universe is a vast transparency on which from the light in which God dwells, is pictured the ceaseless working of his thought and love. It is the veil before the Holy of Holies, concealing, yet ever revealing the mysteries of the Infinite. This is the true reality; and the most successful observer of scientific facts is no better than a word-monger, if he sees it not.

There is no effectual education till the scholar pierces the surface, and discovers the reality, and in it the grandeur of of truth. This discovery awakens him to awe and earnestness in seeking to know and obey the truth. And discovering reality himself, he is prepared to lead others through the sign to the thing signified. He becomes the true iconoclast, shattering the world's idols to disclose God's presence, and to make men aware that, as they walk up and down on earth, they tread the solemn aisles and behold the august glories of God's own temple.

The second requisite for the awakening of the scholar's mind, is a discovery of the unity of truth.

A reason why the mind is insensible, is, that it sees the truth in fragments. Dissection demonstrates, but kills. Analysis verifies; synthesis impresses. After verifying its thought by analysis, the mind must reconstruct it into its wholeness in order to feel its power. The analytic mind is accurate, but often feeble in expression and influence. The synthetic mind is impressive, but often erroneous. But the man who first verifies by analysis, and then reconstructs by synthesis, who first assays his gold in the laboratory, and then flings you the solid ingots and stamped coin of his thought he is the man of power.

This is true of single objects. A temple, when seen as a whole, is impressive; but the specifications of the architect, however essential to the builder, give little impression of the grandeur of the structure. Milton's description of the gate of Paradise is sublime; a critical analysis of it is instructive, but tedious.

So each science has a unity, gradually shaping itself out in beauty from the rubbish of isolated and uninteresting facts.

From dry bones and skulls, Cuvier, by long toil, evokes the science of Comparative Anatomy, complete and beautiful as the Parthenon. Geology leads us among Iguanodons and Pentacrinites into the unmeasured vast before history began,

"O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,"

till at last we discern the mighty thought which links the stupendous interchange of life and death together, and amid the cyclopean fragments catch glimpses of the Cosmos rising orderly and beautiful into being. The study of a science is like the exploration of Nineveh, a digging amid rubbish, encouraged by discovering a sculptured slab here, a protruding wing there, till at last enough are uncovered to disclose the unity of all in a palace.

In the actual history of scientific discovery it has been usual that genius, by its "vision and faculty divine," has first grasped the principle of unity, and afterwards verified it by facts. Newton first saw the law of gravitation, and afterwards demonstrated it; Goethe first grasped the idea that the leaf is the type of vegetable forms, which subsequent observations confirmed; when Oken hit his foot accidentally against a skull, the idea that it was but a modified vertebra, flashed on his mind; and Kepler tried thirteen hypotheses of the planetary orbits, and tested them by facts, before he hit on the Ellipse. Till an element of unity is found, though it is but an hypothesis, the accumulation of facts is only confusing; as, for example, the multitudinous meteorological observations which lie heaped in innumerable volumes, waiting the word which shall declare their meaning.

This unity of each science indicates the unity of all. The lines in which multifarious facts are classified, running together and becoming fewer as discovery advances, point unerringly to a unity comprehending all. This unity we discover in the living and personal God, in the thought of his eternal mind; in his eternal love expressing itself in the creation, and slowly writing in all that takes place the letters of his incommunicable name. Nobler this solution than any

theory of blind development. We see not only the outward unity of the leaf-type ever repeated in endless variety, but in the leaf-type itself we see a deeper unity, the thought of the divine mind fulfilling a steadfast purpose. We see the vertebrate skeleton, as it first appears rough-sketched; we follow it in its modifications through successive geological epochs, till it culminates in man; and we see, not the unity of that type of being alone, but the plan of a living mind, advancing through uncounted ages to its chosen ideal. And as one science after another discloses its unity, as one mass of multifarious facts after another groups itself in order, drawn by the Orphic music of a master thought, we begin to perceive that these are "but parts of one harmonious whole;" that as the typical form of the vertebrate skeleton was advanced through ages towards its ideal, so the universe itself is ever advancing towards its ideal, and is but the ever advancing, never completed expression in finite effects of the thought, the love and the energy of the Infinite and the Eternal God. Thus alike in the history of a species of reptiles, or in the history of man, we see but parts of one whole; the science which treats of the structure of rocks, and that which treats of the stars, and that which treats of the mind of man, is each alike the science of God, revealing in him the central unity of all.

