tor, the architect, the musician, are all shapers and moulders of the material world. But their whole scope and aim is to reach and affect the mind. They cannot reach it except through the body; through the eye, and the ear, and the touch, which receive immediately nothing but corporeal impressions, and yet are the channels to the soul. But even when these avenues to the soul are opened, they would be as far removed from it as ever, as wholly excluded from any commerce and communication with it, as the inhabitants of another planet are from this earth, unless they had within their reach signs, symbols, analogies, resemblances of spiritual things, stamped by the hand of Nature herself upon the external creatures of sense, and which they could present to the mind; as savages learn to offer for barter only objects which the civilised eye can understand and appreciate.

The further we pursue this observation, the more we are compelled to acknowledge the fact of a wonderful similitude, analogy, and correlation between the material and the spiritual world — the more we find it practically asserted and acted on even by the child and the peasant, who yet never heard of the doctrine of ideas,' nor could comprehend the abstract theory, that of all created things the primary archetypal forms lie hidden in the being of their Creator.

But let us now contend not for a hasty assumption of such a fact, however strongly it may be supported, but for a cautious and reverent application of it to the theory of Political Society-the application of it as an hypothesis-as a question still to be solved-with the same reservations and willingness to abandon it, with which any experimental Philosopher proceeds to test the general law which has been suggested to him by a casual

phenomenon, and holds it in his mind suspended and undetermined until it has been confirmed by experiment. Let us claim for it as yet no further weight, than that which is given by every Political Philosopher to his first hasty induction, before he has matured and established it. For a Christian, while he gives to Revelation the reverence, the awful reverence, and value, which is due to the Word of God, will beware also how he employs it to purposes for which it was not designed. We may be bound to go before the ark and consult it in trials and emergencies. But we may not be permitted to carry it out to battle as a charm against the enemy. It may be our highest wisdom to accept in all fulness the declaration of the Church Catholic respecting the Divine Nature; but there may be hidden and unalterable reasons, which would render it presumptuous to apply them to the explanation of created phenomena.

But with this sober and reasonable caution, a Christian may safely proceed to try his experiment.

He will observe, then, that in the Athanasian Creed, as sanctioned by the Church, there is contained the most formal, abstract, generalised, and technical statement of the Divine Nature. It is the metaphysical formula of all revelation. All the other parts and facts of Christianity fall and range themselves under this grand doctrine of a Trinity in Unity, and an Unity in Trinity. And the power of abstraction can proceed no farther. He here reaches the cause of causes-1 -the highest and parent source of all other truths -that point in the ascending scale of knowledge, short of which human reason will never be contented to stop; and beyond which it cannot pass. As a Christian, he has been placed, as by the hand of Angels, upon that pinnacle of the temple of truth, which Philosophy, with stumbling, wandering footsteps, is vainly endeavouring to reach

by a path of its own discovery; and from this he will endeavour to look down and discern its reflection imaged in all the forms that lie before him in the mirror of the created world.

He will not be startled with the fact, that this parent truth is a stumbling-block to the human understanding; one which the mere logical faculty of man could not reach, and in which it cannot acquiesce, except under the wing of faith. He receives it upon the authority of God, by the voice of His Minister and Prophet-the Catholic Church. And he is not surprised to find that the highest generalised formula of a world of mystery and problems should itself be a mystery and problem. But while all human speculations on the subject divide themselves into two classes; one, the most intellectual, contending for the Unity of the Creator, and the other, the voice of the populace, proclaiming Plurality; he will be struck with the deliberate firmness with which Christianity asserts a doctrine embracing both, without attempting to reconcile them by reasoning. When he considers the firm, solemn, uncompromising, peremptory voice in which both these truths are enunciated, and the warnings with which they are accompanied, it will impress on him the necessity of fixing them steadily before his mind in all his inquiries, and of maintaining them combined in the same form and relation in which revelation presents them. They are antagonist doctrines, set as barriers against the extravagances of human intellect on the one side, and of human passion on the other. To the vulgar sensualised mind, distracted and divided by its appetites, the doctrine of the Unity is most strange, and therefore most necessary to be enforced. To the Phi

losopher, whose law of thought is order, system, perspicuity, demonstration, in one word unity, under some form or other, the doctrine of Plurality pre

sents a barrier, which must be maintained inviolable. And as it is the Philosophical Study of Political Science on which we are now supposing the Christian to be entering, he must fix most prominently and primarily before his eyes the doctrine of Plurality. He will then ask himself if these two doctrines, both rigidly guarded and combined, do not constitute the type and model upon which creation has been constructed, the law under which all other laws are ranged, the key to all the phenomena of the world, the highest ultimate expression of all beauty, and all goodness, and all truth, as they are the highest ultimate expression of the Mystery of the Divine Nature.

And a single glance at the constitution of the world in general will reveal a multitude of facts tending to confirm this hypothesis. When he looks at the material world, at any department of natural science, he will see that the whole business of philosophy is to trace some one general law-some one pervading form through an infinite variety of combinations. Every leaf, and every flower, and plant, and tree, and all the classes of animal life, from the zoophyte to the elephant, are constructed upon principles of organisation, which the farther we trace them, resolve themselves more easily into certain grand comprehensive formularies, which themselves, we are instinctively assured, are reduceable under some one head, though we endeavour to discover it in vain. The streams of being branch out into myriads of currents, but we believe we cannot but believe that there is some one fountain-head. They exhibit a plurality in unity, and an unity in plurality.

We look to the mind of man, and we trace it passing from infancy to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood, from manhood to age, from age to death,

through innumerable changes and affections; each moment colouring it with some new feeling, or impressing on it a different idea, and still its very being consists in its identity and permanence.

It is a fixed point amidst a whirl of external vicissitudes, with which it combines at every moment, and yet is identified with none, preserving its own distinctness while it enters into all their forms; until man arrives at his maturity and perfection, an unity in plurality, and a plurality in unity.

We examine the laws of morals; and there also perfection consists in affections which unite minds without destroying their individual distinctness; in obedience, which harmonises actions without converting subjects into slaves; in firmness and consistency of conduct, which reduces the vacillations of human thoughts and feelings into order and permanence, while still they are permitted to exist; in energy, which masters and subdues opposing wills and forces; in quietude, which maintains an unity of being amidst all the vicissitudes of the world; in faith, by which a multitude of intellects (vary as they may in power, in situation, or in age,) are yet capable of receiving and preserving one eternal, immutable body of truth; in reason, of which the one object and paramount law is, to extract from a chaos of phenomena one pervading universal truth, while the phenomena themselves are permitted to retain their distinctness and reality.

So it is with the world of imagination. Every theory of beauty embraces two elements at once. One colour will not constitute a picture; and yet over a variety of colours there must be thrown one tint and tone. One line will not form a statue; and yet, from a multiplicity of lines, the sculptor must place before the eye some one consistent image. A building is a crystallisation of forms; yet towers and pin