through an intervening medium- and to pass through that medium, in order to communion, man's soul must gird itself for continual effort. "Truth," says Dr. South, in one of his sermons, "is a great stronghold, barred and fortified by God and Nature; and diligence is properly the understanding's laying siege to it: so that, as in a kind of warfare, it must be perpetually upon the watch, observing all the avenues and passes to it, and accordingly makes its approaches. Sometimes it thinks it gains a point, and presently again it finds itself baffled and beaten off; yet still it renews the onset, attacks the difficulty afresh, plants this reasoning, and that argument, this consequence, and that distinction, like so many intellectual batteries, till at length it forces a way and passage into the obstinate enclosed truth that so long withstood and defied all its assaults. The Jesuits have a saying common amongst them, touching the instruction of youth (in which their chief strength and talent lies), that vexatio dat intellectum. As when the mind casts and turns itself restlessly from one thing to another, strains this power of the soul to apprehend, that to judge, another to divide, a fourth to remember-thus tracing out the nice and scarce observable difference in some things, and the real agreement of others, till at length it brings all the ends of a long and various hypothesis together, sees how one part coheres

with and depends upon another, and so clears off all the appearing contrarieties and contradictions that seemed to lie cross and uncouth, and to make the whole unintelligible this is the laborious and vexatious inquest that the soul must make after science. For Truth, like a stately dame, will not be seen nor show herself, at the first visit, nor match with the understanding upon an ordinary courtship or address. Long and tedious attendances must be given, and the hardest fatigue endured and digested; nor did ever the most pregnant wit in the world bring forth anything great, lasting, and considerable, without some pain and travail, some pangs and throes before the delivery. Now all this that I have said," continues the doctor, "is to show the force of diligence in the investigation of truth, and particularly of the noblest of all truths, which is that of religion."

This effort, this "diligence," as Dr. South terms it, this self-action of the spiritual life, in order to put itself in contact and mingle with, and so possess, that of God which he embodies in his works and word, appears to be inseparably associated with the consciousness and enjoyment of the feelings of proprietorship. It seems to be a law of our nature that those acquisitions only can be held and valued as our own, which have been made so by a force exerted from within us-and that just in proportion to the intensity of that force, does

the knowledge gained become welded with our souls. In the material universe, which is his handiwork, in the proceedings of that Providential government which he directs and controls, and in the discoveries he has made of himself in the revealed volume, God has placed within reach of finite minds as much of himself as their powers will ever be able to comprehend-but he is our God, at least so far as our consciousness is concerned, only as the action of the life within upon the rich and varied ores of divinity without, fuses the knowledge of him into our own being. To elicit, therefore, this self-action, to nourish it, to increase both its spontaneity and its vigour, is, in effect, to amplify the absorbing and assimilating capabilities of the living spirit, and to qualify the creature for taking into its own individuality of system, and identifying with its own nature, more and more of the allglorious Creator.

Such, in my view, and I do not apprehend any serious difference of judgment in this matter, is spiritual life—or as the old divines have accurately and beautifully phrased it, "the life of God in the soul of man." What is its origin can hardly be questioned by any who agree that this is its nature. What constitutes its simple essence-the primary substratum to which its attributes belong-it is as impossible to ascertain, as it is to determine what is the essence of physical life. We know nothing

of it but by its functions and these, being reverently and closely questioned, inform us that the life of which we speak is one, however begotten, whose object and office it is, by the unceasing effort of its own energies, to extract the elements of Deity diffused through, and embodied in, all the materials of human knowledge-to make them "part and parcel" of itself, and by participation to be an ever enlarging embodiment, by finite spirits, of the thoughts and the propensions, of the character and the counsels, of the Infinite and the Invisible. It will greatly forward us to the conclusions of which we are in search, to notice the main principles which characterise the whole of God's proceedings and arrangements with a view to train up this spiritual life, to strengthen and develop its powers and susceptibilities, and to educate it for its immortal destiny. Looked at broadly, the

conduct of God in reference to the cultivation of religious vitality, is directed to the furtherance of the following ends-to augment its power, to sharpen its senses, and to multiply its manifestations and enjoyments-or in other words, to make more of it, to make it more perfect, and to make it more easily and spontaneously exemplify itself to elicit and mature what is in it, by its selfaction upon whatever is homogeneous without it, in respect of, first, its sympathies then, its perceptions lastly, its expressions.

That it is no mean feature of the Divine purpose in his moral government of man, to increase the power of this spiritual life, we have countless and various reasons for believing. Its own instinctive and insuppressible yearnings which nothing can appease but a participation "of the Divine nature -the exuberant and inexhaustible provision God has made to satisfy them-the wondrous and beneficent skill he has displayed in veiling himself by his works, and word, in such manner as to allow to the quickened spirit such glimpses of his beauty and of "the hidings of his power," as may give a keener edge to its thirst for him, and stimulate into intenser activity those energies by the force of which alone he can be possessed and appropriated -the gradual withdrawal of intervening obstructions between him and the soul, and consequent dispersion of the clouds in which his glory is enwrapped, at the earnest solicitation, and busy but reverent prying, and laborious and persevering and importunate suit, of the sympathizing heart in search of him-the diversified modes in which he images himself to affectionate contemplation, now awing, yet not overpowering, the reason by the exhibitions of his majesty, then charming it into silent and musing admiration by the resources and contrivances of his wisdom, sometimes snatching it up heavenwards as in a chariot of glowing aspirations, and then again descending to the