derly pathetic, as they are sublimely impressive — each suggested by the mountain scenery which the artist is rendering. They are the Death of Aaron on Mount Hor; the Death of Moses on Mount Nebo; and the Transfiguration on Mount Hermon. Pensively, and lovingly, and exultingly, the incidents are drawn with pencil dipped in the heart's warm sympathy, and the full light of Christian redemption shining over the whole delineation. But our limit is reached. We can only thus indicate where other spoils may be gathered by any who have not found the paths to this "land of Ophir." We have strung our beads on a different plan to that of the Athenian maidens who thread here and there a golden zechin into their necklaces of tiny sea-shells. We claim the reader's thanks for multiplying the zechins, and reducing, as much as practicable, the shells.

ARTICLE III.

THE HOLY SPIRIT IN TROUBLOUS TIMES.

Is religion true; in other words, are we under the moral government of God, agreeably to our instinct sense, or as taught traditionally, or as a consequent search into our moral nature and final causes instructs us, and as analogy confirms? Is the world fallen from original righteousness, and does it lose the sense of these realities except as it is awakened by Divine revelations and miraculous interpositions, as the revelations declare, and as experience and history give us practical assurance? Is it the universal tendency of the fallen world to deny, conceal, or obscure the evidences and doctrines both of natural and revealed religion, and to increase in wickedness in proportion to the increase of its supernatural enlightenment, as we learn from the successive judgments of heaven upon the guilty nations, and from the yet unfulfilled prophecies of Scripture? Is it experimentally certain, in regard even to regenerate men, as we must infer from their conduct and confessions in all periods, that without the renewing

or restraining agency of God they would decline into any supposable degree of wickedness from which recovery would be impossible? Is there a Holy Ghost proceeding forth from the Father and the Son, whose office it is to renew sinful men at God's good pleasure, and to preserve renewed men from final apostasy, as the Scriptures plainly declare; and is the work of the Spirit wholly gratuitous, as the Scripture also affirms, and as it must be if the above hypotheses are true? Then it clearly becomes us to think, and reason, and live accordingly, for no different or contrary thoughts, reasonings, or conduct of ours could possibly alter God's recorded plan of government, or our personal relations to it. God's truth could not be affected by our lie.

But these hypotheses are true; for they are but another form of expressing the literal facts of natural and revealed religion. If they are not true nothing could be known for truth by the moral instinct, experience, or revelation; language would be a false guide, and the visible universe itself and the Maker of it would be resolved into an idea. If natural and revealed religion consisting in these facts, and the natural and logical inferences which flow from them, are not Divine institutes, there is no alternative, in the last reduction, but atheism,-the crude and sensuous atheism of the past, or the refined pantheistic atheism that is now steaming up over the Christian world.

They are therefore true. We stand upon them as principia, assured by God, known and settled, and acted on by the Church in all periods. We make them the basis of our following remarks on the theme in which they are all, as above, concluded: viz. the work of the Holy Spirit, and its peculiar necessity in troublous times."

All the dispensations of God to mankind are distinct, but related and necessary to each other. The same God-Father, Son, and Holy Ghost-is in, and by, and through them all, but with diversities of operation. During the Old Testament age the Holy Spirit, invisible, was, as ever, the producer and sustainer of the Divine life in men, through the eternal Son; but the Divine presence visible and manifest was sometimes requisite to rouse the faculties of the stupid world, and produce a more sensible conviction of a moral government over

it. Since the Apostolic age we have no conclusive evidence of a theophany. Ours is strictly a dispensation of the Holy Spirit. Formal manifestations of God will occur only at its close, when Jesus Christ will be revealed from heaven in glory and majesty, to end the probation of earth, and set up a new and more exalted economy. Meanwhile the Spirit is sent or withdrawn as God, in his incomprehensible wisdom, pleases. In the absence of the Spirit man is left to himself, to the guidance of his own reason and the sustenance of his own strength; to elucidate the natural system of the world, and to interpret the revelations, by his own philosophies; to regulate his affairs by his own policy, and produce all practical results by his own mechanism. It is a breaking up of the connection between God and man, the natural and the supernatural, so that the law of cause and effect becomes our highest law, the production of natural happiness our highest rule, and the attainment of it our highest end. But, inasmuch as true wisdom is to be found only in the necessary relations of the natural and supernatural, and true virtue only in a loving agreement with them, and true happiness only in that true virtue, the consequence of such absence of the Spirit is falsehood, sin, and misery. It insures the perishing of our hopes at death, and "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power when he shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire."

