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proof, he puts supreme stress on the evidence of his outward senses, whilst the light afforded by the inward sense-the inward eye is neglected or set entirely aside. He lives so much in the element of visible things, he walks so much by sight, that no room is left for faith, and it is not called into exercise; he does not imagine that as a true disciple, one who knew that the flesh profiteth nothing, he ought to employ a more sure criterion in measuring spiritual things, than that which may be applied to outward, tangible objects. His philosophy was akin to that which is never without its representatives, but which has had its highest development in modern times, according to which sensation is made the source and norm of all truth whether in the outward or inward world. According to Hume, one of its ablest representatives, the impressions which we receive of the world around us, are the exemplars of all truths, and at the same time the clearest and the most reliable evidence of truth which we can possess. As these impressions or sensations under the plastic power of the mind are formed into conceptions, images of the imagination, or pure thoughts, they lose much of their distinctness, and it becomes doubtful whether they convey to us the truth any longer. The reverse, however, of this celebrated proposition is true, if there be any such a thing as fixed and immutable truth. Our feelings and impressions in themselves, when not guided and corrected by our judgments, are most uncertain and indistinct. They are the fertile source of error and delusion, as may be seen from the history of false religions, all of which are based on mere feeling or imagination. Instead of being the norm or exemplars of truth, they are at best only the foreshadowings of truth, the rude substance by means of which truth, brighter and clearer than crystal, is elaborated in the soul. Thomas, accordingly, in his professed desire to be assured of the truth, manifests a want of spirituality and ability to grasp the truth. The most lively exhibitions which he had received of it in the life, the miracles and the death of Christ, had not as yet quickened the sensibility of his heart. The Word, by which the worlds were made, falls powerless on his mind. The predictions concerning the resurrection are forgotten, or if remembered, unheeded. He has no faith, which shows him the necessity of the Saviour's sufferings and of his subsequent resurrection and glorification. There was nothing in Christ or his work, which in his view called for either his humiliation or his exaltation. He was to him nothing more than any other extraordinary man, whom he could see and feel. The divinity that enveloped his adorable person, and shone forth in every word and work, were all lost on his dull, sensual mind, for he had scarcely seen a single beam of its heavenly lustre. With the light shining all around him, he asks for light, and because he has not the organ to perceive it, he denies its existence altogether. Most properly the teacher has occasion to chide a pupil, who had been sitting so long under his instructions, but had made so little progress in spiritual discernment.

The spirit of Thomas manifests itself in our days in various ways. It is the same as that wide-spread rationalism, which attempts to set aside the assistance of faith in religion, and throws man back upon his understanding as his only guide in the formation of his religious belief. As the mysteries of redemption cannot be comprehended by our finite un

derstandings, they are of course discarded one after another until nothing is left but the moral precepts of the gospel, if sacrilegious hands be not even laid upon these. It refuses to admit that man possesses faculties that are higher and superior to those which are active in the study and investigation of the natural world, and of course denies the reality of that communion with Christ and the spiritual world, to which the wisest and the best profess to have attained.

But as Thomas was in the church, and manifested his skepticism even in the presence of the Saviour, so it should not be thought strange, if we should meet with exhibitions of the same spirit in the same place and circumstances, in our days. When strong, primitive, world-conquering faith departs from the church, a cold, dreary rationalism takes its place; the two may be said to be in inverse proportion to each other. It could not be otherwise, for reason is the only light that remains in the soul when the light of faith disappears. As the drowning man catches after straws, so we, when our faith is too weak to retain our hold on the pillars of faith, cleave to that which gives us least support. Tossed upon the billows of infidelity, we wish that we might have lived in the time of Christ, heard him preach, and seen him perform his mighty deeds. Or possibly our desire assumes another form, and we wish to see a vision of some one from the other world, or to hear a voice from the cross with our natural ears. What is this but asking with Thomas to see the scars and to handle the body of the Christ?

