in the mind, exactly so are bodily modifications or images of things arranged and connected in the body" (Spinoza, by Frederick Pollock, p. 282). They further show how latent complex capacities are made active, and they give new character-a symbol of the new birth. Potentialities exist everywhere which only require to be brought into action, and new life is given. The physical world responds to our mental, moral, emotional nature, and our spiritual nature is moved by material activities; even an angel, if we are to hear his voice, must excite physical vibrations. Suppose that it is not so always; suppose the inner ear alone to be addressed, and vision vouchsafed to the inner eye only; would the angels' song on Christmas Eve, the vision and sound of the Lord in Eden, the glorious spectacle on the mount of Transfiguration, and the voice which Saul heard speaking to him in the Hebrew tongue, when he and his followers had all fallen to the earth, be less wonderful? By no means. Does the wonder cease by translation into a more marvellous sphere, and by being made wholly of spiritual discernment? Certainly not. Outer symbols of inner truths, physical forms of spiritual figures, are as the body of truth. When we awake sound from stillness, give tongue to the voiceless air, and mingle strains in harmony to delight the inner and outer man; we possess analogues of sweet associations, sacred sorrow and spiritual pleasure; of confession, as to sin, evoking a response that true righteousness is ours; of tremors, as to judgment, quickening movements of holiness within. the soul and translating darkness into light.

All this, essentially, is miraculous; it is the linking

of the human with the divine; and how true and natural the supernatural is, every man of insight may verify for himself. If any one say—“ It is not marvellous in the sense that deniers of miracle require;” we reply—It is truly miraculous. It shows that humanity is allied to Divinity, that nature is an outer court of the supernatural, that visible things are a precipitation from the invisible. It is admitted by the greatest physicists that all material phenomena are manifestations of the Unknown Power, and inexplicable and transcendental. It would be highly unscientific and unphilosophical to suppose that our reverence for Deity, and our consciousness of responsibility, are in relation to nothing, and tend toward that which has no existence. Every inward tendency implies an outward reality, even as every mystery is some foresight of the unknown. Religious emotion is the product of a real faculty which discerns, as by intuition, that the finite has its cause in the infinite. Aspirations as to truth, desires after purity, the struggle for perfect life, all spiritual or mental phenomena, spring from the Unknown Power, and are symbols of that Truth, that Purity, that Perfection, held by Christians to be Divine. The world is a vestibule, their bodies and souls are double doors to knowledge. The subtle play of flesh and spirit opens a way from ignoble uninteresting conditions, whence seemed no issue, and enables their life to possess present assurance of some blissful future. They come out from narrowness of brain, which conceives no needs differing from its own, to the exercise of sublime power in resolved unreserved self-renunciation. Renunciation which means untiring work, untiring patience, untiring watchfulness, in a world where myriads

of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution. The finest Christians are glad to live because the world is chiefly miserable, specially on that account is life worth living: they live to help some who need. They walk in the steps of Him, who never faltered in seeking the highest good; and the god-like power in them, and the celestial purity adorning them, and the new life given them (John i. 12, 13)-a mingling of the divine with the human, render them living symbols of that Redeemer in whom was the fulness of God.

THOUGHT XVI.

GROUPING OF MIRACLES.

"Miracles are the reflections in nature of the progressive spiritual development, and have their legitimate foundation in the connection between nature and Spirit. . . . Christ is the centre of this development, and the great miracle after Creation."—Altered from CHRISTLIEB.

WE scale heaven by means of astronomic ladder, and winged by scientific imagination pass from world to world. We divine the history of our earth, and intellectually present ourselves at its origination. We retrace the past, discern the present, foresee the future. All changes, subsequent to Creation, are but continuances of realities in another form; and our own continuance will not be as that of material particles in the bubble which bursts, neither is it meant to be, what Jeremy Taylor says, from the Greek, "πоμpóλvž ó äv0ρWπоs," πομφόλυξ ἄνθρωπος,” "man is a bubble;" nor as the dissolution of moss and lichen into gases, but that maintenance of identity which gathers fruit from the flowers of present thought and work. This we know because all real knowledge is true; and responsibility, the highest knowledge of all, requires true personality and distinct individuality for preservation and continuance of essential identity.

Whatever may be the real texture of matter, the

true substance of mind, or the actual nature of life, our change will ensure that continuance of our essential selves which the scientific doctrine of continuity requires for nothing can be annihilated-"Omnia mutantur, nihil interit;” and γένεσις and φθίσις, αὔξησις, and μείωσις, are really only αλλοιωσις. God does not unmake His own works. Continuance of our essential selves, whether as individuals or as a race, is not merely by repetition like that observed in physical nature; but, rather, by mental and moral march to some consummation. Evil, everywhere confronting us, we conquer by a truer voluntary righteousness than that which evil displaces. The life which springs from death overcome, aims at station more honourable than the former. The present wide and far-reaching disturbance is being allayed by a tranquillity, wide and deep, that shines with gladness; even as the dark confusion of chaos. gave place to bright and ordered beauty. We trace historical order throughout. The Destroyer of Satan does not appear until the specific religious and the general human conditions of mankind have accomplished a fulness (Gal. iv. 4). The order of nature is so elevated that Woman, sanctified by the Spirit of God, conceives by the creative act of God; and Jesus, made under the law, fulfils all righteousness. The whole proves that history and human life are not held in mechanical bondage-a science, a philosophy, may everywhere be found as parts of a purpose truly magnificent, producing supernatural effects by intensification of nature's legitimate activity. The wicked punishes himself, the faithful crowns himself. Perdition is the fall prolonged here and hereafter. Redemption