a foreseeing spiritual faculty. Our consciousness is the plate; our character, the object to be portrayed; conscience, the light; cerebral action, the operator; time, the chemical agent. With due care, we learn to know ourselves, and what manner of men we are. In fact, men take their own likeness, day by day, hour by hour, and know not; but, after a while, they will know. The whole is capable of illustration. Using light, and duly adjusted instruments, we look into things invisible to unassisted vision. With more light, and greater mental discernment, we could so look into the germinated seed as to foresee the future flower, the shrub, the tree. We could, in a way, ascertain the nature of things, before the things come to be themselves; and know what our wishes, words, and acts will produce in the future. The process, further extended, gives discernment of other mysteries. By application of photography to astronomical investigation; the use of dry plates, in long exposure and with due adjustment for the heavens, bring into view the light of stars, so far off, in space, that no mortal ever has seen or ever will see them. They are marked on the plate, but eye, looking never so intently on the sky, sees them not. They are stars and clusters of worlds whose light, leaving them millions and millions of years ago, lived on until at last it came and told us, by a sensitiveness beyond the power of our own sense, that not one ray of light that shone so long ago, and encountered the vastness and conflicting forces of space, has perished. It brought to us the signal from very far, of worlds and worlds; and to those worlds, and further yet, is our own likeness carried, moment by moment; and as we form our permanent likeness, and it is seen by the all-seeing, the all-knowing One, so will our fate be. Nothing is lost. "Sunbeam of summer, what is like thee? It is faith, touching all things with hues of Heaven.” Felicia Dorothea Hemans. The many energies which are within us we greatly control, even as we master the external powers which work in nature. We use them for good or for evil; and, after certain transformations, they become fixed. The bad man, as a blackamoor, whom you cannot wash white; or, as a leopard, whose spots no persuasion can change; the prodigal, made swinish, finds a hard master. Nothing is lost. "Let thy mind's sweetness have his operation Upon thy body, clothes, and habitation." George Herbert, The Temple. If we uplift ourselves into more consciousness of the infinite Life, about us and within us, the interpenetration of the universal splendour carries us from glory to glory, by the Spirit of our God. We become rich, by turning the well-doing of common things into sacred duties, and these duties become privileges. Cleanliness, as flowers about us, is a godly and goodly adornment. Dressing and undressing our soul, searching with the light of Scripture for God's Image in it, we find Christ's stamp to boot; and thus know in whom we live and move and have our being. Our mental and moral constitution is being brought into perfect accord with that permanent, reasonable, and intelligible universal process, which fashions former and present things for new worlds. Our intense curiosity is gratified by the full conviction that the sense in us of a future, accords with the universal tendency of all things to the future. The truthfulness of nature seems to awake in our sense of responsibility. Every atom, a centre of the universal energies; every dew-drop, a reflection of heaven and earth; every soul of man, reflecting the image of the Eternal, has the countenance, or likeness, of an everliving creature. Wonderful things are being done! "God shall take thee to His Breast, dear spirit, Into His Breast, be sure ! and here, on earth, Robert Browning, Paracelsus. RESEARCH XI. HOW WE KNOW OF THE SUPERNATURAL. "A spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up; it stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.”—Job iv. 15, 16. "From God, Down to the lowest spirit ministrant, Intelligence exists which casts our mind ROBERT BROWNING, Paracelsus. THERE is a well-known tendency in nature by which all visible things are brought from a state of invisibility, and are made to pass into it again. The energy, so ruling nature, is not a part of it in the sense that a part is less than the whole. It is more; it makes the whole, is that by which nature is, and by which visible nature passes away. It is an over-nature, a supernature, the supernatural which makes nature. This supernatural is, we think, that permanent, whatever it may be, which gives the appearance of abidingness, and of uniformity; though, in reality, there is no fixity anywhere; but change and passing away everywhere, not less surely than moment succeeds. moment. We, ourselves, have a power to change things in their form, by directing force to act on them, and their collocation; but that which these things represent G we cannot change, that which nature tells of is unchangeable. All matter, and every sort of force, whatsoever we feel, or see, or hear, or taste, or smell, we can change. By this we know that matter and force are not the Essence, are not the Cause of Nature; but a clothing, a representation of Something that is more than matter and force. We further perceive that the observed modes of work in nature, which we formulate as laws, are different ways by which the Great Unknown, the Supernatural, acts. Every scientific man knows this. Nature is spoken of as self-contained, as if all things belonged to her, whether far off or near, and as if she did all things of herself. The speech is good for surface work; but, for high use, has to be amended and enlarged. We are not acquainted with any natural process which contains itself, or is fully wrought within itself. Take the growth of a seed into the plant, of the fœtus into the young animal; from the beginning, and all along the line of production, the action of infinite influences did not cease for a moment. Nature is a large clock, and the things of nature are little clocks; like clocks, they have some automatism; but it is not self-originated. Science shows that there is no perpetual motion; therefore the automatism is an endowment by the Eternal, who was before all worlds, and will be when all such worlds, as we are acquainted with, have done their work. "My foot is on the threshold Of boundless life-the doors unopened yet, All preparations not complete within." Robert Browning, Paracelsus. Take example of symmetrical snares, spun by spiders |