As this is the condition of many in, as well as out of the church, it is doubtless owing to the providential care and solicitude of the Saviour, that provision has been made, as in the case of Thomas, by which their incredulity may be overcome. There is a large supply of books adapted to their taste, and indeed called forth by it, in which the external evidences of christianity are made particularly prominent, and in some cases to the detriment of the infernal. Works of this kind, though they may not satisfy one who is in Christ, and alive in him, under this view perform neverthelesss an important service to the cause of christianity. But blessed still is he who can believe without them, who has no need of Paley's Theology nor the Bridgewater Treatises, not only because he is saved from many misgivings, but because his faith is of a higher character, and his evidence for the truth of divine revelation of the clearest and most satisfactory kind.

A DEW-DROP FALLING.

A dew-drop, falling on the wild sea wave,
Exclaimed in fear, "I perish in this grave!"
But, in a shell received, that drop of dew
Unto a pearl of marvellous beauty grew;
And, happy now, the grace did magnify

Which thrust it forth, as it had feared, to die;
Until again, "I perish quite," it said,
Torn by rude diver from its ocean bed;
O unbelieving!-so it came to gleam
Chief jewel in a monarch's diadem.

AN EVENING WALK WITH THE CHILDREN.

BY ELIHU BURRITT.

AND the evening is beautiful! and the heavens are full of stars, mirroring their silvery faces in the snow; and the still woods are jeweled with ice-diamonds, and waiting waveless the rising moon. And the Northern Lights, like zephyrs zoned with rainbows, are waltzing on the pearly pavements of the polar sky. And the mountains look like waves of a silver sea, rising heavenward to greet the stars; and the sky like a sea of molten sapphire, with its golden tresses drooping fondly on the brow of the mountains. It is beautiful—too beautiful to shut out of our sight. Let us all go out doors and read a few paragraphs in the album of the heavens. For this firmament above is the Great Album of the Creator, and the suns are the syllables and the stars are the letters, with which he registers his handiworks. And the first man on the first evening of this new creation, looked up into the same sky-record, and tried to read the illuminated manuscript of his Maker. And the generations before the Flood gazed at these same stars and men that saw nearly the evenings of a thousand years on the earth, looked up at these same golden eyes of heaven, which now look down on us; and they called them by name, and by their light they drove their flocks to new pastures in the old world. And when the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the floods came, and a long night of darkness, the good man in the ark remembered the stars that studded the firmament in his boyhood's time, and the names they were called by among the fathers of the human race. And when the deep, black clouds rolled away, they shone out of their old places in the sky upon him, and he felt at home again, though floating over the shoreless waste of waters, without compass, chart or helm. There they were just as they were set in the sky in the morning of creation. The waters, that had washed from the earth every trace of man's existence, had not quenched one of the "lesser lights" of heaven, or moved it a hair from its place. The splendid Orion had not lost a jewel from his belt; neither the deluge nor the darkness had "loosed his bands." He walked the same king and wielded the same sceptre among the stars this evening, as in the first evening that mantled the earth. The fiery Betelguese shone with the same red brilliancy, and the sharp-eyed Rigel glowed in the left foot, a celestial diamond of the first water. There were the little Pleiades, and the great Dog-star, and the long Scorpion, trailing its gems along the southern sky: and the Eleven Stars, that the young Joseph saw in his dream; and the Seven Stars, which the firstborn child of Adam saw in his infancy. These were the home stars to Noah; they were all that was left of the drowned world, that he had seen and loved in his youth. He knew not whither the sailless, unruddered ark had borne him; the tallest mountain on the earth was buried deep beneath the waters; everything had been swept away but the stars which he had learned by name, perhaps in the tent of his grandfather Methuselah, who remembered Adam. And he felt himself at home.

