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vagrant spirits. The former lifts souls into rational and filial communion with God; the latter empties them of the divine prerogative of personality, until they boast of being as much the passive tool of another's will as the wooden table is the tool of the force that moves it. The former rids the Pythian maiden of the convulsive divination that came at her owner's mercenary bidding, and calms her shattered nerves by the peace of a divine faith; the latter encourages her trances and ravings, as if their strangeness and disorder were the measure of their worth, and the heats of a fever were better than the quiet glow of health. Far more than we are apt to think, from our too materialistic point of view, are we indebted to Christianity for its treatment of the more passive side of our being, for its safeguard against noxious communications, and for its nurture of true sensibilities.

We do not believe that any theory of divine favor has gone too far in its estimate of the Gospel as a gift of grace, and of the soul as depending upon this grace. The theories that have brought the passive side of the soul and the gracious side of the Gospel into disrepute have erred, not by largeness, but by smallness, not by exaggerating divine grace, but by limiting its sphere. We quarrel less with Augustine than with Pelagius, less with Edwards than Whitby, in their claims of gracious assistance to the soul. All spiritual life begins and continues in receptivity. The will never acts without being acted upon. All grace and all truth that are received into its sensibilities are ready to act upon and with the will, and its freedom lies, not in rejecting their influence, but in following it gladly, and so making God's law its own life. The true fall of man is in his never having truly risen; and it was to bring on the true rising, that God's grace and truth were shed upon the world's slumbering sense, and the word received in waiting faith was to go forth with working power.

Evidently, then, a generous view of the worth of the sensibilities of the soul tends to vindicate the importance of the active powers. The larger and higher the scale of the soul's sense of whatever is lovely, true, and good, the larger and higher is the scale of duty and the call for force of will. The first dawn of moral agency and the maturest fruits of heroic

virtue illustrate this tendency, and show the close relation between the passive impressions and the active impulses. The eye and the ear first learn their power by impression from light and sound, and every morning ray that falls upon our eyelids, and stirs our active powers into life, repeats the great covenant between the waiting sense and the active will. It is the essential aim of the judicious student of the soul to carry out into every sphere the spirit of this covenant, and to complete and crown every worthy impression by worthy desires and purposes. The nerves themselves teach the need of uniting the two functions of sensibility and action, by the union of the sensitive and voluntary fibres in their own organization, a union which symbolizes the law of healthy mental economy. When the senses have been overstrained, and their sensibilities over-excited or depressed, what a magic power there is in a brisk walk or ride to calm their fever or dispel their sluggishness! Our social sensibilities follow the same law, and our best sentiments and impressions become poor sentimentalism, unless they go forth into healthy activity. The active will, too, can check morbid social sensibilities: and when we are giddy with some honor, or moody under some slight, to put our hand to the next duty brings our giddiness down to the level of sobriety, or quickens our moodiness into good cheer. The spiritual pulses share in the same economy; and undue religious excitement, whether sanguine or gloomy, works off its heat or its chill in the genial air and exercise by doing something for God and humanity. Action concentrates and strengthens, while sensibility dissipates and softens, the mind; and by the union of the two, the true balance of our being is preserved, all the sensations and perceptions are carried out into worthy desires and efforts, and the rational freedom of our sacred personality is secured by the harmony of true sense with good-will.

By such activity, the will vindicates its force, and establishes the inviolableness of its personality towards the uniMoreover, the will reacts on the senses, and by the strength and order of its volitions it mightily educates the whole range of sensibilities. The habit of the will decides

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the objects which are to be most frequently presented to the consciousness, and has much to do with deciding the spirit in which they are contemplated; for although, for example, we cannot well help seeing what is before our eyes, we are very likely to have before our eyes what we have been looking after, and are apt to look upon this matter according to the general purpose of our conduct. So the will educates the senses, by teaching them the perspective of its own practical tactics, and puts new life into them by the tonic energy · of its own personal vitality. As the will becomes more truly alive, it breathes its life into the understanding, until both are seen to flow from the same living fountains, and moral freedom and rationality are functions of the same sacred personality, the two wings of Psyche, that beat from the pulses of the same Pneuma and waft her to her divine Eros. In all the higher offices of the soul, both functions so blend as not to be distinguished, as in the thought or imagination, the inspiration or heroism, in which the inmost spirit of the man comes out, invigorating every sense with its fire, and brightening every volition with its light.

