awake, up to the times, large-viewed. Land is made to produce them double and treble what it did. They, too, have their fairs, their clubs, their newspapers and books, and, the outgrowth of this very thing, their Agricultural College. The horse-rake and reaping-machine have not only doubled the crops of the country, but doubled its manhood. Equally significant is the movement that is taking place all over the land for a reduction of the hours of labor. It is the direct result of its machinery. The higher nature has come into action. New wants are felt, new aspirations kindled. It is the voice of the spiritual man, only half conscious as yet, it may be, of what he is doing, nevertheless God-directed, asking leisure to train and feed his soul. The gospel repeats it; the same machinery has made it possible; and it must be answered.

And this work is to go on till soul everywhere becomes the peer of body. Every machine helps to make a man, turns out not his statue alone, but the living spirit. Factories manufacture human nature as well as cloth and nails and shoes; do at one end of our being what the Church is trying to do at the other. And when the millennium comes, which is to be when the two shall meet, culture and genius and learning are to be as rich and common at the loom and anvil and sewing machine, six hours a day, as at the bar and bench and desk.

Finally, machinery is an aid of religion by what it does for the whole great interest of civilization. There are some who regard the gospel as a power independent of all natural law and influence, a spirit which not only blows like the wind where it will, but blows unlike the wind with no favorite channel of earth along which its own life determines it to go. Preach it, they say, in its own force and purity, and it must, of necessity, without any aid of human wisdom or policy, do its appointed work. It is a teaching contrary to all facts. Go to a heathen land and proclaim it, and, no matter how pure its truth, or eloquent the lips by which the proclamation is made, its results are only of the meagrest kind. The dark shadows of the old superstitions fall across its light. The habits of savage life still cling to its believers. The outside of society may be made Christian, but down at its core it is heathen

still. Look at many of the points where our missionaries, earnest, faithful men, have spent their lives, and how sickly, how feeble, how uncertain the progress they have made! Why? It is because they carried there religion alone, and left behind all its old associations of culture, learning, taste, and social life, the very atmosphere in which God has ordained it to thrive. The fact is, all the great renovating forces of our being cling inevitably together; love-yea, are compelled to take up their sublime march over the earth, not single-handed, but as an organized army. The gospel, with all its divinity, is only one element of a mighty band laboring for the world's redemption,-the centre of the column, it may be, but having its flank of men as well as angels, its nurture of matter not less than spirit; and to go alone, go with merely its naked truth, into heathendom, is like sending out the officers of an army against the foe and leaving behind its rank and file. So with religious institutions: they cannot exist alone. The Church of Christ is not a building suspended in the air, but one that rests on the earth, one that has underneath its foundations of the apostles and prophets, and Christ himself the chief corner-stone, a vast hill made up of all the combined growth of the ages. It can be raised only as humanity is raised; be perfect, as can be seen now in all lands, only in proportion as the society around it is perfect. To be a high religion there must be first of all a high state of civilization. Hence every thing which tells for human progress, every thing which goes to build up the great interests of our common life, every thing which makes society more refined. and complete, goes to aid the sway of the gospel and build up the Church of Christ.

It is this very thing, however, of which machinery is one of the grandest instruments. Take the printing-press. How much lower down would the Church and all society be without its aid! There is no missionary, none even with the blindest faith, who thinks in going to a heathen land of leaving at least the religious part of its work behind. The gospel, with all its own intrinsic power, confessedly cannot do without books. The printing-press, however, is only one part in

a vast net-work of machinery. It implies mining operations, foundries, lathes, planers, factories, steam-engines, papermills; implies, too, the general progress and culture of society in which all these things can exist. Every book that goes with its flaming torch out into the night of heathen darkness, bears somewhere on its title-page the two names of the Gospel and Mechanics, as the great firm by which it is published.

Yet this direct aid of machinery is infinitesimally small as compared with what it does indirectly. The very beams of civilization rest upon it. Wealth, commerce, the intercourse of travel, the structure of our temples and houses, the thousand elegancies and comforts of our daily life, dress, correspondence, the transmission of thought from age to age, things which make up so largely the state of society where religion has its choicest home, all these are its products. It makes Art possible. Literature leans upon it as its indispensable staff. And when Science climbs the skies, or digs down for truth into the bowels of the earth, or picks apart the elements which Nature has bound together, it is always with some instrument that mechanism has furnished. Take away machinery, and in a hundred years where would ninetenths of our civilization be? and, with nine-tenths of our civilization gone, how long before our religion would be again that of heathen lands, its heaven-born soul clothed with the rags of our common earth?

