the same time! I fully believe that this impression will never be effaced from my heart."

Such is Jesuit revenge; such the spirit that the Society has always manifested, for they have learned it at the foot of the Cross of their Master and great Exemplar, and we may well apply to them the language of the great Apostle to the Gentiles: "For we preach not ourselves, but Jesus Christ our Lord, and ourselves your servants through Jesus. In all things we suffer tribulation, but are not distressed; we are straitened, but not destitute; we suffer persecution, but are not forsaken; we are cast down, but we perish not. Always bearing about in our body the mortification of Jesus that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies."

M

RELIGION AND THE MESSIAH.

ANKIND seems every day to be drifting farther and farther away from a true knowledge of God. Instead of being, as might be said of it at a no very remote period, an exotic, infidelity has come to be a tree so large and flourishing as almost to make us believe it indigenous to the soil. Long since has the name infidel and the profession of infidelity ceased to excite surprise, much less horror, for long since have people become accustomed to hear both. Indeed, by many it is esteemed the mark of a large and expanded mind to profess infidelity; more there are who seem to think that to this profession respectability must infallibly adhere; while few is the number who make the slightest discrimination between Jew and Gentile, Christian and Infidel.

men.

At present, beyond dispute, there is a vast flood of unbelieving These, forswearing allegiance to any and all religious creeds, are ever striving to delude themselves into the belief that there is no God, and seek to find comfort in absolute and utter negation. Vain their purpose. They succeed in but deceiving their own hearts. "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God." So spake Job, many hundreds of years ago. Equally true are his words to-day, despite the vast advances that have been made in science. The geologist, digging deep into the bowels of the earth, may know more about its internal structure and the vast furnaces of heat but poorly concealed by the thin crust on which men walk; the naturalist by the aid of his microscope may have

opened up to our view the secrets of nature; the philosopher may be more intimate with the nice laws which govern human reason; the astronomer may have looked into the heavens and mapped out accurately the course of each particular star and planet; the historian may have deciphered the hieroglyphics of past ages, and revealed to us that what formerly was held as true is false, and true what formerly was thought to be false; nevertheless, not less certain at present than when as fresh from the mint it fell from the lips of Job is it, that only the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. And as foolishness is doubly foolish when all unconscious of itself, how sad is the plight of him who in his foolishness denies God, and yet while he does so deems himself wise!

In the heyday of youth man may play with infidelity as the child with a toy; he may work on his own mind so as to cause it habitually to reject the idea of God; but with all his self-deceiving finesse he cannot entirely drive out beyond the borders of his own thought-lines the traces of conviction of the existence of a divinity. When the cloudless skies that smiled on sturdy manhood are no more to be seen, when, instead, the gathering shadows, falling aslant his pathway, indicate more plainly than words that life's eve is coming on apace, then his mind begins to be filled with gloom and a fear troubles him as he thinks of the dark valley that lies beyond, which he is to traverse alone. Hastily he takes a retrospective glance back through the years that were, and reconsiders the promises by which he has been led to a conclusion so unsatisfactory now near life's close. Ten to one, if uninfluenced by his friends, if left to himself, the man comes back to God. If matters have come to a crisis, if no longer there remains time for cool deliberation, if, for instance, the poor man who all his life denied God, be on his death-bed, it will be the merest chance if, the existence of God being presented to him, he does not admit it. Here, in this critical, awful moment, with the flickerings of reason only left, the man is truer to himself and his nature than when, in the robustness of strength, he protested against any claims superior to his own.

Man in the full tide of strength and vigor may prate about infidelity in public, he may proclaim in lofty terms the freedom of mind and body that is purchased by throwing off old, slavish superstitions, among which he counts the believing in a God, and in the consciousness of his own superior enlightenment and importance may puff and strut about; but down deep in his heart man. refuses to be an infidel. "In silence and at night" he is forced to acknowledge the existence of a Being, infinite, almighty, and unseen, and the "still small voice of conscience" whispers to him that to this Being, and to Him alone, shall he offer up homage, adora

tion, and worship. There is that within man which tells him that he is not the last link in "being's endless chain," that there is a power above and beyond him to which he is subject. Nor must man be taught this in order to know it. This knowledge is within him, and is cultivated best when he is alone and silence reigns around. Who is there can look up into the heavens on a calm bright night, and see them lit up with a myriad of brilliant lights, and not feel the presence of a Being of grandeur and omnipotence? Do not these very stars and planets own the existence of a Creator, and proclaim His goodness and beauty?

"As spangles in the sunny rays shine round the silver snows,
The pageantry of heaven's bright army glitters in thy praise."
"A million torches lighted by thy hand

Wander unwearied through the blue abyss,
They own thy power, accomplish thy command,
All gay with life, all eloquent with bliss."

