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partially changed in its characteristics. The withdrawal of the assumption, that the Infinite wears our image unlimitedly perfected, does not transform our devout emotions into a mere mechanical working off of rhythmical fervors into empty space, because the infinite Reality remains; and it is in answer to its objective attraction that we offer our submissive wonder, our trustful love, our penitential aspiration. What shall we offer to that which is infinitely above us, except that which is highest and purest and divinest in us? Thinking that possibly the Infinite may have some mode of being totally unknown to us, and as much superior to our personal consciousness as this is superior to the torpor of a stone, our yearnings and response to its invitation, the turning towards it of all the holiest emotions first learned in narrower and coarser forms below, are a legitimate expression of our nature, and the fittest tribute we can pay to the God who has revealed the order of his works and the series of our duties, but concealed himself in that omnipresent mystery which eludes all cognition, by underlying and including it. The definite realities of nature, working on the soul, draw out appropriate specific re-actions. God, reporting his infinity in the soul, will likewise fetch a commensurate response; but that response, while vast and unavoidable, will naturally be, when pure, formless as its Object. To say that God reveals the formal contents and features of his being in the soul of his child, as the orbs and relations of astronomy reflected themselves in the mind of Kepler, is to make the Author of all a thing among other things. The supposition that man began in a perfect state, and that the moral emotions are products of the re-actions of his soul on the revealed idea of God as a perfect and boundless moral being, is to us false history, false science, false philosophy. The race began at the bottom of the scale, and have worked their way up, in answer to the attraction of the beckoning truths of God. The idea of God is a crowning achievement of a long series of ascending experiences. The inspiring revelation of the realities of the universe and of the soul finally culminated in that climax. All truth, God himself,

is for ever open and bare. All revelation is therefore a couching of the eye to see, and not an uncovering of the reality seen. Consequently, before the highest truths of religion could be seen, there must have been a patient development of the inner eye. To regard the perfect idea of a perfect God as the origin of our moral powers and distinctions, is like tracing the historic origin of arithmetic to a previous mastery of the calculus. Piety is the flower and perfume, not the primordial impulse, of morality. Veneration, trust, shame, loyalty, penitence, love, and all the other ethical sentiments, were first developed in our human relations by the inner action of the hierarchy of our faculties, and by the mutual outer action and re-action of inferiors, equals, and superiors. These emotions, the highest products of truth in our nature, purified and enlarged, were then exercised by men in their conscious relations with the infinite Cause and Ruler. Conscious of themselves as the causes of phenomena, they instinctively ascribed the type of their own being to the Unknown Author of all phenomena; thus, by a fallacy which few seem even yet to have repudiated, spuriously classifying with what they knew what they could never know. The religion of men began with belief in a God who was intelligible in his nature, unintelligible in his working-scheme: it will end with belief in a God who is inconceivable in himself, but transparent in his order of actions. At every stage of this process, essential religion is the emotional recognition of the law of the whole; essential morality, practical conformity to it. Every intelligence capable of appreciating the law of the whole, must intuitively recognize in it an intrinsic authority far more primitive, binding, venerable, irrepealably sacred, than can be lent by any imagery borrowed from the legislative or judicial forms of human politics.

There is, then, no just ground for the belief which alarms so many, that the detection of this sophism will prove fatal to morality and religion. Refrain from thinking the divine psychology a counterpart of the human, outline Deity no more as a man on the azure infinity, paint not his countenance

in the mirror of imaginative contemplation, still he is the One without whom the Many could not be. Still, we have for our guidance his working scheme revealed in the order and laws of the creation. The sum of conditions necessaryfor the perfect evolution and maintenance of universal order and life, constitutes a symbol of authority and a body of rules not to be escaped. Whatever else goes or stays, the laws of the whole in itself and in relation to the parts, and the laws of the parts in themselves and in relation to each other and the whole, constitute the grounds of a system of religion and morality whose sanctity and sanctions are intrinsic and eternal.

