The more earnest the faith, the more do we rise from the din and smoke of earth into the stormless calm and azure of heaven's heights. Life then assumes ever a deeper meaning, a tenderer joy, a more heartfelt satisfaction. We pass within the outworks to the life of life; and the zest of youth and spring is again fresh in sense and soul. For in the Scriptures we look at all things from a divine, not a human stand-point, and the joy and strength and love of the Highest pass into us while we are beholding. And then also, in those darker days, when "the house we live in " begins to decay, and "mind and memory flee," how securely does the devotee to this higher wisdom and love witness the desolation going on, and hear the busy carpenters tearing down the scaffolding of his existence, only that his true being may stand out in all its simple beauty and reality! He knows as Plato never knew; and the special wisdom of God hath appeared to bring this life and immortality to light, that, though "his outward man perish, the inward man is renewed day by day"; and "that, if his earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, he has a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."

As the Scriptures are inspired, so, if faithfully used, do they become life-awakening and soul-inspiring. As they are living, their pupil is living likewise; as they are wise and loving, he is changed into the same image from strength to strength, and from glory to glory. The soul of the world is brutish, and its ear dull of hearing; but when God thunders and lightens out of heaven, men cannot but look up with awe; and when he says, in the still, small voice of love, though it thrills through the soul more than all the thunderings and lightnings of Sinai, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him," they cannot but hear him, and they have heard him more than any or all other teachers for twenty centuries, and they will go on hearing him for ever.

We live, in truth, in an image-breaking age. We are impatient of the past, because forsooth it is the past. We bid it good-by, and seem to care not to meet it again. Our young country stands straining on the lists, champing the bit till it is white with foam, and hot with impatience to thunder forth and scour the plain in still

wider circles of enterprise, and challenge still prouder victories over matter and over men. Young America is a terrible power in the earth. But the voice of the Master, mightier than that of any earthly potentate, shall be able to say, "Peace, Peace!" instead of war, to this Hercules, and he shall sit clothed and in his right mind.

But in order that the inspiration in the Bible may become inspiration in us, we must read, and muse, till the fire burns. The deep book must be read with our deepest mind. "If the well is deep, and we have nothing to draw with, from whence then can we have that living water?" Voltaire confessed that he had not even read the whole of the book upon which he poured out such a merciless scorn. Other infidels have confessed to a similar neglect. We say then, for honesty's sake, give as much study to your theology as you do to your geology or astronomy, your navigation, engineering, or farming, and "hasten slowly" in making up a final judgment on a collection of books so various, so reverend, and so ancient. But if you weigh it carefully, and drink in its spirit, if you read and re-read its Job and its John, and con its moral tables and golden rules, and exult in its songs, and hush your heart with its prayers, and descend depth after depth into the passion and pathos of Jesus, and, after all this spiritual process, you still find it to be only a bundle of Jewish and old wives' fables, then you will have falsified, we do not say the highest yearnings and moral instincts of your own being, but the colossal testimony of the ages, the innermost experience of the wisest men of the Christian ages. He who turns from the book, when he has thus taken it home to heart and head, has not only to disclaim the power of the Scriptures, but he has got a yet harder battle to fight with history, to deny "Christianity as an existing power in the world, and Christendom as an existing fact, with the no less evident fact of a progressive expansion."

But were we never so familiar with the Scriptures, and could we rehearse memoriter its psalms and its par ables, it is not then by any means to be laid aside, as an old-world book, which we have learned out. The Bible can never be exhausted in that way. If it wears threadbare, it is to the superficial and cold, not the warm

hearted and the deep-souled. We honor God in matter by going to see his Great and his Fair, and we should honor him in mind by admiring yesterday and to-day and for ever the types of his Great and his Good, the heroes of his earlier, and the saints of his later dispensation. We greet with all hail the spring and the song of birds; we walk in the autumn wood without weariness; and with fresh delight and wonder revisit Niagara and the Alps, the Atlantic and the Rhine. Why should we not commune with the Super-Nature, the Soul of things, with new inspiration? Here is the oldest history, the purest theism, here are the wisest laws, the highest idealities of the spirit-world, and the thoughts of the Son of God. There may be a familiarity which breeds contempt, but there is an intimacy which ripens into love. The use of the Bible promiscuously in schools, to be spelled and murdered by dullards of the form, may be injurious, but its reverential and early reading by childhood must be favorable to clearness of intellectual vision, as well as purity of heart. It may be so read as to enslave, not free the soul; there is such a superstition as Bibliolatry, but when intelligently and reverently studied. and digested into the mind, it becomes the charter of the fairest freedom, as well as the missal of the lowliest faith and penitence. Then we would say, let these holiest words be lisped by children at their mother's knee, and let them circle round the fireside of home, and let them make musical and devout the walls of school-room and capitol. Life is too hard with soul-seducing temptations and crushing afflictions, for us to cast away this balm of the heart, this munition against evil. Verily we cannot estrange ourselves from this wise and mighty counsellor without losing something of the best part of life, and vacating a domain of rich experience, refined intellectual culture, and sweet and happy ideas of God and life and life's future, for the want of which no amount of earthly prosperity and pleasures, though broad as the sea and countless as the sands on its shore, can ever compensate.

