This system of unexpected and strange providences shows its advantages at once to a reflecting mind. Man is here in a state of probation, and so of trial, and the suspense and solicitude in which this system keeps him are of the highest moral value. God overrides our plans, breaks the ties that bind us to worldly interests and friends, and drops the curtain of life at eve, or morn, or midday. He permits the prudent man to step into the grave and the careless one to stumble over it. Sometimes, in a wide calamity, he suffers the falling tower in Siloam to overwhelm in a common burial the prepared and the unprepared. In all which he presses the probationer to immediate and daily activity in all moral duty, and enters his solemn protest against the common management of spiritual life on the credit system. These sudden and afflictive providences, that sometimes clothe a family, or city, or state, in mourning, and that are robbed of much of their divine import by being called accidents, fill a most important place among the means that Heaven designs to qualify us for life and death. And their power to benefit man is much in the proportion of their mysterious suddenness and of his consequent inability to escape them.

And the theory of providence here presented furnishes the only refuge under mysterious afflictions. If there may be an event strictly accidental, then no part of the king's highway is safe for the pilgrim subject. For the government of God is limited. Its intention is good, and its practice perfect, so far as it goes. But there are elements in the kingdom, rival, adverse, and owing allegiance to chance. They are as bandits in the territory, within the realm but beyond the law. So is the presence or the liability of an accident a deficiency in the divine government. It may be supplemented by compensatory, remedial, and restorative acts, but this would be a confession of weakness, and rather augment than remove the anxieties of the subject. But if the Lord God Omnipotent reigns and none can stay his hand, then his subject can say, "What time I am afraid I will trust in thee." A throne that is never jarred, a purpose that is never foiled, a plan that is never varied by addition, subtraction or alteration, a supremacy that groups and governs all matter and all spirit in all their changes and rest, and the whole animated and executed by infinite justice and

infinite goodness,

this is the government of God that offers a refuge to the afflicted. It is an ample retreat, and the only

one.

"One adequate support

For the calamities of mortal life
Exists, one only; an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe'er
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power,
Whose everlasting purposes embrace

All accidents, converting them to good."

It is both common and popular among moral teachers to keep silence or speak lightly and imperfectly of the Absolute Monarchy of God. Among us this tendency is favored by the genius of our institutions, in which popular sovereignty is the governing element. This democratic feeling is infused into much of the reigning theology. The pulpit proclaims it, and the pew applauds. Foreordination is said to mean only foreknowledge. The decrees of God are his indorsement in advance of what he foresees will come to pass. His plans have an elastic accommodation to emergencies produced by contingent free will in man and the fortuitous concourse of independent and self-sustaining forces in matter. And that it may be made sure, to those wishing it, that "all things work together for good to them that love God," greater power for repairing, than controlling and preventing, is given to him, and overruling is conceded where ruling was denied. Such a theology bases the government of heaven in part on constituencies and casualties. It infringes on absolute sovereignty, and so virtually advocates anarchy. It gives accidents the precedence and makes the divine government a secondary and restoring process. Such a theology assigns to God rather a struggle for the sovereignty than sovereignty itself.

It reminds us of that myth of Plato in his Politicus, in which the philosopher seems as one seeking for the light, yet still wandering in the gray dawn of the day. According to the myth, when God governs absolutely all goes happily. But at times the innate and independent forces of matter have control. The divine pilot is no longer at the helm. Disorder, evil, and woe reign till God recovers his lost power and repairs the injuries of

temporary anarchy. Christianity gives us a better idea of Providence than this, and the Pulpit ought to furnish us better teaching than the Academy.

ARTICLE VI.

TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE.

