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trospection he learns the laws of his own being; he studies mind, its nature, its capacities, its exercises, its affections-all its intricate and mysterious phenomena; he finds within himself a spiritual world as vast and as inexhaustible as the material world around him-a world that can enfold within its thought the whole material creation, as the chrystalized glass enfolds the curious forms of the artist-trees, plants, flowers, birds, animals, earth, sea and sky, all forms and combinations of material things held within the chrystal, and seen through it as through a lens; and in this pure spiritual world, also, as in a mirror, perceiving the face and the glory of his Maker, he rejoices in himself as the image of God.

Moreover, it is given to this being to hold intercourse with his Maker; not merely to render homage, but to approach with filial confidence the throne of Infinite Majesty; to give and to receive love; and in that love to find peace and joy unbounded and eternal. He, the sole offspring of God, may tread as a son his Father's courts; may know, as a son, his father's counsels; may share, as a son, his father's delights; yet must this intercourse be reverential, and, in part, reserved, the approach of the inferior to the superior, of the subject, though a son, to the Sovereign, though a father, the approach of the finite to the infinite. The society of the creature with the Creator, cannot be like the society of the persons of the Godhead; the creature cannot fathom the thoughts of the Creator, much less can he enter into his counsels as an equal. It is his only to receive, to acknowledge, to love and to adore. His happiness is the highest possible to his condition, but not the highest of which we can conceive. When enraptured with the beauties of the physical creation he exclaims, "How beautiful, how sublime," he meets at most an echo to the outward ear, not a response to the inward soul. When looking upward with adoring love, he cries, "How glorious Thou;" though he meet an approving smile, he feels no syn.pathetic chord vibrating in unison with the innermost fibres of his being, thus stirred at the presence or the thought of God. Communion with God he may enjoy; but for that simpler heartfellowship that his nature craves, he is alone in the wide universe. Sympathy, companionship he has none; and wanting these, he wants also the fulness of joy.

A solitary being thus created in the heaven of thought, would be like a solitary star in the material heaven, which, though pure and radiant as the eye of God himself, would yet wander on in the blackness of darkness forever. But add to this another and another, and as light answers to light, the scene is already brightened, and the responsive rays break the Bolitude of universal gloom. Add now to these a glittering host, and while darkness vanishes, the morning stars sing together, and the sons of God shout for joy. Thus it is in heaven. There is no solitary praise, no single lyre; but one grand unison or oft-recurring chorus, Cherubim and Seraphim, telling their raptures, answer each other face to face.

When the first man was placed in Eden, he was not wholly without society. Angels were his ministers. These elder ranks of the creation assisted this their younger brother with their instructions, and cheered him with their songs. But more especially did his Maker condescend to become his companion; and in the cool of the day the Lord God would appear to Adam under some visible form-resplendent yet supportable by his unfallen vision; would walk with him in the garden, and talk with him as a father with a child. Yet his Maker knew that there was a great void in the life of this infant creature; that an element of his being, essential to the completeness of his happiness, was not satisfied by anything in his surrounding circumstances. It was not enough that, made a little lower than the angels, the head of the whole animal creation, and holding daily fellowship with his Maker, he was placed in a garden of perfect beauty, to dress and to keep it, and as the vicegerent of heaven, was commissioned to have dominion over the new world. It was not enough that his whole sentient nature was gratified, that all his powers of intellect were employed, and that his moral being was developed to the utmost under the immediate tuition of Jehovah; his social nature was not satisfied; his sympathies as a man were not met; his soul found no responsive element in the whole creation amid which he dwelt; for he had not there one equal companion. He could hold no communion with the animal world; and his intercourse with angels, and much more with God himself, was that of the younger with the elder, of the inferior with the superior; wanting in the element of sympathy, of a full correspondence which gives its charm to the society of equals.

Therefore the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him;" I will provide for him a companion suited to his nature and his wants; and he gave him such a companion, made like himself, made from himself, whom he could love as his own, whom he could converse with as his consort; not through such a media as had heretofore given him intercourse with the spirit-world-but face to face. What joy was added to our first father by this gift, is expressed by his own rapturous declaration of devotion to his Eve, and is thus happily rendered by the poet of the Paradise Lost and Regained :

"Thou hast fulfilled

Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign,
Giver of all things fair! but fairest this
Of all thy gifts."

And most fitly does the poet represent the joy of our first parents in each other as finding its highest expression in the united adoration of their Maker.

"When at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,
Both turned, and under open sky adored

The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heaven,
Which they beheld; the moon's resplendent globe,
And starry pole: Thou also mad'st the night,
Maker Omnipotent, and thou the day,

Which we, in our appointed work enjoy'd,
Have finished, happy in our mutual help,

And mutual love, the crown of all our bliss
Ordain'd by thee."

