descend when it speaks to men. It cannot be confounded with interest and utility. These may excite desire, but rectitude imposes a sense of obligation. Its smiles and frowns are too quick for a selfish calculation, and the sacrifices which it commands are made for its own sake, apart from all consideration of consequences. Its emotions are specific; disdaining every other occasion as inferior, they reserve themselves for the presence of those qualities alone which are to form the subject of the final investigation. It has an origin logically anterior even to the will of the ever-blessed God. That is to say, it is not excellent because He wills it, but He wills it because it is excellent; so excellent as to constitute his Nature. Every volition of the Divine mind, therefore, presupposes it, and is its expression. "The righteous Lord loveth righteousness." When it speaks or wills, it wills with the authority of His infinite nature. It is independent of all created existence. Like the mathematical truths of which the material universe is His chosen diagram, but which would have been truths had no created forms or motions ever existed to exemplify them, the distinction between truth and falsehood, good and evil, is perfectly irrespective of human conscience, or created apprehension. It is "from eternity to eternity." As well might we conceive of a past period when the radii of a circle were not necessarily equal, or of some future time when a circle shall have two centres, as of a period when right and wrong shall be converted or commuted. Rectitude is as immutable as the infinite excellence which enshrines it; and "He cannot deny himself." 8. To these necessary beliefs we may add the idea of perfection. An archetype of order, harmony, fitness, and beauty, inhabits the mind, which nothing external has ever realized. The comparison of one degree of excellence with another may have at first awakened the idea, but could not have created it; for how can the relative give birth to the absolute, the effect transcend its cause? Actual experience gives us nothing but the variable, the limited, the incomplete. Yet not only does every new grace unveil its face to us as that of a well-remembered friend, it assures us of an excellence of infinite pertection, and of which all created beauty is only an emanation. No conception of excellence short of this standard is, or can be, final. Passing beyond all the realities of finite being, the mind beholds in the Infinite himself the only greatness and beauty which can satisfy its conceptions, an object which "borrows splendor from all that is fair, subordinates to itself all that is great, and sits enthroned on the riches of the universe." But the existence of that perfection depends not on the ability of any created intelligence to conceive of it. From eternity it must have been the ever-present subject of the Divine contemplation, because the ever-conscious character of the Divine nature. 9. The idea of law is as necessary for the reason as the idea of cause; so that, if every phenomenon must have a cause, it is a truth equally necessary that it must have a law. Holding its eternal seat in the mind of God, it made all the sequences and uniformities of the objective universe possible, when as yet the first of them had to be created. The same is true of the idea of Design, of Personality, of Immortality, and of some others. These truths are all primitive, necessary, universal. The mind cannot act without them. They belong to its structure. Whatever external influence may be necessary in order to awaken them, they have an à priori existence of their own, and claim immediate kindred with the mind of the Creator. 10. Here, then, we find ourselves brought into the awful presence of primordial truth. We can conceive of a period in past duration when the Infinite Being dwelt alone in his own immensity. But, even then, a creation was possible; and here are the deep foundations, the very grounds on which that possibility rested. Even then a creation was purposed; and here are the first truths, the primary ideas, which that purpose presupposed; here, dimly looking forth from the depths of eternity, are solemn and profound aspects of the incomprehensible nature of which the creating will is to be the utterance, and of which created objects are to be the manifestation? But what must be the constitution of the creature who shall be capable of receiving the manifestation? For some of these awful aspects and eternal truths are not susceptible of material forms; ideas of obligation cannot be set forth by color or diagram. Even in relation to such ideas as admit of material representation, the actual must ever fall infinitely below the possible; the worlds which will be are outnumbered by the archetypes ever present to the mind of God of works which might be. And now that the silence of eternity has been broken, and creation has advanced through the successive stages of matter, and life, and sensation, the mind capable of apprehending these necessary and eternal truths is still wanting. They are not, cannot be, in these created objects, any more than the face is in the mirror which reflects it. They do not admit even of being swerved in them. As they were presupposed by the Eternal mind so must they be by the mind of the being who shall infer the character of the Creator from his works. Such a creature appears in the person of men. Endowed with a designing mind be recognizes marks of design in every department of creation. Having the foundations of law, and the principles of science, inlaid in his constitution, he finds himself in a world perpetually appealing to those principles, and referring him to these laws Creation is ever remanding him to its Maker, and thus reminding him that he is connatural with the Divine. The observation of phenomena soon brings him to a fact which, as far as nature is concerned, is ultimate; if he would advance beyond, he finds himself in the presence of the Supernatural. Penetrating beyond the contingent and the sensible, he lifts the veil to find himself standing face to face with truths which were ever present to the Eternal mind as the necessary conditions of its objective manifestation. What close and ineffable communion with the Deity is this; not with His will merely, but even with His eternal nature! CHAPTER XVII. ANALOGY. 