utterance of a Mind within, it is best presented by the kindred sympathies and reverence of a Mind without. But if it were a dynamic accident or a chemical compound, if it had actually been in parts. before it was a whole, if a wild population of physical forces had rushed out of their wastes and subscribed to make it, if it had no heart but the pulsations of galvanism and no meaning in the beauty and grandeur that it shows, then surely the fact would be a paradox, that he best reproduces nature who most flatly contradicts its ways.

The same is true in all the higher departments of our life. Of all great souls, of all steadfast and heroic lives, the ultimate basis is simple trust in God, and a profound sense of the divine significance and relations

of our being here.
direct resort to religious sources of strength, the man
who, in the midst of derision and threats, will stand to
his truth, although he dies, hides in his heart a secret
worship for the inner substance of things as claiming
his loyalty against their empty shows. How could the
lonely "martyr of science" unarmed but with the
sword of his spirit, face the infuriated hosts of organized
ignorance rushing to sweep him from the field, did he
not feel that his back was against a rock at whose foot
he might fall, but which barred alike his retreat and
their advance? Why is it impossible for him to pur-
chase liberty and life by a few false words that will
betray nobody, and concern only the moon or the
atmosphere which will make no complaints? In the
relations of man with man, it is conceivable that
mutual affection and understood compact should secure
an unswerving fidelity: and when a Campanella, sus-
pected for his gloomy prophecies, is seven times stretched
upon the rack, and for twenty-seven years consigned to
Neapolitan dungeons, from which at any moment he
might have bought deliverance by a lie, we can under-
stand, on simply human grounds, the indomitable
refusal to invent conspiracies and label them with
living names. But in the relations between man and
nature, there is no such cogent affection, no such inter-
change of conscious obligation, to support the pleading
for veracity: yet here also the reverence for truth

Even without any conscious and

persists; and Copernicus, having once found for the Sun his regal seat in the heavens, felt it would be a disloyal thing to keep it secret, or drive him forth again as an exile or a wanderer. However useful to mankind this sentiment may be, as securing the successive steps of knowledge, no one in feeling it thinks of this. It is not a social impulse to which he yields; but an implicit and ineradicable faith that the true is best, and when known is obligatory; wielding over us an authority with which we have no right to tamper. The secret background of this feeling is therefore a recognition of reality as divine and as the determining source of human duty. It is an inward trust in the order of the world as truly sacred, and entitled to the unqualified homage of human thought and will.

Still more obviously does this trust lie at the foundation of character, when from the intellectual reverence for truth we pass to the moral reverence for justice. Look into the hearts of the men who, from time to time, have risen in disinterested revolt against some wrong on which the world's conscience has gone to sleep,Wycliffe and Savonarola in the Church, Clarkson and Garrison in the State, and ask what is the inspiration which fans their enthusiasm and renders their patience inexhaustible? Is it any reasoned estimate of what society loses by its shortcomings ?-any statistical survey of avoidable mischiefs? or any measurement of their personal strength against the resistance to be overcome?