belie your thought, if I charged you with making deities of finite objects, whether stones and trees, or suns and stars, or men and women. Just as grossly do you misrepresent the Christian theist when you charge him with worshiping a creature when he worships Christ. He forewarns you that while he sees Jesus the perfected man, finite, suffering, dying, he sees also the Eternal Word; that same Power which you see in nature. He sees it no longer dimly, nor as a dumb and unconscious force, but clothed in all the attributes of Divine Fatherhood and of our own humanity in infinite degree; coming into the world through a more perfect and open way than that of nature in order to take men's spiritual burdens upon himself, purify his child and raise him up to the divine communion. This is what he worships in Christ. He no more worships a finite and suffering man when he worships God in Christ, than you worship stones, trees and mountain, when you worship God in nature. But in a man, finite and suffering, yet unstained by sin, in a humanity not partial and one-sided, but in complete and majestic proportions, he has access to the Godhead in his warm glories and his forgiving and cleansing love, such as you can never have through material nature, nor yet in a humanity foul with the stains of moral corruption.

As between Unitarianism as Channing held it and Trinitarianism as Stuart held it, plainly the controversy ought to cease. Not that by any means they are one and the same. But both tend to a sublimer unity in the mind and heart of Christ when artificial distinctions have fallen down. Channing's prime objection to creeds was that they come between the disciple and his Lord, and so are a hindrance to progress. He believed that Christianity as yet had been but half-apprehended; that orthodox and heterodox alike were in the beggarly elements, and that their true progress lay not away from Christ but towards him, as out of wintry desolation towards the solstice of summer warmth and verdure. He worshiped God in Christ, at least in his latest meditations, as much as any orthodox monotheist could possibly do, for in his last public utterance, which has been called the swan-song

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of a son of Light, he shows clearly that he had full faith in the hypostatic union, "the fullness of Divinity" in Christ, though he believed it a doctrine too vast and mysterious to be packed into our human formulas.

"All the doctrines of Christianity," he says, "are more and more seen to be bonds of close, spiritual, reverential union between man and man; and this is the most cheering view of our time. Christianity is a revelation of the infinite, universal, paternal love of God towards his human family, comprehending the most sinful, descending to the most fallen, and its aim is to breathe the same love into its disciples. It shows us Christ tasting death for every man, and it summons us to take his cross, or to participate of his sufferings in the same cause. Its doctrine of immortality gives infinite worth to every human being, for every one is destined to this endless life. The doctrine of the 'Word made flesh' shows us God uniting himself most intimately with our nature, manifesting himself in a human form, for the very end of making us partakers of his own perfection."

When the denominations have done with the human creeds, and trust alike to "the Word made flesh," they will meet together, not by any compromise of opinions, but in the due course of Christian progress, not on any field of past controversy, but on those higher planes of thought where the beams of truth once refracted and separated, are gathered and reunited into one ray of white light which reflects the sun in his original brightness. No people ever received Jesus Christ as presented in the New Testament history, in a discipleship clear of all human trammels, without being drawn into higher and higher unity with him. Theologians are evanescent and soon pass away. But the Word of God remains. A church founded upon it—such as Channing dreamed of and prayed for, fettered by no human interpretations, but gathered only around him in whom the fullness of Divinity dwells, has all the future for its inheritance with none of the effete dogmas of the past it may grow forever into the more perfect form and body of Christ till he lives in all its functions: its differences will be only as surface waves, while its unity of spirit will be as the deep, still currents beneath.

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HUME AGAIN AND HUXLEY.

BY WILLIAM MOUNTFORD.

By Thomas

LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS. Henry Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S. 1871. Modern unbelief, spiritually, is a difficult subject to deal with, because of its being a thing of temper rather than of logic. It arises from mistiness of vision, and not from definiteness of perception. It is the disease of a mind disproportionately informed, and which has attended too little to the history of the world, spiritually, in comparison with the eagerness with which it has minded the surrounding world, for its connections with the eye, the ear, the stomach, and with those sciences which help as to measurement and classification. And as to this epidemic of unbelief, it is a great gain when an eminent sufferer explains how there is certainly nothing to see, because of his being blind himself. For, on the subject of miracles, a scoff at the Old Testament is not an argument, however witty it may be accounted. And an unbeliever has no right to criticise the Bible, if he knows no more of pneumatology than most men do; just as a Choctaw would not do well to laugh at the Principia of Newton, merely because of his being able to spell in it, like a hornbook, and see only nonsense.