I. We observe our need of the Holy Spirit subjectively; that is, a necessity consisting in our nature as it is.

That we may be better understood, let it be observed, beforehand, why we say that natural and revealed religion, — the body of Divine truths as first revealed, or as republished in the Holy Scriptures, is necessary: viz. because it could not otherwise be known, and a moral government could not be carried on, inasmuch as there would be no rule or standard of moral judgments. Man is clearly incompetent; for whatever may be supposed to have been true of him in his original and normal state, it is not now true:

1. That man has intuitional knowledge of his relations and duties to God and to his fellow-man, or the course of the Divine government, in the present constitution and state of

things. The moral instinct is a sense of God, of right and wrong, of accountability, by which we are susceptible of knowledge. But it is not knowledge, for knowledge has its definable and more or less intelligible objects, the actual relations and duties of moral beings, an actual rule and government over them, and a providential ordering of affairs, all which are not mere abstractions and images, but matters of fact and practical. The sense is innate, we cannot get behind it. But knowledge is experimental, or hypothetical, or speculative-all implying an exercise of our reasoning faculties, it is superinduced by revelation.

or

2. Experience is insufficient. For we are parts of a vast and incomprehensible system. Our relations and duties stand in an infinite series which exceeds our reckoning, and could not be brought within the comprehension of the human mind. Besides, when we grow beyond the province of instinct which is less active in man than in the brutes, our experience is slow, painful, confused, uncertain, complicated, conflicting. We die before we learn to profit by it to any considerable extent. We cannot transmit it to the next generation, but only the record of it; and the history of our experiences succeeding generations know not how to interpret to any valuable purpose till they have had a similar experience on their own account, when it is too late to interpret it to any saving benefit, so that the world, in this respect, would but roll the stone of Sisyphus to the end.

3. Yet more futile are speculation and hypothesis. For these are the product mainly of the imaginative reason, and the imagination, as things are, is but little better than an ignis fatuus to mankind in general. Subordinate to an infallible guidance, it is doubtless a great auxiliary to knowledge, wisdom, and virtue. But otherwise it cheats us by its decorated fictions out of all realities, and ultimately our salvation. Shall we resolve by a conjecture the problems of God's natural and moral government? Who has not become more confused and perplexed the more earnestly he has attempted this solution in the

highest exercise of the speculative powers? "It is as high as

heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?"

4. But what is most to be considered is, that in the present

abnormal state of the world, eyery man of it is a depraved being, ungodly, selfish, appropriating, in derogation both of God and his neighbor; that the different individuals, families, tribes, nations, and races of men have their respective peculiar propensities to evil; that these propensities naturally tend to disturbance, irregularity, and destruction, to the perversion of truth, the annihilation of virtue, and the defeat of the ends of moral government. This tendency would become effect notwithstanding the hindrances which our instinctive, inductive, or speculative reason, or any consideration of expediency and utility should interpose, without the clearer light and more authoritative sanctions of natural and revealed religion. This is made historically evident by the character and condition of those individuals, nations, or races on which this light has not shone, or in the exact ratio of its obscuration; -as Paul has written.

5. Moreover; natural and revealed religion, with their miraculous attestations, affirm their own necessity on the above grounds. They profess to have been given to the world, and to have set up their respective ordinances and institutions because, otherwise, the knowledge of our relations and duties would be mainly impossible; the world would settle into general sottishness and brutality, and the ends of its reprieved and probationary state, as proposed by religion, could not be attained.

6. Furthermore, there is authentic history, from the earliest periods, that, as religion could not have been reasoned out, in consequence of the perversion of the human faculties by. sin, so actually it is not the product of human reason, but is a tradition, through the generations, from those who received it from God himself because of its alleged necessity for the guidance of mankind.

All this is indeed a humiliating and fearful account of the nature and effects of sin. But sin is not the less real because it has wrought such evil to the world; and the account of it, as given by religion, is no disparagement to religion which, while it simply describes and illustrates the evil, proposes, at the same time, the only possible, and, if men would accept it, an all-sufficient remedy for it.

But, natural and revealed religion being given, it might be