All honor, then, to the world's long array of mechanical inventions. They are the forms in which the Spirit that wrought such wonders with Peter and John and Paul of old, is doing in our day its miracles. They are made up, not of wood and brass and steel and iron merely, but also of brain and manhood; are thoughts, ideas, truths; ay, sometimes, philosophies and poems. The light of heaven is on their glit tering shafts; the song of hope and freedom and progress in their clatter and whir. The words of the old prophet are true: the work of God is done on wheels. The locomotive engine behind its palace cars drags after it the long train of civilization; drags humanity up the slope of the Ages and on to the great Pacific shore of the Future! Sledges and ham

mers are beating into shape with their giant arms the great gospel doctrine of universal brotherhood. It is something of the roughness and asperity of society that is smoothed away in every rolling and planing mill. Sewing machines and knitters carry with them a second thread fastening more closely together the different parts of our race. It is love as well as lightning that runs along the telegraphic wires; and out of every loom, finer than silk of Lyons, rich and beautiful beyond any tapestry of Lowell and Lawrence, there comes the fabric of religious grace and virtue. Machinery is a gospelworker; mechanical, the friend not opposite of what is free, spiritual, dynamic. One of the links between man and his Maker, one credential of his eternal relationship, is found in the very heart of our factories. The great driving wheel of all earthly machinery is far up in the heavens, has its force and direction supplied immediately from Omnipotence. And every mechanic, true to his vocation, is doing in the workshop six days a week one part of the same thing which the minister aims at from another point on Sunday,-building up the kingdom of God!

SIMULTANEOUSLY with the appearance of the volume of Dr. Bulfinch, on the Christian Evidences, comes the more pretentious work of President Dodge.* The method of the two works is different. Dr. Dodge has very little to say of the external proofs of Christianity, but treats it from an unusual, if not from an original, stand-point. He means to be liberal, and he tries to be profound; but after all, the bonds of his sect hold him back, and his investigations go but little below the surface thought of the discussions about things natural and things spiritual. His thought, too, is not always consistent.

*The Evidences of Christianity, with an Introduction on the Existence of God, and the Immortality of the Soul. By EBENEZER DODGE, D.D., President of Madison University. Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1869. 12mo, pp. 244.

He is a sturdy defender of the rights of reason, and yet he warns reason off the ground in a very summary way, where it should seem to have the best right and the most necessary work. What can be more preposterous than such a limitation as that in this paragraph?

"The reason cannot by its own light pronounce on the credibility and worth of the miraculous facts of Christianity. It can exclude only what no one admits. Their credibility must rest essentially on testimony. The interpretation of these facts may give us doctrines which loom up above our reason. Now, in such cases, the court must declare itself incompetent to pronounce a decision. Any other principle would exclude the grandest verities from our faith, and justify the old heathen postulate, that man was the measure of the universe."

These are not the words of a clear-headed thinker. Equally vague and futile is the strange talk, on page 132, about the personality of God, that one God is no God, that only the triune idea makes God live.

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The coming of Christ reveals the ascending presence of God, frees him from the iron mechanism of his own laws, and presents him as an absolute personality. It casts a gleam of light, faint but real, on the way in which we are to think of him. He is alive, alive throughout, - alive absolutely and eternally. There are no latent elements in his consciousness. He knows himself absolutely, and can perfectly respond to the cry of his creatures. This absolute personality is triune; for he is not a subject finding his object out of himself, but his own consciousness is the living synthesis of both. This tri-personality represents the divine life in its absolute fulness. Analogy seems to teach that simple, bare unity is death, — for it is the form of consciousness without any content, and that duality is only an infinite antagonism; while the blending of subject and object in the unity of consciousness, in other words, trinity alone, is life. God is three in a sense in which he is not one, and in such a sense as makes him the only living and absolute personality. This speculative statement is without any special value, except in just so far as it may bring into relief the grand idea of Christ and his apostles, that God is not only a personal being, but that there is an absolute fulness of personal life in him."

Such talk as this shows the bewilderment of a brain which has become clogged by metaphysical terminology which it does not comprehend. The idea of the passage comes from the words of Coleridge much more than from the words of the Gospels.

When Dr. Dodge leaves metaphysics, and is willing to speak of practical things, he is a safe teacher. His spirit is kind and conciliating. Unfortunately, the ambition to be a philosopher spoils his