Inspiration is not infallibility; else it must be subjective in the mind of each receiver, as well as subjective in the mind of the giver. Inspiration is no chain of compulsion, either to the intellect or the heart. High and

holy as it is, and descending from the heaven of heavens, it falls gently on the soul, as the rain comes from the zenith, nor mars nor breaks a single petal of the tenderest flower. Though coming from above, it is, like all light, discolored by the atmosphere it passes through, and issues to us as Mosaic, Pauline, Johannine, or Petrine. Inspiration is not, again, perfect character, any more than it is perfect knowledge. It is a help, not a substitute, for our natural powers. The men inspired may not al ways be the men perfect; there is in them likewise the play of the terrible engine of the will. It is as Peter said of the miracle done to the lame man at the Gate Beautiful, so of the world taught," Why marvel ye at this? Or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we made this man to walk?" It was not because they were so perfect in character, or so wise in intellect, beyond all other men, that Paul and John spoke as they did, but because they were illuminated from on high that they and all men might become more wise and more perfect. Inspiration casts no discredit on human nature, but it honors and glorifies it rather, that it can be the sharer and congenial recipient and user of so heavenly a wisdom. It has no conflict with, and assumes no haughty precedence of, reason and genius, but, on the contrary, the intellectual kings and princes of the race have bowed their laurelled heads at the foot of the cross, and have felt glorified, not humiliated by the act. In its light they have seen light, and been made strong and beautiful as angels by its life and its love. From its elevated plane of vision, they have spoken with a second-hand inspiration, and have kindled anew the failing hope of the world, and disarmed the problem of despair, the destiny of man.

O wonderful Bible! book of the ages, theme of David and Paul, of Moses and Jesus! a recorded revelation from Infinite Wisdom to frail, ignorant man, sitting in sackcloth and ashes! Egypt is gone, but a race of slaves from her bosom have been the teachers and leaders of the nations. Greece and Rome, too, have had their rise and growth, decline and downfall, and they too are gone; their mythologies and their philosophies have crumbled with their Parthenons and their Pantheons. But this mighty river of thought, the confluence of divers

streams of wisdom on the highest subjects of God and the soul and the soul's eternity, taking its rise in the remotest mountains of antiquity, flowing down with an ever-accumulating volume and power through successive climes and countries, bearing on its broad bosom the freight of untold treasures, corn from Egypt, gold from Ophir, myrrh and frankincense from Arabia, silks from Persia, oil and honey from Syria, and its own richest wealth from Judah's sacred mount, - still pouring onward with its deepening and resistless tide, as from the hollow of God's own hand, at once giving a refreshing draught to a thirsty soul, and fertilizing provinces and kingdoms with its inexhaustible streams; what if it have a tinge and a taste from the soils it has passed through, a sediment from the affluence of its tributaries, and a bitter and a sweet from the luxuriant vegetation which adorns its banks and dips into its current? Is it not still the Great River of the waters of life, making glad the city and church of our God, rolling ever onward with its majestic sweep, and carrying with it the innumerable commerce from every kindred and tongue and people under heaven toward the Greater Sea?

A. A. L.

ART. II.—AUSTRALIA, ITS HISTORY AND RESOURCES.*

AUSTRALIA was discovered, almost simultaneously, by the Dutch and Portuguese, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. But the discovery consisted only in the mere ascertainment of the existence of land at sev

1. Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, performed under the Authority of her Majesty's Government during the Years 1844, 1845, and 1846, together with a Notice of the Province of South Australia in 1847. By CAPT. CHARLES STURT, F.L.S., F.R.G.S., etc., etc., Author of "Two Expeditions into Southern Australia." 2 vols. 8vo. London: T. and W. Boone. 1849.

2. Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, with Descriptions of the recently explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the present Colony of New South Wales. By MAJOR T. L. MITCHELL, F.G.S. and M.R.G.S., Surveyor-General. 2 vols. 8vo. London: T. and W. Boone.

1838.

3. Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, including a Visit