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with the feeling-this is the conscious link of the spiritual world—the living bond between the Father and his children. The Father can never on earth come nearer to us than him; we can never get nearer than him to the Father. We know not what the eternal ages may develop, or how that mysterious sentence, "Then shall the Son of Man also himself be subject unto him, that God may be All in All," may bear upon his future mediation; but surely now he stands between us and the beams of divine day, like an Angel in the sun." There is no getting him out of the eye of the world. The poor sinner looks at him, and mourns, yet rejoices. The proud transgressor hates and foams, but cannot help looking at, and thinking of, Christ. The infidel, feeling him in his way, invents theory after theory, each trampling down each, to resolve him into clay or into mist; but still he stands victorious and serene above them all, inscrutable as an enigma, vast as a God, and warm as a man. The fierce theoretical dogmatist would seek to turn aside that smile, and fix it on the pages of his catechism and the men of his creed; but, like summer sunlight, it scatters abroad, and "sprinkles many nations." Many look down, and strive to forget him; some try to look above him, into supersolar regions; but in vain. His image pursues them into the depths, or flies before them into the heights of nature. In this age, only a few, even among those who disbelieve his claims, yell out faded blasphemies and foul calumpies against his name. More now of all kindreds and climes are beginning to wish this Angel to descend, and are expecting from him—and from him alone-the full solution of the dread mystery of man and the world.

For why? He only understands it. He has passed up every step of the ladder, from the child to the God, from the manger to the throne. He has felt the pulse of all being. He listened to the hearts of harlots and of publicans, and heard humanity beating even there. He looked into the dim eyes of the poor, and saw therein the image of God. Even in devils he found out all that was left of good in their natures, when they confessed him to be the Son of God. While the long hair of the prostitute wiped his feet, which her tears had watered, the eye of the lunatic tarried, at his bidding, from its wild wanderings, and began to roll calmly around him. Herod became grave in his presence, Pilate

washed his hands from the shadow of his blood, Peter wept at his look, and Judas died at his recollection. Angels ministered to him, or sung his praise; the grave was ashamed of hiding his dust; earth threw his ransomed body up to heaven; and heaven sent forth all its guards, and opened all its gates, to receive him into its bosom, where it shall retain him till the times of the restitution of all things.

Thus faintly have we sought to depict the character and eloquence of Jesus. Scripture writers did not, nor needed to do it. They never say, in so many words, Christ was very eloquent, very wise, very humble, very merciful, or very holy. But they record his Sermon on the Monnt; they show him taking the Pharisees in their own snare; they register his tears at the tomb of Lazarus; they paint the confusion of the witnesses, who came, but could not bear testimony against him; and they tell of his washing his disciples' feet. We have, alas! no new facts to record of him; and must say of that life so marvellous, yet humane, "It is finished." But even as the most splendid object in the sky is perpetually painted, yet always new, as the sun is unceasingly rendered back by the wave of ocean, the dewdrop, and the eye of man, so let it be with the Sun of Righteousness. Let his blessed image be reflected from page to page, each catching more fully than another some aspect of his glory, till he shall himself stand before the trembling mirror of the earth, “as he is," and till every eye shall see him." Then, probably, it may be found that all the proud portraits which the genius of Taylor, and Harris, and Rousseau, and Goethe, has drawn of him, are not comparable with that cherished likeness of his face and nature which lies in the bosom of the lowly Christian, like a star in a deep-sunken well, the more glorious that it is solitary and seldom seen, for ever trembling, but never passing

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away.

NOTE.-Since writing this chapter, we have read Dr. Channing's Life. We find in one of his letters two of our thoughts anticipated; one. that of Christ's unconsciousness in working his miracles, and another, his superiority to them. He says, "Miracle working was to him nothing, compared with moral energy." And this. he says. duced his unconsciousness. We rather think that that was the result of the miraculous force stored up in him and which, in certain circumstances, as when it met with strong faith, came forth freely and irresistibly, as water to the diviner's rod, or perspiration to the noonday sun. But it was not because it came out so spontaneously that

CHAPTER XIV.

PAUL.

It was asked of old time," Is Saul also among the prophets?" it may be asked now, is Paul also among the poets? Wonderful as this is, it is no less certain. A poet of the first order Paul was, if force of thought, strength of feeling, power of imagination (without an atom of fancy), heaving ardor of eloquence, and energy of language, go to constitute a poet.

