nothing better seen than the mere material enamelling. The meaning of a transparency can be seen only by looking at the light, or in the direction of the light, which is shining through it; not by looking upon it from without, in an external or reflected light.

Nature is a transparent, figured veil, God shines behind it. By and by the veil will be raised, and the philosophy of nature will give place to the beholding of the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, no more seen as through a glass darkly, but face to face. The glass darkly is a discipline for the infancy of our being, before we can bear the light. There is to be a world where there shall be no temple (or rather, there is such a world, and we are training for it) because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it; and no stained glass to look through, nor any need of Sun or Moon to shine, because the glory of God itself lightens that world, and the Lamb is the light thereof. But at present, as we must approach God spiritually only through a Mediator, so we can see his light only through the transparencies around us, or by the Earnest of the Spirit within us, revealing him in his word. At present, day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth forth knowledge, and with Day and Night we hold communion; we listen, while they tell us of our God, for every day is a new conversation, and every night a new revelation from Him.

Now if Nature be made on purpose to commune with man concerning God, to teach him the Divine Majesty and Glory, and as it were to look the being and attributes of the Creator into his soul, or to call into activity and life that idea of God, which in the very build of the human constitution is already there, there must be a mighty power of disclosure in nature, and

a depth and richness of intelligence rendered inert and useless through the insensibility of man. What a dire necessity would such blindness be, if it were fatal, not voluntary! There must be an unfathomable wealth of instruction, a world of glorious significance, upon which the eye of the mind, in such insensibility, is closed. How vast and precious an influence would these scenes and elements exert in building up our being, if we were properly alive to them! There would be "transferred into the internal economy of ideas and sentiment something of a character and a color correspondent to the beauty, vicissitude and grandeur, which continually press upon the senses." And this internal economy of ideas and sentiment, of which John Foster so beautifully speaks, would not be intellectual merely, but full of the sense of God and heaven. There would be the home-feeling of a father's house, the tracing of a father's hand, the sense of a father's presence, the enjoyment of every natural blessing by a father's kind arrangements. When God himself is in the soul, diffusing there the spirit of his love, how every created particle of matter, and variety of form, shines in his light!

This universe shall pass away—a frame
Glorious! because the shadow of thy might,
A step, or link, for intercourse with Thee!
Ah! if the time must come, in which my feet
No more shall stray where Meditation leads,
By flowing streain, through wood, or craggy wild,
Loved haunts like these, the unimprisoned mind
May yet have scope to range among her own,
Her thoughts, her images, her high desires.
If the dear faculty of sight should fail,
Still it may be allowed me to remember
What visionary powers of eye and soul

In youth were mine; when stationed on the top
Of some huge hill, expectant, I beheld

The sun rise up, from distant climes returned,
Darkness to chase, and sleep, and bring the day,
His bounteous gift! or saw him towards the deep
Sink, with a retinue of flaming clouds

Attended; then my spirit was entranced
With joy exalted to beatitude;

The measure of my soul was filled with bliss
And holiest love; as earth, sea, air, with light,
With pomp, with glory, with magnificence!

WORDSWORTH.

There are scenes in nature that compel even careless minds to pause with something like a feeling of religious adoration in the soul. We look at Niagara, and we think of God,—his attributes his infinite power-his eternity-his incomprehensibility -and the unfathomableness of divine truth. And indeed it is like coming upon the verge of those abysses in theology and morals, and in the attributes of God, down which you gaze and gaze, till the soul becomes dizzy in the effort, and almost insane in the impossibility of comprehension. You can go no further, you can see no deeper, but the truth pours on, shrouded in foam and clouds of mystery. You are lost, if you attempt to advance. You may long ever so earnestly to see the depths, but impassable barriers are there. You look over the verge, if at any point this is possible, but you can never see where the torrent strikes, nor how deep; for the storm, the fury, the whirlwind of conflicting elements, the spray beaten into powder, and tossed in clouds of foam, prevent you. But the cataract pours on, and the thunder roars. You do not deny the existence of the Cata

ract nor the sublimity of it, because you cannot see to the bottom of it, but you gaze, and wonder, and adore.

Such a scene is analogous to the mysteries of the Divine Nature, and such a scene brings a religious mind very near to God, and impresses it with a deep and solemn awe, which, though different from the excitement of imagination merely, is in perfect harmony with all the delightful emotions produced by scenes of loveliness, and impels the soul to the exercise of prayer and praise. The vague delight of the mere poetic sensibility is quite another thing. There, an elevation may be reached by the mind where it is apparently very near to heaven; a kind of table-land among the mountains,—an interval between material forms and spiritual realities, where it seems to worship something, yet it knows not what, and may glide off, according to its own character, into bare, indefinable, mystical pantheism, or pass to a real and devout communion with the living God. And in some respects the two movements may look alike, though not only unlike, but antagonistical.

There is a mysticism, a mystery, and an indefiniteness, that may arise from the fall of a vast body of truth into language, or into the mind, and from the commotion of great thoughts struggling for expression; just as the cataract of Niagara is attended with clouds of eternal foam and spray, through which you cannot see the bottom, and out of which, and over which, when the sun is shining, the rainbows glitter and dance. There is also a mysticism, a confusion, a transcendentalism, elaborate and artificial, produced not by the presence, concussion, or struggle of truth, but by the absence of it, and the counterfeit of falsehood. There is nothing else but the cloud, the halo, and the painted rainbow, but no cataract of Truth. Just so, there may

be the semblance of religious reverence and worship, in a soul much absorbed in imaginative contemplations of nature, without any approximation to that piety of the affections, that worship of the heart, inspired by the Spirit, and described in the Word of Jehovah.

The phrases of devotion may be used and the language of religious rapture, but, resting in anything short of God, the apparently worshipping mind is in mere reverie or utter bewilderment, and all the seeming religion of nature is but the trance or delirium of its own fancy. In such a trance, the mind may walk close upon the verge of the spiritual world, as a sleepwalker on the edge of a precipice, yet not enter it, nor converse with its realities. Thoughts may be uttered, which show that nature has lifted the mind above nature indeed, yet not to God; which look like the breathings of a true piety, but yet are unsubstantial fancies. A man may seem to strike fire, by striking his own eyes; but the flashes will set fire to nothing, and are in themselves nothing. Such are all the lights of pretended religious inspirations, that come not from the Divine Spirit and Word, but proceed merely from the concussions of self and nature. And as Coleridge has remarked of the imitation of the fire of imagination itself, so it may be said of the substitution of any semblance, instead of the earnest religion of the gospel; a deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colors may be elaborated, but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and only children put it to their mouths.

At the creation, man alone became a living soul, and God is not said to have breathed into anything else, in that sense, the breath of life. It is a wild dream of the imagination, as incapable of scientific investigation as it is of proof, that because the