Now, young friends, a deluge will never come again to bury out of sight this green, peopled world; but storms will come, and winds will come, and you may drift far away from the home of your childhood. And what makes that home? If all your relations and friends should go with you to far-off lands and live with you there, would you not have left behind a great deal of your home? Yes; you could not take with you the old home-stead; the elms and the oaks under which you played; the hills you climbed in summer to see the sun go down in the west, or in winter with your sleds; the brook that purled through the meadows; the mountains looming up in the distance like huge cushions of green velvet for the sky; the fields of alternate green and yellow, and the faroff woods. But begin now to look up into this blue world above; to make these star-fields a part of your home; to bring these glorious constellations into the circle of your acquaintance; to call them by name; to associate them with all the objects to which your home affections cling, and you may carry your home with you the world over. Orion, Arcturus, Bootes, Virgo, the celestial companions of Job, Noah, and David, will be yours, in every place and every condition; acquaintances, neighbors to your paternal homes. It may be your lot to see but a little space of the earth's surface; and to know but little more of the geography of the earth than what you learn from your map. But here you may study the geography of the heavens and see every celestial territory it describes. Without going a mile from your father's door, your eye may travel over worlds that arithmetic cannot compute nor geometry measure. Your eyes can do this, and when you have reached the extreme limit of their vision, your thoughts may go on forever into worlds beyond. Young friends, suppose you spend a half hour every bright evening out in the open air in appropriating these brilliant constellations; in bringing them within the home-circle of your acquaintance.

TO A SKYLARK.

ETHEREAL minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!

Dost thou despise the earth, where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye

Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest, which thou canst drop into at will,

Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

To the last point of vision and beyond,

Mount, daring warbler!--that love-prompted strain
('Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond)
Thrills not the less the bosom of the plain;

Yet might'st thou seem, proud privilege! to sing

All independent of the leafy spring.

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood,
A privacy of glorious light is thine;

Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of heaven and home!

THE GRASS.

PROM THE GERMAN, BY THE EDITOR.

WITH Wonderful gladness bounds my heart when I see a beautiful sod. I cannot express how I love the green grass; no plant, no flower do I love so inly, with such true joy of soul, as I do the green grass. There are times when I do not tire beholding it, refreshing my eyes and heart with it; and then I am glad that I live on the earth.

A green, grassy earth around me, and a blue heaven above me-these are my highest natural joy.

I remember how in childhood it made me happy to find grass spoken of in the Bible; and that holy book became the more precious to me when I read how God has there honored the grass. With what delight did I read: "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, and the herb yielding seed. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after its kind." Then I felt at home on the earth. How deeply also was my heart impressed by the words of our Saviour: “If God so clothe the grass of the field!" I could scarcely think of God in a more tender way, than as the kind being who clothes the grass of the field. After I felt the sweet force of that passage I could pray to Him with more confidence and love. When I read, in the history of the miraculous feeding of the multitude: "There was much grass in the place"-how this occurrence moved my heart; how I felt that the miraculous had associated itself in the most friendly way with the natural course of the world and entered the sphere of human life! It seemed to me a very important circumstance that where the divine-human Saviour walked among the people and blessed them, there was much grass; and exceedingly pleasant, it seemed to me, it must have been to the thousands who were hungry to sit down on the grass and be fed by the friend of man.

It is not merely the refreshing green, so pleasant to the eye, the color of hope, that I love in the grass. It grows so luxuriantly; and the blessings of heaven are so plainly seen in it. It exists so plentifully. Where nothing else is seen, there is still the grass-a symbol of overflowing goodness, and a pledge of every kindly gift of nature.

More than all do we see the effect upon the grass, when after a long drought, the fruitful showers begin to descend. Before all else it is green in the spring. The first green grass in warm moist places, how it rejoices the heart-this sign of regeneration and of heavenly promise! The pearly dew glistens most richly in the green grass.

The grass clothes so beautifully mother earth; even the grass makes it more maternal. Where grass grows I feel at home, even when separated from all else that is familiar to me-where no grass grows, O how desolate and cheerless! However much art and industry may do to beautify earth, the curse of God seems to rest on those spots where no grass grows. On the soft grass the weary one who has no other place of repose lies down and sinks into refreshing slumbers.

Whatever of beauty the earth possesses, my fancy ever associates

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