A discovery of this unity of all reality, is essential to awaken the scholar to earnestness and awe in his work.

It is a poor distinction of the Positive Philosophy that it denies alike this reality and this unity, and so annihilates these primal sources of scholarly earnestness, and dries up these living springs of a true culture. It is a malignant Medea, teaching her votaries the lesson of the Peliades, to cut the Cosmos in pieces, and, powerless to reconstruct and vitalize, leaving the dead fragments to seethe forever in the boiling caldron of a destructive analysis. Recognizing no substantial being, and busied only in classifying shadowy phenomena, it exalts into scientific literalness the poetic pathos of Burke, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue."

It is also necessary to the scholar's awakening that he discern his own personal relations to the truth.

A speck on a seaman's chart represents a real rock; he must shape his course to avoid it, or his ship will be dashed in pieces. So a principle of spiritual truth, however brief its statement, expresses a reality which the voyager in life disregards at his peril. Nature holds us in the iron fingers of her laws, and, if disobedient, crushes us in her closing hand. So spiritual truths are not abstractions; they express the existences and laws which encompass us; we must conform our action to their rocky realities, or perish.

When a contemplative man walks amid the solitudes of nature, at first his idling mind is pleased with forms, colors, and motions; then soothed and elevated by the beauty in which, through material forms, the universal spirit touches the spirit of man. Presently his thoughts concentrate on the resistless forces working in the profound silence-electricity, able to split the oaks with thunderbolts, yet silently invigora ting all growth-forces in every sprig pumping food from earth and air, decomposing, combining, organizing, coloring; forces that bind the atoms together so that human strength cannot sunder them; forces that bind all things to the earth, so that a volcano's strength cannot hurl them off; forces in the winds that sway the forest, and in the clouds lifted from the ocean and transported hither, now rolled into Alpine masses, and now dissolved into the most delicately penciled tracery; forces which move the earth itself, seeming so still, with a swiftness and momentum which the intellect can calculate and express in figures, but which the imagination cannot conceive. He trembles as he finds himself helpless in the grasp of these Titanic forces, himself a power amid them. He feels with awe his personal interest in all that is. He wakes to earnest inquiry. He longs, even to anguish, that the mute forces would break their eternal silence, and tell him whence they are, and with what purpose they work and rest not through all the ages, and to what destiny they are bearing him. He longs for the firmament to "burst its shining floor and open on and up" till it reveals the secret of the universe.

He sees

To these questionings he gains some answer. these forces to be the expression of an eternal intelligence, himself a participator in the spiritual nature of that intelligence, an actor in his universal plan, with relations to the unseen and the eternal, more grand than to the seen. As the earth, seemingly so motionless and so far from the heavens, yet moves and shines a star amid the stars, so his life, seemingly so ineffective and earthly, moves and shines amid the grandeurs of eternity.

But this discovery of his personal relations, both to the seen and the unseen, awakens him to more earnest questionings. Are wisdom and love supreme? Do they direct infinite intelligence and power in their service? In himself are hope and fear, the noble and the vile. Around are joy and beauty, but also woe; he cannot shut his ear to the time-long cry of human anguish. What is the solution of the problem? Whence the conflict of good and evil? In what is it to issue? What must he-a consciously responsible agent amid these realities-what must he be, and do, to insure the favor of God, the coincidence of his own action with the eternal requirements of God's wisdom and love, harmony with the laws and relations of his own being, and the realization of its highest possibilities?

This is the awakening of the mind in the discovery of the reality and the unity of the truth, and the inquirer's personal interest in it. This is the first requisite in any true education.

The second requisite to development, is ACQUISITION.

By this is meant, not the acquisition of facts, but of the central principles which give significance to facts. In any physical science, for example, the mere accumulation of facts confuses. It is not till the mind strikes some master principle of the science, that the significance of the facts flashes out, and their multiplication is no longer confusion, but order and strength. It is only then that the mind has taken possession of these facts. The same is true of universal truth. The true acquisition is not a cumbersome erudition, but the pos