revealed to my mind is simply this: The results of a man's conduct reach over into the other world on those that are persistently and inexcusably wicked, and man's punishment in the life to come is of such a nature and of such dimensions as ought to alarm any man and put him off from the dangerous ground and turn him toward safety. I do not think we are authorized by the Scriptures to say that it is endless in the sense in which we ordinarily employ that term. So much for that, and that is the extent of my authoritative teaching on that subject.

BELIEF IN GOD A MATTER OF INTUITION.

[The Vitality of God's Truth.-Evolution and Religion. 1885.]

TO-DAY

O-DAY there are great topics about which the minds of men are unsettled. I do not know that there ever was a period in which thinking, educated men were so unsettled as they are now concerning the nature and existence of God.

There is no use of hiding these things. It is of no use to say that a man must be a fool who does not believe in a God. I tell you that the question is a profound one. I have both sympathy and respect for any honest man, whose mind labors on that question. When men say that you cannot prove the existence of God by science, I say "Amen," and only subjoin that it never was pretended, either by prophet, by seer, by apostle, by the Saviour, or in the word of God, anywhere, that it could be proved in that way. God is a spirit. Science deals with matter. You cannot demonstrate the existence of God in any such way as you can demonstrate the existence of matter, or even the fruit of organized matter in human constructions. Who would ever undertake to demonstrate the quality of one of Raphael's pictures by any scientific process, or in any court except the court of a man's taste? You might scrape off the paint, and chemically separate it, and give the proportions of red and yellow, and blue, and green and gray, but all that would not come anywhere near to a demonstration of the superb artistic genius of Raphael or Titian; nor would any test, by alkali, by acid, by reagent, by measurement, by inches, by lines, or by any mechanical means, approach a proof. I should like to see an engineer's report on Rubens's pictures. An engineer can tell you everything that belongs to altitude, width, and extent. He can give you a picture of a fort, and tell you where its weakness is or where its strength lies. He can gauge a mountain; he can weigh it in every way; he can tell where to cut off and where to fill up; he can lay down beforehand the yet unaccomplished result in a pic

ture that shall be as the thing is to be when it is really executed; but what would be an engineer's report on John Milton's poetry? I should like to see Mr. Huxley, Mr. Tyndall, or any other man, give a scientific account of King Lear, of Hamlet, or of Shylock. Yet the world does measure and appreciate these things. How? By a laboratory process that is more subtle and a great deal higher than any that deals with mere matter. The evidence of thought is before the tribunal of thought. The evidence of quality is in the presence of the tribunal of quality. A man standing before a magnificent scene, and not seeing anything in it, is not a judge of the man that stands before the scene and is thrilled in every faculty of his nature by it. I know that there is the existence of a God —well, not exactly as I know that it is summer because I feel it; yet that, perhaps, is as near an illustration of it as is possible, though it is not an analogy. I stand in the presence of God and of the facts that are poured in upon me. I do not undertake to say it is just so much; but I am in the presence of a power that is not represented by the air, the earth, the water, or any chemical elements. I am in the presence of a Spirit that encompasses me, that inspires me, that lifts me out of myself. No human being ever did it. Nature never did it. It is God; it is God. Moral intuition is the great evidence of the existence of God. Yet we are not to despise men who having had the ordinary and conventional teaching of the existence of God, look into it philosophically, or search it scientifically, and are overwhelmed with doubt. They are yet in the desert; but they are on the way to the promised land.

THE "SACREDNESS" OF THE BIBLE.

[Lecture on "Conscience."-A Summer in England with H. W. B. Edited by James B. Pond. 1887.]

THERE

HERE are multitudes of men who think that the Bible is sacred. No thing is sacred except a responsible human being or Divine Being. Only by the permission of language we call places sacred," but they have no virtue in them; nothing issues out of them, no atmosphere comes from them. We use the language in that way. The Bible: it is a Book that makes a vast amount of sacredness among men. It is a Book that, as respects the past, is almost as invaluable as the future which it depicts. Criticism may carp, men may cut at it and cut it up; the Bible is, after all, a Book that will stand as long as men are in sorrow and in despondency, and are in conscious guilt, and are desirous for the development of love and peace and hope and joy; it is the fountain of