The prophet sings: "The stars gave light in their watches and rejoiced, when God called them they said, here we are; and with gladness they shined to him that made them." How beautifully does not Milton express this thought in his "Morning Prayer" of Adam and Eve! but not more beautifully than when picturing this supremely holy happy pair as strolling through the walks of Paradise on a fine summer night, listening to the music of the spheres and in enraptured wonderment turning their gaze to the starry firmament set with countless dazzling lights, while to the ear is wafted the low soft cooing of mellow-throated birds and sweet aroma of herb, tree and flower fill evening air, than when as thus alone in the midst of so much magnificence and grandeur he persents them to us as overcome by the splendor of the scene about and seeking to give expression to their feelings by murmuring, one to the other, strains like this:

But no less

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep,
Both day and night. How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard

Celestial voices in the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to others notes,
Singing their great Creator! Oft in bands,

While they keep watch, or nightly sounding walk

With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds

In full harmonic number joined, their songs

Divide the night and lift our thoughts to Heaven."

eloquently than to this primitive pair in Paradise, all alone with nature and their God, does the Creation speak to

all of us, telling us of the Creator; and indeed, hard and calloused, if not entirely dead, must be that heart that will not listen, or that, listening, cannot hear its voice repeating ever the same story, telling over and over again of Him that made all things, and asking us to join in praising Him. Midst "pathless woods" and desert sands this voice may be heard, and, O, what a tempest of meaning has it not for him who, in contemplation, stands on the " lonely shore of the deep sea" whose waves, dashing at his feet, sing ever the same, same song! Truly, is there here a “ rapture and society" -the society of God and the rapture of His presence! Well does Childe Harold address old ocean :

"Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Gleams itself in tempest

Boundless, endless and sublime,—the image of eternity-
The throne of the Invisible."

For him who can thus commune with nature it is impossible, long or persistently, to remain insensible to the presence of God, whose existence all the elements vie in attesting. "All nature cries aloud through all her works," and speaks to us of a power above. Every wind that blows, every summer zephyr as well as every wintry blast, every blade that grows, every bird that sings, every animal that breathes, every living thing in the heavens, on the earth or under the earth,-all attest the existence of a God. Blind must he be who cannot see; obstinately perverse, who, seeing, will not believe.

It is not our purpose by formal demonstration to establish the existence of God. Such demonstration does not properly lie within the scope of our article. It will not, however, be out of place to assert here the old philosophical thesis, that so-called theoretico-negative infidelity or atheism is impossible. That man may be a practical or theoretico-positive atheist, we readily concede. By a theoretico-negative infidel is meant one who has attained the age of maturity, and is still in entire ignorance of the existence of God. A practical infidel or atheist is one who, though he knows God, lives and acts as though he did not. A theoreticopositive infidel is one who, by the abuse of his faculties, has reasoned himself into the belief that there is no God. That there may be, really are, practical infidels, is a fact nobody thinks of denying. That there may be, and are also, theoretico-positive infidels, but skeptically rather than dogmatically so, is just as true. There is no doubt but that man starting on wrong principles, or starting on right principles but fallaciously reasoning, may come to the conclusion that there is no God, especially if he be seeking after this conclusion. But not immediately, or by one act, does

man so conclude. Doubt first arises in the mind; this, by constant repetition, becomes a habit, which in turn settles down to a conviction. Nevertheless, the conviction is never final. Never is the mind at rest in it. Nature will assert herself, and the voice of nature is, there is a God.

Theoretico-negative infidelity is impossible, because it is what it is. We cannot imagine that one may grow to the age of manhood and know nothing of God's existence. This contradicts all experience. Man is a rational animal. As such, he is necessarily a reasoning animal. Being this, he cannot remain unconscious of God's existence. For, God's existence is demonstrable, and being demonstrable, is understandable. God's existence is demonstrable by arguments drawn from metaphysics, physics and morals. Now, it may be that all men have not sufficient intelligence to understand all these various arguments; certainly all are not capable of understanding them in their details and niceties; or, granting that all have sufficient intelligence, all have not the time to devote to the study of these arguments. But, conceding this, there is no man still possessing a glimmer of intelligence who is not capable of understanding one or other of the arguments by which we are led infallibly to believe the existence of God. Equally true is this of him who, segregated from his infancy from association with his fellow-man, has not the benefit of the latter's teaching. Supposing a man, all his days, leading a solitary, isolated existence in the midst of a desert or woods, still will he come to a knowledge of God. For the assertion of God's existence is bound up with the first principles of reason. The ratiocination is so easy that even such a man as we have described, by his own unaided effort, will make it. Whether he look to himself or to the world around him-and no matter what his isolation or how limited his reason, if not entirely wanting, he will not fail to do either he will be led to know God. These great truths, his own existence, the existence of the world, the harmony which, in a measure, he is able to see pervading the universe, will naturally suggest themselves to him. Then will come the question, whence this world, whence this harmony, whence am I? Just as naturally will he come to the conclusion that there must be a power superior to the world and to himself. He may not call it God, he may not understand just what it is. What matter? He understands equivalently, nevertheless, that the power is God. The emotions asserting themselves within him, his own purpose in life and what after life, the moral law which God has implanted in the heart of every human being,-all these again will be so many dif ferent ways of announcing to him the existence of God. It fol