cult and terrible to pass. You are all the while running up a score of guilt. Wherefore God saith to thee, in a strain of grand and solemn irony-Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.

"How dangerous," says John Foster, "to defer those momentous reformations which conscience is solemnly preaching to the heart! If they are neglected, the difficulty and indisposition are increasing every month. The mind is receding degree after degree, from the warm and hopeful zone, till at last it will enter the arctic circle, and become fixed in relentless and eternal ice." Ah! thou youth of an immortal destiny, beware of thine orbit! How stands thy soul's astronomy towards God and the heavenly world?

We cannot recall the past, or renew the early seed-time of the soul, and therefore the retrospect of youth is often sad, even to the Christian in later life, whose hope of a renewed immortal youth in heaven is strong in the Redeemer. Foster says, in a strain of melancholy beauty, that it is like visiting the grave of a friend, whom we had injured, and are precluded by his death from the possibility of making him an atonement. But we may secure ourselves, by the grace of Christ, against a repetition of the evil and the injury. That mind must be hardened indeed, that can return to the pursuits of life from such visits, and still strike down one after another of the remaining opportunities of lasting happiness, or treat them with insult or neglect. Yet thus do multitudes repeat the story of the Sybil in their own experience, and the last books are the costliest and most difficult

to gain. And multitudes pass away with nothing but the avenging memories of lost opportunities to follow them; angels of mercy, struck down here, to rise in the judgment against their murderers!

Fearful is even one instance of the rejection of the offer of life eternal. How long can it be persisted in, without an interminably fatal result? If men will go on, over and over again, putting from them the cup of immortality, in every way ministering to the disease of sin, and retaining its leprosy in the soul, refusing the aid of the Great Physician, the elements of an everlasting character are all the while forming. If men will exclude the gracious influences of the Divine Spirit, and prefer their alienation from the life of God, no wonder if God at length retires from them, and leaves the completion of the sinful creature for eternity to the hands of the Master Workman, Death!

THAT which we find in ourselves is the substance and the life of all our knowledge. Without this latent presence of the I AM, all modes of existence in the external world would flit before us as colored shadows, with no greater depth, root, or fixture, than the image of a rock hath in a gliding stream, or the rainbow on a fast-sailing rain-storm. The human mind is the compass in which the laws and actuations of all outward essences are revealed as the dips and declinations.

COLERIDGE-The Friend.

'Tis not in Folly, not to scorn a Fool,

And scarce in human wisdom to do more:

All Promise is poor dilatory Man,

And that through every stage.

YOUNG.

TRUE natural philosophy is comprised in the study of the

science and language of symbols. The power delegated to nature is all in every part; and by a symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory, or any other figures of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents. Thus our Lord speaks symbolically, when he says that the eye is the light of the body. The genuine naturalist is a dramatic poet in his own line; and such as our myriad-minded Shakspeare is, compared with the Racines and Metastasios, such, and by a similar process of self-transformation, would the man be, compared with the doctors of the mechanic school, who should construct his physiology on the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF.

CHAPTER XVII.

Voices of the Summer continued-The power of habit-The difference between habit and impulse-Difference in Character while habit is forming, and when it is formed-Both the good man and the wicked satisfied from himself, by the nature of habit—Our responsibility for all our habits, of opinion, of feeling, and action.

If we inquire what is the grand impression produced by this joyous season, between what part of human life and character it bears the most striking analogy, we shall find it in the power of habit, and the heedlessness with which the process of the formation of habits is carried on. The summer of our life is the period in which moral causes are ripening and preparing for the harvest, the period in which the seeds and principles set at work, work on unto perfection. It is also the period in which an abounding richness of foliage, depth, and beauty of colors, freshness and power of life, turn away the thoughts from everything like decay, and conceal the rapid progress of the Season from report and consciousness. Not even here and there are

there any grey hairs upon Ephraim, and it seems as if the glory

and fulness of this tide of life could never cease. We sport like the butterflies around us; we throw ourselves as upon the sum mer clouds, and indolently sail away with them.