the Lord will manifest Himself, and the truths of His Word and kingdom, to certain characters but not to the world, is fully answered in the words of our text. It is, therefore, for every one to consider, whether it is best for him to live and die without any clear and assured knowledge respecting spiritual and eternal things, or to have them manifested to him by the Lord. They who think the former state to be preferred, may consistently turn from the Lord, reject His Word, determine to have none of His reproof, and confine their affections, thoughts, and studies to the world, the body, and natural things, whatever may be the consequences hereafter; only let them be assured that they miserably deceive themselves, when they dream that the worst consequence will only be annihilation. But let those who deem the latter state the preferable one,—that is, to know the Lord and the momentous things of eternity and to enjoy them-(and this, brethren, I trust, is the conviction of all here present)—then let them turn from and hate all evil, study the Holy Word, elevate their affections to the one Only Lord, our God and Saviour, and keep His commandments, so as to come truly to love Him. So will our understanding and will be admissive of His wisdom and love,-the whole Godhead-the Father as well as the Son,the Lord as Divine Love as well as Divine Truth, will manifest Himself to us. We shall know with an assurance equivalent to actual sight, the nature of our God and of our own souls, and of the spiritual world for which they are destined: we shall be prepared for solid and eternal happiness; and, when called from this sublunary scene, we shall be invited to enter into the joy of our Lord.

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DISEASES.

THE secret of true life is vigorous health,-the delicious spring of all animal enjoyment, and the finest light whereby both to think and to love. Without health, the larger part of our time is at once wretched and unprofitable. Sickness, which, in its intenser degree, is disease, turns existence from a blessing into misery; it makes us 'go mourning all the day long,' and if not checked in its inroads, soon issues in the death which it foretells. True of the body, it is even more true of the soul, which has likewise its health and its ailments; and in no less intimate connection with its vitality, and happiness, and death. Far more emphatically does the ancient proverb apply to the soul than to the body,

Non est vivere, sed valere, vita.

[Enl. Series.-No. 13, vol. ii.]

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It is easy to know wherein spiritual disease consists, -as easy as to know when we are distempered physically. We are well when we feel ourselves diligent in the pursuit of intelligence, and have a conscience void of offence toward God and man,' when we are earnest to keep God's law, and thence tranquil, and sensitive to whatever is beautiful; we are sick when these conditions are absent or reversed. What sickness can be more miserable, and subversive of true enjoyment and peace, than to have a mind preyed upon by superstitions? This is why Solomon says that 'whoso findeth wisdom, findeth life;' that 'she is a tree of life to them that lay hold of her, and happy is every one who retaineth her.' It is because of the spiritual diseases that the physical ones exist; or rather, they are both of them outbirths of the same infernal cause. Whatever is good, beautiful, and enjoyable on earth and in human nature, comes of the Divine life operating primarily through heaven, or the bright and angelic part of the spiritual world; whatever is evil, offensive, and ugly, comes of the perversion of that life by the inhabitants of hell, and their malignant influences and assaults. For, that man is continually exposed to the secret and silent action of evil spirits, is no less certain than that he is blessed by the ministration of angels. It is acknowledged by all theologies;— the instigation of the devil,' which is only a conciser way of expressing it, is a phrase of every court of justice in the land. The degree in which a man becomes a victim to these influences, is of course determined by his reliance or otherwise on the Divine aid, which alone can repel them. Under the law of correspondence, the principles and circumstances of the infernal regions are played forth even objectively, or in visible shapes and phenomena. Earth holds not only the dim shadows of things celestial; there are pictures of infernal ones as well. 'In nature,' says a great and religious writer, 'the existence of Hell seems to me as highly declared as that of Heaven. It is well for us to dwell with thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine: but the blasted heath, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into weakness,-have these no language for us?'* Disease belongs to the same dark catalogue. In its moral forms, it is directly inseminated and sustained by evil spirits, the door to their agency being the 'fallen nature' inherited from our parents and ancestors: its physical forms appear among us, because of the universal and immutable ordinance that all things and conditions spiritual, shall result * Ruskin, Stones of Venice, vol. iii. p. 138.

into material representatives. Proximately, these latter are induced by infraction of the laws of the physical world. Though all such afflictions are referable, ultimately, to the providence of God, yet it is no direct supernatural influence that casts a man into rheumatism or fever, but carelessness of something purely natural. This is the immediate cause of physical suffering; else man would not be the free agent that he is, in matters of health and self-protection. It by no means follows, accordingly, that because of their common origin, the spiritual and the physical forms of any given disease shall coëxist in the same person. It is in the total of the world and its inhabitants,-some experiencing the spiritual, others the physical, that the representative fulfilment is effected. Physical disease visits the most virtuous, if they neglect to take sanitary precautions; and the man who attends to them, though he be a thief and a liar, probably has not a day's sickness in his lifetime.

