orders of intelligence, and to stand in the maturity of his strength in the very centre of the panorama of truth. And if it be true that every mystery in Scripture, as giving pledge of an enlargement of capacities, witnesses to the glories with which the future comes charged, and if from every intricate passage, and every dark saying, and every unfathomable statement, we draw new proof of the magnificence of our destinies, which of you will withhold his confession that the difficulties of the Bible are productive of benefit, and that consequently there result advantages from the fact that there are in Scripture some things hard to be understood' ?"* Dryden has briefly and beautifully expressed the substance of many of the preceding remarks in the following lines :— "Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars To lonely weary wandering travellers Is reason to the soul; and as on high But guides us upwards to a better day. When day's bright lord ascends the hemisphere, So, pale grows reason in religion's light, So sinks and so dissolves in supernatural light Some few whose lamps shone brighter have been led From cause to cause to nature's secret head, And found that one first principle must be. Whether some soul encompassing this ball, * Ibid, Vol. I, p. 374-5. There are doubtless many other benefits arising from this obscurity. See "Eight Sermons," by the Rev. G. S. Drew, of St. Pancras, London; Sermon vii. Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll In this wild maze their vain endeavours end, For what could fathom God were more than He." THE DARKNESS OF DELUSION. The fiend they found Assaying by his dev'lish art to reach The organs of her fancy, and with them forge WE have called the phenomena for which we are accounting, nocturnal, compared the existing state of things to darkness, and treated of the darkness of ignorance as resembling night in general, without reference to the special states of body and mind with which it is associated. Of these one of the most pertinent to the subject in hand is dreaming. Though not a necessary consequence of night it is one of its frequent accompaniments, and though not identical with darkness we may be pardoned for calling it darkness, and the spiritual condition to which we would compare it, the darkness of delusion. Ignorance is negative, being simply a want of knowledge. Delusion is positive, and implies error, mistaken for truth. The one originates in a darkness of which we may be conscious, the other in a darkness of which we are not conscious, and which fancy, or folly, or madness, would dissipate with false lights and cheer or sadden with fantastic apparitions. Both are of the night, but the former involves those who may be called the waking, the latter those who may be styled the dreaming. Now the dream state presupposes and cannot be understood but in connexion with a sleep state. Nor ought the resemblance between this also and the spiritual condition of men in general to be wholly overlooked. But we shall dismiss it with a very few observations. "Balmy sleep" "steeps the senses in forgetfulness," and while the body under its influence resembles a breathing corpse rather than a living organism, its inhabiting spirit, though often in wild activity, seems to the waking observer as torpid as that corporeal framework that appears to be its dormitory. But to this it may be said there is nothing analogous in the state of mankind as regards religion. That subject has attracted the attention of men in every era of the world, and often convulsed society with controversy, with wars, and with martyrdom. The state, then, of man cannot be one of spiritual lethargy. But after deducting from all this excitement and commotion whatever can be traced to worldly politics and party violence, to the prejudices which religion so often opposes, to the passions which it resists, and the pride that it mortifies, to the vices which assume its name, and to the merely intellectual curiosity which it awakens, as well as to that genuine and lively interest in the subject itself which we admit but deem exceptional, and account for consistently with the proposed hypothesis, what remains but apathy or torpor? Does religion, regarded simply as our duty to God, occasion that personal, practical, profound, and universal attention which its paramount importance ought always to inspire? K The truth is that notwithstanding the excitement which its connexion with other subjects may have caused, it has always in its naked simplicity been so distasteful to men in general, that something unusual or something startling, a grievous sickness, a serious disappointment, a melancholy bereavement, or a marvellous escape, is necessary to awaken them to a sense of its real importance. But however natural, in the ordinary sense of that word, may be this insensibility, is it normal? If there be verily a God, a sovereign Creator and moral governor of the universe, a being of infinite wisdom, goodness, and power, in whom we "live and move and have our being," ought He not to be, and, but for some such catastrophe as the fall, may we not presume that He would be, in all our thoughts? Would not the knowledge of Himself, His ways, His works, and His laws, of the proper manner in which to worship Him, and of the right mode of procuring His favour and promoting His glory, be the one great end and aim of our whole existence? Man is a rational, responsible, and immortal creature; whence, then, this strange indifference to the most important of all the subjects that can engage his reasoning faculties, to all that can make responsibility serious, and to all that can make immortality awakening? Surely if we were not now on the "night side of nature," and the sun were above our horizon, the day would summon us one and all to its duties, and men by their spiritual activity over all the earth would prove that they were "up and stirring." We are not ignorant of the arguments by which this reasoning may be met, and shall consider |