ing how the babe is trained a felon; nor the evidence of philantropists who have entered the dens of vice, that they might rescue the young from destruction; nor to explore yourselves the pestilent recesses of our towns: rather shun such contamination, but reflect upon what unavoidably comes under your observation; and, above all, allow no false theory to hinder you from endeavouring to ameliorate their condition. If it is said that such evil is irreconcilable with the providence of a gracious God, I answer, that man is responsible for what he has power to remedy; and, as no man liveth to himself alone," he must bear, to some extent, that of his brother's condition; and dare not answer the Almighty, when He asks, "Where is thy brother' - in what condition doth he lie? "I know not; am I my brother's keeper?" 66 If the world's regeneration be a task too great for one, let all help. Let us strive to attain the highest degree of perfection, and work hopefully and perseveringly, for God will work with us. While vice is not only opposed to God, but to all the laws by which He governs the universe, they all conspire to advance virtue and truth. Is not knowledge power? and virtue beautiful, pleasant, and healthful? While vice is selfish, is not virtuous love diffusive and attractive? While the practice of vice makes a man detestable to others, does not a life of virtue endear him to those around him, and make even his memory precious? Blessed with these advantages, if we are earnest in our onward progress, we shall require no miracle to make us prosper. And if we continue faithful to the end, we shall join the celestial choir in singing—“Not unto us, O Lord, but unto Thy name give the glory, for Thy mercy and Thy truth's sake." G. C. Edinburgh. THE TWO WORLDS, THE VISIBLE AND THE 1. In surveying the forms and aspects of external nature, contemplative minds have ever felt, that within those forms there lies something more than is beheld by the corporeal eye; something more than is even appreciable by it. There is a sense of something suggested, not seen; a kind of soft whisper to the spirit, that there are secrets lying hidden beneath the surface, far more beautiful and delicious than any information that may be collected from above. There is a consciousness, moreover, of some mysterious affinity and sympathy between the human soul and the objects which surround us-a consciousness of some rare and electric medium of association, which makes friends and companions of them, though, for anything the senses can discern, what that fair bond may be is wholly undiscoverable. -- 2. When reduced to shape, perhaps the proofs that such impressions and persuasions are not mere whims of fancy, but are really and justly felt, and consequently that they bespeak truths, will be found to be three, namely, the proof yielded by the structure of language; the proof which lies in the wide-spread and untaught conviction of these har monies; and, in reference to the second point, the proof yielded by the wonderful enjoyment which man derives from the contemplation of the physical world. 3. First, then, it is by virtue of a spontaneous belief in these properties and relationships of nature, that we invariably go thither for language to express the phenomena and movements of our inner being. There is an instinct perpetually active in us, to the effect that we may always confide in the help of nature, when we would speak of our thoughts and our emotions. If individuals among us be unconscious of it, it is simply because it has become so much a matter of course that we take no notice of it. Circumstances of daily occurrence, however great and splendid, soon cease to be regarded with attention. Hence arise, however, all the terms in which we speak of the operations of intellect, as reflection, consideration, &c. (which are correspondences of acts performed in the physical world), together with all those charming and vivid metaphors in which we allude to the warmth' of our affection, the blossoms' of hope, the 'springs' of happiness, the 'sweetness' of our beloved's smiles. 4. The wide-spread conviction of these harmonies is testified by the poets and philosophers, who are the spokesmen and amanuenses of mankind in general. Homer, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and a host of others, perpetually allude to it in verse. Plato, Lord Bacon, Chalmers, Foster, with a hundred more, might be quoted as speaking of it in their prose. Take, as a single instance, Sir Thomas Browne::- "This visible world," says he, "is but a picture of the invisible. Things are not truly seen, but in equivocal shapes, as in a portrait; and counterfeiting some more real substance, which is contained within their fabric." 5. It is, however, not only among the writers in connection with philosophy and poetry (which, by the way, in their central essence, are the same), that we find this conviction announced. As shown by a celebrated lecturer, all the men who have been greatest in the application of art and science, have been distinguished by their clear understanding that their art or science was but the outward rendering of invisible truths. Art and science are not things laid on the surface of society. They are outbirths from its interior quality; just as the verdure of the fields is not a carpet laid down and spread over them, but an outvegetation of hidden seeds. The soliloquies of thoughtful minds cannot but end in such conclusions. 