V.

LO! GOD IS HERE!

ACTS XVII. 30.

AND THE TIMES OF THIS IGNORANCE GOD WINKED AT; BUT NOW

COMMANDETH ALL MEN EVERY WHERE TO REPENT.

PAUL, it would appear, looked with a very different feeling on times past, and times present. Behind him, he saw the age of ignorance and irreligion, so dark and wild, that life appeared to lie quite outside the realm of Providence, and earth to be covered by no heaven. Around him, he beheld the very æra of God, in which the third heavens seemed almost within reach, and life was so filled with voices of duty and hope, that it appeared like some vast whispering gallery, to render what else had been a divine silence and mystery, audible and articulate. Behind, he saw a world abandoned; from which the great Ruler seemed to have retired, or at least averted the light of his countenance; to which he spake no word, and gave no intelligible sign; about whose doings it were painful to say much; for so little were they in the likeness of his government, so abhorrent from the spirit of his sway, that they must have been enacted during the slumber of his power. But now, the hour of awakening had arrived: the foul

dream of the world's profaneness must be broken; and Heaven would forbear no more. The divine light was abroad again: divine tones were floating through this lower atmosphere, and came, like solemn music, across the carnival shouts of sensualism and sin. Out of hearing of these tones, the far-travelled Apostle never passed: they reached him through the rush of waters, as he sailed by night over the Ægean: the voluble voices of Athens could not drown them: they vibrated through the traffic and the cries of Roman streets, and even pierced the brutal acclamations of the amphitheatre; they were ubiquitous as God, who was everywhere commanding all men to repent. Whether in his own life, or in the world, Paul found the Past, to be profane, the Present, divine.

With us this order is reversed. Our faith delights to expound, not what God is doing now, but what he did once; to prove that formerly he was much concerned with the affairs of this earth and the spirits of men, though he has abstained from personal intervention for many ages, and become a spectator of the scene. The point of time at which our thoughts search for his agency, and feel after him to find him, lies not at hand, but far; belongs not to to-day, but to distant centuries; and must be reached by an historical memory, not by individual consciousness. To our feelings, the period of Divine absenteeism is the present; wherein we live on the impression half worn out, of his ancient visitations; obey as we can the precepts he is understood to have given of old; and, like children opening again and again the last tattered letter from a parent

mysteriously silent in a foreign land, cheer ourselves with such assurance of his love as he may have put on record in languages anterior to our own. "O happy age,'-we think,- that really heard his voice! O glorious souls, that felt his living inspiration! O blessed lot, though it passed through the desert and the fire, that lay beneath the shelter of his peace!' In short, our experience is the opposite of Paul's. That voice which commanded all men to repent, resounds no more ; its date has gone clear away into antiquity; and it can faintly reach us only through the dead report of a hundred witnesses. Once it was the very spirit of God quivering over the soul of man,-a mountain-air stirring on the face of the waters. The frosts of time may have fixed the surface, and caught the form; but how different this from the trembling movement of our humanity beneath the sweep of that living breath! No such holy murmur reaches us, to whom the Present is earthly, and the Past, divine.

Perhaps some one may deny that there is any real variance between Paul's estimate and ours; on the ground that, in his view, the time sacred above all others was his own; and in our retrospect that time remains so still. Yet it may be conjectured, that if we could be put back into his age, we should hardly see it with his eyes. Possibly enough, we might look about to no purpose for that presence of the Holiest which followed him through life; and listen with disappointed ear, for that whisper that "everywhere" came to him from the Infinite; and though at his side when he was in the third heaven, might see nothing but the walls of

his apartment, in coldest exile from the transports of the skies. If you go into the tent-maker's warehouse, where he worked at Corinth, you find the canvass and the tools, and even the men that ply them, such as you may pass without notice every day. The lane in which he lived in Rome seems too dingy for anything divine, and the noisy neighbors too ordinary to kindle any elevated zeal. The city's heat and din, the common crush of life, the hurry from task to task, seem far enough from the cool atmosphere of prayer, and the glad silence of immortal hopes. And if you converse with the men and women, for whom the Apostle gave his toils and tears, who received the whole affluence of his sympathies, you may be amazed, perchance, that he could find them so interesting; and lament to discover, in such an age of golden days, the vulgar speech, the narrow mind, the selfish will, the envious passions, of these later times. And, taking the converse supposition,think you, if he had been transplanted from Mars Hill to Westminster, he would have been beyond the hearing of that voice of God which he proclaimed and obeyed? that the celestial light which rested upon life would have passed away?—that his hope would have been as faint, his worship as unreal, his whole being as mechanical, as ours? Ah, no! let there be a soul of power like his within; and it matters not what weight of world may be cast on it from without. Be we in this century or that,-nay in heaven or on earth,-it is not that we find, but that we must make, the Present holy and divine.

In vain then do we plead, that our view of time coin

cides with that of Paul. we should have listened to him on Areopagus in the spirit of the Epicureans that heard him; not refusing perhaps to join the light laugh at his enthusiasm; and wondering how a man with his foot on the solid ground of life and nature, can cast himself madly into the abyss of a fancied futurity, and an absent God. And as, in yielding to the suggestions of such temper, we should have felt falsely, and have looked on Paul's age with a deluded eye, so would his be the true vision of our times; and his earnest proclamation of the continued sanctity of existence would show his discerning intuition of realities concealed from us. For, God has not faded into a remembrance: he has not retired from this scene with the generations known only to tradition. His energies have no era; his sentiments cannot be obsolete; "his compassions fail not." Why, even sense and material nature, his poorest and faintest interpreters, rebuke this foolish dream,-that he was, rather than is. They forbid us to think of him thus, were it only in the mere character of Creator. They show us, in the very structure of our globe,— in the rocks beneath our feet,-in the vast cemeteries and monuments they disclose of departed races of creatures,-that Creation is not single, not single but successive; not an act, but a process; not the work of a week or of a century, but of immeasurable ages; not moreover past, but continuous and everlasting; as busy, as mysterious, as vast now, as in the darkest antiquity: so that Genesis tells the story of last week, as truly as of the six days that ushered in the world's first Sabbath. The universe indeed

With such temper as we have,