Our sympathies were aroused, and we tried to force our human nature into an appreciation of the mood in which the irrational animal then stood. The effort taught us some truths. The attitude of the creature was that of mere apathy; not despair, nor content drawn from solacing speculations. Its eye took in no range of a pitying heavens, nor a broad earth, full of possible pastures. It thought not of the multitudes of its kind scattered upon a thousand hills, whose compassionate fellow-feeling might alleviate its distress. It solaced itself with no pleasant prospect of the Spring, filling its little circle with the juiciest of all green grass, nor even of the coming night with its comfortable rest and sleep under shelter.

Recoiling from the blank inanity of such a mind, and recovering our identity, we had no need to ask, "Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him?" We saw why the Lord was mindful of him. Are we not, too, tethered here in our lonely student-room, within our narrow circle of limitations, with seemingly little part or lot in the breathing world around? But is our vision drawn heavily down to a few rods of earth? What are the daily realities of our thought; what, but a bundle of far-reaching hopes, sympathies, yearnings, for the possible? Bound to a point of time, with a little radius of space, our thoughts wander through eternity;" we "look before and after," and see "the vision of the world and all the wonder that will be." We are not solitary, though the most unknown of all our race. Our window opens upon a sky that overlooks an unnumbered multitude of just such beings as ourselves. We are friends with, and can love, every several inhabitant of England, Persia, India or Japan; and and they have known us already, though they have not seen us. They sympathize, at this moment, with all our experiences, our disappointments, and our aspirations. We would long to be with them now, and know what they are doing; and so would they with us, and the whole. race is one in sympathy and in hope. What hope? The hope of union. We are all yearning with unutterable longings to have the "mountains interposed" removed, and, "like kindred drops, to mingle into one." No cheek would be dry at the thought of an assembly of all kin dreds, tribes, and nations, eye glancing into eye, heart

throbbing against heart, and the electric current of humanity pulsating through the whole. How every individual heart thumps the roll-call for the "Parliament of man, the Federation of the world!" What! is this the simple truth of a race cut up with deadly hate, with war and bloodshed? We speak of man and the race, as we think Christ looked at them,-as God looks at them,-of what is in man, though man himself know it not. Christianity saw, and sees, the possible in man, and gives an everlasting security that it shall some day be actual. It promises a fulfilment of the sublimest and farthest-reaching aspirations of the race. Not the least of all does it acknowledge, sanctify, and call out the sentiment of humanity. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, is, after all, at the bottom of every man's heart; and the religion of Christ aims to develope, and has developed, this into higher and higher manifestations. It teaches man to love men as the children of a common Father, and as having, beneath all layers of peculiarity, essentially the same substratum of human nature with himself, so that there needs no Masonic token to recognize a brother at the farthest pole. It teaches him to do good to every human being, and to desire his highest good as truly as his own. Thus it is, that the charities of Christendom have ever been growing larger and larger, and accomplishing more and more for the material good of the race.

We ask, has Christianity any limit for this charity, so that a man should not desire for his fellow man the greatest good conceivable for himself? If not, let us consider what this may be; let us seek some interpretation of the greatest good for a man which Christianity itself may

sanction.

We find ourselves begirt with imperfections, and daily living a life which never fulfils our aspirations; evil incli nations within, and a world of obstacles and temptations without, are at variance with all satisfaction of the soul. Such satisfaction, we know, is to be found only in the entire harmony of our will with God's will. This puts us at one with God and his universe. It brings all harmonies, completenesses, satisfactions, in its train. In such a condition, goodness becomes as natural as breathing, and there is no strain of the soul from diverse promptings.

New truth finds its way into the mind, and assimilates therewith as unerringly as the nutriment assimilates with a healthy body. The eternal lustre, of which the imperfect soul caught but glimpses, is now an ever-present reality, beaming through all creation. All the happinesses conceivable for the soul follow as corollaries. Such a conception of our highest good, it seems to us, Christianity warrants. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things (all desirable things) shall be added unto you." The attainment of this is the hope of our days. With all prayer and endeavor we strive to make it ours, and feel that we have a divine assurance that it is possible for us, and in this way may be obtained.

