dearest disciple, no love of God with men is denial of God, and misanthro blaspheme. "Scatter all our g Well those Wesleyans write and sing. Your fellow-creatures never drop! broken whip, whom some philanthrop we must not! The victim of avarice rising from discouragement, buoyant spirit, that can lift all as the sea a chi pathos your surrender of his case. habit reform: or "stinginess is th miser once a miser forever!" If you Without God is nothing, prosperous or private discourse. Approving sym communion-bread and wine, the Lo table, but an inner board, a sacrament I am mortified; you are sorry; the pany or congregation goes mournfull out my best performance for myself. the bitter herbs, the Jews were told, over with. In that too is God, putting lion's carcass of my defeat, with wh compare, to which ovations to Grant mind, wounded, is not stabbed through charm beyond that on Achilles' body, How much God is to you, is the test beauty? Your idolatry shall cease, as folds from as a blossom, the tree of lif a bitter cup to drink to the dregs; bu truth has no bottom, or settling on the never draw it dry. God were not, were aught WITHOUT that writes with no pen, makes his m as things never satisfied, the grave, b call into court the horse-leech with its give!" There are instances more to th and pride are filled, but not love. you feed on, you cannot exhaust. It you would quench. Intercourse, conve earthly expressions and pre-supposed tent. The foiling, infatuating, uncon manifestations can disenchant. Would we withdraw from it, - it is our withdrawing-room! The shining veil of flesh-illusion falls to unfold interior feature more winning. Death cannot take it away. You fight for it with the last enemy, like Hamlet leaping into the grave. You reclaim it of God; and what but God in you, prefers the claim he allows? "I have prayed over my love," said one to his friend. "It does not need to be prayed over," was the reply. What room in the eye for the landscape, what room in the heart for the dear form to move round as it lists! "E'er in our ashes live their wonted fires: " And the live coals of age, let passionate youngsters know, have intenser heat than all the flame and sparkle of youthful fancy, in what is called first love. Yet the reasons are unknown. You love you cannot tell why, because the Why is so great; because it is God in you! REASON for loving? It is an insult to love, which suffers no basis or reason but itself. Love God, dost thou say, O John, “because he first loved us?" Nay, but by inevitable drawing! Love men, not for what they do for us, but are! Attempt to drain a pool under a hill: the water keeps coming, till we find it communicates with Lake Superior, Mount Washington, the clouds of Heaven, the everlasting sea; and empty it we never can. There is another stream, whose bed is harder yet to lay bare, the love of God, which God is, in the human soul-our personal regard issue of immense personality. "Sweetness and Light," says Matthew Arnold, as Swift said it better before. Love and Light, let me say; a burning and a shining; no such light from candle or lamp of the sun, but that they burnt first. From the fire of religion comes its illumination, else cold and dim as the phosphorus on the wall, from whose combustion even its faint tracings get their lustre. Religion, the literature of morals? Nay morals the running over of religion! Something deeper than Duty made the world. Legal obligations are like ropes that hold the ship in a storm or at the wharf, but cannot impel; or like rudimentary animal forms detached by growth. Blest to be rid of our conscience by the unfolding soul! As one said, "a conscientious angel would be a monster," so there are men and women, as Ecclesiastes saith, righteous, he meant self-righteous, over much; conscience so plenty with them, such a Cochituate, they can supply the house with their own service-pipes, and exempt the rest of us from a moral pulsation, if we will but follow their cue, as the French bishop gave a dispensation to the district when the Emperor arrived! But, if others prefer to be reflections and echoes, or to look at the sun only in an eclipse through smoked glass or stained cathredral windows, — let it be no crime in us to preserve our health by basking and working in the open day. None to be forsaken, because none without God! Spite of stories, like "Faust," of being sold to the devil, none saleable to him. He is not in funds, has not got money for the price of a soul, cannot prove property or show his title-deed; and God will never give him a quitclaim. "Don't give up the ship!" What marine record so melancholy as that fine print in the most unconspicuous part of the paper, of an abandoned vessel; and an abandoned man, or an abandoned woman -is there such a thing? an abandoned child, boy or girl? Not till we strike work in God's employ: which who can do, that looks back and sees on what brinks, through what gulfs, a