dreariness of hopelessness, his spirit sits desolate and angry in her anguish, and he curses the senseless energies of irrational Nature, that have destroyed such beauty and delight, and laid waste his hopes, and extinguished his darling life. Brute Nature! to crush beneath its dreadful heel so fair, so fragrant, and so tender a flower! Fool Nature! to make, and straight unmake! to destroy goodness, and happiness, and the fountain of joy, and let vileness and misery, ugliness and shame, live on!

So when death, at last, draws nigh his own soul to extinguish it in eternal night, he yields himself up, with cold and hardy stoicism, to be dissolved back into the elemental power of which he was made at the first: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, soul to ashes; all, dust to dust. Nature has done with him. She made him; she unmakes him. Old Necessity, working by its law, put him together, at the first; and now grinds him to powder again. now grinds him to powder again. The inquiry rolls on forever, senseless, pitiless, aimless, without rest, without change, and hears no cry, and heeds no prayer, and knows no thrill, and knows no compunction, and knows nothing; brute and inexorable, rolling on from everlasting to everlasting. This great, eternal, dumb Force, this is the materialist's GOD!

In the process of our reasoning, we have now got back to a one element from which all things spring; to this unity all things are referred; by it all are explained, and here the materialist makes a final stop, and says: This is God; and there is no other. He thinks that he thus accounts for all things, and that here he has reached the Unity after which philosophy strives, and in which the mind and heart of man find a refuge from the questions that haunt his solitude, and embitter his toil.

This supposition that he has reached a satisfying "unity"—will not bear scrutiny, as will be shown hereafter; but, for the present, we are content to take him upon his own ground; and remark,

X. THIS SOLE, ORIGINAL, ABSOLUTE, IMMUTABLE, EVERACTIVE POWER, IS SPIRITUAL AND PERSONAL.

We have already seen that the "original Power" con

tains, essentially, all finite powers that ever can exist. The whole force of gravitation that is in action now, or ever will act; all the several kinds of chemical attraction or influence; every specific energy of material substance, of organization, and of life; together with all intelligences, persons, spirits, are all involved and contained within the one eternal element. But,

How are they contained there? To this we answer: There are only four possible ways. Upon the supposition that this element is a purely natural power, then whatsoever particular forces of substance or of quality have existed, exist, or will exist, must have been wrapped up within the eternal element, either,

a. As each a real and specific entity held, from everlasting, in unity with other entities; or else,

b. They had being merely, under the form of a natural tendency and necessary law of production, sure to operate effectively so soon as the indispensable conditions shall have been wrought out.

Again: upon the supposition that the element be a spiritual one, then each particular atom must have had being from eternity, either,

c. As a positive specific reality, eternally generated by the infinite volition, or,

d. As a certain energy of the eternal Will, sure to be put forth at an appointed time; that is to say, as an idea and fixed purpose (decree).

There can be no other modes than these four; and one of these even (a) is excluded, by the conditions of our present problem, as we shall immediately see, in the following

EXPLANATION. A. The "Original" may be a natural power. If so, then either the thing itself must have existed always, or the power that must constitute the thing, so soon as the necessary condition or concurrence comes; and this condition, too, is itself necessitated. But, if we take the first of these suppositions, and say that all elements have always had their specific character; then we have not advanced one step in our "philosophy," which strives towards unity, and

we are still entangled amid the multiplicity and diversity from which we have been struggling to escape. If, by this one "element" of which we have been speaking, we mean merely an inconceivably thin fog or mist into which all the material universe has been (in our minds) rarefied, and where its seve ral elements all commingle, we have still just as many things and the very things to account for, as at the first.

We find oxygen and nitrogen blending in our atmosphere; we find carbon, and gold, and silver, with many other elements, scattered throughout the earth. The question is: whence came these? And how came they to be at all? Are we so wise, as to imagine that we have answered the questions, when we say: there was, originally, an infinite cloud, or sea, composed of atoms of these several kinds; and, by and by (as birds of a feather flock in company), like sought out like or mingled in amicable contrariety, and so chaos became cosmos! Who does not see that the very question in which we began still remains? Whence did these same atoms of oxygen, of hydrogen, of carbon, of gold, and of silver come?

