that God is now known to govern all things, and to produce all effects by general laws? Laws! What are God's laws? The expression of his will, the modes by which his designs are accomplished. And who can assure me, that in every spot of his great universe, where, at this moment, one of these laws is operative, there, issuing it and applying it, there is not a present and active God? For me, suffer me to believe, to recognize my Omnipresent Maker, now, this instant, at my side, meting out to me each inhalation of the breath which animates me, and keeping in action, and mingling in their proper combinations, and animating with the requisite energy, all the forces and functions by which each pulsation of the vital fluid is propelled throughout my frame. For, besides its truth, this conviction has this very great advantage. If I am thus conscious of his vicinity to me in the processions of nature, and the experiences of life, he becomes to me a near God, and not a God afar off, in the economy of his grace; so that when temptation assails me, or sin has vanquished me, or trouble harasses me, I have no far interval of distance to surmount to reach him,

and no faithless doubts, as to whether, from his remote sanctuary, he will hear and help me. I do not need, like Job, to cry, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!" I have but to think, and he is beside me, and he anticipates the supplication of my need ere it finds utterance in my tongue, for noting and marking my every purpose, I feel that he beheld it, while it was yet forming in heart. And with David I am able to say, "I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved."

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To be able, at any point in the course of our lives, to have immediate recourse to God, at once to find his seat, and having reached it, to feel an assurance that it contains the very Being we seek, and not a dim and attenuated abstraction merely, is surely a consideration of some consequence to us, subjects of fear, and feebleness, and death, as we are. And yet, besides that of which we have been speaking, incident to a condition of imperfect scientific culture, — there is an abstraction lying at the very threshhold of our endeavors to conceive of him, which we cannot remove without derogating from the dignity we

feel to be his due, and eventually involving ourselves in practices of superstition specially prohibited in the exhortations of his word. We know each other, and all things of which we have any distinct conceptions, through the media of vision, and form, and substance. But God we cannot see. His form, visible, perhaps, to angels, eludes the most solicitous search of mortal eye, and his substance is impalpable to human contact. "He is a Spirit, and they who worship him, must worship him in spirit," see him by faith, and embrace him by love. The ordinary avenues of sense, by which we apprehend sublunary objects, are powerless to furnish us with an image of the Inscrutable. "No man hath seen God at any time," says Jesus; and, "to what, then, will ye liken God," asks Isaiah," or what likeness will ye compare unto him?" The nearest approach to any substantial representation of him, given to our intellectual perceptions in the Bible, is one drawn from the least material of all physical things. "God is Light," says St. John, “ and in Him is no darkness at all." Now, here we confess is a difficulty meeting and perplexing our very earliest inquiries after God, and one of so

embarrassing a kind, that in their unaided attempts to surmount it, men have very generally either descended to idolatry, embodying their conceptions of himself, or his attributes, in corporeal form, and "so worshipped and served the creature," rather than the Creator, or have filled his throne, on the other hand, with some dim and indefinite abstraction, too vague for the apprehension of the intellect, and of consequence, too meagre and insipid for the embrace of the heart. And yet, despite our embarrassment, in attempting to frame for ourselves an image of Him whom "no human eye hath seen or can see," we labor under no more insuperable difficulty, than when we attempt to portray to ourselves the true form of any human friend. For surely, we would not for a moment admit, that the identity of our acquaintance, that the personality of which, ourselves are conscious, resides in our bodies, or any, or all of their members. Is it of our hands, our feet, our heads, or any of our corporeal parts, we say, us? Slaves as we are to sense, and form, and substance, we are conscious that these are not ourselves, but of us; that we possess them, that we occupy and use them, as God the sub

stantialities of nature,- for our convenience, for the expression of our desires, and the accomplishment of our purposes, but that we are within them, and distinct from them, pervading them, and yet separable from them; that changing periodically as they do, till not a particle of what composes them now, was theirs ten years ago, we remain, with all our feelings, our memories, and hopes, what we have ever been, and that when they shall resolve back to the dust from which they were moulded, detached from them, and independent of them, we shall continue to live, and think, and feel forever. They are the means and the media of communication and intercourse between us and our fellow-spirits, and the instrumentalities by which we manage and use the inanimate world about us, but that which distinguishes us and our brethren from the rock and the sod, is itself the active and intelligent prin. ciple, the vital and rational being, which we feel to be ourselves, and which in others we admire and love. Of the same nature, though of dimensions grander far, is the God we seek. And divesting ourselves, as far as practicable, of the too tenacious associations of substance and mat