maculate purity. He knows that it is only goodness divested of every evil that can give such form. And as he gazes upon the seraphic and cherubic glories of those heavenly beings, with holiness in all their looks, with loveliness, and humiliation, and innocence, and adoration, and spotless garments of truth and purity, how truly he may feel in his soul that the beauty of the Lord our God is upon them because it is within them! That is worship in the beauty of holiness. That is a scene which no eye of impurity can approach to look upon, for it is of heaven only, where nothing can enter that in anywise defileth, that worketh abomination, or that maketh a lie.

But let us now inquire still further, and more practically, into this philosophy of human forms. We say, the form is truly beautiful only because it is good; and though the connection is not fully recognized by persons in general, yet it is partly, and felt strongly; and that is the only secret of its great power in the world. And the truth is, too, we are actually forming our souls-shaping their very substance into beauty or deformity, according as we do or do not act out the nobler and diviner qualities of our nature. This may be seen even in the marks which human life is leaving upon the outward form. See how the protracted experience of this life fixes its impress upon the features of every one; how, sometimes, the lines and lineaments of the countenance will reveal, even to a stranger, the predominating influence through which one has passed; how the airy features of joy, the deep lines of sadness, the withering marks of misfortune, disappointment, and hope deferred, the contracted visage of habitual deceit, or the open contour of generosity and benevolence and nobleness, all are cut, by an infallible sculpture, in the face and form of the subject of them. Now, precisely so it is with the spirit, in reference to all the experience of the manifold life of the world. The outward form indeed, generally speaking, is but the expression and moulding of the interior form. By the hereditary and the actual, it is the spirit that does all. And each passion leaves the deep tracery of its working, each fine feeling the delicate imprint of its passage over the soul, each thought the lines of its

engraving. If, now, we had a microscope to look upon the spirit, we might see, in distinctness, all the fine engraving, sculpturing and coloring of this life. But ah! the angels do see this.

There is a story of a sculptor who received a visit in his studio from an interested observer, who, after admiring the almost finished production which stood before him in marble dignity, left the artist, and after an absence of some considerable time, returned to take another view of the work which had so interested him. "Why," said he, "you have done nothing to it since I last saw it." "Oh, yes," said the artist, "I have softened this feature, and brought out that; I have given a greater prominence to this muscle, and a less to that." "But these are trifles," said the visitor. "Yes," rejoined the artist, "but a great many of them make perfection, and perfection itself is no trifle."

Just so it is with regard to the spirit of man, which is no less a solid and substantial structure than the marble form of the artist, and which is wrought upon through long years by the great artist, Human Experience, where every enterprise in which we have engaged, every pursuit and calling of our lives, every disposition and affection with which we have followed those pursuits, especially the predominating principle which we have suffered to characterize us, becomes wrought into the form and texture of its spiritual organism, and will appear in feature, color, shade, in beauty or deformity, in the world to which we are all inevitably traveling. There we shall stand revealed to the eyes of all who will look upon us; revealed to ourselves; not as the natural man who beholdeth his outward face in a glass, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was; but as an inhabitant of eternity, with whom the book of life is all unrolled, and the spirit is, finally, both inwardly and outwardly, the fixed, enduring form of its own good or evil.

To all lovers of beauty and worshipers at its shrine, what an incentive to such an ambition is here! In such a light the whole subject assumes a new importance. It becomes transfigured and immortal. It is not character alone, but the

outward expression and surroundings of it, which fire the soul with a true and laudable desire. What are all the riches of this world, or what would they be in a true and orderly condition, but the appropriate externals of a corresponding interior state? And so throughout the universe.

I once knew a woman of culture and refinement who frequently expressed an honest and ardent desire to be beautiful, even in the spiritual world. And why not? If heaven itself is enriched with all outward beauties, and if the very angels themselves are forms of charity and inexpressible loveliness; and more, if hell, by an internal cause, is compact with all spiritual deformity, I think that a true man or a true woman can desire nothing else than that the regenerated soul, with all its affections and thoughts, may appear in heaven in heaven's own glory. How much of truth, more than we have suspected, is there in many passages of the Scripture which speak of the beauty of holiness? And when this outward covering of flesh which enwraps the world shall be all torn off by death, what revelations will surprise us, as we see, in the countenances of our fellow-beings, the marks of every virtue and every evil for which they have been distinguished in the earth! There is many a beauty, far-famed and longfamed in the world of nature, who will have to part with it all in the spiritual world; and many a rude and disfigured countenance whose spirit will there shine in heavenly radiance, "as the stars forever and ever."