This supposition, then, in any investigation of the present kind, cannot be adopted. Let us turn to the other alternative, "b." What is that? According to this hypothesis, each atom, or element, has not existed from eternity, by itself, but there is an eternal somewhat which had a power of varied production, and was possessed of energies never all wholly inactive, and these which we now behold, were, from everlasting, sure to act at some time, and to be acting at this time. This element is neither fluid, nor aerial, nor fiery, nor electrical, but a mysterious and indescribable something, which, by an inherent law of necessity, will turn itself into everything that will be. If the original power be a natural one, this is the only mode in which things finite and temporal can be supposed to have been originally involved within the infinite and eternal one. But,

B. The original power may be spiritual. What then? Why then, each particular atom must have existed from eternity, as has been remarked, either as a specific reality

eternally generated by the power of the original will put forth continuously from everlasting; or, as a part of that power, held in reserve, but definitely appropriated to this particular thing, and determined for its particular time (idea-decree). It may be, e. g., that these atoms of oxygen that I am breathing have always been in being, as an eternal product of an eternal volition. Who is able to arrest them, single out each one, and read its date? Again, it may be that all these elements, and every atom of each of them, were absolutely created, when as yet there were none of them, at a certain particular point in the immense past, at a certain definite number of ages, years, days, hours, and seconds, from the present instant of time. Then, they first began. Before, they were not. How then were they from everlasting contained in the eternal? Thus the power which is in them now, constituting their essence, he possessed, and was able to put it into these forms; the conception also of what they now are, he always had, and the archetypes of all things rested in the unfathomable depths of his mind. The certainty of their existence lay in the fixedness of his purpose to create each one, in the place assigned and at the time appointed, from everlasting.

In either of these two ways, may the manifold forms and kinds of being which the present universe shows, have been involved in the original, if that original were spiritual; in either of these, but in no other way than these two (c. and d). No other way has ever been suggested, that we know of, in which material things could have been eternally involved in a spiritual Original; but, in every Pantheistic theory, a different origin and evolution is necessarily implied for finite intelligences. Every such theory presupposes the reality of a certain element, not yet personal, but from which persons will and must come fined potence, omnipresent, eternal, indescribable, whose qualities cannot be definitely enumerated, but from which, not only all matter but all souls are born—it is, or contains, an element that is truly and properly spiritual; and that element can be imaged, in its omnipresence, no VOL. XIII. No. 50.

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otherwise than as an infinite spiritual mass (as ethereal as you please), the original stuff out of which all finite personalities are composed. If the reasonableness of such a theory be conceded, or its possibility, then there certainly would be another hypothesis for us to consider, in addition to the four already announced. But we meet this new comer upon the threshold, by the denial of his existence. That is, we affirm:

There can be no such thing as a "spiritual mass," out of which individual personalities may be carved, or from which they may be condensed, or of whose elements they may be combined or constructed. The mind cannot conceive of a chaos of spiritual substance from which a world of intelligences should be developed, and there is no such thought. The phrase "spiritual substance" has no meaning whatsoever if intended to shut out personality; for the meaning of spiritual substance is, that substance which is personal, in being intelligent, sensible, and volitive-in that it is will, knowing, feeling, choosing, doing. The substance which is marked by these traits, men call "spiritual;" they mark it by that word; and they mean, and can mean, none

other.

In saying this, however, we do not imply, that there may not be traits or properties of spiritual being not yet named in human language, or recognized in human thought. We do not deny that there may be powers in some spirits altogether surpassing those in any "persons" who have yet come within our knowledge, or that the Eternal and Original one may thus be, in a mysterious and incomprehensible sense, super-personal. One definition limits only on one side. We say what "spirit," at the least, must be; not what it may be, beyond. We draw the line beneath which it cannot sink, and the limits which, at lowest, it completely fills; but we do not assume to define the shadow of that great mystery, into which the word, in its grandest and divinest meaning, recedes and expands, overshadowing the mind with an unknown majesty, baffling the utmost stretch of pursuing thought, overpassing the profoundest and the broadest search of the soul's anxious and awe-struck vision. We