ships of Commerce coast all lands, and push the enterprises of trade into the remotest regions, it is discovered that religion is as universal as traffic. Here is a fact to be accounted for; and we are safe in the position that it can be in no other way explained, than as the result of a religious tendency in man, which belongs to his nature, and is a part of himself.

The forms under which this religious principle shows itself are exceedingly various; yet here again it follows the analogy of the human constitution in other respects. It may be dwarfed, stunted, enfeebled, as in the case of the worldling; distorted in all its developments, as in the idolater; a howling wilderness of folly, as in the fanatic; or a fair and noble growth of all the virtues, as in the truly religious man. Yet, just so is it with all the essential qualities of human character. What is a due and needful spur to exertion in one, is in another that "vaulting ambition" which seeks spheres of honor or emolument high above what other men attain. The wise and noble emulation of one great Athenian, became in another the restless craving that would not permit him to sleep. The worthy aim of a well-regulated mind, to which the prizes of wealth appeal only with a moderated force, is in another mind a worldling's greedy thirst, or a miser's devouring hunger. We do not say that the essential principle, whose developments are so various in some respects, is in all cases of the same original strength. Every man has his own battle, and what to one is a friendly arm of help, may be to another, by its undue intensity, the raised and armed hand of an enemy. Yet it is true that men everywhere are of "like passions," and in their virtues and vices, their good and bad qualities, are constituted a brotherhood by the same power that gave to them a nature essentially the same in every age, and under every sky. Thus the religious principle is one, wherever we see it, though varying, exceedingly, in the forms under which it is manifested.

It will be understood that, in speaking of the religious tendency, or element, we carefully distinguish it from the effects wrought in the soul by the regenerating power of the

Word and Spirit of God. We simply claim that God has made it impossible for any man, whatever his condition, to be absolutely irreligious. It is true, that to individuals of a certain class, we sometimes apply this epithet; yet in its absolute sense, it is never truly applicable. Why is it that professed unbelievers show, in respect to religion, an impatience in argument, a sensitiveness to opposition, an intemperance of language which they scarcely ever manifest in treating ordinary subjects? Is it not because they are consciously in the wrong, and more than suspect that in opposing Christianity they have engaged themselves to a desperate enterprise? Was it not some such influence as this that pointed the smooth and facile pen of Gibbon with such sharp satire, whenever, in his History, he had occasion to speak of the Christian Religion or its advocates? And was it not this same ineradicable religious sense that found expression in that declaration of Hume, "If I were a believer in Christianity, I would stop every man I met, and warn him to take care of his soul?" or in that outburst of the blasphemer, Thomas Paine, "Were I compelled to receive the doctrine of a future life, it would make me the slave of terror?" And when the French infidel cries out as he dies, "O, Galilean, thou hast conquered!" does not this most painfully suggest how, having fought all his life the hard battle of unbelief, he has lost it at last? This religous sentiment, too, became an avenging law of nature in Caligula, that wicked Roman Emperor, who, though more unbridled and profane in his contempt of Deity than almost any other named in history, yet was accustomed to tremble like a very slave at every indication that a retributive Providence rules on earth. Well said John Calvin, that "the most audacious contemners of God, are most alarmed, even at the falling of a leaf. They try every refuge to hide themselves from the Lord's presence, and to efface it from their minds, but their attempts to elude it are all in vain. Though it may seem to disappear for a moment, it presently returns with increased violence; so that if they have any remission of the anguish of their conscience, it resembes the sleep of persons intoxicated, or subject to frenzy, who enjoy

no placid rest while sleeping, being continually harassed with horrible and tremendous dreams.”

The simple children of nature, unskilled in the arts of sophism and subterfuge, and aware of no reason why they should try to stifle the religious sense within them, are never irreligious. Led astray by the most outrageous errors they may be, degraded in all their ideas of God and of the worship he requires, but irreligious they never are. And whenever these or others are brought at length under the direct influence of the truth in religion, every process of their minds with reference to that truth, shows that God has prepared the soul antecedently to receive his revelations. It is then seen to be with religious truth as with every other; it finds in the soul a sense to which it is adapted. As the light has prepared for it an eye to be filled with its beam, and a sense of sight to be gladdened by it, so truth, of whatever species, finds that intelligent nature to which its lessons are addressed, furnished with the endowments suitable to its appropriate entertainment. And as there are varieties of truth, so are there different and adapted faculties. Mathematical truth does not address the imagination; neither are matters of taste or criticism decided by the same operation of mind that measures triangles, or solves the problems of Algebra. Religious truth is like every other. It has prepared for it a religious sense, and a religious faculty.