No doubt the idea of a God who is like ourselves, only infinitely present, powerful, wise, good, and holy, works with intense moral and religious efficacy in the consecrated soul that harbors it. But if we really do not know that God is exactly such a being, nothing is to be gained, but much in the long-run to be lost, by pretending to the knowledge. Our ignorance may better imply his superiority to our knowledge, than his inferiority to it. At all events, the admission of our inability to know the nature and lineaments of his being, can neither empty the sphere of piety, nor remove the basis of morality, so long as his inscrutable essence every where defies our escape, and his enactments are written in the creation and the soul. There is no other scepticism so profound as that which fears that the truth is bad, and therefore shrinks from the sight of it. Grant me but to see and to follow! is the sublimest prayer of humanity. That an illusion favorable to virtue is better than a reality unfavorable to it, is a dangerous saying; for the only excellence capable of universality must be one generated by truth. If the view offered by Spencer for the reconciliation of science and religion be a just view, the influence will unquestionably be as benign as it must be powerful. Let there be no prejudice to prevent a fair examination of it. It is a philosophy less moulded and tinted by the human personality than the theory advocated by Martineau; and, in some of its aspects, it seems, in consequence of that, a closer correspondence with the reality. It

is no subject for dogmatism; and modesty best becomes the The man of the widest and keenest vision is

wisest man.

invariably the most tolerant and meek.

"Men whom sovereign wisdom teaches,

That God not less in humblest forms abides

Than those the great veil hides,

Such men a tremor of bright reverence reaches ;

And thus, confronted ever with high things,

Like cherubim, they hide their eyes between their wings."

But, let us remember, the true function of eyes is to see, not to be hidden. What generous thinker will not hold, with Spencer, that "when there is perfect sincerity, each man true to himself, every one striving to realize what he thinks the highest rectitude, — then all things must prosper."

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Going through the whole of the twenty-five volumes of our three authors, and making a sincere effort to seize their inmost general qualities, we characterize them distinctively, the first as an effective stimulator, the next as a masterly educator, the last as a sublime inspirer. Judging, not from what they would themselves consciously confess or affirm, but from what, as it seems to us, the collective spirit of their several writings reveals, we should say, that the ends which they loyally serve, and the order of those ends, are as follows: Emerson, freedom first, beauty second, truth third, worship fourth, utility last. Spencer, truth first, utility second, freedom third, beauty fourth, worship last. Martineau, worship first, truth second, beauty third, freedom fourth, utility last. Practically considered, the individual model, shown in Emerson, may be the most pungent, but is the least satisfactory. Rationally considered, the scientific model, shown in Spencer, is the most sound and desirable. Artistically considered, the humane or academic model, shown in Martineau, is the most lofty, attractive, and apparently complete. Or, to express our thought with other words and in a little different aspect, Martineau is the ripest and richest product of the past; Emerson, the most original and piquant phenomenon of the present; Spencer, the most capacious exponent of the future. The representation of the results of human experience, full

of warmth, awe, beautiful joy, and aspiration, drawn directly from the earnest soul, is the more gracious and attractive spectacle the critical estimate and rectification of those results by the standard of science, if a somewhat chillier task, is yet a noble and needful one, and still richer in the promise of future fruit.

ART. II. - THE FEMALE CHURCH OF KÖNIGSBERG. Spiritual Wives. By WILLIAM HEPWORTH Dixon. London:

Hurst & Blackett, 1868.

MR. WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON'S new book may be readily criticised and easily denounced. It makes a very long story where many readers will think there was unusual occasion for concise statements; and with this extended, and withal attractive, from a literary point of view, recital of spiritual disease of the most dangerous form, it can hardly be said to connect any saving resumé of sound principles. That Mr. Dixon has wilfully sinned herein, need not be assumed: we prefer to believe that he has seized upon the facts intercalated in his lively pages as material available for a study in morbid psychology, which he really thought instructive as well as entertaining; and that he has in considerable measure avoided the discussion of principles, because he was not prepared to carry it through.

The speed with which the book has come to us, from its author and from the press, may help to explain why we have a brilliant sketch, rather than a profound and rigorous discussion. The opening chapter speaks of "the present month of November, 1867;" the preface is dated "New-Year's Day, 1868;" and on the 1st of February the volumes arrived in Boston. English criticisms soon followed them,— some warmly eulogistic, others hot with virtuous indignation. The traditional Podsnap of the "London Times" uttered the wrath and horror of conventional British propriety. Some other prominent and many obscure organs of British opinion fol

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