better than Alpine guide has led him, and got him into debt, for which he owes, says the sacred bard, "both thanks and use." But, one may say, do what I please, it will all come out right! I can go to Heaven, if I like, round through hell. Well you can go through every bramble, thicket and swamp. We wish you joy of your journey! But, if you believe the Infinite Goodness, you cannot pervert it. When the slave said to the old Greek sage, "Was I not fated to steal," and the master answered, “yes and to be whipped," the thief had not proceeded on the ground of some theory of necessity, but of a sensual appetite, which any philosophy would have checked. As a charge of electricity guards the door against unhallowed touch, and only the wise hand, that will not be harmed, can manage the lock, so the doctrine of God's infinity and unavoidable mercy can be abused by none by whom it is understood. It is a heat-lightning of love that does not hurt. We shall never wrong, in God or man, the goodness we appreciate. Those, who may be pointed to as examples of its misuse, hold it only as letter and dogma, not in spirit and truth. I suppose Dante puts traitors into the lowest circle of his Hell, because they touch bottom of depravity. But treachery to an idea that possesses us is an impossibility. Only those without the idea, or made to stand fast by a lower rule, will fear the consequences of Heavenly vision. We do not pay, in personal safety, a price for the glory of the Higher Law. But this doctrine will also make us work. It is a gospel to be proclaimed and, as men run till they drop dead, not to publish ill tidings, but victory, so we shall be moved to communicate the grace of God. It will enable us to suffer too; for, in it, the whole of us cannot suffer, as the whole of Christ did not. He is called an infinite sufferer. But only the finite in him suffered: the Infinite was, as it must be, at peace. Not the hundredth part of Jesus suffered on the cross. How small a portion of him was the body! so we sing. We learn our lighter cross to bear : But it is not always lighter. Sin is the heaviest cross. The cross we make with our own hands, and lay on our own shoulders, is more galling than that which was borne to Golgotha; and the joy of faith in God's compassion, which creates virtue in us, will inspire patience too. It will also awaken prayer, which is not beggary for selfish favor, but climbing to God with others in our arms. A man with a bleeding heart cried, "God help me," over and over again. But by his petition, though repeated with such importunity, only a little was he soothed. Then he cried, "God help my friend," whose heart, he knew, bled like his own. At once his face was lightened. The love of God chose his love for his friend as its own channel, and bestowed, in oblivion of grief, the healing balm. Of belief that, in the divine power all is for the best, is born hope. Those, who think woe and fear indispensable motives to obedience, falsely impute to such faith the license which springs from despair, as sailors break open the wine-chest before a wreck. Invincible rectitude is twin with immortal trust. C. A. BARTOL. SONNET FROM PETRARCH. "Dolci durezze e placide repulse." GENTLE severity, repulses mild A soft-toned voice, whose accents undefiled Whether to bridle in the wayward mind Lest its wild wanderings should the pathway miss, Or else its griefs to soothe, its wounds to bind; That saved my soul; no other peace I find. T. W. HIGGINSON. I THE TWO RELIGIONS IN T V. T is unnecessary to push farther the from the two central figures, Jesus: far enough to show that they run in tirely distinct regions towards hostile k Between these two systems lies the cho ing that neither justifies itself sufficien other; or we may elect one in preferen not accept. It is not yet given to mer same time, or to consciously hold co principles that are mutually destructi and say that the followers of Jesus mi faith; or we may be followers of Jesus have added fictions to religious faith choice be made? On the ground of a constitutes authority? Both systems 1 volume, both are included in the sam religion of Jesus has better historical w The books that contain it were earlier genuine in authorship, certainly contai material. Their portraiture of the cent historical person is Jesus and not the the imagination. But these considera here, let them pass. We must look cision. There are two criteria of authority; Rationality. We shall choose the spi cal, and the rational faith before the religion of Jesus is the spiritual and ra the Christ is the mechanical and arbit It may surprise some that spiritualit gospel above the fourth, for Matthew a is entirely against prejudice and tradi always been called the "spiritual gos with "Spiritual" people, mystics, devo musing, dreamy, abstract and indefinite curs oftener in John than in Matthew, peculiar sense which in Matthew is ne "The Spirit" is described as a disting |