the place of those, who may know Him with their mind, and For man is formed for labor, as a bird labor with their body. for flying. And it pleased the Most High to form such a creature, who might partly equal the angels, in contemplating and knowing heavenly things with his spirit, and in part resemble beasts of burden, that is in his body. For if man could not labor, what would he be else than a swine? This we may clearly see in voluptuous and sluggish men, who delight in nothing but whoremongery and sensual indulgence, &c. Is there a father who does not enjoin exercise of some sort upon his son, although he might educate him without labor? Man therefore ought to do whatever belongs to his calling or position, meanwhile awaiting in faith whatever issue God may appoint.

V. 23. Nazaraeus vocabitur.-Nazareans were disciples of a certain class, who were trained to learning under a peculiar discipline, as is found in the books of Moses. Jerome derives the name from the flower neser for Christ is the flower of Nazareth. Others prefer another explanation, supposing Him to be thus designated because He was set apart and educated for spe cial learning and doctrine. It is certain, that this appellation was not given to Christ by accident or undesignedly, but according to some divine purpose. It is said, this was "spoken by the prophets," no particular one being named, a method of reference

not unusual.

Easton, Pa.

J. H. A. B.

Nazarenus.-Christ was a Nazarene, i. e. learned and educated in doctrine. You may see the learning and wisdom of Christ, in what Luke tells us He did in His twelfth year. Note: in reference to the phrase, "spoken before by the prophets," that it is often used when no particular passage is cited, when the writer may nevertheless know, that it is found somewhere in the prophetic books; unless you prefer to understand the law, synecdochically, which is of frequent occurrence among Hebrew writers, and also occurs in the instructions of Christ: It is written in your law, He says, when that of which He spoke is not written in the law but in the prophets. Note: The evangelist here speaks of a singular custom of some Jews, on account of which they are called Nazareans, i. e. obliging, gentle, welldisciplined, abstinent, which custom was a figure and type of Christ, especially their peculiar devotion to God, and the manner in which they chasten the body. Thus Christ will be a Nazarene free from every spot, and with a character most completely disciplined. As if Matthew should say: do not wonder that He dwells in Nazareth, for He will be a Nazarene indeed, i. e. holy and religious. Note: If we are Christ's, we also will be Naza

renes.

THE RELATION OF MAN TO NATURE.'

LET any one, gifted with a reverent and earnest spirit, a clear intellect, and a soul tremblingly alive to impression from all that is truly great and beautiful, walk forth among the works of creation, that still stand "glorious as at the first day"-let him gaze on the blue heaven that stretches over him, in boundless magnificence, "like the inverted hand of God"-let him extend his vision over the broad earth spread out beneath, with its lofty mountains, shooting heavenward peaks of snow and peaks of fire, its plains and its vallies, its rivers and its oceans, its islands. and its continents, its icy North and its burning South, let him survey the countless generations of plants, that adorn the surface, from the creeping lichens and humble mosses of the arctic solitudes, to the majestic, luxuriant and profuse vegetation of the regions of the tropics-guided by the revelations of science, let him ponder over the myriad races of animals that people every nook and corner of this fair domain and swarm even in the cold depths of polar seas-let him contemplate the incessant play of forces as well on the smallest as on the grandest scale, and the restless activity of the almost infinite mass of ever-ending, ever-beginning life-and he cannot but be overwhelmed with a sense of awe and wonder-he cannot but feel that here lies a burden and mystery-that "the holy problem of the universe" is yet unsolved—that no Oedipus has yet arisen to give a full interpretation to the riddle. He only hears the voice of the Erd Geist in Faust—

"In Being's floods, in Action's storm
I walk and work-above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and death

An infini e Ocean;

A seizing and giving

The fire of the living:

'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I fly,

And weave for God the garment thou seest him by."

Vast and triumphant indeed are the achievements which modern science has made in every department of physical knowl

'This article contains the substance of an address pronounced before the General Union Philosophical Society of Dickinson College in June last.

edge, and much of the darkness that has heretofore brooded over the face of nature has vanished before the light of her adventurous torch. With a zeal that never flags-an aidor that is never damped—and an eagle glance that is never satiate or weary she travels the whole world over again and again, the object of her search not the philosoph r's stone, or the elixir of life, those strange chimeres of the alchemistic brain, but the untold secret. For this she clambers to the summits of the Andes and the Himmalayas-for this she drops her sounding line into fathon less abysses-for this she directs her keel into perilous and unknown seas-for this she digs down into the chambers of the rocks and brings up the relics of an extinct creation, the hieroglyphs of the Almighty-for this she gifts and measures and weighs and compares, with patient toil, day af or day and year after year. It is not the desire of gain or the advantage of any material interest that Gils her with such extraordinary energy, but the love of truth and the half conscious persuasion that every new discovery brings her nearer to the goal of her hopes. From an immense accumulation of facts and observations, gathered with incredible diligence from every clime and every shore, and subjected to the most rigid scrutiny she deduces, by a process of the broadest in duction general principles and general laws. And the highest result of all her labors hitherto is the Cosmos of a Baron Humboldt. With a bold prophetic instinct seizing on the sublime idea of the unity of the creation, he has endeavored to reduce all known laws and principles to that unity and present a finished picture of the whole. But the attempt has not been successful, for the time is not yet. To advance, however, the idea, to delineate by the power of genius a few grand outlines, and announce the dawn of a brighter era in the fature, when all thru is dark and chaotic will disappear forever before the indomitable will and intellect of man, is glory enough.

