clouded, of innocence lost in selfishness. The history of the individual is seen to be the history of the race; an infancy of simplicity-a knowledge of good and evil-an exile from its first joy-a weary toil in the wilderness of care and trouble. The first records of our race are of passionate men restrained, though feebly restrained, by a law graven with faint yet ineradicable characters on the soul. Ignorance of the end of life, mistaken views of right, excessive action of the lower passions through want of excitement in the higher, weak social ties, and, preceding or accompanying this moral degradation, cruel idolatries; and yet an unceasing even if blind struggle after a welfare not obtained, a reverence still earnest when misguided, affections fervent although narrowed in their exercise, a condemnation of evil as monstrous, even though indiscriminate in judgment and manifested by barbarous severity, these are the grand but marred features of the early race. Rank vegetation on a thousand battlefields, massive ruins silent and waste, deserted homes, where bleaching bones tell of the pestilence, are ghastly hieroglyphics, preserving to future times the lesson that sin has wrought woe to buried ages. And advancing civilization is the assurance that this stern lesson has not been unheeded. For man has advanced. The theory that history represents only returning cycles of the same moral and mental phenomena is superficial though ingenious. The same tendencies and efforts forever reappear, it is true; but each time fuller and stronger in proportion to their really intrinsic importance, the higher tendencies outgrowing the lower; and what is yet more important manifested ever in more and more minds. Man has advanced. Bards with their visions of truer glory and felicity; prophets with their solemn warnings, and heavenly promises; law-givers with their deeper insight into social relations and human duties; the unconscious strivings of masses impelled by the spirit of their age; clans uniting with clans to preserve their common interest, nations ceasing to conquer and finding their own greatness in each others prosperity; science, skill and industry supplying want, disarming ill and opening new stores of good; artists embodying their visions of beauty; students confiding to the few who will listen to their profound discoveries; untaught souls, big with truth, which they labour to utter; martyrs steadfast in conviction through death; and, animating and guiding all these, inspired souls communicating to those sitting in darkness their visions of light in the spiritual world; and in the fullness of time the Son of Man, who, one with the Father, was the incarnation

of Ideal Humanity; and lastly, a waiting world slowly but surely imbibing his spirit;-these are the steps of the long pilgrimage by which the exiled child is led back to Eden, to walk in matured manhood with God.

Such is the fact which observation and history alike present. Both show us a highly endowed creature prevented by misuse of its powers from realizing fully the sublime destiny, for which it was created, of progressive approximation to the Eternal Spirit. What explanation now does philosophy give of this fact? Philosophy cannot explain it, but it can analyse the results of experience, and describe partially the phenomena of our moral progress-the first full promisethe blighted hope-the unextinguished power of good still bursting into life. Philosophy teaches in the first place, that our spirits, unfolding in our present organization, exhibit a variety of passions. The child overflows with an instinctive life, which it manifests in countless tendencies and propensities. Physical appetites, social sympathies, curiosity ever fresh, spontaneous activity, love of power to guide itself and direct all things by its own will, happiness found in the exercise of these tendencies as well as in obtaining the objects they seek, and obscurely appearing through its crowding sensations, impulses and efforts, some great ideas of truth, beauty and good, mark the first developement of the mind. Withal there are ignorance, inexperience, novelty, and want of habits. By what means shall a being so richly endowed, with such varied organization, in such multiplied relations, preserve peace among its passions and be adapted to the ever changing circumstances of its condition? Yet with the neglect of order either within or without, must come inward discord and outward strife. Only a perfect original harmony of dispositions, a balance of powers spontaneously preserved, and the regular and equable unfolding of all its faculties could prevent sickness of soul and body. But now comes in the great mystery of moral freedom, for this complicated nature must guide itself. And it is difficult to see, how the human spirit thus trusted to itself could avoid error; for necessarily the animal propensities are developed first, the love of power next, the social sympathies afterward, and the moral faculties last.When the higher powers do in right time begin to act, they find inferior powers already strengthened by habit of exercise. What but long experience can teach man the length and breadth of the laws of his own and all other nature, the inexorableness of their penalties provided in kindness, the minuteness of the applications, the mutual relations of these

laws? What but multiplied experiments can train him to the art of self government? In the first state of impulse and instinct, then, philosophy cannot well see how the excessive action of some powers could have been prevented.