The physical laws were the same to Adam as to ourselves. Had he fallen from a tree, would he not have been bruised? Had he trodden on a sharp flint, would he not have bled? Would he not have been drowned, had he fallen into the Hiddekel or the Pison? Or, supposing him to have kindled a fire, would he have been insensible to its heat? and if sensible, and he approached too near, would he not have been burned? So with all the other relations of man's body to external nature, and the laws which govern them. Wherever neglect of the physical laws brings on disease now, it would have brought it on with our first parents. There was disease in the world ages before Adam was placed upon it; for wherever there is animal and vegetable life, disease, like death, is inevitable,-not that animals and vegetables become diseased through neglect of the physical laws, because they are unconscious of them.

Connected thus intimately, it follows that the best and shortest way to diminish physical disease, is to strive to diminish that which is spiritual; seeing that wherever there is most scope afforded for underlying spiritual forces to express themselves, the physical outbirths of those forces will most abound. So long as mankind surrender themselves willingly to the malignant seductions of infernal spirits, thereby opening the way for aggravation and extension of spiritual disease, so long will physical disease continue in full force. The principle is daily becoming verified. Before the advance of civilisation, though the names, and thence the apparent diversities of disease, are multiplying, disease itself is steadily decreasing.* As arts and sciences, social economy and refine* See Marx and Willis, On the Decrease of Disease effected by the Progress of Civilisation. 1844.

ment, move onwards,-all these things being essentially connected with moral or Christian advance,-the means are increased by which life is defended, and pain alleviated. While knowledge is power, it is also bodily health. How much more, then, may be anticipated from the direct warfare with the very fundamental causes of disease carried on by the extension of religious principle and motive,-in other words, from the gradual evangelization of the world. Intelligence assails disease proximately, becauses it teaches what are the physical laws of health, and the implicit obedience they require; improvement in morals helps to subvert its very basis.

The miracles performed by our Lord consisted chiefly in healing, for the very reason that bodily diseases represent the more awful ones of the soul which it was the object of his life and death in the flesh to remove. 'Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness, and all manner of disease among the people.' Every cure which he wrought represented the liberation of the soul from some particular kind of moral evil, or some specific intellectual error. 'Bless the Lord, O my soul,' says the psalmist, 'who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases.' Thus were the miracles in question performed not merely as indications of a Divine power to command, but as media of spiritual instruction. To the more intelligent Jews who witnessed them, they must have been wonderfully significant, seeing that an especial function of their Scriptures-the Old Testament of our Bible -and of the entire ritual of their religion, had been to train them to look for lessons of spiritual wisdom in things physical and objective. Under this discipline, the love of signs and wonders became eminently characteristic of the Jewish mind, as a taste for philosophic speculation and discussion, was peculiarly distinctive of the Greek; so that, from disposition as well as habit, they must have been prepared-or at least the pious and better part, who had eyes to see-to perceive in those acts of divine cure the benignest and most godlike of promises. No man rightly appreciates the miracles who does not interpret them after the same manner. That such is the true and the prescribed intent of the miracles, is shewn by the very word used to denote them, which is almost uniformly onμeîov, 'sign,' implying that they are to be regarded as significant, i.e. significant of something interior to and higher than the bare, physical performance. The value of a thing is always in proportion to its significance,-to the truth which it representatively teaches; and significance alone can establish value. The spectacle of the world is the grand, permanent source of sound and sublime instruc

tion which we find it, entirely by virtue of its significance. As the chief effect of female beauty depends on expression, so the beauty of the material universe comes of our being able to perceive in it the expressive characters of Divine intelligence and love. When, in daily converse, we would speak of a thing as utterly worthless, we say that it is insignificant,-it teaches nothing but what we see in its blank outline. When, occasionally, the miracles are termed repara, 'wonders,' it is intended to chronicle the awe and astonishment excited in the beholders; when termed dvvapers, mighty works, it is a substitution, by metonymy, of the cause for the effect, to intimate the agency present.

Next to their significance, the glory of these miracles is their harmony with nature. Miracles are not, as many suppose, at variance with nature, but only with unexpanded notions about nature. It is a first principle of true philosophy that events, apparently the most unnatural and incompatible, admit, nevertheless, of classification, when taken into some higher synthesis,-that in the long run, everything is referable to law. Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every 'general law' is only a particular fact of some more general law, presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no finally enclosing wall. The principle which to-day seems circumferential, to-morrow appears included in a larger. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end, but that every end is a new beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon." Physical science is continually revealing, or at least pointing to such higher, more comprehensive, laws, within which the familiar ones are contained; and miracles, however widely they may be at variance with the ordinary course of things, come under a law which comprises both themselves and the daily phenomena which surround us, a law of which the sight is not withheld from the inquirer. The contentment of the world in general with the light they possess, is no reason with the Fountain of Wisdom for withholding enlarged supplies from those who ask for more. Darkness, for the most part, is not so much the darkness of night to an eye that is open,' as of day to an eye that is closed' in indifference. Everything is a miracle when for the first time witnessed; it is our ignorance of the cause of the phenomenon which gives it the miraculous aspect. Gaining clearer knowledge, we refer it to its place. Though there are thousands of things not yet understood, he would be a bold man who would enumerate what things are absolutely incomprehensible. With every step upwards in intelligence, we learn to think more of the