standard of conduct and feeling which it erects, and to teach them, more emphatically than by words, that their degree of happiness must of necessity be as low as their moral attainments are humble. Further: man, though he has been increasing in knowledge ever since his appearance on earth, has not been improving in faculty-a shrewd fact, which they who expect most from the future of this world would do well to consider. The ancient masters of mind were in no respect inferior in calibre to their predecessors. We have not yet shot ahead of the old Greeks in either the perception of the beautiful, or in the ability of producing it; there has been no improvement in the inventive faculty since the Iliad was written, some three thousand years ago; nor has taste become more exquisite, or the perception of the harmony of numbers more nice, since the age of the Æneid. Science is cumulative in its character; and so its votaries in modern times stand on a higher pedestal than their predecessors. But though nature produced a Newton some two centuries ago, as she produced a Goliath of Gath at an earlier period, the modern philosophers, as a class, do not exceed in actual stature the worse informed ancients-the Euclids, the Archimedeses, and Aristotles. We would be without excuse if, with the Bacon, Milton, and Shakspeare of these latter ages of the world full before us, we recurred to the obsolete belief that the human race is deteriorating; but then, on the other hand, we have certain evidence that, since genius first began unconsciously to register in its works its own bulk and proportions, there has been no increase in the mass or improvement in the quality of individual mind. As for the dream that there is to be some extraordinary elevation of the general platform of the race achieved by means of education, it is simply the hallucination of the age-the world's present alchemical expedient for converting farthings into guineas sheerly by dint of scouring. Not but that education is good: it exercises, and in the ordinary mind develops, faculty. But it will not anticipate the terminal dynasty. Yet further: man's average capacity of happiness seems to be as limited and as incapable of increase as his average reach of intellect, it is a mediocre capacity at best; nor is it greater by a shade now, in these days of power-looms and portable manures, than in the times of the old patriarchs. So long, too, as the law of increase continues, man must be subject to the law of death, with its stern attendants, suffer ing and sorrow; for the two laws go necessarily together; and so long as death reigns, human creatures, in even the best of times, will continue to quit this scene of being without professing much satisfaction at what they have found either in it or themselves. It will no doubt be a less miserable world than it is now when the good come, as there is reason to hope they one day shall, to be a majority; but it will be felt to be an inferior sort of world even then, and be even fuller than now of wishes and longings for a better. Let it improve as it may, it will be a scene of probation and trial till the end. And so faith, undeceived by the mirage of the midway desert, whatever form or name, political or religious, the phantasmagoria may bear, must continue to look beyond its unsolid and tremulous glitter-its bare rocks exaggerated by the vapour into air-drawn castles, and its stunted bushes magnified into goodly trees-and, fixing her gaze upon the re-creation yet future, the terminal dynasty yet unbegun, she must be content to enter upon her final rest-for she will not enter upon it earlier—" at return" "Of Him, the Woman's Seed, Last in the clouds, from heaven to be revealed Satan with his perverted world, then raise But it may be judged that I am trespassing on a field into which I have no right to enter. Save, however, for its close proximity with that in which the geologist expatiates as properly his own, this little volume would never have been written. It is the fact that man must believingly co-operate with God in the work of preparation for the final dynasty, or exist throughout its never-ending cycles as a lost and degraded creature, that alone renders the development hypothesis formidable. By inculcating that the elevatory process is one of natural law, not of moral endeavour-by teaching, inferentially at least, that in the better state of things which is coming there is to be an identity of race with that of the existing dynasty, but no identity of individual consciousness -that, on the contrary, the life after death which we are to inherit is to be merely a horrid life of wriggling impurities, originated in the putrefactive mucus-and that thus the men who now live possess no real stake in the kingdom of the future, it is its direct tendency, so far as its influence extends, to render the required co-operation with God an impossibility; for that co-operation cannot exist without belief as its basis. The hypothesis involves a misreading of the geologic record, which not merely affects its meaning in relation to the mind, and thus, in a question of science, substitutes error for truth, but which also threatens to affect the record itself, in relation to the destiny of every individual perverted and led astray. It threatens to write down among the degraded and the lost, men who, under the influence of an unshaken faith, might have risen at the dawn of the terminal period to enjoy the fulness of eternity among the glorified and the good.