If modern science had done nothing more than to destroy the reign of marvel and of magic it would still have accomplished a great work. In rude and primitive states of society the forms of things are discerned only through the misty twilight of ignor ance and as the timid cow-boy passing at night-fall through a gloomy wood sees quiet stump and rock suddenly transformed into monstrous shapes, that threaten to devour him, so to them the phenomena of nature that come not within range of their daily experience are magnified out of all due propotion and ascribed to the agency of good or evil spirits. But now the wand of Science has broken both the terror and the charm of the old poctic superstitions. The veiling of the sun or moon

by eclipse has ceased to agitate the bosoms of beholders with fear. His thunder bolts are taken from the fist of Jupiter. The Oreads and the Dryads are driven from the shades of the forest. The Nymph has forsaken her fountain. The Phoenix lies buried in his own ashes never to rise again. The Genii have retired far beyond the ridges of Caucasus. The Gnomes have descended into deeper caverns and the "pert fairies and the dapper elves" no longer trip it o'er the moonlit green. The Ocean has been robbed of his mermaid and his kraken, and the penetrating sagacity of a Lyell resolves even the semi-apocryphal Sea Serpent into a giant species of shark. Thus science proves fatal to all these magical creations of Fancy, and leaves them no fixed dwelling-place on the land or in the sea. They survive only in the realms of fable or of song, and gradually loosing their hold on the common mind, fade like spectres in the first beams of the morning.

Some there be, who maintain that the overthrow of the marvellous has shaken the faith of men in the divine and supernatural, in other words, that the study of nature leads directly to infidelity and materialism. This is a serious charge and no doubt true of certain individuals and certain periods. But that there is a necessity in the case were very hard to believe. Truth must be eternally one, and God's first revelation cannot be at war with his latest and his best. That a wide-spread dualism has come to prevail between physical science and philosophy, and the religion of Jesus Christ, which is the highest philosophy, in which all enigmas are at last to find their proper solution, is a matter for profound regret. Both are injured by the separation, for, in such a state of antagonism, science on the one side is compelled to grow more and more of the earth-Earthy, subdued, like the dyer's hand, to the complexion of that which it works in, while religion, on the other, must perforce assume a character more or less fantastical, magical, and unreal. Only by the union of the two-only by their true inward union and reconciliation, can the meaning of the world, the great end toward which all things are unconsciously striving and struggling, become clearly apparent.

By reason of the exalted position, which man occupies as the head of the lower creation, the centre toward whom all lines converge, including in himself all that is beneath, he stands the flower and crown of all, the high-priest and interpreter of nature, the medium through which the visible, external and transcient passes over into the sphere of the invisible and eternal. He is the eye of nature, for all else is blind; he is the voice of

nature, for all else is dumb; he is the soul of nature, for all else is perishable and fleeting; he is he lord of nature, for supreme dominion is his noble birth-right-dominion in knowledge and in power; dominion in knowledge, in the fullest and deepest sense of that word-dominion in power, in the fullest and deepest sense of that word. "Yet do we not now see all things put under him," but such is his high prerogative in virtue of an original grant from heaven.

And what creature so well fitted as he to bear, like Atlas, the whole world on his shoulders? Is he not linked to nature by ten thousand ties? By the material of his body-for he was fashioned out of the dust of the earth, and the same elements, that compose this glorious temple, with its rare symmetry, its thinking head, its feeling heart, and its skilful hand run in every stream, float in every breeze and crumble in every clod of the valley. And when the mystic cord that binds them together is unloosed do they not speedily revert to their primal condition? Most of the solid rocks that make up the crust of the globe were probably at one time constituent parts of living or ganisms-and the mould of generation upon generation of the offspring of Adam lies blended with the soil on which we daily tread, undistinguishable in use or appearance from the roughest mineral heaps.

And further, man is linked to nature by his organic constitution. The same blood, the same bone, the same nerves, the same tissues, the same organs, the same powers of voluntary motion and the same desires, under infinitely varied forms and modifications, are found throughout all gradations of the animal kingdom from the whale, "hugest that swim the ocean-stream" down to the minutest microscopic animalcule. Man's body only differs in its more complex and perfect structure. He is brother therefore to the worm, The fish, the reptile, the bird, the beast are repeated in him-have lot and share in him. All this too can be safely affirmed without giving the slightest countenance to the Lamarckian theory of development so-called, which has been revived and ingeniously advocated in our day by Professor Oken and the author of the Vestiges of Creation. Development there indeed is, but development in the idea, by successive acts of creation, not by transmutation of species. Progression there indeed is, progression upward, both in the order of time, from the beginning on through long cycles of preceeding ages to the pres ent historic period, and in the order of rank, for the oldest living beings as well as the most simple and the most distant point onward and upward, as types to the thing typified, and perishing as