use, and testified that they came from a high state for our exaltation. Saul, the king, when he chanted the mystic chant of the prophets, knew that an unwonted power had come into him (1 Sam. xix. 24). It need not startle us that the true and the counterfeit have a resemblance. We must try the spirits.

That which we know to be good, but cannot utter, indicates a coming greater power of speech. High states of spiritual joy may be disciplined into an abiding comfortable assurance of eternal life. The things of daily life and thought can be made boundless better, boundless worse; and all mean more than we are now acquainted with. We may be deluded by evil, acting as a demon against us; and go with Ahab to destruction. (1 Kings xxii. 19-22); or every virtue may be as an angel that ministers; and our sacred thoughts and good acts may be mighty, as the war-chariots of God, to defend us (2 Kings vi. 17). There are realms of darkness into which, even while living, we may cast ourselves; and there is a light so good to dwell in, and so real, that we feel it. There are powers of the world to come, that we taste, and there is a grandeur that we may now lay hold of, by which we possess eternal life (1 Tim. vi. 5, 12, 19).

"There is but one good rest : We pillow our head upon Truth's pure breast."

RESEARCH XIII.

NATURE AS A REVELATION OF THE UNSEEN.

"Rise, O my soul, with thy desires to Heaven,

And with divinest contemplation use

Thy time, where time's eternity is given,

And let vain thoughts no more thy thoughts abuse;

But down in darkness let them lie;

So live thy better, let thy worst thoughts die."

Ascribed to SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

"The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."-Rom. i. 20.

THE highest of the arts is the art of life. To live safely, so that no future change shall cause loss; to live wisely, be holy and true, so that any future day of trial shall bring joy, not grief; is, of all things, best. It means the carrying of our intelligence to the highest issues of mental power, of moral purity, of useful activity. It makes of every day, a living poem; of every duty, a picture; of our inner and outer history, a beautiful anthem set to universal music.

Nature is full of lessons. At sunset a little bird alighted on a pear-tree that grew in Luther's garden. Luther, looking on it, said, "That little bird covers its head with wings, and will sleep still and fearless. Over it are the infinite starry spaces, and the great blue depths of immensity; yet it fears not, and is at home.

The God, that made it, too is there." comforted himself, and was not afraid.

Thus Luther

The corn, how beautifully it stands in the fields, erect on strong and stately stem, bending down golden crest, weighted with food for man! God's thoughts unfold to us in the sunshine and the breeze, in fruitful trees and fragrant flowers; and when we say—

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!"

our awed spirit rests in the truth, "God measures those waters in the hollow of His hand." In the thunder and lightning, when the earth quakes, when volcanoes send forth their fiery lava, we stand amazed. The elegant fragrant rose, the beautiful form of a fragile fluttering insect, is an entrancing sight. Like Linnæus, the more deeply we penetrate the secrets of nature, the fuller our reverence, the wiser our heart, the more loving our spirit. "O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! in wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches." "Within our heart unchanged,

So glows the love of Thee, that not for death

Seems our pure passion's fervour, but ordained

To meet on brighter shores Thy majesty unstained.”

Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

In our life are lingering, long-drawn verities. Tragedies, abrupt and forcible, come from powers mightier than the life they exalt or mar. More fascinating are those epics of humanity in which motives, hopes, ambitions, centre in one all-absorbing aim. Carlyle considered that a man's religion, or want of religion, was the chief fact. The basis of Greek Philosophy was that the mind of Deity was like, but more than, the mind of man. Jacob clothed his son Joseph with

a coat of many colours, in feeble imitation of our own Heavenly Father's love, who gives light and shade, the brilliant overhanging skies, the field-flowers, the lichens-gray, black, yellow-that clothe the rocks; the glossy ivy, mosses of hue, spreading a gay carpet round the gushing fountain; the primrose, like modesty, shrinking from gaze; the violet, so hidden as to be most detected by fragrance. All these present a scene which the artist imitates and the poet celebrates, rising to the great truth-Nature is a revelation Divine.

Job (xi. 6) declared long ago "that the secrets of wisdom are double to that which is." Whether he meant that nature not less hides than reveals secrets; or that phenomena are but one side of the great realities with which we have to do; he testified of a great truth. Every substance, whether presented to us in the solid, liquid, gaseous, or ultra-gaseous form, is the product of energy, is due to pressure or absence of pressure.1 The various forms of atoms and combinations of molecules; the arrangements of the earth's strata; the difference between the organic and inorganic; the distinctive peculiarities which give size and shape to every star, plant, animal; the varieties of life; are by the unseen energy acting in various directions, intensity, and continuance. All this fills the world with enchantments. We change, all things change, yet remain the same. That which is not yet in nature, becomes nature by taking shape in things, by representation in our feelings and thought; then, by diminishing, through pain and

1 There are about seventy elements. About sixty are pure metals; the others are not metals. Some are solid; one is liquid, bromine; the remainder are gases when at the ordinary temperature.

enfeeblement, comes death; and this, not so much a departure from life, as a going whither our Lord has gone before, carries the reasons, purposes, and effects, for which things existed into the future; where they tend to the determined completeness. There is more in this than private and individual consolation. It is evidence for all men of a spiritual power which brings the soul into submission to the will of the Most High; and moulds it into a divine nature, even as suns are fashioned from the elements, and made worlds of fire, of light, of life, of beauty. Physical things are perceptible terminations of radii proceeding from some invisible centre. It is one of the great truths that Nature is a revelation of the unseen world.

"Line by line,

Form by form, nothing single nor alone,

The great below clenched by the great above."

Aurora Leigh.

Nature is a greater revelation than some of us believe. Holy Scripture, and the manifestation of the Holy Ghost in the Church, are special, distinctive lights, to reveal more fully the Divine transcripts in Nature. Every spiritual fact is not only in touch with natural truth, but with the other side; and when men generally see this, as Lord Bacon said, their minds will be brought about to religion.1 He who will be a true scientist and philosopher, or an accurate theologian, must be loyal to the seen and to the unseen; nor less faithful to the natural and apparent form, as inseparably related to that which is beyond. Jangling will be done away with, when we recognize Nature as the chief organ of Divine

1 "Meditationes Sacræ," x.