-HUGH MILLER. THE INTELLECTUAL CHRISTIAN. That "there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit," was the declaration of an inspired man regarding the apostolic church; and the same remark is applicable, though in a modified sense, to the churches still. We cannot look on the religious soul, or trace the mental movements of those who are in earnest preparing to meet their God-the men who believe the five grand realities, God, Sin, Death, Judgment, and Immortality without observing an exhaustless variety in the Holy Spirit's work. The one Lord, the one faith, the one baptism, are held or rejoiced in by all whom that Spirit has taught; but the complexional distinctions of Christian experience are so manifold as to baffle our endeavours to describe them. But before proceeding farther with an account of these varieties, it may be well to repeat what we mean by Christian experience, and we think that a definition is not difficult. It certainly is not the result of those intuitions which, according to some, constitute true religion. It is not the mere development of our own consciousness along the various channels in which man's emotions run. It is just the written truth of God exemplified in the life of man. the heart corresponding to what the Scriptures say of a believer's heart. It is the understanding existing in the conditions ascribed to the Christian understanding by the Spirit of God. It is the will moving in harmony with the laws It is by which it should be regulated, according to the revelation of Jehovah's mind. It is, in short, the whole man rejoicing, lamenting, hoping, fearing, aspiring, doing, suffering, all according to the mind of the Supreme, as unfolded in his unerring Word. Now, it will at once be seen that there is much in the life even of some earnest Christians which cannot be brought under this definition or description of experience; for there is often very much that is in direct opposition to the will of God. There is the prevalence of unbelief, declining to accept of the gospel-and that can be no ingredient in Christian experience, in any proper sense. There is the morbid and self-consuming spirit of the legaland neither is that possessed of aught that is properly Christian. It is rather the mind in a state of disease, than the mind guided to the dwellings in which, David says, "the melody of joy and health is heard." There is the overwrought and feverish excitement which signalises some minds at seasons of awakening and revival. Neither can that be comprehended in any right definition of Christian experience. In short, the experience of a Christian is one thing; but Christian experience may be a widely different thing. With the former, much ignorance or error may mingle from time to time-in the latter, there can be nothing but what is according to the mind of Christ; it is the living epistle of the Lord Jesus; and were this distinction carefully kept in view, it would often preserve the truth from being injured in the house of a friend, as well as deliver the soul from the error of supposing that its condition may be right and safe while declining to close with God's offer of mercy, or mixing up the divine specific against sin and misery with man's own corruptions, his errors, and perversions of the simple truth. The peculiarity, then, to which we would here refer, in regard to Christian experience, may be called the experience of the intellectual man. That the intellect should hold a prominent place in our religion, as in all that man finds to do, only fanaticism will question. Every gift of God is good; and, while consecrated to his service, a powerful intellect, far from conflicting with spirituality of mind, may supply grand materials, on which the soul may ruminate and grow strong, or ascend to those lofty regions to which only the few can soar. To pronounce a divorce, as some have done, between intellect and godliness, and assume a necessary union between feeble mental faculties, and the faith of God's people, is to injure religion, and outrage the order of things. It is the declaration of Paul, that he "would pray with the Spirit, and pray with the understanding also he would sing with the Spirit, and sing with the understanding also ;" and the same should be the determination of all who know that the religion of the God of truth is adapted to the whole man, and is meant to subdue and spiritualise our faculties, not to extirpate or overlay them. On the other hand, however, while some would displace the intellect, or look with suspicion on its use in religion, others would allow it too prominent a sphere, and this is never done without detriment to the power and ascendency of spiritual truth in the soul. It is clearly the mind of God that the most gifted in point of intellect cannot penetrate into the mysteries of the spiritual kingdom by any self-derived strength. The very attempt to do so implies a misapprehension of one of the first principles of the oracles of God; for here the gifted and the feeble are utterly on a level. If it be true that "no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost;" if it be "not by wisdom, nor by might, but by the Spirit" of the living God, that all saving truth is known-then the attempt to know it by mortal power implies direct antagonism to revelation. mystery hid from ages continues hidden still from the wise and the prudent, while it is often revealed unto babes; and the oblivion of this leads, we repeat, to spiritual detriment, or often to shipwreck in the faith. The We need only glance at the condition of the churches to see illustrations of this. When the intellectual preponderates in the mind of men, even though conversion may have taken place, it is not uncommon to notice a coldness—almost a scepticism-on the subject of vital godliness, as the Scriptures describe it, or as the heart of the Spirit-taught Christian rejoices over it. Religion is regarded rather as a thing to be judged than submitted to rather as a subject on which to exercise ingenuity, than a system designed to permeate and sway the whole heart and soul, and strength and mind. It is mainly objective in its character; its truths are studied with the calmness or the coldness which characterises the manipulations of the algebraist, not with the earnestness which becomes us when life or death for ever is at |