opinion. If we accept it with reference to those countries in which it finds favour, where man is not placed in the conditions necessary to his normal expansion, we cannot admit it to be possible in quite different countries and under different conditions. Here, in a more favourable medium, screened from the influences which impede and trammel the free play of its operations, the human mind is of inexhaustible fecundity. It must be received as certain (and I hope there is nothing humiliating in this to our species) that, by the nature of things, death is merely the appearance, life the reality. Thus, to confine ourselves to things which are more closely connected with our subject, the creeds which crumble away are soon replaced by others. There are never complete ruins, or ruins that last long; it may be even said that there are no such things as ruins, there are only changes, successions, transformations. It is with the moral as with the physical world. In crossing the vast forests of the New World, the traveller perceives, clustering around the enormous Sequoias and Tulip-trees overthrown by the tempest or by time, shoots already vigorous, and suckers yet tender, trailing on the ground. Here is the image of the moral world. Around ancient forms of faith, by the side of ancient institutions which are vanishing away, spring up new ones which are born either of them or of their fragments. Ordinary or timid minds are struck only by the aspect of the ruins; they do not see that which germinates beneath, or is already

sprouting forth from them; and they shrink with affright from the spectacle of apparent death which environs them. But the man who is habituated to reflection and to the more extended spectacle of history, finds in all this nothing to astonish nor sadden him. If his heart be moved at the cruel sufferings of those who, as they see solitude encroach upon their temples, and the chill of death benumbing the very limbs of their deities, look forward with horror to the void that seems to open upon them in the religious future of humanity, the mere fact itself leaves him calm and perfectly unmoved. He knows that the laws of nature are irresistible.

"Ut silvæ foliis pronos mutantur in annos,

Prima cadunt: ita verborum vetus interit ætas
Et juvenum ritu florent modo nata, vigentque."

He is aware that if forms fall like the leaves of the forest at the close of the year, if words have their inevitable vicissitudes, ideas remain, and partake of the unchangeableness of the Creator.

This truth, of which the development and proof may be traced in history, is to be found living and palpable, su to speak, in the moral and religious condition of America ; and here, within a comparatively restricted compass, we may personally witness the thorough manifestation of one of the great laws of humanity. On setting foot for the first time in that country, we are, at the first glance, bewildered, as it were, by the noise that surrounds us; one

would naturally suppose that the religious world was splitting up in all directions, and what we expect is to see it yawning down to the lowest abysses. As we gaze on the infinite division of its sects, their collisions, their unceasing dissensions, their meetings, their revivals, the Gospel daily ground to dust, Christianity in a permanent state of crisis and decomposition, we naturally apprehend that darkness was about to overspread these vast regions, and annihilation to swallow up life. But, God be praised, there is no pretence for it; the sun shines there as it does elsewhere, perhaps even with a stronger light and livelier brilliancy. It would appear that in proportion as the divine seed of the Gospel is subtle, so has it the greater fecundity and power of life. It is, at all events, certain, that the active fermentation which causes decomposition, and is also its result, is not a consuming fire. It is the condition, as well as the sign, of new vegetation and energetic life.

We have, I am aware, and cannot too often repeat it, great difficulty in this Europe of ours, with all our prejudices in favour of official churches, in forming to ourselves an idea of the potency and reality of these new manifestations of the religious sentiment; and we easily bring ourselves to believe, with the scepticism of well-bred people, that the religious sap of humanity is exhausted. And it can hardly happen otherwise. How is it possible that we should not misapprehend the character of the resources of the human

mind in the matter of religious creation? Are we living under the conditions necessary to their being conceived, elaborated, and produced? I perfectly comprehend the general opinion on this point, pretty much as I comprehend the astonishment of unlettered opinion, on learning that the palm-tree, when isolated and deprived of the impregnating dust, remains barren. The palm-tree has need of frée air and space, but it requires also that the winds should discharge those fertilizing duties towards it which nature has imposed upon them; and it is on this condition only that it can bear fruit. But this condition being fulfilled, it soon presents a vigorous fructification to the sun. So is it with the human mind. The contact of souls is as necessary to the generation of ideas as the contact of bodies. is to the generation of a different order of being. Where there is no free communication between minds, there can be no spiritual creation. Isolation arrests the jets, if I may so speak, and the growth of the soul, or, to borrow the language of Plato, prevents its pinions from developing and enlarging. This is true of all our sentiments, all our aspirations, of the religious sentiment as well as of every other. It is especially true of religious worship, which is the free manifestation of this sentiment, and the outspread of it to the light of day. But we cannot too frequently remark, that when free air and free communication are restored to the human mind, if it so happen that hereditary creeds should contrive to give it the slip, it loses no time

in finding new ones for itself; it becomes restless, it gives itself no repose until it succeeds. Are we perchance to suppose that human nature ever undergoes a fundamental change, and that its primitive instincts disappear together with the forms under which they have appeared? Yet nothing short of this must happen, that is to say, nothing short of a deviation from the laws of nature, before the possibility of such an occurrence as its remaining indifferent to the great questions with which that faith was allied can happen. Indifference, as is well known, may for a moment overlay the mind, may become a permanent condition indeed of certain minds, but it cannot be the mental condition of the masses, that is to say, of the whole human race, which requires a very different resting-place for its head.

Absolute liberty, such as it exists in America, in religious matters, is often enough the source of severe shocks to our feelings. The infinite multitude of sects saddens when it does not shake us, and it often does shake us, and cause the very base to tremble on which the whole edifice of our faith reposes. In the agitated medium which is the effect of liberty, received creeds are constantly bending under the violence of opposing winds, and we have often reason to be alarmed lest the frail flower should be bruised and perish for ever. But, besides that its germ is immortal, whereever liberty is present the remedy is at the side of the evil. In societies existing under another régime, the crumbling