6. It may be well to advert also to the numerous Scriptural statements which involve the idea. They are of many kinds, but we need quote but one; namely, the class of expressions wherein the Lord calls himself the true light, the true vine, and the giver of the true riches. All these passages necessarily imply that material light, the gardener's vines, and the monarch's riches, are not the genuine ones, but the representative or emblematic. 7. The proof that there is a just impression among men as to the visible world being only one side, or one aspect of the actual universe, is furnished, as above said, by the wonderful enjoyment which man derives from contemplating nature. It is impossible for things to be really loved and enjoyed, unless there be an adequate perception of them. Mind alone can furnish this perception. The lovely forms of nature are complete nonentities where the rational or intellectual faculty is debased and stultified; and where not bestowed at all, as in the lower animals. However exquisite the organs of the senses, 'eyes have they, but they see not; ears have they, but they hear not.' As finely and tersely expressed by Epicharmus, νους ὁρᾶ καὶ νους ἀκονει· τ' ἄλλα κωφὰ καὶ τυφλά. ""Tis mind alone that sees and hears: all things beside are deaf and blind.” 8. On the other side, it is equally impossible for mind to love and enjoy, unless there be something in the thing loved, that shall act by a species of reciprocity. Accordingly, as it is solely through the possession of mind that man, for his part, is capable of deriving enjoyment from nature; so it can only be from the circumstance of material objects containing an analogue of mind, that they, for their part, are capable of giving him enjoyment. This analogue of mind in the lower things of the material world, is not to be supposed to share anything in common with the human intellect. That doctrine we leave to Empedocles. It consists in those secret qualities or essences which alone can render material objects approachable by the lofty and ethereal substance we call our understanding, seeing that the laws and properties of matter and of spirit are perfectly separate and distinct, and that as it is only matter that can act upon matter, so it can only be spirit that can influence spirit. 9. But what are these occult essences? Whence has arisen in the minds of reflective men this settled conviction, that the things we see around us are no more than the dress or attire of a kind of souls which they inclose? Clearly there is something more than can be seen. What may that something be? 10. To arrive at a satisfactory solution of this query, it will be well to commence by asking, What is the true theory of creation? For this will prove to be the axis upon which everything else will turn. Did God, when he made the world, mould it out of "nothing"-append laws to it for its governance, set it in motion, and then retire from the majestic work? Or, is our earth, together with the countless other earths that populate space, an actual emanation from Himself, from His own Divine corporeity, and, therefore, as closely resting on Him now as in the beginning? 11. That all things were created out of "nothing," is usually regarded as the view that we ought to hold, if we would be orthodox. But, unfortunately for its friends, it is opposed, not only to science and common sense, but to Scripture itself, where it is plainly taught, in the Greek of St. Paul, that "out of" God are all things. (é avrov, Romans i, 20.) Besides, if all things were created out of nothing, that is, out of pure space, to nothing they could return; a declension shown by science to be impossible. It is no use to reply, that "all things are possible with God." Only those things are possible with the Divine, which are conformable to his own order,-heaven's first law. Even the Bramins have a better idea than this. They say the Creator is like a mighty spider, who, out of himself, spun the web of the universe. 12. The idea of the world having been created out of "nothing," has been satisfactorily shown to have originated in the fifth century of the Christian era, when it was thought necessary, by certain of the fathers, to neutralize by a tremendous and authoritative dogma, once for all, the popular but pernicious doctrine bequeathed by Aristotle, that the world had No beginning. For it was but natural for the Aristotelians to ask, "If God, as you say, made the world, of what did He make it?" The fathers were not prepared to say. They set forth, accordingly, that it was made from that which has neither parts nor properties, nor any possible capacity for being converted or moulded into shape, and from which nothing ever did or can proceed. All such blind substitutes for consistent and useful views must in time give way. Meanwhile, it is equally droll and pitiable to observe, how pertinaciously those who are pledged to the past, the whole past, and nothing but the past, seek ever and anon to galvanize effete follies into a mock and bloodless vitality. 