"If a man has a statue decayed by rust and age, and mutilated in many of its parts, he breaks it up and casts it into a furnace, and after the melting he receives it again in more beautiful form. As thus the dissolving in the furnace was not a destruction, but a renewing of the statue, so the death of our bodies is not a destruction, but a renovation. When, therefore, you see as in a furnace our flesh flowing away to corruption, dwell not on that sight, but wait for the recasting. And advance in your thoughts to a still higher point, for the statuary casting into the furnace a brazen image but makes a brazen one again. God does not thus: but casting in a mortal body formed of clay, he returns you an immortal statue of gold." - CHRYSOSTOM.

CHAPTER I.

NATURALISM.

THE tendencies of the present age set strongly and decisively towards what some would call by way of distinction the practical. That which is apprehensible by the senses, and can be handled, weighed, and measured, is sure to become sufficiently valued, while that which transcends the senses hardly obtains an attentive hearing from the working world. In the long run, however, the highest truths are always the most useful, and produce the most wide and thorough changes in human affairs. Material interests are always promoted by spiritual, and neither can be undervalued without detriment to the other. It is not, therefore, a love of what is really practical which works any ill to religion: it always saves religion from running into fanaticism and superstition. It is not a proper value of material things, it is an intense and confirmed naturalism placing itself in opposition to the supreme

good, which works all the mischief to religion of which the preachers complain.

The preachers, however, do not always recognize the fact, that there are two species of naturalism, one lacking the religious element, the other including it; and that the latter is a cropping out from the former, and borrows from it its whole style of conception and reasoning. In describing these two kinds, and showing how one runs into the other and shapes religious ideas, we shall indicate, we think, a radical vice in our theologizings, and disclose one of the deepest wants of the present hour.

By the word "Naturalism" we describe a belief in nature alone. It is a new name for the old infidelity. It indicates the creed of one who has a lively faith in the objects of sense, but in nothing beyond. What he can hear, see, handle, taste, and smell, he affirms to be veritable existences, and he affirms no more. This material scene, therefore, spread out under the sun and the stars, limits his hopes and expectations, and the highest aims of his being do not reach any farther. He does not of necessity deny that there are other modes and realms of existence. He simply does not affirm. If you aver anything beyond the limits of time, so far positive as to be thought worthy to sway us and shape our ends, he reminds you that you have no proof of

it, and that you have passed over into the region of speculations and shadows.

Though religious ideas be excluded from this creed and cultus, it does not follow of necessity that religious names and rites must be, such names as God, the Soul, Immortality, and Eternal Life. But they are used invariably to describe things and processes on the hither side of spiritual existence. God is the unconscious energy immanent in matter, circulating through all nature, and showing ever a new phasis in the trees and the grass, and man and woman. He is not a Being out of nature and above it, but a force subject to it and locked in with its conditions. In the ever-living and glowing Cosmos we behold the beauteous face of the Supreme. The human soul is its life circulating in man, instead of the cedar, the myrtle, and the violet. The soul is immortal, not individually and consciously, but only in the sense that, when a man dies, the life that was in him is drawn back into the general vortex, to reappear by and by and blossom anew in flowers and animals and little children; and so man is sure of eternal life.

But when it attempts to transcend the sphere of visible nature with its growths and decays, it finds itself in a vast inane or a hopeless and boundless night. Death is not a transition to another existence on the thither side of nature,

but a change of form within it. The region beyond lies on the imagination without form or voice or motion. Such is naturalism without religious ideas, sometimes with the pale adornment of religious phraseologies from which religious ideas have been expunged.

Religious naturalism differs from this mainly in the fact that it extends the domain of nature farther outward into space and time. It never transcends nature; or if it does, it finds itself in darkness or in spectral light, and comes back straightway to materialism for a place to stand upon.

As it cannot rise out of the natural degree of life, and shake off the clogs of sense, its only resource is to drag along its cumbrous material, and wield it in spiritual things as best it may. It cannot rise to the conception of a purcly spiritual world, but it can push forward the

dominion of the natural world so as to include the dread hereafter. It cannot rise above the level of time, but it can extend its view longitudinally and get some glimpse of the adjacent plains.

Hence its view of death and of what lies beyond it. Its immortality is only the natural life prolonged. The external body wastes and dies and mingles with the dust again. To the natural senses and conceptions the man exists no more. But naturalized faith preserves the scattered dust