The degree in which Paul possesses the logical faculty, the extreme vigor and keenness of his understanding, have blinded many to the power of his genius, just as, on the contrary, with many writers, the luxuriance and splendor of their imagination have veiled from common critical view the subtlety and strength of their insight. In the one case, the eye of the cherub is so piercing, that we never look up to the wings; in the other, the wings are so vast and overshadowing, that they conceal from us the eye. The want of fancy, besides, which we have indicated, and the severe restraint in which he usually holds his imagination, till his intellectual processes are complete, have aided the general impression that Paul, though acute always, and often eloquent, is never poetical. Whereas, in fact, his logic is but the buckler on his arm, behind which you see the ardent eyes and the glittering breastplate of a poet-hero, worthy of mingling with the highest chivalry of ancient song, with Isaiah and Ezekiel, with Habakkuk and with Joel. It was a poet's eye, although glaring and bloodshot, that witnessed the first martyrdom-a poet's eye that was smote into blindness on the way to Damascus-that looked from Mars Hill, over that transcendent landscape and motley audience-and

Christ rated it low, but because its effects were the mere scaffolding to his ulterior purpose. We advise every one to read the last thirty pages of the second volume of Channing's Life. They constitute the finest apology for the real ty of Christ we ever read, and show deep insight into his nature. They show that Hall's definition of Unitarianism--that its whole secret consists in thinking meanly of Christ -did not at least apply to Channing.

that, caught up to Paradise, saw the visions of God, and, according to some, was ever afterwards weakened by the blaze. He nearly fulfilled to the letter the words since figuratively applied to Milton, who

"Passed the bounds of flaming space,
Where angels tremble as they gaze,

Who saw. and blasted by the excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night."

In Paul, first, we find art arrested and pressed into the service of Christianity-a conscious and cultured intellect devoting itself to plead the cause of heaven-the genius of the east, united with the acuteness and consecutive thought which distinguish the European mind. The utterances of the old prophets, of Jesus too, and of John, are artless as the words of a child. Even the loftiest and longest raptures of Isaiah are as destitute of junctura as the Proverbs of Solomon; the difference only is, that while Solomon walks calmly from stepping-stone to stepping-stone, Isaiah leaps from rock to rock, and peak to peak. The words of Jesus, when mild, come forth disconnected as a stream of smiles when terrible, are successive, but separate, flashes of forked lightning. Paul alone, of Scripture writers, aims at composition in his system, his description, and his style. His system is a dark but rounded orb; in description, he essays to group objects together; and the style of the chief part of his principal Epistles is an intertangled chain. We might conceive that meeting on the Damascene way to typify the contrast between intuition and analysis—the divine Intuitionist looking down from above-the baffled but mighty analyst falling like a dead man at his feet, to rise, however, and to unite in himself a large portion of both powers, to blend the learning and logic of Gamaliel, the schoolmaster, with the light streaming from the face of Jesus, the child.

Here we see how exquisitely wise was the selection of Paul, at that point of the history of the new religion, to become its ambassador to the west. The first enthusiasm of its youth was fading, and the power of the first impulse from on high had necessarily, in some measure, spent itself. The miraculous glory surrounding its head was destined gradually to decay. That it might, nevertheless, continue to live and spread-that it might pass in its power into the midst of

those cultivated countries, where it was sure at every step to be challenged, it must assume an elaborate shape, and find a learned advocate. A Paul was needed; and a Paul was found, nay, enlisted into the service, not by any subaltern officer, but by the Great Captain himself. There is no evidence that he was deeply read in Grecian lore-had he been so, we should have had thirty instead of three quotations from the Pagan poets; nor that he was ever trained to the study of the Grecian dialectics; but his intellect, naturally acute to subtlety, was subjected to the somewhat severely intellectual processes which then abounded in the Jewish schools; and he was thus qualified to reason and wind a way for Christianity, where the force of miracle, or the instant lightning of intuitive feeling, were not at hand to cut and cleave it. The religion of Jesus passed through the East like a ray through an unrefracting medium; when it came westward, it found an atmosphere to be penetrated, and a Pauline power to penetrate it by bending, yet remaining pure as a sunbeam.

When Paul arose, Christianity was in a state of disarray. The manna was fallen from heaven, and lay white on the ground, but it was not gathered nor condensed. Had it been designed for a partial or temporary purpose, this had been comparatively of little importance. But, as it was meant to tarry till the master should come, it was necessary that it should assume a shape so symmetrical, and a consistence so great, that no sun of civilization or keen inquiry could melt it. For this purpose, Paul was stopped, and struck down, and blinded, and raised up, and cured, and taken like his master into the wilderness (of Arabia), and brought back, and commissioned, and preserved, and sent to Athens and to Rome, and inspired with those dark yet wondrous Epistles of his parts of which seem to preserve certain great halfutterable truths in frost, till the final spring shall come.

Some even of Paul's friends have regretted the analytical cast which the intuitional religion of the "Carpenter" took from his hands, and have said, "not Paul, but Jesus." There are several reasons why we cannot concur with them in this. First, The intuitional element was not lost, it was only exhibited in another form: the manna was that which had fallen from heaven; it was only formed into cakes by a master hand. Secondly, Intuitional impression can never circulate widely