13. More rational than such a notion, we conceive to be the doctrine that God, in the infinite past, undulated from Himself out-breathings of His own divine substance, which gradually becoming more and more dense in their recession from Him, eventually formed the worlds and their apparel.* It is impossible for anything to be, and yet not exist as mind, before it can exist as matter. Light, for instance. "Let there be light," was a Divine volition having reference to a preexisting form in the Divine mind. Such volition must otherwise have been devoid of meaning, and unproductive of any result. The same with the creative fiats of man, trees, flowers, animals, birds, the sea, mountains, the stars, and everything else which enters into the composition of the visible universe, including every line of beauty, and every touch of harmony. God thought them, and then sent them forth as essences, spiritual at the first, but finally expressed in a material clothing, the material being separated from the spiritual expression in a discrete degree. The constructive acts of God's image upon earth, namely, man as an inventor and framer, are of precisely the same nature, only that they are finite. Before any product of the artist's pencil, the author's pen, or the sculptor's chisel, is thrown into objective existence, it is created, matured, and produced, as a mental thing. * This is beautifully imaged in what chemistry shows to be the constitution of all, even the most solid, matter, aëriform or gaseous fluids being doubtless the primary elements of all visible substance. Man himself is only the temporary consolidation of a small quantity of atmosphere. What even are the words which fall from the lips of one who speaks to us, but the physical depictions or fulfilments of the invisible ideas in his mind? This, in brief, is the universal law both of genesis and of exode. 14. (It is not to be supposed that the Divine emanations, after being thus sent flowing forth, were left to themselves, and thus to an independent existence. Such a theory would be a fitting partner for the Epicurean one of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Whatever has proceeded from the Divine mind as a creation, retains for ever, by influx, the Divine life which animated and filled it at the first. It is quite a mistake, therefore, to suppose that God having made the world, retired from it. If He did not continually infuse Himself into it, as a flowing stream, it would that instant cease to exist. It requires as much life, says Emerson, for conservation, as for creation.) 15. By virtue, then, of this outflowing from the Deity of causative essences, or the essential forms of things in their spiritual actualities, the atmosphere immediately surrounding him,-the earliest sphere, that is, of his Divine effluence,-is a universe of the souls of things. This is the SPIRITUAL WORLD, which may be described, accordingly, as made up of the projections of the Divine mind, in their youngest and most heavenly state. By reason of his presence as its centre, it is full, and yet for ever replenishing with new supplies of those projections. By reason of his Divine attribute of Omnipresence, it is infinite in extent; and by reason of his immortality, it can never end. None, even of its slenderest objects, can ever die or become emaciate; while to their beholders, that is to say, the population of the spiritual world (which consists of the souls or spirits of mankind denuded of their temporary flesh, and of whose number we ourselves shall some day be), they appear with all the beauty and distinctness that material things do to men on earth; and with infinitely more, because in the spiritual world things are viewed as they really are, whereas here we see only their effigies or likenesses. The possessions of those who have preceded us as travellers to the spiritual world are the first-born and immortal spring-blooms of God's mind. Our possessions are but evanescent pictures of them; and so long as we remain here, we shall see nought else. In the spiritual world again, as it is the grand and unbounded repertory of causative essences, there is of necessity an infinitely greater variety of shape and beauty than is beheld on earth; for our little planet is the outer covering of a very minute portion of the world of souls or essences; and hence we have but a few detached sketches of the panorama which inhabits there: and what few we have (albeit they are so lovely), we see "as through a glass darkly." 16. The spiritual world comprises not only the essences of all things other than man, but all that makes up the reality of man himself, even while he is a lodger in the flesh. So long as his time-life endures, he is, however, unconscious that he is an inhabitant of the spiritual world, because his material or corporeal livery associates and identifies him with the material one. And for the same reason, he enjoys none of its privileges. Still, as to his soul, or inner being, man is as truly an inhabitant of the spiritual world, from the first moment of his existence, as |