"The being of God is a law to His works, for that perfection which God is, giveth perfection to that He doth."-Hooker.

There is a profound faith in the Being of the All-good, deeper than mere belief in His Existence-faith in a Seyn beyond the Daseyn, which is the witness that in man the Absolute Goodness exists, the Light lightening every man; and thus man's own existence is a witness to the existence of an Absolute Goodness, the witness to the Being of God.

"Whom do you count the worst man upon earth?

Be sure he knows in his conscience more

Of what right is, than arrives at birth

In the best man's acts that we bow before."

And this witness is truly Catholic, is borne by Humanity even the Professor and his audience, while questioning the existence of the Christ, worship the vision of the All-good, and they turn from all other learning to search the depths of divine philosophy. Meditating thus, he grows calm and judicial, he sees good in all; with the immortal Alice, he begins to think everybody is right. Recognising this fundamental union of all men, he is inclined to pass from sectarian intolerance, to a catholic indifference, to pursue a pilgrimage

1154

"To many peoples, various climes,
Where I may see saint, savage, sage,
Fuse their respective creeds in one,
Before the general Father's throne."

He is tired and wants rest.

1137 He will

"This tolerance is a genial mood!"

"sit above, viewing all creeds ".1

There is nothing," writes Fichte, "further from real

1 Tennyson's Palace of Art.

love of man than a certain tender-hearted catholicity of sentiment, much bepraised now. This, far from being the love of God, comes from an absolute shallowness and vagrancy of mind, capable neither of love nor hate."

1167

"But when his foolish heart begins to expand

In the lazy glow of benevolence,"

when he is sinking into the spiritual apathy which is death, when " weary of tracking and testing," he resolves to settle down into a mild indifferentism,

Far, far away the receding gesture
And looming of the lessening vesture.'

Not error, not doubt, not the uttermost scepticism is death; out of these, we struggle to rise; but a philistine agnosticism, acquiescence in wrong, lazy indifference, this to our poet is alone wickedness. The thought is fully expounded in Fichte's Religions Lehre. Not in attainment, but in effort, not in knowledge, but in aspiration, is the end of life attained, viz., the development of self through victory over the evil, the imperfect, the dead. No chalice, beautiful in form and colour, can quench the thirst of him who asks for living water.

So the best utterance each can give to the truth which God has revealed to his soul is the best worship for each; through this truth, however imperfect, if he be faithful to it, he does hold communication with the Christ, and is climbing the ladder from earth to heaven

"The moral efforts of all ages," writes Mr. Goldwin Smith, "will be efforts to realise His character, and an infinite variety of character will be produced, ranging from the highest human grandeur to the very verge of the grotesque ".

Once more we find ourselves in the chapel, listening to the mystical application of Pharoah's Dream. Finding

"the sermon proves no reading

Where bee-like in the flowers I may bury me

Like Taylor's, the immortal Jeremy!"

Yet he finds that water is

"welling up from underground".

As we have it in Paracelsus

"Love which endures and doubts, and is oppressed,
And cherished, suffering much and much sustained,
And blind, oft-failing, yet believing love,

A half-enlightened, often-chequered, trust ".

And thus we come back to the opening thought. There is the world of the visible, the world of sense, into which we are born, in which we are buried, out of which we are to rise into the spiritual world. We climb out of the ocean, i.e., "the boundless continent, to our own pin-point rock," our little world, our Mount Zion, or Cathedral, or Lecture Hall. Upon that rock in the ocean, that watch tower (as we have it in Cleon), we look upon the universe-down into the depths, around upon the sunlit surface, or through the cloudy billows to the far-off lights of Heaven upwards. Here we struggle for life, holding on through the storm; sometimes we are cast down by the waves, but as we struggle, we grow strong, each learns in his own case what "all the blessed evil's for," and therefore trusts God for others; the poet is sure that as God has drawn him near, called him by his name, so He is caring too for these ruins of humanity, for all who are seeking Him, if haply they may find Him-he has gained a fuller understanding of the Lord's words"where two or three are gathered in My name, there And so he concludes with the Doxology.

New Wine.

"Through the ages one unchanging purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns."

I HAVE chosen for my motto a somewhat hackneyed quotation, and the fact that it is so often quoted recommends it to me, as proving it contains a thought which comes home to the mind and heart of this generationthe thought that there is a process of development, not physical only, but mental and spiritual, not for individual men only, but for man, for Humanity. We have been searching the world's archives for the descent of man, and we have discovered his ascent.

And how has man risen? He, the Adam, the earth-born, has climbed like some flower out of his dark grave of ignorance, awakened by the touch of light, by the vision, through the senses, of created things, and ever as he turned his face sunward,-ever as the sun rose higher, and fresh floods of light streamed from heaven, has he grown in glory and beauty. "By the process of the suns" has man's soul been awakened, and as in reverent contemplation he searches into the mystery of the visible, there rises before him a vision of the things which "eye hath not seen "—the realities, of which these things are "the patterns”.

But whilst admitting that light has come to man from without, whilst seeing the work of God in Nature, we must recognise also the work of man himself in the harvest field. In the sweat of his brow does he eat bread-not only, if he would live, must he search out new truths, but each generation must bring fresh life

out of the old ones-must dig about the old fig tree, and lay on the fruit-bearing soil-must cut down the dead branches of the vine, and with labour and pain, plant and water, watch and wait, ere the rich fruit appear, ere from the ripe clusters one may press out the rich red wine; each generation must provide new vessels for the new wine, the good wine, which God hath kept until now.

I shall endeavour in the following paper to illustrate the motto I have chosen by taking some pages from the history of inductive science during the last few centuries, and to show from these, how man has been gradually educated to receive larger intellectual conceptions, greater moral and religious inspirations.

Three times especially as it seems to me, in these last days, has a door been opened into the heavens, a new vision of Divine glory has pierced the clouds which bound our little earth, and a voice, as of a trumpet, has been heard calling upon man, the finite, the child of time, the victim of death, to draw nearer to the throne of God, that he may know the Infinite, the Eternal, the only true Life. But each time he has been dazzled, blinded by the sudden blaze; the darkness has seemed to gather round him, and he has had to wait until his eye became used to the unaccustomed splendour. Each time men have cried that belief was perishing, but the true opinions changed into knowledge, for "opinion is but knowledge in the making"; and the false ones dying down became the soil, out of which was quickened into life a larger, a more living faith.

A period like the present of doubt and discouragement was the beginning of the time which we now call the Renaissance, the new birth of thought and discovery -the time when dead and dying faiths put forth fresh leaves. I know nothing since so startling, so utterly