But secondly, leaving this, as an insoluble mystery, philosophy recognises the fact, that a disproportionate activity of man's powers has impaired his original health both of character and of body; and teaches that through a transmitted constitution these evils are inherited. The child comes now into the world sovereign not of a peaceful but of a troubled realm. He is born with ungoverned and excessive tendencies, incomplete, unbalanced. It becomes easier therefore to account for the imperfect characters which we see around us now.— The young will is from the first the slave of giant passions now. But again, philosophy recognises the principle of sympathy in our nature, active from our earliest hour. And sympathy opens our minds and characters to all the influences of teaching, example, society, institutions and condition. We are mimics from the cradle, and ape the extravagances and improprieties of all around. Thus are we educated in mingled good and evil; and even our better tendencies, confidence, reverence and love of approval co-operate to destroy the harmony of our primitive nature. The inexperienced child is not left merely to his own half blind guidance. He is led by friends no clearer eyed than himself, and by none whose eye is single. How can he then but err from the first? His origi nal instincts, even when healthy and right have no chance to act freely. But here let us most carefully observe, that errors are not sin. They injure the being who commits them; carried to extremes and constantly repeated, they would destroy him; they unfit him to fulfil his appropriate functions in the creation; they prevent the completion of his destiny; they place him in conflict with universal order; but they excite in the agent regret only, not remorse, and they deserve from other beings pity, not condemnation. Errors are temptations to sin, not sin. But now comes in a new era of spiritual existence. The action of our impulses, gratifications and disappointments, hopes and fears, the aid and hindrance of others, their approval and censure, in a word, experience has been the occasion for awakening reason and conscience. Reverence and honor, taste and enthusiasm, the love of excellence and the idea of infinite good, establish within us a law superior in its right to passion, opinion or custom. God, through conscience, his vicegerent in the soul, commands; and in this light of duty-nature, providence, society, events reveal

everywhere to the soul the obligations of rectitude. But with reason too has come self-interest, and we begin not only instinctively but deliberately to seek our own good.Were our passions well balanced, rightly directed, and healthy, perhaps it might be expected, that we should cheerfully receive the guidance of reason, and that we should at once perceive that we best secured our highest good by implicit obedience to the law of right; though even in this most favorable case, when we consider the power of habit, struggle might not improbably come. Such struggle between reason and passion, between duty and interest would be sin. But constituted as we now are our passions are monstrous, perverse, diseased; our ideas of interest received from them are erroneous; and the will, acting from false motives, of course rebels against duty, or is too weak to perform it. Here then, in this conflict between the higher and the lower, between selfish instincts and a disinterested law, between the animal and the divine, the local and the universal, the momentary and the eternal, is actually sin. Sin therefore is much more than error. It is not blindness of the intellect, but disease of the will. And thus evil in nature, its consequences are proportionately evil. It shuts the soul against the light of God, which beams from all his works and ways; it grieves the spirit which works within; it destroys self respect and prostrates hope; it perverts our instincts and makes prudence short sighted; it cuts us off from the approval and encouragement of our kind, and unfits us for the opportunities of improvement forever offering; it places us in opposition to the kind provisions of our creator, hides from us a Father's smile, and burdens us with a sense of his righteous disapproval and with a dread of his lost favor. Its fruit is death; for what is life of soul and body but the inspiration of God? And if he withdraws his spirit, we die. Thus philosophy finds in the first place, an imperfect explanation of the origin of moral evil, in the creation of a free intelligence, gifted with numerous powers, placed amidst countless co-operating circumstances, and inexperienced itself. It sees that no power, or disposition is in itself evil, but that all evil begins in the excessive, disproportioned action of our powers. But secondly, it sees that evil once introduced is, through natural descent and social influences perpetuated. Philosophy thus explains the fact of much wide spread moral evil which is not sin. But thirdly, philosophy teaches, that sin originates in the resistance of our lower passions strengthened by habit to the guidance of reason and conscience; though it cannot wholly account for this struggle. Thus to sum up

these views, philosophy bears consenting testimony with observation and history, that sin is every where and always, so long as it endures, a source of evil to the agent himself, and to all connected with him. In a word, philosophy recognises the fact of sin, as an obstacle to the growth of human spirits in the likeness of their spiritual Parent.

This rapid, though if the attempt has been successful, somewhat comprehensive and thorough sketch of Man's Moral Nature and Condition has been given, not because it is thought that these views are expressed in the New Testament, but that we may bring to an understanding of the Gospel doctrine of Man our best information. Nothing can well be simpler than the manner, in which Jesus and his apostles addressed men. If we except the epistles of Paul, whose mind was evidently predisposed to metaphysical reflection, there is hardly a trace of what could be called philosophy in the New Testament. Jesus spoke always to the experience of all men whether wise or unlearned, and with words of transparent clearness and irresistible power laid bare their inmost consciousness to themselves. But this simplicity came from his profound insight into human nature and men. Hence, though not alluded to expressly, all that has been now described, and far more, is fully recognised in the Gospel. First, Man's originally pure nature, his filial relations to God, his destiny of progress, lie at the foundation of the whole ministry of Jesus; for why would God have felt or manifested an interest, and such an interest, in a creature not intrinsically of sublime worth? God's love and Christ's love are a revelation to us of the inherent dignity of our nature. But the high privileges of man, as a free intelligence, are yet more revealed in the fact that a human being was once thus glorified with the near presence and full love of God. In this "first of many brethren" we learn to see Man, as God made him and meant him to be. Again, and in the second place, the universal fact of sin is unveiled in naked deformity by the very first word of Jesus; "Repent." The whole purpose of his mission was this redemption from our self-wrought disease. Uncompromising as conscience he condemns wilful wrong. Not a syllable of tolerance does he utter for hardened crime. His warnings are stern and brief; his reproofs are soul searching; his commands are exactingly strict. And in his pure presence self indulgence, negligence, sloth, selfishness, folly stand abashed at the misery of their conscious meanness. Man learns his present degradation in contrast with the unsullied perfections of the Son of Man. In the free, spontaneous, graceful excel