Again Christ says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and our heart yearns to obey him, and throw its boundless arms of love around the race. Our own growth is but an epitome of the growth of the race, and in it we forever percieve our own experience enacted. We look abroad and behold it, too, leading an unsatisfactory life. It goes toiling and seething through its continuous existence with multitudinous discord and unsettled aims. It forever yearns, unconsciously though it be, for unity in itself, and unity with God. It forever nourishes a sublime discontent at the contrast between its actual life and the possible. Like the bound Samson toiling for his captors, it maddens at the waste of its divine energies in these endless trivialities, and wantonly gives them vent in crime. O, brothers, our soul yearneth for your harmony. Anxiously do we search the records of your history for some heavenward progress, through all its seeming oscillations. Fervently do we cry, "Father, may thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven." The divine element of hope, which the sheep has not, casts forward into the future for a vision. The vision is unutterable, but the assurance may be told. The yearning shall not always remain unfulfilled; the prayer shall not always remain unanswered; the infinite possibility shall not always remain unactualized. The sensuous circle of earth, possibly renewed with greener springs, fades away, and the endless perspective of the future converges into one vivid picture on the background of eternity. No infinitely divergent lines, suggesting maladjustment and contrariety of design, but everywhere, and 24

VOL. XV.

through all things, run harmonious tendencies towards unity of issue. That issue we discern. The highest good which we conceive possible for our soul has been realized for all human souls. The attainable is attained, the harmony complete. Every human will is consciously enacting the Divine will, and ineffable peace, serenity, and beauty, flood the constellation of spirits. Not one erratic orb produces perturbations in the system of infinite connections. Obedience, love, unity, errors explained, wrongs adjusted, truth apprehended, evil evanished, the good victorious in every heart, and mind, and will!

"One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off, divine event,

To which the whole creation moves."

Hope, then, which "springs eternal in the human breast," and sympathy, which can be happy only in the happiness of all, are forever beguiling themselves with a vision of the time when that which Christianity teaches as the highest good, shall have been accomplished for each and every member of the race. A thoughtful person, entertaining such views, will naturally ask himself these two questions:

1. Am I indulging hopes, which, however pleasant, are proved to be groundless by any means which we have of knowing the truth?

2. Even if the hope have sufficient foundation, is the practical effect of cherishing it beneficial or injurious, or simply of no avail ?

I. Inborn hope and sympathy, educated by Christian sentiments, inspire the anticipation of such a destiny for the race as we have described. Is it a delusive hope,— is it groundless, unreasonable? Of course the answer is prompt enough from the Orthodox side of Christendom. In the revelation of God's truth which the Scriptures contain for us, we have a positive answer, they say, to all such speculations. Planting themselves upon the cumulative testimony of the church through all its history, they tell us that the gospel expressly makes known that a portion of the human race, large or small, will forever remain alienated from God and goodness; that hope is wasted in longing for the purgation of evil from all hearts and from

the universe, for we are told that the wickedness of some will be absolutely without end. Now, without disputing that we get a revelation of truth from the Scriptures, and disclaiming all desire for a warfare of texts, we may yet very fairly question this positiveness of Scripture declaration upon the subject. We may demur as to the uniformity of the testimony of the church, from the time of Origen, who thought it not incompatible with God's word to believe that evil would have an end by the conversion of all souls, down to the present time of Hudson, who finds it not incompatible with the same word to believe that evil will have an end by the annihilation of wicked souls, and whose book resembles a ghastly charnel-house, with its hideous array of authorities. We may challenge those who claim such testimony to find for themselves the positive assurance for their dogma in the spirit of the Bible. What discerning soul can feel that the Bible reveals the inspired soul of Jesus to us, as holding, for one of the deepest faiths of its being, the issues of eternity in the form and prominence with which the Orthodox world now promulgates the doctrine? Or, if there be those who can get their assurance only from precise statement and literal declarations, we have the amplest means for meeting them on their own ground, in the fact that modern criticism, following its own inexorable laws, and betrayed by no emotional proclivities towards any theory, most uncompromisingly denies the positiveness of even the letter of Scripture on this subject. We deem it a sufficient answer to the position of the Orthodox, that all recent careful investigation of the Scriptures, both in letter and in spirit, by those who have no theory to maintain in this direction, has reached, at least, this point of conclusion, the denial of positiveness.

This last we believe to be the strict Unitarian position. Led by the dictates of reason and sound sense to a scrupulous investigation of Scripture, they have found therein sufficient means of refuting the Trinitarian views of Orthodoxy, which were their especial stumbling-block. In the same investigation they have had occasion to notice the other dogma of the church, in regard to which they seem to be not particularly concerned. Their candid conclusion is, as we gather from the general expression of their writers,