To him, every eye will gleam with something of intelligence. For him there will always be the poetry of smiles, and the music of kindly voices. He will find a welcome at every hearthstone, such as the angel found in the tent of the patriarch, because the gladness of good tidings will be stamped upon his brow. While the careless observer sees in the sullied garb and toilworn form of the workman only a portion of a manufactory, he will mark the symptoms of determined purpose, of embittered feeling, or of unfruitful exertion; mark, to soften or encourage, as need may be. He will find in the feeble and wailing child, not only a pair of little hands to labour, or a voice to clamour for assistance, but will trace the outbreaking of the immortal mind, and will feel that the infancy of an heavenly inheritor is cradled in the homes of earth. From him the purple of the conqueror and the pride of the tyrant cannot conceal the characteristics of the man. His eye can discern, midst the deceitfulness of riches,' the one bright spot which they have not clouded; the hidden link of that chain which binds the heart to the family of man. He will be hopeful, and he will inspire hope. He will seek improvement for others, and he will find it for himself. He will bestow richly from the abundance of his affections, and he will meet with glowing affection in return. Does any one doubt it ?—then surely he knows very little_of the strength, and fervour, and enduringness of human love. He hardly suspects how powerful is the mind of man to make for itself a mirror in the minds of his fellow-mortals, as the moon casts her reflected image into the bosom of every transparent stream. Not only are new objects of interest and new springs of enjoyment almost daily added to the means of happiness, which the lover of humanity possesses, but to him the ordinary connexions of life have manifold power of conferring good. His attachment to his relations and friends is not a mere refinement of selfishness. He loves them, not only that they belong to himself, but also that they belong to God; not only that they are his friends, but that they are the friends of human kind. He loves nature, not only because he discerns, with all the intenseness of keen perception, the excessive loveliness of her fruitful vallies, the awful magnificence of her mountains, and the holy quiet of her solitudes, but because he feels, that all these have a healthful and purifying influence upon mind. He knows that they are all ministers for good,' and, therefore, that they are his ministers; for so to feel is more than to be one with nature;' it is to be one with God; it is to be one with every being, who is working the same work in any part of the vast universe; one in intention-one in spirit, that spirit the Spirit of Love. So to walk the earth is surely to look it as it is looked upon by him who made it. So to look upon

upon

mankind is surely to regard them as they are regarded by him who died for them; truly in a degree immeasurably smaller, but still in the same spirit, the Spirit of Love. If there be any one who has hitherto viewed the world with a cold or a suspicious eye, let him be persuaded to believe, that there is a happiness in reserve, which none of the pleasures which he has yet known can surpass, and which very few of them can equal. Whatever are his circumstances, there is added enjoyment or new consolation in loving and being loved by his kind. If he be poor, it will delight him to find, that there is a power within him which can effect much without the help of riches. If he be rich, he will have the assurance, that even though this night his soul may be required of him', he hath laid up in his treasury some objects of affection, which he can carry with him beyond the

grave.

To the neglected and the solitary there can be nothing which promises so much satisfaction, as cultivating a warm and lively interest in the welfare of all around ;-to think of himself less as an individual than as a part of the great whole. To those, whose lives, like the aged Jacob's, are bound up in the lives of their children, whose tenderness is doubled and whose sensibilities are quickened by anxiety for their welfare and happiness, there is no feeling which can bring with it so much quietude and consolation. The great cause of human improvement and human happiness is one in every corner of the earth. The friend and the father, who has made that cause his own, is not alone in the more immediate trust which devolves upon him. The wise and the good of every nation and clime are his coadjutors, and his power to effect good is multiplied in theirs. They form together a glorious phalanx, mighty to achieve the purpose they design. Each can, in some measure, command the resources of all, and by the strength of their union it might be said of each, that

"Thousands at his bidding fly,

And speed o'er land and ocean without rest."

To what earthly power could a parent more willingly commit his charge than to the protection of such a brotherhood? Who knows like him, who has been the friend of the orphan, how strong is the interest which the fatherless excite; who feels like him, who has abounded in love to all men, how rich a store of affection descends upon every human creature as his natural inheritance, and how surely the providence of God is extended to all his offspring in the care of one another?

To such as these, to the poor and the desolate, the timid and the anxious, the weary and the aged, the idea of a common brotherhood, a common stock of love and kindliness, must be full of light. How joyous must be their awakening in a world

where they feel that they can never be as an alien and a stranger! Even the thought of helplessness for themselves or their offspring loses half its bitterness while they have the assurance that many will be to them as fathers, and mothers, and brothers, and friends. How peaceful must be their descent even into the valley of dark shadows! The work of a death-bed is retrospection. There will be present all that we have cherished, whether with an holy or an unholy love. Death comes not to excite new affections, but to put the seal upon those which have been long indulged. The work of resurrection will be, not creation but renovation. Blessed are they to whom it shall restore, not a vain longing for the things of this world, which passeth away, but the faces which once beamed upon them with confidence and joy, the forms they loved and tended, the voices they heard in welcome, the minds they improved and elevated; all those they have cherished for his sake who gave himself for us, leaving an example that we should follow his steps.' He will unite them in an everlasting bond. He will give them an abundant entrance into the mansion of his glory,' even the dwelling-place of the Spirit of Love.

W.