Man now enters upon his existence in the social state. However isolated the place of his birth, he is, nevertheless, ushered into the family, and is trained in the society of others. But the family-except in its first formation-is not constituted upon the principle of elective affinity. It is society, but not chosen society. God setteth the solitary in families; and this organization is designed at once to meet and to develope the social feeling in man. Yet the mere family relation does not do this in perfection. It is too much a necessary thing or a thing of course-there is too, little volition in it. Parents know why they love their children and delight in their society; and by and by children come to understand why they love or ought to love their parents, and why home is so much better than any other place on earth, and nothing so delightful as, after a season of separation, to see again father and mother face to face. When for a season, a family is scattered, letter-writing, however full and frequent, cannot sustain the interest or supply the want of home. However many things may be said with paper and ink, and however pleasant may be the notes of travel in each day's budget, it is reserved for the re-union-the speaking face to face—to complete the joy. Then what was written must be again told with a fresh interest. But not all families are thus happy; and sometimes one and another member of the family circle, is constrained to go outside of that circle in quest of the living social sympathy that every human heart instinctively craves. Brothers and sisters grow up loving each other, at first they know not why; until the development of character weaves some chord of elective affinity that draws them into a closer, fuller sympathy. Yet, in the course of years, it comes to pass that father and mother, brothers and sisters, and early home are all forsaken for a new love, wholly elective that alone can meet the inmost yearning of the soul, and in which all the experiences, the desires, the thoughts, the hopes, the aims of two sympathizing and congenial minds, guarded from all the world beside, are opened to each other, face to face.

Man is by nature social. A life of continuous solitude does violence to his individual constitution, and to the constitution of the world in which he lives. God places him in society from the first. But this family organization, with all its resources and adaptations for happiness, does not in our fallen state, meet all the wants and the capacities of man as a social being. In this alone he can find the fulness of joy.

Outside the family are other circles in whose society the nature of man finds in some respects the complement of itself. Yet these societies are often based upon interest, convenience, or some form of selfishness, and are governed by conventional laws. There is little heart-play in them. The speaking face to face is not always the expression or the occasion of joy. This itself is regulated too much by conventional forms or hampered by motives of interest. There are circles of friendship where the heart rules, and where each re-union is welcomed with a gush of joy; circles whose gathering is longed for by their members as a necessity of life, and in whose atmosphere all is sunshine and peace. No correspondence of the absent can impart to these the life of the present, nor can that life be fully communicated to any who do not participate in it face to face. But such circles are rare and limited. Seldom are they of unmixed purity and loveliness; and they change perpetually with the change of circumstnaces and the flight of years. There is no mere society, whether its bond be literature, congeniality, or friendship-however select, and however guarded, that can meet in its fullest, highest measure of the social element of the soul.

But though neither the family nor the ordinary arrangements of society can satisfy this feeling, it is met perfectly in that spiritual society composed of the children of God-the true disciples of Christ, and in the communion which these together enjoy. I speak not here of a mere fellowship in a Christian church, but of the society of true Christians; and of their social communion as the children of God, as distinguished from their private personal walk with God. This communion, I say, alone meets fully man's social nature, and this is necessary also for the completeness of Christian joy. Of course this spiritual communion does not meet those social feelings and sympathies that are specially adapted to the family. It is not a substitute for these. These still have their play. But this communion is added to all other forms of pure and lawful social intercourse, to the family circle, to the circle of business, of politics, of literature, of society, of innocent pleasure; it is added, I say, to these as the very highest type of social communion,-its only complete and ... perfect type; so as to become the one pure and perennial source of social joy. This you may see illustrated on this wise. Let there be a family in which is found the utmost purity, kindliness and mutual love possible without the presence of religion ;-where all the charms of home are blended in the happy circle that never knows a jar. There seems to be between the several members of that family the fulness of joy in their daily intercourse and their every social sympathy.

Suppose now that two members of this family-a brother and a sister, -are awakened to a new spiritual life in Christ. Thenceforth they are drawn towards each other by a tie they never felt before, and stronger than any that hitherto has bound them. Each has become more lovely

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in the other's eyes; and each has fathomed more deeply the other's soul and both have felt the power of that all-encircling love that shall hold them in its fulness through all eternity. And this is a tie,land this an experience in which they two are bound apart from all other members of the family. They are not selfish in their separation, they have abated none of their former love for the rest of the household; that love is the rather increased by the desire that these also should share in this new experience; but there has come into the bosom of this family, in the hearts of two of its members a new principle of life, that brings out emotions and sympathies before unknown to themselves; and far above al the delights of the family circle, the love of parents and children, of brothers and sisters, is the joy of these two regenerated souls—their joy in each other as they speak of their innermost experiences in language that they only can understand.

Such on a great scale is the joy of Christian communion to those who as the followers of Christ are separated from the rest of mankind. They have no selfish exclusivenesss, no want of interest in the family at large; -rather, a deeper, livelier interest in its welfare than any other of its members; they have no morbid distaste for such innocent pleasures as they have shared in common with the whole family; but they find in each other in their communion as Christians, a joy that far transcends all other joys, and in which those not spiritually renewed cannot sympathise or share.

This spiritual society is entered from choice. No one is born into it, or made a member of it by mere outward arrangements.. It is the society of believers. It is founded upon character; upon moral affinities: they who compose it are alike in their principles, desires, and aims, in their one grand object for the present life, and in their hope for the future. They are subjects of the same experience, have known the same deliverance as a prelude to the same joy. And in this is one of the strongest and most peculiar bonds of their sympathy; for, other circumstances being equal, they who have known a common trial, or have escaped a common danger, are ever drawn to each other more strongly than those who have known only the even tenor of joy.

Moreover, by their experience and their principles they are a separate society, and as such, are the more strongly welded together by the heat of the blows of opposition from without. They are united also in and through one common head, and by the love they bear to Him are strengthed and enlivened in their mutual love; and they are looking onward to one blessed and eternal home in all the fulness of joy. How could it be then, but that these persons should be held together by the strongest ties, and should find in communion with each other the fullest satisfaction of their social wants.

I say in communion with each other.

Imagine but two Christians up

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