SELF-INDULGENCE.

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There are poets whose writings indicate rather a human than an individual interest in themselves, as though self had been but the specimen in which they found imaged the psychological history of their kind. In Hartley Coleridge's volumes self is presented in colors so delicate and forbearing, and in union with such a generous regard for others, as well as for abstract things, that self-pity seems but the sadness of one who could look down upon himself with the same feelings which he would bestow on a horse over-driven or a wounded bird.

His muse interpreted between him and his neighbors; she freshened and brightened the daily face of Nature ; she sweetened the draught of an impoverished life, and made atonement to a defrauded heart.

His nature was one, which, alike from generosity of heart and versatility of mind, had a large power of appreciating the most opposite gifts. We have little doubt that he cordially admired many, who in him would have remarked little except his defects. Edinburgh Review.

When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself: I'm getting up now to do the Business of a Man; and am I out of humour for going about that I was made for; and for the sake of which I was sent into the world. Was I then designed for nothing but to doze and batten beneath the counterpane? Well, but this is a comfortable way of living. Granting that wast thou born only for Pleasure; were you never to do anything? I thought Action had

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THE CHURCH ALWAYS ASCETIC.

been the End of your Being. Pray look upon the Plants and Birds, the Pismires, Spiders, and Bees, and you'll see them all regular and industrious, exerting their Nature and busy in their Station. For shame! Shall a Spider act like a Spider, and make the most of her Matters, and shan't a Man Act like a Man? Why don't you rouse your Faculties, and manage up to your Kind? For all that, there's no Living without Rest. True; but then let's follow Nature's directions, and not take too much of it.

Providence does not grant Force and Faculties at Random, but every thing is made for some end. The Sun, as high as 'tis, has its business assigned, and so have the Celestial Deities. And where 's the wonder of all this? But pray what were you made for? For your pleasure? Common Sense won't bear so scandalous an Answer. Antoninus.

The foundation stone of all religion is a sentiment in the breast of man of disproportion or disunion between him and God, between him and the Infinite. This sentiment underlies the entire religious life of the world. It has given shape to all man's distinctive hope, to all his aspiration, to all his best activity. He has the idea or inward sense of infinitude, of perfection, of a life which is not derived from without, and which is above all vicissitude and perturbation, and he feels that this is not the life which nature gives him. Hence the beginnings of his religious life, or of his attempts to conciliate the Infinite,

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involve a conflict between him and nature. Nature gives him a life underived from within, derived from past ancestry, a life depending on a myriad external things, and hence subject to a myriad pains, disquiets, and disappointments. His soul whispers to him of a higher life than this, the life of God, a life which flows wholly from within the subject, depending upon no outward circumstances whatever, controlling all outward circumstances in fact, and subject therefore to no pain, no disquiet, and no meanness forever. By all the attraction of the latter life over the former, he aspires to placate it, to draw it nearer to him, to win its blessedness. And he knows no way so direct, so full of influence towards this end, as the denial of the natural life, or the persistent mortification of its desires, ambitions and splendors. This life, he says practically, which I derive from nature, shall not be my life. I hate it, I abhor it, I banish it. I know of a serener, of a freer, of a higher life than this, and all my instincts bid me crave it. Hence I will kill this mortal natural life within me. It may for long years yet invest my body, but my soul shall have no participation in it. My soul shall mourn in its joys and rejoice in its sorrows, if so be that I may thus get deliverance from it.

Hence it is that you see the religious life, under whatever skies it may flower, involve more or less of asceticism. Hence the universal attitude of the church has been an attitude of aversion towards the joys of the merely natural life; and its constituent principle the conviction of the inadequacy of the merely natural life of man to attract the divine complacency. Henry James.

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RELATIONS TO THE EXTERNAL WORLD.

Of the external world, indeed, too little account has been made in the faith of Christians. They have not cared to recognize it as the shrine of immanent Deity; have stood in uneasy relations to it; often inimical to it; sometimes trying to get rid of it as an illusion; usually regarding it as a foreign object, like a great statue on the stage of being, with only stony eyes and ears for the real play of passions that whirl around. Existence in its essence, has been felt as an interview between man and God, at which space and nature have been collaterally present, but in which it was not apparent what they had to do. Physical science and the plastic arts may have reason to complain of the depressing influence of this imperfect view, and of the hard necessity under which it places them of pursuing their ends with only scanty and grudging recognition from religion. Martineau.

Mr. Bellows says Christ was the first complete repudiator of asceticism. The war is between the higher and the lower instincts, not between spirit and matter. He hates those sentimentalists who talk about dropping all evil with the body. It is the most intense selfflattery.

Wouldest thou that thy flesh obey thy spirit? Then let thy spirit obey thy God. Thou must be governed, that thou mayest govern. Quoted from St. Augustin.

The body too has its rights; and it will have them. They cannot be trampled upon or slighted without peril.

THE ANIMAL AND THE DIVINE LIFE.

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The body ought to be the Soul's best friend, and cordial, dutiful helpmate. Many of the studious however have neglected to make it so; whence a large part of the miseries of authorship. Some good men have treated it as an enemy; and then it has become a fiend, and has plagued them. Guesses at Truth.

The wonder of the body lies in this, that it brings man into the whole order of the world, without surprise, because with full preparation. If he is to be subject to day and night, there is day and night already written upon his members; half his moments are a rest, even when work and thought are in their fullest power; his aims and desires have their gay fresh morning, their high flown noon, dubious twilight, meditative evening, and night of cessation and repose and this on the minute scale of hours as well as in the circle of the threescore years and

Some will be forward to inquire What is this Animal life and what the Divine, that this must so pompously triumph over the other? and why, if the one be so much more precious in the eyes of God than the other is, does he not, without so long ambages and tiresome circumstances enthrone her at once, giving her her due honour without delay, and mistaken and lapsed Souls that happiness they are capable of, without so tedious and irksome trouble.