1. In the evolution of a Divine system it may be expected that every part will be in harmony and analogy with every other part. For if the whole is to be, in some respect, an analogue of the Divine Being, every separate portion of it must be similarly related to every other part, otherwise the whole will not resemble Him. Accordingly, we find that the entire constitution of man is arranged on a plan which harmonizes all its parts into one whole, and that whole with the universe. The full illustration of this fact would require an analysis of all the preceding chapters. We shall, however, only glance at two or three of the more general indications of such a plan in the human being, point out certain analogies between the human dispensation and those which preceded it, and the rules and means of classification which the subject suggests and provides. 2. Viewing man apart from the universe which surrounds him, he exhibits in his own person an all-related system of means and forces. Even the lowest and minutest part of this system has a constitution of its own. A single hair is an organization, a world. But all the infinitely diversified parts of the system, physiological, mental, and moral, are elaborated into a single constitution. These characteristic parts are not developed capriciously and without order, but according to a law which regulates their succession. Supposing them to be all present, and in their appointed order, we have seen that it is not optional or immaterial to man which part prevails and which submits. Their rank and office are fixed. Sensation is the servant of thought; thought subserves emotion; emotion can, through the medium of thought, be diverted or be held in abeyance by the will, while conscience is, in the sense previously stated, the supreme authority for the will. As a being who is capable not only of understanding the great process into which he has come, but of actually subserving it, the rank and office of his motives are commanded. His self-love is designed to regulate his appetites, his affections to control his self-love, and his regard for the will and character of God to direct the whole. And who does not perceive that this order is according to an ascending scale of importance? that, while the appetites ask but a small range of objects, self-love contemplates the good of the entire being, and for all the future; the affections embrace the similar well-being of others; and a sense of duty, by leading him into the presence, and placing him under the government of God, surrounds and unites him with the origin and end of all things. No derangement of this all-compacted constitution can take place with impunity. The higher parts are not independent of the lower; the least is essential to the integrity and the well-working of the entire man. No property, function, or power, is isolated. "All the parts are mutually ends and means." Nor, viewed in relation to time, is the identity of his nature ever lost, or the progress of his character ever discontinued. Memory, association, and habit, present the record of his history. The past, in its effects, is ever present with him. His character, though always undergoing modification, is always whole. 3. Regarding man in his objective relations, we find all the preexisting laws, physical, organic, and animal, brought forwards, and assumed in the corresponding parts of his constitution. His structure and physiology point to a type, and are suggestive of the great scheme of organization in which he finds his appro priate place. Many things which were only begun in the preceding stages of creation are resumed, more fully developed, and completed, in him; and some things which, before, were shadowy and vague, are interpreted, and even become the interpreters of other things. Man is to understand creation, and, by this means, to know his Creator. Accordingly, he is placed in sensible communication with the external world; or, is made susceptible of a sensible change, or mental impression, answering to each of all the phenomena of external nature. These phenomena are all related by certain general laws, or in a uniform manner; and he is capable of recognizing these uniformities, confidently calculates on them, and generalizes them all into groups and classes according as they more or less resemble each other. These phenomena, besides being related to each other, are related also to that which contains them, and which accounts for their existence; and man is made susceptible of having the ideas which these relations presuppose, awakened in his mind -ideas which conduct him directly to the infinite and eternal Being for whose manifestation the creation exists. But the phenomena actually created do not exhaust the Divine resources, for God is infinite; and man is able to imagine, not only the archetypes of existing realities, but of objects unknown to the actual universe. In other words, he can ascend from the visible and contingent to those laws and facts which, to nature, are ultimate, and from these again to the necessary truths which these contingent objects and ultimate facts presuppose, as well as imagine a vast range of unrealized conceptions which these necessary truths make possible. Thus constituted, it might be expected that he would be capable of learning more from his intelligent fellow man than from any other object of external nature; and, accordingly, he is endowed with the power of interchanging thoughts, of bearing credible testimony to the truth of his statements, and of believing testimony so rendered. Language, the great medium of his mental communications, is an ever-growing illustration of the analogy existing between the operations of the world within and all that exists around it. Indefinitely varied as are the relations which he sustains to external objects, and the points from which he views them, four or five classes of verbs at most, employed in four or five moods, are made to supply all his purposes, owing to the resemblance of which he is conscious between his different states of mind. Innumerable as are the kinds of relations existing between |