subjugation, the spirit of unhesitating sacrifice, the readiness to give up even life itself-whence do they spring? There is no impurity there; on the contrary, wherever they act, their purifying influence is felt. From our earthly nature they do not spring, for they war against the passions and appetites, they are the manifestations of a better nature--the advanced guard, if we may so speak, of the powers of an invisible world. If our faith in these divine attributes were to be less, because we cannot see them; if we ventured to slight the generous sentiments by which they are revealed to us, because they cannot be the objects of our examination, should we not indeed become contemptible to ourselves, and unworthy of the gift of life? If these are imaginations, leave them for me, and take away that which you call reality.

And the Conscience !-it is the most powerful voice which speaks to the heart of man; more wonderful, more inexplicable, than any instinct whatsoever; a deep mystery of the soul, which the sense can never explore, yet which is an object of the most undoubting faith-Thou must'-Whoever has heard that mandate in his heart, speaking amidst temptations and pleasures and necessities; whoever has felt that it ought to be obeyed, has not seen, but yet has believed.' The clearest revelation of an invisible world, surpassing in authority and power all that is visible, has been his.

He has believed in moral obligation, in duty and in right, and such a faith makes man an immortal being. He has believed in God; for the idea of God is that of rectitude, intelligence, goodness, love, power, invested with the attributes of the infinite. He has found,

too, in nature, and in his own soul, no equivocal traces of the being to whom all these attributes belong; traces unseen by the outward eye, but ever visible to the spirit. In God and in his conscience, in the order and the disorder of the world, he finds the need and the promise of an immortal life; without this and without God it would be idle to talk of duty.

Here then are mind and its powers, here are the infinite, the beautiful, the lovely, the holy, the just, the divine, the immortal, all subjects of undoubting faith, yet all invisible. These are our life, they are what we cherish, what we prize. These are what rouse up our souls within us when we read of those chosen men in whose hearts things unseen have triumphed over the objects of sense. Nothing can make clear the page of human history but the admission of things invisible. The idea of illimitable power which comes in, in the midst of a world of limitations, of duty amid the strife of interests and pleasures, of what is unchangeable in the midst of fluctuation, of eternity in the midst of time, of God in the diversity of nature, these alone can explain a large portion of the history of human nature. And things invisible have been the most powerful agents on the stage of events, inasmuch as the spirit is the loftiest part of human nature. Man is not, like the brute, an organized being, ministered to by intelligence, -man is a mind ministered to by organized matter. Whoever regards him in a lower light does not understand him.

The invisible, then, is everything-the visible, how little in comparison! The invisible comprehends the soul, the power of thought, and all goodness, virtue.

Is there anything in the universe so grand, so high, so beautiful, or so true? It is this which ennobles and purifies the soul, and this which brightens the world with reflections from above. Here are the order, harmony, benevolence, and beauty which enchant us when we survey nature. It brings exhaustless delights. The invisible, without, speaks to the invisible within, in language which cannot be misunderstood. God speaks to the soul. Therefore it is that the earth is beautiful; if what our eyes behold or our hands can touch were all, that world would be a desert.

Do not then pride yourself upon your acuteness or superiority of mind when you profess to believe only what you see. Marvellous acuteness! The eagle then ranks higher than you, for he sees better and further. Superiority like this belongs principally to old and corrupted nations, who have refined upon their luxuries and wants, till they have made sensation everything, all the rest nothing. It is a real symptom of degradation, for it argues a weakness of moral principle, the tendency of which is quite of an opposite nature. All moral agents believe in things unseen; if they cease to do this, they cease to be moral. But it is in this as in other things, the ignorant treat as fancies, what those who understand them know to be important truths. Astronomy, to one totally ignorant of it, is no less a chimera than religion to a sensual man, or music to the deaf.

And here I cannot but observe that the grand aim of Christianity was not so much to increase the number of things which we must believe without seeing them, for many of these were believed without its aid,

but rather to submit some of our hidden realities to the cognizance of the senses. Jesus came, not so much to make us believe what we cannot behold, as to make us behold what heretofore had been only believed in. He came to incorporate in his life, to manifest and clothe in a form that might be seen and felt, all those lofty ideas of goodness, greatness, and truth, which had been floating about in the human mind for ages. The government of the world by an infinite mind, the new existence reserved for our race, the dread of sin, and the mercy of God, these might be the objects of faith before, but he fixed and embodied them in external facts, in the course of his lofty mission.

Place man where you will, in whatever condition you please, he will be noble, great, pure, moral, and blessed, if he has not seen and yet has believed.' He will be little and low, immoral, and finally wretched, if he believes only because he has seen;'

ILLUSTRATIONS BY COLERIDGE.

Mr. Coleridge, in his Aids to Reflection,' has some thoughts and illustrations on the atonement or redemption, by Jesus Christ, which are worthy of notice, and their influence cannot fail to be salutary wherever they are read. We shall give but an abridgement of some of his statements and illustrations. In a reference to the opinions of others, Mr, C. says:

But besides the debt which all mankind contracted in and through Adam, every man, say those divines, is an insolvent debtor on his own score. In this fearful predicament the Son of God took compassion on mankind, and resolved to pay the debt for us and to satisfy divine justice by a perfect equivalent. Accordingly it has been held, by more than one of these divines, that the agonies suffered by Christ were equal in amount to the sum total of the torments of all mankind here and hereafter.'

It is easy to say-' O but I do not hold this, or we do not make this an article of our belief!' The question is--Do you take any part of it; and can you reject the rest without being inconsequent ?—If you attach any idea to the term justice, as applied to God, it must be the same which you refer to when you affirm or deny it of any other personal agent, save only that in its attribution to God, you speak of it as unmixed and perfect. I may therefore put the case as between man and man.

A sum of £1000 is owing from James to Peter, for which James has given a bond in judgment. He is insolvent, and the bond is on the point of being carried into effect, to the utter ruin of James. Matthew steps in, pays Peter the thousand pounds, and discharges the bond. In this case no man could hesitate to admit, that a complete satisfaction had been made to Peter.

Now we will put the case that James had been guilty of the basest ingratiude to a most worthy and affectionate mother, who had not only performed all the duties and tender offices of a mother, but whose heart was bound up in this her only child-all which he