constrain them to believe in a Great and Good Being, the Author of their own being and of the universe. It embraces the same mixture of elements, experiential and intuitive, as is found in the arguments which carry conviction in the more important transactions of life. It carries with it the sanction of our constitution, and yet allows observation to contribute out of its ever-accumulating stores. When ingenious men make the inference demonstra. tive, it holds out incitements to other ingenious men to detect weaknesses and breaks in the links of the chain. When there is a loose appeal to consciousness or faith, there is always a possibility of persons urging in reply, "You may have such a sentiment, and I allow you freely to indulge it, but do not impose it on me;" or more frequently this vague feeling may be satisfied with a God as vague and empty as itself. If the account given above be correct, then the grounds of our beliefs can be spread out, and the argument defended-the experiential elements by the logic of induction, and the mental elements by the logic of intuition; and the whole pressed home, in an appeal which no one is at liberty to decline to look at and to accept.

The account given shows how the argument may be resisted. The conviction springs up naturally, but not necessarily. Men may overcome it, being led into a labyrinth of sophistry from which they discover no outlet, or, more frequently, being hardened by an encouraged pride, or sensualized by a course of vice. An atheist is a phenomenon which rarely presents itself; and when it does, it is to be viewed with a feeling of humiliation and compassion. It may be allowed, I think, that there have been persons who have striven hard to persuade themselves that there is no God, and have so far succeeded that they are troubled with the conviction only at some of the more lucid or awful moments of their lives.

We see how man is responsible for his belief in God. Were the argument altogether apodictic, there would be no possibility of doubt, and therefore no room for the consent or dissent of the will. But the argument being moral, and not demonstrative, there is room for the exercise of an evil heart in rejecting it, and therefore of a candid spirit in falling in cheerfully with it.

The account given shows not only how we can build up on

defensible grounds the argument for the Divine existence, but also how we can construct a defence of His more peculiar perfections, such as His goodness, justice, and infinity. Those who describe the whole process as one of feeling, are apt to take a very light and loose view of the Divine Being; they talk of Him as mere power, or mere activity, or mere life. But when we give a wiser and juster view of the conviction, we see that the same considerations which lead us to believe in His existence, also constrain us to believe in His unbending righteousness and His spotless holiness.

Following out the theory, we can account for the low, the unworthy, the perverted representations taken and given of the Divine character. When the higher intuitions of the mind are not called into exercise by proper training and the appropriate objects, they lie, to a great extent, dormant, and so God or the gods believed in come to be largely stripped of spiritual or moral qualities. As men's minds became barbarized and narrowed, their attention was confined to a very limited class of objects as the manifestation of the Divine power. God came to be contemplated not as the author of creation, nor as the actor in it throughout, but as operating merely in certain portions of it, which were contemplated with peculiar feelings of wonder or fear; and as these portions were viewed as inconsistent with each other, there arose gods many and lords many. The doctrine of the unity of God, and of the spirituality of God, being lost sight of, the gods became to be multiplied indefinitely, according as it suited the impulses, the fears, the superstitions of the votaries, or the interests of the priests and their temple. The distinction between God and His works being lost sight of, distorted traditions, and baseless fables and myths, the natural expression of human wants and wishes, clustered in ever-increasing intensity round the gods, and their places of worship, and certain awful spots in nature, or mysterious agents operating in it; and these were handed down from mother to son, ever growing in waywardness and strength. In the history of religion we have two things to be accounted for by those who would give an explanation of the nature and genesis of the religious conviction. We have an all but universal belief in a

divinity or in divinities, with nearly as universal a degradation of the character of Deity. The double phenomenon can be explained only by supposing that there are native religious tendencies in the mind, ever working but ever liable to be abused and perverted, and requiring to be called forth into healthy exercise by the presentation of suitable objects, and indeed to be guided and directed by a standard revelation.