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The fully developed will is essentially free. Its freedom is in its character or quality, not in its circumstances or relations. The practical view of the soul brings to naught the disputes of both antagonists, the determinists and indeterminists; for it shows that true freedom, instead of being slavishly determined by circumstance, shows its liberty in acting upon circumstances, and, instead of being undetermined by circumstances, is bound by its own free rationality to follow their seasonable and practical leadings, bound, too, to act according to the interior necessity of its own spiritual nature, which nature is perfect freedom. So the soul is freest when most obedient, and the man of truly wise and good will unites in his personality the elements of freedom and rationality. He does not part with his personal freedom before nature or man, nor even before God. When in his attitude of deepest humility, as in prayer, least of all can he abjure the living soul, made in the image of the Father.

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The practical study of the soul meets the difficulty of reconciling free will with divine grace, and shows that true

freedom rises as divine grace is won. Here indeed is a region of mystery in the sources of our volitions, such as we found before in the sources of our impressions. Many of our volitions come of themselves, without conscious effort of will, and without any perceptible cause in any impressions upon the sense. The will, like the sensibility, opens into or from an unknown shrine, and there is a mystical element about heroic action, as about intellectual and spiritual enthusiasm. In religion there is a theurgic mysticism, or mysticism of the religious will, as there is a theopathetic mysticism, or mysticism of the affections. The best things that men do are surprises to themselves; he is a poor student of history and life who does not acknowledge the existence of a hidden well of moral force, as well as of intellectual inspiration. Let the mystery of its nature be acknowledged, and whether an occult faculty of the soul or secret grace of God, or both a faculty and a grace, we are to seek its blessing by drinking the living water instead of idling with our speculative divining-rod by its brink. Great as is the mystery, it is but the same that envelops all life, whether in the senses or the will; since all life is from the unknown to the known, the unconscious to the conscious. A child's laugh, like a poet's inspiration or a hero's fire, springs from a source wholly unknown except by its fruits, a source as little fathomable as the essence of life itself.

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These illustrations become more clear when we consider their practical application to the habits of the soul or to its law of periodicity. The same Divine wisdom which combines the centripetal and centrifugal forces of our globe into the resultant force that guides its revolution, combines also the two forces of our personal being in cycles or periods that establish the divine order in human life. Our existence must certainly move in cycles either for good or ill, and a wise study of man will investigate his periods, and try to time and tone them wisely. The bad man, in his round of evil habits, illustrates the law of periodicity in its inversion, and the good man rejoices in its rightful course. A child's first walk implies this great law, and a well-trained man follows it in his daily and weekly round of activity and rest.

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child makes one foot take turns with the other, and the little creature's alternate footsteps prove the benign relation between effort and repose. The mind of a well-trained man walks its round of duty and enjoyment with similar alternations. The mere active and passive states of experience relieve guard with each other, - not only in the alternation between the day's work and the night's rest, but between different states of waking life. There is a constant interchange of activities and passivities, the function that is now active soon tending to be passive, and that now passive soon tending to be active; as when overstrained nervous sensibility relieves itself by muscular action, or overtasked muscular activity delights in being refreshed by pleasant sights and sounds.

So the day and night side of the soul answer to each other, as the day and night of nature which utter their speech and show forth their knowledge. The simplest illustration of the soul's periods is borrowed from the heavens, and may well be used to elucidate the celestial law of life. A true life is that in which the senses, attracted to their central objects in the order of moral magnitude and nearness, and the will, moving on its centre in the proportion of its mass and intensity, combine their forces in one harmonious round. True to this celestial law, the being of man, like the being of the globe which he inhabits, has its true life by its orbit, and the soul, like the earth, is impressed from without, and expresses itself from within, as it moves about its central sun. God, who has given the impressible capacity and the expressive faculty, or the sensibility and the will, decrees and guides the resulting motion; and as in his grace he is present in the sensibility, and in his law present in the will, so in his providence, harmonizing both grace and law, he abides with the soul in its round of uses, and gives inspiration to its faithful march, his spirit guiding its periods like the spirit in the wheels of the prophet's vision.

A wise thinker will try to study carefully the diurnal application of the laws of life, and endeavor to form his plans of observation, meditation, labor, and recreation, so that each day shall turn his life upon its rightful axis, and give every

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