the Supreme Being are incompatible with the spirit of prayer and petitionary pleading taught and exemplified in the Scriptures. Second, that this being the case, and "supplication with arguments and importunate requests" being irrational and known by the supplicant to be such, it is nevertheless a duty to pray in this fashion. In other words, it is asserted that the Supreme Being requires of his rational creatures, as the condition of their offering acceptable worship to him, that they should wilfully blind themselves to the light, which he had himself given them, as the contra-distinguishing character of their humanity, without which they could not pray to him at all; and that drugging their sense of the truth into a temporary doze, they should make believe that they know no better! As if the God of Truth and Father of all lights resembled an oriental or African despot, whose courtiers, even those whom he had himself enriched and placed in the highest rank, are commanded to approach him only in beggars' rags and with a beggarly whine!

I on the contrary find "the Scripture model of devotion," the prayers and thanksgiving of the Psalmist, and in the main of our own Church Liturgy, perfectly conformable to the highest and clearest convictions of my reason. (I use the word in its most comprehensive sense, as comprising both the practical and the intellective, not only as the light but likewise as the life which is the light of man. John i. 3.) And I do not hesitate to attribute the contrary persuasion principally to the three following oversights: First (and this is the queen-bee in the hive of error), the identification of the universal reason with each man's individual understanding, subjects not only different but diverse, not only allogeneous but heterogeneous. Second, the substitution of the idea of the infinite for that of the absolute. Third and lastly, the habit of using the former as a sort of superlative synonyme of the vast or indefinitely great. Now the practical difference between my scheme and that of the Essayist, for whose talents and intentions I feel sincere respect, may perhaps be stated thus: The Essayist would bring down his understanding to his religion: I would raise up my understanding to my reason, and find my religion in the focus resulting from their convergence. We both alike use the same penitential, deprecative and petitionary prayers; I in the full assurance of their congruity with my reason, he in a factitious oblivion of their being the contrary.

The name of the author of the Natural History of Enthusiasm is unknown to me and unconjectured. It is evidently the work of a mind at once observant and meditative. And should these notes meet the Author's eye, let him be assured that I willingly give to his genius that respect which his intentions without it would secure for him in the breast of every good man. But in the present state of things, infidelity having fallen into disrepute even on the score of intellect, yet the obligation to show a reason for our faith having become more generally recognized, as reading and the taste for serious conversation have increased, there is a large class of my countrymen disposed to receive, with especial favor, any opinions that will enable them to make a compromise between their new knowledge and their old belief. And with these men the Author's evident abilities will probably render the work a high authority. Now it is the very purpose of my life to impress the contrary sentiments. Hence these notes:

DIALOGUE BETWEEN DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES.†

MY DEAR

In emptying a drawer of rose-leaf bags, old (but, too many of them) unopened letters, and paper scraps, or brain fritters, I had my attention directed to a sere and ragged half-sheet by a gust of wind, which had separated it from its companions, and whisked it out of the window into the garden.-Not that I went after it. I have too much respect for the numerous tribe, to which it belonged, to lay any restraint on their movements, or to put the Vagrant Act in force against them. But it so chanced that some after-breeze had stuck it on a standard rose-tree, and there I found it, as I was pacing my evening walk alongside the lower ivy-wall, the bristled runners from which threaten to entrap the top branch of the cherry-tree in our neighbor's kitchen-garden. I had been meditating a letter to you, and as I ran my eye over this fly-away tag-rag and bob-tail, and bethought me that it was a by-blow of my own, I felt a sort of fatherly remorse, and yearning toward it, and exclaimed, “If I had a frank for this should help to make up the ounce." It was far too decrepit to travel per se--besides that the seal would have See ante, p. 100.-Ed.

*Mr. Isaac Taylor.-Ed.

looked like a single pin on a beggar's coat of tatters—and yet one does not like to be stopped in a kind feeling, which my conscience interpreted as a sort of promise to the said scrap, and therefore (frank or no frank) I will transcribe it. A dog's leaf at the top was worn off, which must have contained, I presume, the syllable Ve