Ir is a significant indication of some prevailing tendencies among us, that transcendentalism is no longer a term of reproach. In some fields, it is generally admitted to have not only an intelligible but an indispensable place. It is more and more clearly and widely recognized by vigorous thinkers, that in psychology there can be no exposition of freedom, and in ethics no establishment of an ultimate rule of right, except by a process purely transcendental. But in physical science the ground is still strongly contested. The loudest voices declare that, in this field, all transcendental speculation is both impertinent and fruitless. The naturalist affirms that the actual facts of nature are all that science has need to explain, or the scientific explorer has power to investigate. Denunciations of any a priori philosophy of nature are as bold and arrogant among so-called scientific men, as they are frequent. And yet nothing can be more unphilosophical, and nothing more contradictory to the very basis upon which the naturalist himself rests his investigations. For surely this basis is an a priori one, else is it nothing stable. The cardinal doctrine that matter occupies space is ideally gained and does not result from any induction on the field of our experience. Space can never be brought into our experience; on the contrary, our experience is ever occurring in space. But this no sense can reveal, and the experimental philosopher is therefore obliged to transcend experience at the very outset of his procedure. The same is true. not only in reference to the other cardinal properties of matter, but all through the researches of science. Though discarding,

in words, transcendental speculation, every naturalist holds to it and stands upon it, at every step of his way. Any syllogism, deductive or inductive, can claim validity for a moment, only as it rests ultimately upon what no syllogism could produce. If there be nothing which cannot be proved, then is there nothing which can be proved. They," said Theophrastus, "who seek a reason for all things overthrow all reason.' "To deny that anything is evident of itself unto man,' said Hooker, "is to destroy the possibility of knowing anything."

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Moreover, it is to be noted, that the mere classification of the facts of nature, by which some particular fact is referred to a more general one termed a law, is far enough from being science. It is not a knowledge of nature which we thus possess, for knowledge is the agreement in consciousness of an object with our ideal, and hence involves a transcendental element in its very being. That which is made must be expounded by that which is unmade, the thing seen must be penetrated and informed by the truth unseen; else is it only an object of belief, not of knowledge, a matter of opinion, not of science.

Furthermore, any professed explanation of one fact by another, so far from enlarging the domain of our knowledge, only transfers us to a wider field of ignorance. When we seek the reason why, in any particular case, we assuredly do not find it by simply learning that it is the same which works other and grander results. Nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that I know what makes the apple fall, as soon as I learn that it is the same power that holds the planets in their places. I ask for an explanation and am answered: gravity; - but the response, reduced to its simple meaning, is only the truism: whatever is, is, in other words: that which makes the apple fall, is that which made it fall. To say that this power produces many other effects does not explain any one of them. Though we suppose ourselves thus to have comprehended the facts, they are really more incomprehensible than before, just in proportion to their greater extent. We have not increased our knowledge, but have only, in truth, affirmed our ignorance in broader terms. If in the last resort we introduce a Deus

ex machina, to cut the knot which we cannot untie, this is only a still broader fact, which explains nothing, and is as void of all rational signification as the one with which we first started. God who is only necessary in order to expound nature, needs himself an exposition as much as nature does. Moreover, even such a Deity is altogether beyond experience; and Humboldt was therefore more consistent than most modern naturalists when he excluded God entirely from his "Cosmos." We should not mourn over his irreligion while we cling to a method of investigating nature whose legitimate result would lead us also to ignore both absolute truth and an absolute Deity.

The truth is, all science which is not properly transcendental is both unphilosophical and irreligious, — unphilosophical, because it offers no rational and self-sufficient principle for the explanation of nature, and irreligious, because its highest generalization, to which it gives the name of first cause, is only assumed to be first, in contradiction to the very process by which its being has been affirmed. If the reason did not by its own immediate insight know God, and could believe only in the Deity derived from experience and induction, then all reverence and worship would be impossible. We could not adore gravitation, we could not love some grand law of central forces; and just as little could we offer these exercises to the power next beyond these, which the logical understanding affirms to be, but of which it can predicate neither freedom, nor love, nor self-origination.

ARTICLE VII.

NATURE-WORSHIP; ITS ROOT AND ITS FRUIT.

THE remark is a correct one, that popular literature has never been so tinged with a religious hue as now; but, unfortunately, not with the Christian religion distinctively. Thus, we open a volume of Schiller and read: — "I find in the Christian system