the best qualities that can exist in the individual and in human society. The only proof that you can make of the Bible is to live it that will settle it. A very worthy methodical man, whose mind is very much like the multiplication table, everything divided off into exact figures, and accustomed to read his Bible before he goes down, as he says, into the world every morning, has got half way down the block when he says: "My soul, I forgot to read my chapter!" and back he goes, all a-tremble, to the house, and runs up into his chamber and shuts the door, and draws down his face and reads a Psalm. Blessed be David, who wrote so many short chapters! The moment he has read his chapter he feels better. Now he goes down: "I have done my duty." What sort of a God must he imagine our God to be? My children love me, and greet me with the morning kiss and with the evening farewell; but suppose, in the height and excitement of some enterprise, one of my children should forget to kiss me; do you suppose I would lay it up all day, would think anything about it? Do you suppose God lays up all these little things in his disciples and friends? Is He as narrow and as mean as our conceptions of him are? And it is in this way that the Bible is constantly used. Men swear by the Bible. It is an idol under such circumstances; stands in the place of God, and is an idol. A man sits down accidentally, or he has put his child upon the Bible, and the mother says: "My dear father, the child is sitting on the Bible!" Well, better foundation he could not sit on.

EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY.

[Lecture on "Evolution and Religion."-From the Same.]

THEN there is beyond that an element in Evolution which endears it to me and to every man; I think it throws bright gleams on the question of immortality. I see that the unfolding series in this world are all the time from lower to higher, that the ideal is not reached at any point, that the leaf works toward the bud, and the bud toward the blossom, and the blossom toward the tree, and that in the whole experience of human nature, and in the whole economy of the providence of God in regard to the physical world, everything is on the march upward and onward. And one thing is very certain, that neither in the individual nor in the collective mass has the intimation of God in the human consciousness verified and fulfilled itself. The imperfection shows that we are not much further than the bud; somewhere we have a right to a prescience of the blossom, and the last we can see of men and of the

horizon is when their faces are turned as if they were bound for the New Jerusalem, upward and onward. I think there is no other point of doctrine that is so vital to the heart of mankind as this-we shall live again; we shall live a better and a higher and a nobler life. Paul says: "If in this life only we have hope, we are, of all men, most miserable"; and ten thousand weary spirits in every community are saying: "Oh, this life has been a stormy one to me; full of disappointments, full of pains and sorrows and shames and poverty and suffering, and now comes this vagabond philosophy, and dashes out of my hand the consolation of believing that I am to live again." And it is the cry of the soul: "Lord, let me live again." The accumulated experience of this life ought to have a sphere in which it can develop itself and prove itself. Now, I have this feeling-I thank God that the belief in a future and in an immortal state is in the world; I thank God that it is the interest of every man to keep it in the world; I thank God that there is no power of proof in science that we shall not live. Science may say: "You cannot demonstrate it"; but I believe it; then it is my joy. Can you go to the body of the companion of your love, the lamp of your life, and bid it farewell at the grave? One of the most extraordinary passages in the Gospels is that where the disciples John and Peter ran to the grave of Jesus and saw the angels sitting, and they said to them: "I know whom ye seek; He is not here; He is risen." But what a woe if one bore mother or father, wife or child, to the open grave, and there was no angel in it; if you said farewell forever as the body was let down to its kindred earth. It is the hope of a joyful meeting by-and-by that sustains grief and bereavement in these bitter losses in life. Science cannot destroy belief such as this of immortality after resurrection; it cannot take it away; it cannot destroy it, and it is the most precious boon we have in life-the faith that, through Jesus Christ, we shall live again, and live forever.

Jones Very.

BORN in Salem, Mass., 1813. DIED there, 1880.

YOURSELF.

[Poems, with a Memoir by William P. Andrews. 1883.]

'TIS to yourself I speak; you cannot know
Him whom I call in speaking such a one,
For you beneath the earth lie buried low,
Which he alone as living walks upon:

You may at times have heard him speak to you,
And often wished perchance that you were he;
And I must ever wish that it were true,
For then you could hold fellowship with me:
But now you hear us talk as strangers, met
Above the room wherein you lie abed;

A word perhaps loud spoken you may get,
Or hear our feet when heavily they tread;
But he who speaks, or him who's spoken to,
Must both remain as strangers still to you.

I

THE DEAD.

SEE them,-crowd on crowd they walk the earth, Dry leafless trees no autumn wind laid bare; And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,

And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare;

No sap doth through their clattering branches flow,
Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear;
Their hearts the living God have ceased to know
Who gives the springtime to th' expectant year.
They mimic life, as if from Him to steal

His glow of health to paint the livid cheek;

They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel,
That with a seeming heart their tongue may speak;

And in their show of life more dead they live

Than those that to the earth with many tears they give.