"Rily," quoth Demosius of Toutoscosmos, Gentleman, to Mystes the Allocosmite, "thou seemest to me like an out-ofdoor patient of St. Luke's wandering about in the rain without cap, hat, or bonnet, poring on the elevation of a palace, not the house that Jack built, but the house that is to be built for Jack, in the suburbs of the city, which his cousin-german, the lynxeyed Dr. Gruithuisen has lately discovered in the moon. But through a foolish kindness for that face of thine, which whilome belonged to an old school-fellow of the same name with thee, I would get thee shipped off under the Alien Act, as a non ens, or pre-existent of the other world to come."-To whom Mystes retorted ;-" Verily, friend Demosius, thou art too fantastic for a genuine Toutoscosmos man; and it needs only a fit of dyspepsy, or a cross in love to make a Heterocosmite of thee; this same Heteroscosmos being in fact the endless shadow which the Toutoscosmos casts at sunset. But not to alarm or affront thee, as if I insinuated that thou wert in danger of becoming an Allocosmite, I let the whole of thy courteous address to me pass without comment or objection, save only the two concluding monosyllables and the preposition (pre) which anticipates them. The world in which I exist is another world indeed, but not to come. It is as present as (if that be at all) the magnetic planet, of which, according to the astronomer Halley, the visible globe which we inverminate is the case or travelling-trunk ;—a neat little world where light still exists in statu perfuso, as on the third day of the creation, before it was polarized into outward and inward, that is, while light and life were one and the same, neither existing formally, yet both eminenter: and when herb, flower, and forest rose as a vision, in proprio lucido, the ancestor and unseen yesterday of the sun and moon. Now, whether there really is such an Elysian mundus mundulus encased in the macrocosm, or great world, below the adamantine vault that supports the mother waters, which support the coating crust of that mundus

immundus on which we and others less scantily furnished from nature's storehouse crawl, delve, and nestle-(or, shall I say the Lyceum, where walk οἱ τούτου κόσμου φιλόσοφοι)— Dr. Halley, may, perhaps, by this time have ascertained; and to him and the philosophic ghosts, his compeers, I leave it. But that another world is enshrined in the microcosm I not only believe, but at certain depths of my being, during the more solemn Sabbaths of the spirit, I have holden commune therewith, in the power of that faith, which is the substance of the things hoped for, the living stem that will itself expand into the flower, which it now foreshows. How should it not be so, even on grounds of natural reason, and the analogy of inferior life? Is not nature prophetic up the whole vast pyramid of organic being? And in which of her numberless predictions has nature been convicted of a lie? Is not every organ announced by a previous instinct or act? The larva of the stag-beetle lies in its chrysalis like an infant in the coffin of an adult, having left an empty space half the length it occupies; and this space is the exact length of the horn which distinguishes the perfect animal, but which, when it constructed its temporary sarcophagus, was not yet in existence. Do not the eyes, ears, lungs of the unborn babe give notice and furnish proof of a transuterine, visible, audible, atmospheric world? We have eyes, ears, touch, taste, smell; and have we not an answering world of shapes, colors, sounds, and sapid and odorous bodies? But likewise-(alas! for the man for whom the one has not the same evidence of fact as the other)—the Creator has given us spiritual senses, and sense-organs-ideas I mean-the idea of the good, the idea of the beautiful, ideas of eternity, immortality, freedom, and of that which contemplated relatively to will is holiness, in relation to life is bliss. And must not these too infer the existence of a world correspondent to them? There is a light, said the Hebrew sage, compared with which the glory of the sun is but a cloudy veil: and is it an ignis fatuus given to mock us and lead us astray? And from a yet higher authority we know, that it is a light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And are there no objects to reflect it? Or must we seek its analogon in the light of the glow-worm, that simply serves to distinguish one reptile from all the rest, and lighting, inch by inch, its mazy path through weeds and grass, leaves all else before, and behind, and around it in darkness? No! Another

and answerable world there is; and if any man discern it not, let him not, whether sincerely or in contemptuous irony, pretend a defect of faculty as the cause. The sense, the light, and the conformed objects are all there and for all men. The difference between man and man in relation thereto results from no difference in their several gifts and powers of intellect, but in the will. As certainly as the individual is a man, so certainly should this other world be present to him: yea, it is his proper home. But he is an absentee and chooses to live abroad. His freedom and whatever else he possesses which the dog and the ape do not possess, yea, the whole revenue of his humanity, is derived from this;-but with the Irish land-owner in the theatres, gaminghouses, and maitresseries of Paris, so with him. He is a voluntary absentee. I repeat it again and again,-the cause is altogether in the will: and the defect of intellectual power, and "the having no turn or taste for subjects of this sort," are effects and consequences of the alienation of the will, that is, of the man himself. There may be a defect, but there was not a deficiency, of the intellect. I appeal to facts for the proof. Take the science of political economy. No two professors understand each other;and often have I been present where the subject has been discussed in a room full of merchants and manufacturers, sensible and well-informed men and the conversation has ended in a confession that the matter was beyond their comprehension. And yet the science professes to give light on rents, taxes, income, capital, the principles of trade, commerce, agriculture, on wealth, and the ways of acquiring and increasing it, in short on all that most passionately excites and interests the Toutoscosmos men. But it was avowed that to arrive at any understanding of these matters requires a mind gigantic in its comprehension, and mieroscopic in its accuracy of detail. Now compare this with the effect produced on promiscuous crowds by a Whitfield, or a Wesley-or rather compare with it the shaking of every leaf of the vast forest to the first blast of Luther's trumpet. Was it only of the world to come that Luther and his compeers preached? Turn to Luther's Table Talk, and see if the larger part be not of that other world which now is, and without the being and working of which the world to come would be either as unintelligible as Abracadabra, or a mere reflection and elongation of the world