most unenlightened believer, who beholds religion covered with a load of ceremonial pomp, who comes to its outward altar as alone or above all other things sacred, who listens to the voice of its priests speaking in an unknown tongue, and sees the Saviour's broken body and streaming blood literally in the symbolic wafer and cup; -nay, the supposition is poor and weak; I go further and say, the man who, wholly out of the pale of Christendom, cries from a full heart, "There is one God, and Mohammed is his prophet; " or the pagan sage, who, ignorant of one Infinite Spirit, trusts only the good demon in his breast, is nearer heaven while on earth, and more likely to have an entrance into it ministered to him hereafter, than the nominal Christian, who has no vital, regenerating faith in truths familiar as household words to his understanding, flowing around like the air he has breathed from infancy, and the light that shines upon him from heaven.

Let us lay aside, then, as of inferior import, our doubts, disbeliefs, denials, and questionings, upon which we may have falsely prided ourselves; and let us gather up our convictions, as wheat sifted from the chaff. Let us positively establish our faith, and enthrone it over our life. If it be only so brief as to say, not as mere phrases, but with a living significance, that Christ is our Saviour, and God our Father, and God's Holy Spirit our accepted Sanctifier, and immortality, running over these graves we must lie down in, our destined career; let it take its seat to preside in us, and rule with a rightful sceptre our thoughts and conduct. Let it make us walk as on

the borders of an unseen state, guarded by a lofty companionship that shall give us victory over temptation, deliverance from sin, and pluck out the sting of death! Then shall it fulfil its office, and be transformed into, or succeeded by, nobler and as yet unknown exercises of our immortal nature in the world which is to come.

THERE are two methods of moral improvement: first, acting from ourselves according to an abstract principle; and, secondly, living over again the example of actual excellence. It is the latter method to which the text points. It is certainly a very remarkable power which God has given us, of representing to and realizing in ourselves a character different from our own; of putting on, becoming another person, another soul. We cannot fail to see in such a constitution the divine purpose, not only that we should enter into the feelings of others, but moreover that we should enlarge and enrich our own nature; not be confined strictly to our native tendencies and original biases, but borrow others' wisdom, copy others' virtue, imitate all good examples, assimilate every right quality, and incorporate into our own being a thousand exotic and foreign excellences. He who exercises not his imagination and sentiment to this end, but, in the grave and forbidding, proud or exclusive way we sometimes notice, shuts up his

heart to its own independent resources, becomes meagre and impoverished, and is on the way at last even to idiocy, lack of common feeling, lack of common sense. A consideration of some of the modes in which this representing, realizing power operates may help us to understand it as a moral faculty, and consecrate it to the highest uses.

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Do we not see a very familiar display of it in the genius of the poet, by which he conceives of characcreatures of his imagination, yet true to nature and drawn from nature-distinguished from one another and from himself in their modes of thought and actuating passions, and, through all the variety of situations in which they may be placed, severally well sustained? Nothing is more common than this representation in the Bible itself. Sacred historian, psalmist, and prophet are continually figuring certain characters before our minds, as examples or warnings. The whole book of Job is, not improbably, thought by many critics to be a dramatic poem; and certainly, if so, the sublimest ever written; grander than the epic of Homer, with pictures more vivid than ever dropped from the pencil of Milton or Dante, and delineations that strike deeper into the immortal essence that we are than the tragedies of Shakspeare. The parables of our Lord are commonly but portraitures to our spiritual fancy of diverse moral characters; and we can learn the lesson he intends, only by a vigorous use of this representing and reproducing power.

The exercises, too, of the human voice in recitatation and oratory, only set before us in tones what

the pen has first traced in simple words. From the child that is taught to speak the sentiments of some hero, saint, or martyr, in his earliest declamations at school, to the grave debater in legislative halls; from the narrator at the fireside, to the lively rehearser of inspired pages of human composition, or the edifying reader of the sacred word of God, what do we see throughout but this very endeavor of the soul to personate and put on, or accurately to report the meaning and feeling of, some other character; and, so far as it is understood and believed to be a noble character, to adopt, appropriate, and live over again, its nobleness. Here, again, is the main office and talent of the historian and biographer, to enter into the very heart and secret life-springs of those who have animated the events of a period, and set them forth in their true shapes; as Paul, speaking of a record of his own thus made, says, "These things happened for ensamples."

It is to give a lesson through the same personating, pictorial power of the soul, that the artist puts before us his creations, the loveliness of the Holy Family, the purity of the Virgin Mother, the devotion of dying confessors, or the courage of bold apostles; the true end being to stir a holy rivalry in us to put on such virtue and sanctity, and enter with a glorious jealousy into competition with every form of excellence.

Or, to illustrate the subject from more homely, universally known facts, the reality and strong working of this imitative and assimilating power of the soul will not be doubted by any who have noticed