I. David Hume is alive again, for thinkers, in the person of Dr. Huxley. As to Hume's argument on the subject of the supernatural, the modern scientist is a zealot. But he says he is not a materialist any more than he is a spiritualist; because, as he says, he does not know what really matter is, any more than anybody else knows what spirit is. But if really he does not know what matter is, by what logic can he say that the miracles of the Scripture never happened, because of what commonly are called the laws of matter? For if he does not know what matter is, he certainly does not know all about it, and about what is possible or impossible with it.

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As Huxley does now so did Dr. Priestley speculate more than eighty years ago on the possibility of the particles of matter, being the meeting-points of forces. But for all that, he called himself a materialist in philosophy. But Huxley says that he is himself neither a materialist nor a spiritualist. Though he says that nothing will prove to be true, but what has been found amenable to the laws and methods of science. There was a party which had a name of their own, once, at Jerusalem, and which said that there is "neither angel, nor spirit." Evidently Dr. Huxley would anticipate that the Sadducees will prove to have been right. But luckily his logic in that direction, is not good.

The argument of Hume, as to miracles, and Hume working again through Huxley as he never could have done, in his own lifetime these are not the affairs of merely a few people curious about metaphysics. The atmosphere of thought has become so highly electric, that a plausible error like Hume's afloat in it, is like poison, for every mind everywhere. Unitarians may suffer from it, first and most; but if it is left unchecked, the Methodists in the backwoods, earlier or later, will have faith fail them. A miracle of either the Old Testament or the New is of no great importance to me, merely as an old chronicled occurrence; but it is of infinite worth, in illustration of my nature, as connected with a world invisible, and with agencies and laws, which are awaiting me, to live by, hereafter.

Hume writes thus,-"As a uniform experience amounts to a proof; there is here a direct and full proof from the nature of things against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior." This proposition has been the bugbear of the theological world; and with the way, in which it has been worked in Boston, there has been a good deal of effect and notoriety. And yet it is a gross fallacy; which for detection needs only to have those words minded" uniform experience." For justifying the purpose of the proposition, "uniform experience" should mean the experience of all men in every age; or, at least, it should

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mean the experience of a perfect man, perfectly educated, and with a perfectly exhaustive knowledge of the laws of nature. For of course the uniform experience of a boy of ten years will not suffice for the purpose of the argument, nor yet that of a one-sided mind, nor yet that of an insane person.

"Oh, then," it may be said, "there is no knowing at all about anything, and no believing!" But it does not follow that because nobody can know all things; that, therefore nobody can believe anything. Oh, grand and kindly constitution of human nature, under the fatherhood of God! For, in and of himself alone, any man would be a fool or something worse. And the greatest man would be a nobody, but for the truth involved in that grand text of St. Paul's, "We, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another." It is with intercommunication of thought that man learns, and that even he learns how to learn. It is by a general trust in the intellectual atmosphere of our times, as to this thing and that, and a thousand things, that we are able to talk at all, to any good purpose. Often for a belief of great importance, there may be various reasons. And of these many reasons, one man is accounted as an expert that in regard to some, and another man is trusted for his opinion Every one members one of another" as to others. is what we really are, and are meant to be by nature, and it is just as this membership is living and trusted and loved, that human nature grows rich and strong morally, intellectually and politically; and it is just so, also, that our nature kindles and glows with the promise of immortality.

Uniform experience of nature, amounting to a proof that miracles never can have happened—it has never been had, and cannot be had. But as a matter of experience, can nature be trusted for uniformity? For as evidence concerning the possibilities of nature, what would be the experience of every man, woman, and child now living? The uniformity of nature for the last eighty years, might be presumptive evidence, but it would not be conclusive, as to what nature may have allowed a thousand years ago. The uniformity of