ON THE RELATION OF THEOLOGY TO GENERAL SCIENCE
AND LITERATURE.

Et vos, o lauri, carpam, et te, proxima myrte,

Sic posita, quoniam suaves miscetis odores.-VIRG.

SOME writer once observed,-Shew me the beginning, and I will tell you what must be the end.' The expression is vague and obscure; yet applied to particular cases, it becomes intelligible. A cycle may often be traced in the course of human thought and action, which seems to terminate almost at the point, where it commenced. By a sort of instinctive prescience, in their earliest speculations on the moral order of the universe, mankind grasped at dimly-discerned, but sublime and comprehensive generalities, and, with an infantine impatience of slow and laborious deduction, pressed forward at once to ultimate conclusions; and when, distrusting such assumptions, a more advanced age discarded these mythological dreams for exact reasoning and scientific methods of investigation, the results, that were thus gradually evolved, pointed back again to the primitive generalities, and often confirmed and illustrated, sometimes rectified, but rarely reversed entirely, the broad views, that had been thrown out in the indistinct vaticination of the first ages. Hence the grandeur and the inwardly-felt truth of

many of those brief glimpses into the eternal plans of providence, which have survived to us in the fragments of the most ancient philosophy and poetry. In the mythi, which among all nations have been the vehicle of the earliest science and civilization, the most divergent agencies of human thought, and all the multiform expressions of human feeling, were thrown together in a chaotic mass, over which brooded, as its only binding and impregnating principle, the spirit of a vague and mysterious theology; until light was created, and the darkness rolled away from the face of the waters, and the warring elements separated themselves, and the sciences, disentangled and independent, each took their own course to the discovery and development of universal truth. In this disconnected state, the various departments of human knowledge and enquiry have now existed for centuries-exacting an ever-increasing division of intellectuai labour-storing up fresh accumulations of facts, leading to continually wider generalisations, and encroaching more and more on the limits of each other's territory; till at length there has arisen in men's minds a dim consciousness of the homogeneousness of all truth-a persuasion, that no results of one science can be inconsistent with those of another-that they must all ultimately harmonise; and that unshackled freedom of enquiry is indispensable to ascertain what they are to compare them with each other, and on the broad basis, which their combination supplies, to rear cautiously and reverentially the edifice of a nobler and more exalted philosophy, than any, which the world has yet seen a philosophy, whose final object is God-whose field is the boundlessness of providence-whose foundations are laid in the unchanging laws of the universe. In this tendency, there is an obvious return to the relation, in which the sciences anciently stood to each other; they become again but different expressions of one universal truth-but different organs of one all-pervading spirit; and theology is again invited to resume its natural position, as the centre towards which all speculations must ultimately converge-the regent science, to which all the rest are but servants and tributaries, and at whose feet they finally deposit all the treasures of their most extended researchthe dispenser of life and power, which gives them a common aim, and imbues them with a common energy, and binds them together in an all-embracing law of unity and peace.

We trust, that a few remarks on the relation of theology to the wide circle of general knowledge will not be deemed inappropriate or unacceptable in the first number of a work, which is devoted to the dissemination of liberal views of religion, and designed to carry its pure and elevating spirit into all the departments of intellectual exertion. If we mistake not the signs of the times, society is rapidly becoming prepared for the

entertainment of such views. Theology has been crippled by the scholastic fetters in which it has for centuries been bound ;~ released from these, and left at liberty to resume its original companionship with nature and science and humanity, it will put forth new energies, and at once impart and receive the influences of a nobler life.

In treating of this subject, we shall not make the usual distinction between natural and revealed religion, or proceed to point out the various proofs, which astronomy, geology, physiology, and the other sciences furnish of the being of a God and the reality of providence; not only because such views have been so exhausted, as hardly to bear repetition, and the argument, which they sustain, when properly conceived, may be compressed into a single sentence-but because all this evidence has often been exhibited without effect to minds, not previously disposed to feel it by deep and serious impressions, taken from the early influence of some positive religion. Conceiving nature and the gospel to teach the same lessons, we use the term theology in a sense, which carries up the mind to that primitive and eternal truth in the bosom of God, above and before all those forms, whether acting on the outward sense or transmitted by tradition, in which it has ever been embodied and made known to mankind. Christianity indeed cannot be separated from the order of providence; it is a great fact within the circle of our present existence, wrought into the plan of God's moral government, and sustaining a positive relation to the course of nature, the succession of events, and the moral constitution of the human race: and since it operates more powerfully on the mind, than the vaguer indications of the physical world, and whatever renovation may be looked for of the religious spirit among mankind, must be sought in the increased influence and authority of its hopes and principlesit is Christian theology-religion, as we find it unfolded to us in the narrations of sacred history, and see it breathing and acting in the life of Jesus-of which we propose briefly to trace the affinities with the general agency of human intellect in the fields of literature and science. We here take Christianity in its widest sense, as signifying the origin, development and progression of a great moral change in the condition of mankindprepared by the institutions and fortunes of a peculiar people, brought to pass by the teachings, example and fate of a wonderful individual, and still going on-still in the way to its final completion. To know what Christianity is, therefore, we must study the writings, which record the circumstances of its origin and propagation; we must trace it in its course through the succession of ages, and examine what has been its actual influence on society; we must finally survey it in itself, and in its