prehensible by sense, and it is to discover the outward creation that the senses are given. All internal things are apprehended by thought, and it is to seize this far higher order of realities, that thought is given. Never was eye or ear made perceptive of Deity: "no man hath heard his voice at any time or seen his form:" he is the object of simply spiritual discernment, the holy image, mysteriously shaped forth from the quarries of our purest thought, and glowing with life, beauty and power, in the inmost sanctuary of the mind. And his reality there is a certainty of the same rank as the existence of the universe without. There is truth then, and only a wise enthusiasm, in the established strains of Christian piety; invoking the presence of the Holiest to the soul as his loved retreat, and humbly referring to him the purest thoughts and best desires. I pretend not to draw the untraceable line that separates his being from ours. The decisions of the Will, doubtless, are our own, and constitute the proper sphere of our personal agency. But in a region higher than the Will,-the realm of spontaneous thought and emotion,—there is scope enough for his "abode with us." Whatever is most deep within us is the reflection of himself. All our better love, and higher aspirations, are the answering movements of our nature in harmonious obedience to his spirit. Whatever dawn of blessed

sanctity, and wakening of purer perceptions, opens on our consciousness, are the sweet touch of his morning light within us. His inspiration is perennial; and he never ceases to work within us, if we consent to will and to do his good pleasure. He befriends our moral efforts; encourages us to maintain our resolute fidelity and truth; accepts our co-operation with his designs against all evil; and reveals to us many things far too fair and deep for language to express. But, while he is thus prompt to come with his Spirit to the help of seeking hearts, he is expelled by the least unfaithfulness; and when the "spirit of truth" is driven away, this holy "Comforter" no more remains. To receive the promise, we must deserve the prayer, of Christ, that we "may be kept from the evil," and "sanctified through the truth." Finding a Holy of Holies within us, we need not curiously ask whether its secret voices are of ourselves or of the Father. Christ felt how, within the deeps of our spiritual nature, the personalities of Heaven and earth might become entwined together and indissolubly blended: "Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, and they also one in us." And so, the Holy spirit within us, the spirit of Christ, and the spirit of God, are after all but one ;-a blessed Trinity, our part in which gives to our souls a dignity most humbling yet august.

VI.

CHRISTIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.

GENESIS III. 22.

AND THE LORD GOD SAID, BEHOLD, THE MAN IS BECOME AS ONE OF US, TO KNOW GOOD AND EVIL.

IT is a favourite doctrine of one of the wisest thinkers of our day, that "if Adam had remained in Paradise, there had been no anatomy, and no metaphysics." In other words, it is only on the lapse from the state of health, that we find we have a body; and on the loss of innocence, that we become conscious of a soul. Disease and wrong are the awakeners of our reflection: they bring our outward pursuits to a pause, and force us to look within: and the extent of our self-study and self-knowledge may be taken as a measure of the depth to which the poison of evil has penetrated into our frame. The man who, instead of being surrendered to spontaneous action, voluntarily

retires to think, has fallen sick, and can effect no more. The art which has recovered from its trance of inspiration and found out that it has rules, begins to manufacture and ceases to create. The literature which directs itself to an end, and critically seeks the means, may yield the produce of ingenuity, but not the fruit of genius. The society which understands its own structure, talks of its grievances, plumes itself on its achievements, and prescribes for its own case, is already in a state of inevitable decadence. And the religion which has begun to inquire, to sift out its errors, and treasure up its truths, has lost its breath of healthy faith, and only gasps in death. With sighs and irresistible longings, does this noble writer look back upon imaginary ages of involuntary heroism, when the great and good knew not their greatness and goodness, and genius was found which was a secret to itself, and men lived for God's sake, instead of for their own. Could he realize his dream of perfection, he would stock the world with unconscious activity, and fill it with men who know not what they do.

This celebrated paradox could never occupy a mind like Mr. Carlyle's, did it not envelop an important and seasonable truth. But before we give ourselves up to the despondency it must inspire, it is as well to see whether there is no illusion in its

sadness; and whether its pathetic complaints may not even be turned, by an altered modulation, into a hymn of thanksgiving.

To sigh after an unconscious life,-what is it but to protest against the very power of thought? To think is not merely to have ideas,-to be the theatre across which images and emotions are marched ;-but to sit in the midst as master of one's conceptions; to detain them for audience, or dismiss them at a glance; to organize them into coherence and direct them to an end. It implies at every step the memory and deliberate review of past states of mind, the voluntary estimate of them, and control over them. It is a royal act, in which we possess the objects which engage us, and are not possessed by them. It is an act of intense selfconsciousness, whose whole energy consists in this, that the mind is kindled by seeing itself: as if the light were to become sensitive, and turn also to vision.

Again, to sigh for an unconscious life, is to protest against Conscience. For what is this faculty but, as its name denotes, a knowledge with one'sself of the worth and excellence of the several principles of action by which we are impelled ? Shall we desire to be impelled by them still, only remaining in the dark as to their value and our obligations ?-to be the creature of each, as its turn