heavenly condition which God seeks to create within him. Thus Nature opens to him the long vistas upward and downward, and confronts man with a mirror that reflects the hues of a redeemed or an inverted humanity.

The sentimentalists can shut themselves up and babble about the beautiful, and make this world all good and perfect, and convince themselves that God created it as an artist, and that toads and spiders and wolves and green flies and obscene birds are turned out as his models of the comely and fair. But we think a tolerable use of the reason would convince almost any one that there might be a nature compared with which this is cold, deformed, and dim, and that there would be, if it were not best that man's natural world should be the analogue of his spiritual condition, warning him against the downward lapsings, and inviting him to patient climbings towards the glorious summit, and the eternal stars. And it is a most significant fact that the universal consciousness has taken up into itself the meaning of Nature; for all human language represents the operations of mind, good and bad, by things good and bad in the world. without. Into Nature all language sends down its roots and draws up its life, to depict the hideousness of sin or the sweetness and beauty of virtue; and for this purpose all the snakes and beasts of prey hiss and howl through it, and all pleasant sights and sounds make it chromatic with their colorings and resonant with their music. There is hardly a word in any language that describes a mental process or a heart process which, traced to its root, is not found to conceal an image drawn up from the natural world to reflect the beauty or deformity of the soul; and however the sentimentalists would have it, the soul intuitively reads its subjective heaven or hell in the face of nature, "clear as in a molten mirror." The very words we are using illustrate the point, for heaven is the participle of the verb to heave, and means something raised or arched above, and, by analogy, the soul's serene heights above the perturbations and storms

beneath; and hell in the Hebrew was a loathsome valley, whence rose the fetid smoke of human sacrifice, and hence the soul's cavernous deeps where humanity is sacrificed in its lustful fires.

6. Dr. Bushnell's chapter on the character of Christ describes with great skill its traits of more than a human greatness, and its tints of more than a human loveliness. No biographer's imagination could have originated such a conception, he argues; no finite mind could do it, for it could furnish no such ideal from itself; therefore it is a Divine reality come down out of the heavens. The logic of this chapter, as severe as it is beautiful, crowds us closely to one of two alternatives, either to bow before a superhuman and divine virtue in Christ, such as can never be "developed" out of man by the highest reach of his faculties, or else to accuse Christ of making extravagant, false, and boastful pretensions. Imagine a Socrates, a Fenelon, a Washington, or any model man you please; and how much "progress" must he make before he can stand up and proclaim, “He that hath seen me hath seen God," - "All that the Father hath is mine," "Receive ye the Holy Ghost while I breathe upon you"? And when any "developed" finite being says this, will not the world turn from him as developed into a blasphemer or a madman?

7. The doctrine of justification by faith, as woven into Dr. Bushnell's argument, is relieved somewhat of the hard literalism of the old Orthodoxy. The death of Christ is not substitutive, or made "to square up a legal account of pains and penalties according to some small scheme of book-keeping philosophy." What then? He does not tell us what, with any sufficient clearness and amplitude. That Christ "fulfilled the law," and thereby rendered it possible for man to be saved, is certainly true, taking the word law, not in the narrow sense of a technical rule or verbal commandment, but as the Supreme Order of the universe, which God can never break or disregard. In this sense the

whole Divine Advent in Christ- the birth, life, death, glorification, and the mediation by which God yields himself to the heart of man-is the fulfilment of Law, for it is the upholding of that Eternal Order without which humanity might have perished, and, for aught we know, the heavens might have rushed down into ruin.

We have called Dr. Bushnell's system "Calvinism transfigured," for all the Calvinism there is in it is toned by the softer and sweeter colorings caught from more heavenly revealings of the truth of God. But we care not much about names, if so be they do not obscure our vision of things, and we will be tolerant of sect, provided it will keep out of the way as the Lord comes to gather up the scattered truths of his broken Church, and reset them as the jewels of his kingly crown.

THE LITTLE CRADLE AND THE LITTLE GRAVE.

I HAD a little cradle,

And a little face slept there;
It was the glory of my home,
That childish beauty rare.

And now I have a little grave:
Do thou be still my heart,-
God doeth well, and he has fixed
For me the bitter part.

The cradle now I put away,

(I scarce can see through tears); This little grave it will be mine, Through all my coming years.

Some day the little form would stray
From out its cradle bed;

HELP me to bear, my Father! lift me up

Above the snares that compass! If my cup

Should prove a draught of bitter, and the way be rough
Thou choosest I should go in,

-'t is enough

That thy Love ordereth; - let it be for me

The cup to drink, the way to walk in cheerfully.

A. F. W.

"WE demand an immortality, and we run to waste unless our very days are numbered."

"WE are ultimately in the power of our ideas. These modify our passions. In this or that individual man, the victory between passion and reason may be doubtful. In Humanity, as it lives from age to age, the final victory is not so doubtful."

A WINTER SERMON.

BY REV. A. P. PEABODY, d. d.

PSALM Xxxix. 3:-"My heart was hot within me; while I was musing, the fire burned."

Ar this season there is a strongly marked contrast between different classes of those exposed to intense cold. In not a few of our narrow streets and rickety houses you may find poverty-stricken families, hovering with contracted limbs and chattering teeth over scanty fires, while their dwellings seem a mere lattice-work, designed for the free passage of the northern blast; and probably there is no suffering from the cold, that is keener than might be witnessed, not far from any of our homes, on such a morning as this. But with the thermometer at its lowest range, the axe of the woodman plies with a vigorous and merry ring; the farmer trudges, unchilled, in the snow by the side of his team; and warm, glad life far outspeeds the wind it braves in the swift sleighs that track our interior river-courses and lake-beds.

Whence this contrast? The cause is, manifestly, internal, not external,- personal, not atmospheric. We are heated, chiefly, not from without, but from within, not by the fuel burned in our presence, but by the fuel which we ourselves consume. We carry about within us our own hearth with its undying fire,- our own stove with its perennial radiation of heat. Our lungs are the seat of a perpetual combustion; of a coal-fire kindled with our first breath, extinguished only with the last. The fuel is the carbon and hydrogen contained in our food, which are carried, in combination with other elements, through the processes of digestion and blood-making, conveyed to the lungs, and there oxidized, or, in other words, ignited and burned by the oxygen inhaled from the atmosphere. This combustion it is which heats the body; while the circulation which it demands and sustains enables the human system to resist to a wonderful, and in some cases a seemingly miraculous degree, the effect