world ever has been-the morbism of the mind has ever manifested itself chiefly in a strong tendency to perceive and worship only the outward and visible. And is it to be supposed that this disease is to be cured by a system of religion which should consist only, or chiefly, in symbolic figures and sensible images? Our Lord taught us a different lesson, when he said to the woman of Samaria, "Believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what...But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The natural man, if left to himself, never would have conceived of the glory of God as manifesting itself in "the still small voice" within. What he wants and delights in, is something grand, splendid, pompous, awful-huge temples, cathedrals, long drawn aisles, with mystic symbols, solemn sacrifices, thrilling chaunts-things that strike only the eye and the ear. He was humoured in this for a time, while he was, as it were, in the childhood of human existence; but being supposed now to have come to manhood, these childish things are done away. To revive them, in the feeble imitations of medieval fancy, is only to combine the dreams of youth with the dotage of old age. Before, however, leaving this subject of ancient symbolism, or hieroglyphic teaching, we may just observe that no one need suffer himself to be æsthetically disquieted, because he finds that a similar system was adopted, with divine sanction, under the old law; or because he meets with similar incongruous combinations of animal being, as the one above alluded to, to body forth spiritual ideas, in the prophet Ezekiel, and in others of the divine writers. What is enigma to us, was instruction to them.* These strange signs were then well understood, by means of established laws of intellectual interpretation, but now they would speak in an unknown tongue, and would require an interpreter. A slight glance over the New Testament (excepting only the book of Revelation, which is necessarily a symbolic book, having reference to the future and unknown) will suffice to convince us that the method of teaching by enigma is done away, and that we are now to be instructed by true doctrine clearly enunciated, and that religion is to consist, not in mystic signs, but in energetic principles. In a word, morality, not mystery, is to be the Opnoka-the high ceremonial and service of the Christian religion.James i. 26, 27. * This point is clearly brought out in a Lexicon on Hieroglyphics, by that man of master mind, the Rev. Joseph Sortain, of Brighton, to whom we are indebted for some of the foregoing observations. NOTE B.-ON ANALOGY. We have raised the question whether the analogy which our fancy so fondly traces between things natural and things spiritual be an "existing fact, or merely an illusive creation of the mind within itself,” not because we doubt its existence ourselves, but because it is a question which has crossed deeper minds than our own, to wit, the truly original John Foster's. Yet no man was fonder, or had a happier gift of tracing the numerous analogies of Nature with moral truths than he; and we can hardly believe he doubted its veritable existence as a feature originally impressed upon the works of creation, whereby "the things of earth are copies of things in heaven." There is certainly a strong presumption in favour of its reality on several grounds: first, because the works of nature are the works of God, as much as the works of grace; secondly, because the Scriptures are full of these traced analogies in symbolic illustrations derived from the works of nature; thirdly, because this concord of correspondence is unconsciously," as Trench, in his Notes on the Parables observes, "felt by all, and by deeper minds continually recognised and plainly perceived between the natural and spiritual worlds." 66 On these grounds we can easily subscribe our selves to the sentiment "But when the Spirit on the mass new-born And all creation's one gigantic type, For Christ and Christianity arranged." It But it is a totally different thing when you come to the symbolism of Art:-here, all is human and fanciful, except so far as the symbols adopted are such as God has ordained, to wit, the rainbow, the two Sacraments, &c.; but the works of nature have all something of divinity in them, and bespeak at once not the power of man but the power of God. Viewed, too, as the works of God, enclosing a hidden meaning, they speak directly to the soul, or moral intelligence within, and not to the mere outer senses. may be said, indeed, that art is "a following of the process of nature," not only in its imitations, but by embodying an element of spiritual teaching with its material designs, so that "the finite creative power which is in Art is an image of the infinite creating power which works in Nature." But, in answer to this, we may remark, in the first place, that there is nothing "creative," strictly speaking, in Art-it is at best only an inanimate imitation of things created; and, in the next place, its symbolism must, by the very conditions of its human invention, be arbitrary and fanciful and of dubious import as to its application, there being in this case no "innate harmony existing between the symbol and the thing symbolised," as there is presumptively between the works of nature without, and the moral world within man. A striking example of the latter kind, in which scarcely any one, however obtuse his intellectual perceptions, would fail to see the correspondence, is that declaration of God, in the 55th of Isaiah: "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." Here the analogy both in origin and in effect between the word of God, and the rain and snow, the one acting upon the heart of man, and the other upon the earth, is so obvious, that even the ploughman whose head was almost as dull as the clods upon which he trod, would perceive it, and gather instruction from it. Many equally palpable correspondences between the works of nature, and the operations of grace, might be given out of the Bible. And it is this circumstance, that the analogy, in these cases, strikes the ignorant quite as much as the educated, which proves that the recognised resemblance is no mere fiction of the fancy, but that it arises out of, and is grounded upon, an existent correspondence between the things themselves. This analogy, then, or correspondence of relations between |