Thus it is that we have the whole secret - the whole philosophy of beauty and deformity. We seek not to carry it beyond this world by any forced or artificial theology. We only aim to look at it spiritually and internally. It is a mighty power. We bow to it, we worship it, we adore and idolize it. There is nothing so ministrative to human vanity, and nothing, frequently, so deceptive and ruinous. But there is a true beauty. It is the outward sign of an inward reality. Seldom, however, do we see it so in its fullness. It pertains, in its perfection, only to the spiritual of man, and to the glorified spirit after death. It is richer than any art, or any sculpturing and coloring of the outward world, and it is such as the angels of heaven are clothed in.

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TOPICS OF THE MONTH.

MR. MOUNTFORD AND HIS ARTICLES.

We wish to say a few words in regard to the able, earnest, conscientiously written articles which Mr. Mountford has furnished from time to time for this journal. For we think that the main purpose of those articles has been misunderstood by some of our readers. They seem to think that what Mr. Mountford would present to us as the only alternative is, that we must either believe in modern ghosts, demoniacs, tabletippings, and the other alleged facts of modern Spiritualism, or give up all that is miraculous in the Scriptures. And they say that if this is really the alternative, then they must give up the whole. We have read Mr. Mountford's articles with care before printing them, and have viewed them in a very different light from this. He is speaking of the philosophy which underlies all religious belief, and he says that the philosophy which throws Spiritualism qutside the pale of human inquiry, as being in itself utterly incredible, no matter what evidence may be brought to sustain it, strikes at the foundation of our belief in all spiritual revelations and manifestations, even such as we find in the New Testament.

In this we believe that he is right. If, reasoning in the abstract, from the nature of things, we conclude that there can be no communication between us and spiritual beings now, then on precisely the same grounds we conclude that there never could have been any such communication. As respects their moral significance, and the evidence, external and internal, on which they rest, and by which our belief in them is determined, we by no means place the alleged facts of modern Spiritualism on the same level as the Christian miracles. We are speaking only of the a priori or philosophical assumption by which Spiritualism is cast aside without examination, because it is supposed to lay claim to a sort of communication with the spiritual world which is in itself utterly

incredible. We say that if from the nature of things such a communication is incredible now, it must for the same reason have been incredible always. And this is the consistent reasoning of those scientific men who deny the Christian miracles. They assume, for it is only an assumption, that in the nature of things all such communications are impossible or, at least, incredible, and therefore any alleged revelation from God, such as is related in the New Testament, must be rejected at once.

It is not strange that they who reject Christianity as a divine revelation should make this assumption. But that Christians should adopt it, striking as it does at the very heart of their belief, is a strange and suicidal course. And it is against this inconsistent and unreasonable mode of treating the subject by Christian writers that Mr. Mountford has been using all the force of his logic, the keenness of his wit, and the power of his genius.

Hume's sophistical assumption of the Incredibility of Miracles, because it is against all experience that a miracle should be true, but not against all experience that human testimony should be false, is virtually accepted by Christian writers as true in its application to all alleged miracles except those related in the Bible. But philosophical reasoning, and principles of abstract truth, know nothing about the Bible. If Hume's, or any other man's, abstract reasoning proves that a miracle is from its very nature incredible now, it proves that it has always been incredible, no less so two thousand years ago than it is to-day.

The question is not whether the phenomena of Spiritualism, as they are reported to us, are true – we care very little about them; but whether the philosophy which rejects them. without investigation, as being in their very nature incredible, is the true philosophy. Is there within the reach of our human reason any just foundation for the a priori conclusion that it is a thing utterly incredible that man should under any circumstances have communication with an unseen spiritual world? This is the real question at issue in the discussions which Mr. Mountford has been carrying on with great ability