superstition. The holiest of our race have oftentimes stood in a minority of one, and would have been indeed forlorn, could not each have said, “I am not alone, for the Father is with me."

So constituted are we, that human love, given or received, does not satisfy the soul; ever to the God of truth, the Father of spirits, goes up the sigh,

"My heart is pained, nor can it be

At rest, till it find rest in Thee."

No truth in science, however, is a better proven fact than that to the presence of God in the soul "love is life, and hatred is death." The apostle John, who knew much of that

"hidden love of God, whose height,

Whose depth unfathomed, no man knows,"

simply stated a universal experience when he said, He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, but he that hateth his brother is in darkness;" for the smallest cloud of enmity will gather blackness, and hide that “presence in which is fulness of joy."

From the love of God flows love to man, as water from its fountain. But shall we name that hidden spring, "enthusiasm of humanity?" Shall

we say that goodness, interpreted as "goodwill to men," is the same thing with "faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen?"

I said, faith works by love; but how does it work? Is it not inevitable that truth entering the mind should bring it into collision with error? and that, while "to err is human," while life necessitates change and growth, true life in the soul should manifest itself by nonconformity and opposition to retarding forces, such opposition as may often be detrimental to that union which is the strength of "usefulness?"

Hence come divisions, alienations, strifes in the family, anarchy in the state, the loosening of wholesome restraints, the subversion of beneficial practices and institutions. In the renaissance of Christianity in the sixteenth century, great were the complaints of Cecil, bitter were the sorrowings of Luther, over the misrule, the licence, the miseries, the immoralities, as well as profanities, which followed the overthrow of superstitions, serviceable, perhaps, for more than for holding society together, and for hiding from view the corruption which must be going on where life has been and has ceased to be.

Devoutly thankful are we that, "having put their hand to the plough," they looked not back, which I think they must have done, either with desire or determination to return, had the "Enthusiasm of Humanity" been their sole inspiration.

"

That it has not been by harmonious fraternities, nor by well-disciplined organizations, but by the "rude claws of her unruly page," that "Dame Una" has, once and again, "the wicket open rent,' and let in the light of day upon the haunts of superstition and falsehood, we have ample testimony in the Peasant and Thirty Years' Wars, in the "Great Rebellion," and in the French Revolution.

This will not be disputed; but my view of the Reformation as the renaissance of the Christianity of Christ, of the French Revolution as being anything but antagonistic to religion, is, I am aware, very likely to be called in question.

And I should have little hope that I could maintain my ground, if I believed that the Spirit which was in Christ and in His apostles was the "Enthusiasm of Humanity," the love of Christ mere "goodwill to men," or the faith of the gospels and the epistles the "love of goodness" so interpreted. More than once does Christ speak of His spirit

"the Comforter" which was to "testify of him," as "the Spirit of Truth;" that Spirit, which, with clear, open, single eye, sees error under all its disguises, and seeing, speaks its thoughts, heedless of consequences, whose voice the guileless hear and know, and which they gladly follow, being made free and "sanctified through the truth."

In one word, Christ's love is "the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." "The simple rise as by specific levity into the region of all the virtues," where they grow and thrive as fruits on a living tree. These fruits are spoken of in the New Testament as "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness;" but no one of them is said to be the Spirit which "will reprove the world of sin;" or "give the word of wisdom." The victories of faith celebrated in the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews are all, without controversy, victories achieved by faithfulness to personal conviction, through which, not only the "elders," but the confessors of every age (though "every martyrdom looked mean when it was enacted," and every saint

* Emerson.

has suffered as a sophist) have, nevertheless, "obtained a good report.'

That this faith, involving self-reliance and selfconsistency, was the faith that brought about our great Reformation, cannot, I think, be for one moment questioned; nor can it, I think, be denied that the terrible injury done to superstition by the French Revolution was of service to the cause of truth.

While I am far enough from identifying the French "Liberty, equality, and fraternity”—much as they may have had in common-with the principles of Christian brotherhood, or "the liberty wherewith Christ makes us free," I feel bound to confess, that I think much injustice is done to the Deists of the last century, when their attacks on Christianity are presumed to have been attacks on the Christianity of the New Testament-on the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. Him they do not touch; no, not the hem of His garment; while as to the scorn and severity with which those thinkers treated the Christianity of Antichrist, and the religion of "the Society of Jesus," if we do not share their deep aversion for error and falsehood, at least let us not glory in our shame!