common sense as well as with piety, and reverenee to do this instead of comparing God to things below the level of highest humanity. But when we do this, we do it with our eyes open to the fact that man at his best and highest is infinitessimally sinall and base as compared with the glory of God; that all our noblest virtue must be abysmally below the heights of divine goodness, and that our purely intellectual conceptions of God's nature and mode of existence, if we are foolish enough to form any, are all utterly worthless. Our anthropomorphism is only justified by the fact of our first of all believing in a God, in spite of all difficulties, and then being necessarily tied down both to think and speak of Him in terms of the highest reverence within reach of our faculties. Our anthropomorphism is more than justified when further we are conscious within ourselves, and freely confess to others that our language about God is inadequate to convey our conceptions of Him; and that our highest conceptions must inevitably fall depths below the reality of what God is. The danger of anthropomorphism lies in our clinging to any conception of Him after the reason, the conscience and the heart have pronounced that conception to be inconsistent with the highest wisdom or goodness. On another occasion I may revert to this subject and show the grounds on which we may reasonably entertain anthropomorphism conceptions, and use anthropormorphic language. At present I will only repeat that to some measure of anthropomorphism we are hopelessly bound, so long as we believe in God at all. If we break this tether, we at once lose all connection with Him whom we devoutly call "The Father of our Spirits." D. WILLIAMS & Co., Printers, 14, Bishopsgate Avenue, Camomile Street, E.C. Anthropomorphism. PART II. A SERMON, PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE, REV. CHARLES VOYSEY. ISAIAH XLIII., 10.-Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord and my servant whom I have chosen, that ye may know and believe me and understand that I am He." TRUST my hearers will duly appreciate the difficulty of the subject before us; and will remember exactly. the point which we have to establish. I am not now undertaking to prove the existence of God, or even to show that the balance of probabilities is in favour of such a belief; all that I attempt is to show that some degree of anthropomorphic conception and language being both necessary and appropriate in thinking and speaking of the Divine Being at all, anthropomorphism of this sort is no valid argument against the reasonableness of a belief in God. In still plainer terms, granting that there is a Divine Being of whom we can at best know exceedingly little, we have nothing to draw upon for our conceptions of Him, but the best and highest of the phenomena of the universe within reach of our observation; and we have no language in which to express our conceptions but that which is more or Rev. C. Voysey's sermons are to be obtained at St. George's Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden House, Dulwich, S.E. Price one penny postage a halfpenny. less anthropomorphic. And it is not only necessary to do this in order to satisfy our natural aspirations, but it is eminently becoming so to do. For it accords best with the demands of reason, and also with our instincts of piety and reverence. Anthropomorphic conceptions of God are not, therefore, necessarily false because they are anthropomorphic; nor are they necessarily false because they are very inadequate. They may be true as far as they go, and may be trusted provisionally till more light and wider experience enable us to relinquish them for truer conceptions. It is very important to this argument to keep continually before our minds the fact of man's superiority and supremacy over the whole portion of the universe within human ken. The most potent and grand of all external objects is, without doubt, the Sun, which is not only the source and parent of the whole planetary system in which we revolve, but the perpetual originator and preserver of all vegetable and animal life. Yet, if modern science is to be trusted, we can give a tolerably good account of the sun's own origin, of its gradual condensation, of the birth of one planet after another from its successive rings of detached vapour, of the very chemistry which is at work in the diffusion of its light and heat, of its many and tremendous storms, of its rotation and even its revolution around some immeasurably distant centre; we can go further still and predict that at some inconceivably remote period it will burn itself out and become-what the poor little moon now is a mere cinder, a cinder not even shining with borrowed light like our satellite; but drifting possibly iu perennial darkness. Well, from the sun we infer with a considerable amount of probability what are the nature, constitution, and movements of the myriads of stars, which are only so many suns, more or less like our own; and some of these we have detected in various stages of their development, which in turn have helped us to learn something about the formation. of our primary. But hitherto, not one word have we heard from any explorers that gives even a hint that these heavenly bodies possess a grain of intelligence, or consciousness, or will. They are the scenes of the action of forces-however grand or stupendous-which no one dreams of calling intelligent, but which, without being moved by chance or caprice, are moved in a certain order or method and act with unfailing uniform results. Leaving aside the forces, of whose origin and nature so little is known, these brilliant objects in space, of which those forces are the scene, are manifestly inferior in the scale of being to any creature that possesses consciousness, instinct, and volition-such as a bee, or a dog, or a beaver—much more must the suns in the firmament be inferior to such a creature as man who is not only possessed of consciousness, instinct, and volition; but also of intellect, pure affection, and a moral sense. To those who feel the charm of the mingled wonder and admiration excited by what is in the first place exquisitely grand, full of lustre and shedding life, cheerfulness and warmth through millions and millions of miles of space, the sun and all his brother stars are naturally objects of interest verging on veneration and worship; and when, to this natural effect on the senses, is added the intellectual rapture of reading its history and seeing unfolded in the spectrum the multifold mysteries which are being enacted in its photosphere, remembering gratefully the while that this glorious globe of flame is the father and mother of our system, of all that lives and breathes, of our very selves, of our complex frame, of our subtle brain, and of our bounding emotions, it is only one marvel the more that we do not fall down before it and worship it as a God; or at least reverence it as the highest symbol of creative majesty and power. But we do no such thing-we have put away this solar worship as a childish thing; and with all its grandeur and glory and benignant power we put the sun lower in the scale of being than the poor frail man who owes his life and all his blessings to its heat and light. And why is this, if not, because we have found no trace in the sun of consciousness or intellect; still less of affection and moral sense? From being regarded as a deity, the sun has sunk to the levél of a servant of servants; it is now regarded as a machine and nothing more, to which we can feel no gratitude, though beholden to it for everything deserving our thanks. Except in metaphor we we cannot love the sun; nor think of his pleasure or displeasure when we do right or wrong. Familarity has in this case bred not exactly contempt, but dethronement. No one with proper feeling despises the works of God, whether he believes in God or not; but such acquaintance with the history and structure of the most glorious object in our universe as we have gained has made it impossible for us to to feel any more emotion of reverence and homage towards it than we feel towards a stone. I I need say little of man's superiority on this planet. would only call to mind the grounds on which his supremacy is admitted by those who in this argument might be considered our opponents. Man's superiority over other animals is admitted to consist chiefly in the comparatively enormous preponderance of his reasoning faculties, which have at length given rise to articulate language, to literature, and to abstract reasoning, to say nothing of the infinite variety and number of skilful inventions. Man is also distinguished from the lower animals by the possession of a moral sense, which means not a mere category of things which he may and things which he may not do, but a sense that he is bound to do what is believed to be right and because it is right, even though he may not personally benefit by it. The fact that some animals have occasionally exhibited a moral sense does not affect the fact that in man the moral sense is unspeakably more general and more powerful than in the lower orders of creation. Thirdly, man is distinguished by the capacity for an altogether nobler affection than that usually manifested by the other animals. It is true they share with us the possession of sexual and parental and sometimes of social love, and under the influence of domestication are capable of the most devoted friendship both for man and for their fellow creatures; but man is capable of the highest known form and degree of love, and has manifested heroic devotion for his fellow man, such as no animals have ever shown. Fourthly, man is by nature religious, and though he himself is the noblest being on earth—and in the heavens too, so far as we can discover yet he persists in believing in some One infinitely higher than himself, to whom, in some yet undefinable way, he and all creatures owe their being, on whose |