and its God, as they stand thus developed before our eyes. For human nature is a ruined temple, though a temple still. The greatness of its capacity, and the splendor of its architecture, show how divine is the hand that made it, and how important its purposes. That it is in ruins proves that some great disturbing force has swept over it and shaken it to its foundations. But the guards that have been placed around it show that even over the ruins there presides a wise and merciful God, ready not only to meet and correct the evils which this shock may produce, but to make it, by turning it into a means of probation, conduce to the moral and spiritual elevation of His people.

§ 28. Recapitulating the points taken in this chapter, we have

a. The existence of a Supreme Lawgiver, inferred from the existence of conscience as a law.

b. The existence of a Supreme Judge, inferred from the existence of conscience as a judicial tribunal.

c. The existence of a Supreme Spiritual Executive, rewarding and punishing in life and after life, inferred from the retributive attributes of conscience, themselves incessant and unconditioned by time or matter, and aided by a complicated apparatus of physical

and social sanctions.

We have the same species of proof for these propositions that we have for similar propositions connected with human society. From a code, we infer a law-making power; from a court, a judicial; from the enforcement of the decrees of such court, an executive. If, in addition to such data, we find that within certain limits the freedom of the subject is

maintained, we infer that the government is one which, for purposes of its own, finds it wiser to preserve individual liberty and to impose individual responsibility, even though at the risk of occasional disorders, than to attempt to destroy these agencies, by making all action to depend upon a direct and resistless governmental impulse. And our conception of the power and prevision of such a government rises in proportion to the energy, the splendor, and the compass of the instrumentalities it brings to bear to carry out its polity. Applying this same reasoning to the facts before us, we have the spectacle of a God, Creator, Judge, and Avenger, establishing and vindicating a moral law by sanctions unconditioned by time and matter,

CHAPTER II.

FROM MIND.

a. THE NATURE OF MIND.

§ 29. The consciousness of each of us attests the existence of a distinct individuality, peculiar to ourselves, capable of choosing or rejecting; of comparing, judging, and classifying; of reasoning and of imagining. This individuality, viewing it in its intellectual relations, has no bounds. It is able to bring together instantaneously and often unconsciouslyso flexible and rapid are its movements-the desert rock, on which the shipwrecked mariner may stand, and the hamlet four thousand miles off, in which lies his home. It spans myriads of years with its sudden arch. It stands on the observatory, and measures the height and determines the weight of stars, whose very light cannot reach us under a million of years. Nor is its dominion limited to things real. It creates as well as recalls; it convokes imaginary assemblages as well as reproduces those which have been dissolved by time. Blinded in front by an impenetrable. veil it certainly is, for it can foretell not the events that are to come; but its sight backward and upward and downward is unobstructed, and the closing to it of the future is only

another proof of that contrivance which gives enough light to illuminate, but not enough to destroy probation.

b. THE CAUSE OF MIND.

§ 30. What must have been that workshop in which agen

cies such as these were constructed? He that formeth the ear, does He not hear? He that makes the mind, guarded as it is, so as to subserve the purposes of probation, and yet unlimited for all else beside, does He not think?

This, however, may be illustrated still further. We stand, for instance, on the sea-shore, and see a vessel tossed in the waves—no human power, it would seem, can save it. A rope, however, is projected from the shore, by which the crew are ferried over and saved. In this we recognize the action of human intelligence and beneficence. Turn, then, for a moment, to another scene. Buildings are seen crowded with the sick and dying:

The wounded from the battle plain
In dreary hospitals of pain,

The cheerless corridors,

The cold and stony floors:

Lo! in that house of misery

A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom,

And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,

The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow as it falls

Upon the darkening walls.

We see human design in the rope cast to the foundering ship: shall we not see a divine purpose in an agency like this flung out among the sick and dying? Or can we refuse to see the same designing power, acting upon the same subject-matter of a fallen nature, when we view such a mission as that of Dorothy Dix to the insane of our own land?

§ 31. Let us take, however, one or two more illustrations. An Englishman is seen casting stones, apparently idly, into the Niger, and watching the bubbles as they slowly rise from the mud below. The women and children gaze almost in sympathy at one whose objects in life are apparently so much like their own. It is Mungo Park, calculating, from the length of time the bubbles take to rise, what is the depth of the mysterious river whose sources he is about to explore. A boy sits by a chimney-fire in Lancashire, curiously scanning the lid of the tea-kettle as it flaps up and down under the pressure of the steam arising from the boiling water beneath. The housewife scolds him for his idleness, but she need not. It is Watt, catching the first conception of the steam-engine. That subtle element of mind, residing within that boy's frame, is to project itself forward from the chimney-corner until it binds the world together with ligatures of iron,-until the steam-horse dashes over tressel-work and through tunnels, so as to equalize the markets and unite the sympathies of distant nations, and until the press so works as to supply every home with a library at the former cost of a tract.

Now how are we to account for the human mind otherwise than by the supposition of a spiritual creative power?

5