These statements, let it be observed, are all apart from any questions of man's native goodness, or of the measure of his moral ability. We are speaking of man as God made him; a religious being, the highest function of whose mind is to know and appreciate religious truth, and the noblest form of whose responsibility is that which calls him to perform religious duties. The God of nature has so ordered it that there shall be on earth one of his creatures gifted with ability to know and worship him. And that creature is man. It is thus God has made him; nor, in this respect, is it left in the power of any influence or combination of influences to unmake him. Blinded, besotted, misguided, he may be, and depraved he ever is, but he is still that being

whom God created with the ability to recognize the Creator in his works, and to pay him due homage.

Now, it is sufficiently apparent that a principle in human nature, such as that we have described, must not be undervalued, nor are any of its manifestations to be treated as if they were a weakness only. There is a certain element in the very lowest of these manifestations that is entitled to respect. The self-confident dealer in philosophical subtleties, who looks undaunted into the face of the greatest mysteries, nor doubts his ability to thread the avenues of even the divine secret, is not entitled to despise the simple nature of the credulous idolater who kneels before a god of stone, or adores the bloody wheels of Juggernaut. For, till he who weighs thus deliberately all truth in the balances of his reason, and laughs at credulity and faith alike, can show us that he has mastered this very impulse in his soul that compels him thus to "meddle with all wisdom," and this conviction that will not suffer him to doubt that the truth in religion is the most excellent of all truth, he must acknowledge that poor idol-worshipper as his brother, and confess that it is the self-same principle of nature which induces the one to seek saving wisdom in his reason, and the other of his dumb and deaf deities. Neither let the Christian despise the idolater. That want of the soul which Jesus fills to overflowing with the manifestations of himself which he makes to thee, O believer, is just that which the unhappy Boodhist would supply out of the vain rites of Gaudama. Despise him not; but pity him, rather, remembering that only for the Gospel thy soul had pined as bitterly and as vainly.

If, then, we place the fact we have considered in its proper relations, we cannot fail to admit that the true religion is a real want of man. They are not empty abstractions with which the Christian preacher deals; not curious problems concerning the unseen and the unearthly; not dreams of credulous minds recited in the ear of superstitious infirmity. It is not a strife of creeds, nor an effort for ascendency of contending parties, in which he mingles. It is not a mission of proselytism on which he goes forth. There is

never a beating heart on earth, but testifies to the magnitude and moment of that great interest he seeks to promote. In every age the soul of man has yearned to know that important secret which he is sent to disclose. Schools of philosophy have been established, and the world's wisest men have grown grey in the effort by means of them, to ascertain the very elements of that truth which he is commissioned to declare. Men have wasted life in pilgrimages, starved in deserts, have endured inflictions of bodily pain which we cannot think of without a shudder, have cast their offspring into the burning arms of Moloch, or into the monster-haunted Ganges, have laid themselves down before the ponderous wheels of their idol's car, have practiced, in short, the greatest conceivable ingenuity of self-torture and self-immolation, under the impulse of convictions to which the Christian preacher addresses the word of power that can still the tumult and compose all to peace. And of those who throng the world's thoroughfares of traffic, or run its gay career of pleasure, or climb its steep heights of ambition, there is not one but in his unoccupied moments has thoughts and questions that trouble him more than any of the vicissitudes of trade, or the disappointments of ambition. These great questions which in his sober moments outweigh all others,-which will often crowd from his mind. even the world's thronging cares, and make him feel the whole vast moment of that unanswered query, "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"-these are the topics of a Christian preacher's ministry. If there is a man who, in the interchanges of human life, offers to communicate a real thing, adapted to meet and supply a real necessity, it is he who has it in charge to preach on earth the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We now remark, in the second place, that the forms under which the Religious Element manifests itself, even those which are primary and original, prove that the human consciousness is on the side of true religion.

Montgomery, in his poem, "The Pelican Island," describes, near the close, the quickening power of natural beauty and grandeur on even the savage mind, under certain conditions, in raising its conceptions to that Being