We see how the conviction is to be called out, strengthened, and refined. It is by the presentation of objects fitted to awaken the intuitions into energy, and to keep them in proper exercise. The idea of a moral and spiritual God is to be aroused and kept alive by the attention being directed to moral and spiritual truths, or rather objects. This is what is done, in the best of all modesin the concrete mode, in the Word of God-which ought therefore to be thrown open to children at an early age. This is what is done in a religious training, conducted according to the inspired volume. A God who is at once Light and Love is set before us, and he is represented as revealed to fallen man in the face of His Son; holy precepts are enjoined by Him as the guardian of duty; and thus is generation after generation reared, the child being trained by the parent, and the child becoming the parent in order to train the child. Natural Theology is also fitted to confirm and widen this conception among the comparatively few who may be expected to study it. According as men are taught to look on their own nature as spiritual, so will they be disposed to look on God as a spirit; and according as they are educated to look on the conscience as an undefeasible property of humanity, so will they be led to look on God as essentially holy. Still it is only, I believe, by an abiding written revelation that the truth can be made patent to the great mass of mankind, or saved from perversion by the fancies, the foolish speculations, and the infidelity of the educated. Only thus can we get light admitted into the dwelling of the poor man, and into the heart of the busy man of the world, and only thus have it handed down from age to age. I am aware that even though the Bible were withdrawn, the religious conceptions would go down, in lands which had once enjoyed its light, to the next age in comparative purity. But as genera

tions succeeded which had not been trained in its lessons, I am convinced that the great mass of the people would speedily lapse into some degraded worship, probably of the Mormon type; and that the philosophers, pursuing their own favourite ideas, would exercise little influence, certainly little influence for good, and care little to put forth what little they have over an unthinking multitude, who would appreciate their distant and refined speculations only by evincing at times their shrewd sense of their practical absurdity. It is by a permanent Luminary being kept up in the sky that we expect light to be so diffused over our world that all men may behold it, and walk in it, and see objects in it.

SECT. III.-ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

The doctrine of the soul's immortality cannot be established by rigid demonstration any more than that of the Divine existence. But in the one, as in the other, there are necessary principles involved, which look to obvious facts, and issue in a conviction which may be described as natural. The expounded argument is the expression of processes which are spontaneous. It draws materials from a variety of quarters, and admits of accumulation. No one of the elements is in itself conclusive, but in the whole there is a high probability quite entitled to demand belief and practical action. There are three intuitive elements involved.

I. There is the intuition of self as a being, a substance, a spiritual substance. Every one is immediately conscious of a self different from the material objects which press themselves on his notice, and of the action of mental attributes in no way resembling the properties of matter, of lofty thoughts and far-ranging imaginations and high moral sentiments, of lively and fervent emotions, and of a power of choice and fixed resolution. The circumstance that the bodily organisin is dissolved at death is no proof that these qualities or the existence in which they inhere shall perish. We see the body die, but we never see the spirit die. We know that the soul has existed; we have no evidence that it ceases to exist. The burden of proof may legitimately be laid on those who maintain that it does. The soul exists as a substance, and will continue to exist, unless destroyed by a power from without capable of

producing this special effect. I doubt whether the argument can be stretched further. It is possible to conceive that the dissolution of the body may be an adequate cause of the destruction of the soul, and the idea could not be repelled by any positive demonstration. It could only be urged in reply that there is no necessary connexion between the breaking-up of the bodily organism and the death of the soul, and that the soul is convinced that it may look on in the midst of the struggles of the material dissolution, and survive when they are ended.

And here it is worthy of being noticed that we have no experience of any one thing being absolutely annihilated. Man knows no such thing even among material objects. He casts wood into the fire, and the existing combination of its elements is destroyed, but the elements themselves are not lost; one part has gone down into the ashes, another has gone up into the air, and not one particle has perished. What is true of material particles is no less true of physical forces. Man cannot create a physical force, and as little can he destroy it; if it be in a statical state, he may bring it forth into a dynamical one; if it be in activity, he may contrive to counteract it; but he cannot create it on the one hand, nor put it out of existence on the other. The force which came from the sun to the plants in the form of heat in the geological age of the coal-formation is not lost; it was received by the vegetable organisms, it was laid up in the strata of the earth, and is ready to burst forth, on the needful conditions being supplied, in fire and flame, and be a source of mechanical force in steam. And if no material particle is ever lost, and no physical force lost, is it consistent with the analogy of nature to suppose that mental force is lost? If mind is extinguished on the dissolution of the body, it is the only force known to us as being absolutely annihilated, and yet it looks and feels as if it were the most imperishable of them all.

II. There is the conviction of moral obligation and responsibility pointing to a judgment day and a state of righteous retribution. The argument built on this ground is felt by many strong minds to be the strongest of all. Kant, so severe in his criticism of the physical argument, yields to the moral one. Chalmers fondly