despair of Roman paganism, as by the first rays of the dawn-could he not, looking on Lebanon and Tabor, on Jerusalem and Galilee, have said: "He hath shed forth this advance of Christianity in human affairs. God has a plan, and he thus reveals it. God is giving triumph to Christianity; therefore, let Lebanon and Tabor, let Jerusalem and Galilee, know assuredly that God hath made our Lord the Lord of the Roman earth, indeed, and that the influence of the Holy Ghost is Christ's continued life"?

What if, later, when Christianity had ascended the throne of the Cæsars, Peter had stood on the Tiber, and had beheld philosophy, little by little, permeated by Christianity? What if he had looked back on the persecutions and martyrdoms which gave purity and power to early Christianity, and which make her record, even to your infidel Gibbon, venerable beyond comment? Could not Peter, there on the Tiber, have said, looking on the Appennines, and Vesuvius, and the Mediterrannean, and on Egypt: "Let Rome and the Tiber, let Alexandria and the Nile, know assuredly, since our Lord who was, and is, and is to come hath shed forth this, that he is Lord"?

What if, later, Peter, standing on the Bosphorus, when Rome had lost her footing on the Tiber, had beheld the rushing in of the Turks to pulverize the sunrise foot of Old Rome; what if he had remembered the day when, standing on two feet, Rome, planting herself on both the Tiber and the Bosphorus, folded her arms and looked at the North Star, and proclaimed herself likely to be as eternal as that stellar light; what if, remembering all that had come and all that had gone, he had beheld that colossus topple toward the west, smite itself into pieces on the Alps, and fall in fragments on the Rhine, on the Elbe, on the Oder, some pieces scattered across the howling North Sea to the Thames, and to the sites of Oxford and Cambridge-these fragments of old Rome built up in these places into universities which caused at last the illumination which brought the Reformation; what if Peter, beholding thus the Greeks driven toward the sunset, and old Rome becoming seed for the Reformation, had stood on the Seine, on the Elbe, on the Oder, and had witnessed the varied progress of the ideas of Him who affirmed once that he had many things yet to say-might not Peter there, side by side by Luther, have said once more: "He hath shed forth this; therefore, let the Alps, and the Rhine, and the Seine, and the Elbe, the Thames, and the German Sea, know assuredly that this gulf-current in human history, now two thousand years old, is not an accident-that it means all it expresses, for what God does, he from the first intends to do. He who has thus watched over the cause of Christain truth, and has been breathing the Holy Ghost upon the nations, hath shed forth this; and therefore let Berlin, and Paris,

and London, and Oxford, and Cambridge, know assuredly that God hath made him Lord?

What if, later, when the tempest of persecution, rising out of the sunrise, smote upon those universities, and blew the "Mayflower" across the sea, Peter had taken position in that vessel, as its billowing, bellying, bellowing sails fled across the great deep in the icy breath of that time; and what if he had seen on the deck of that "Mayflower" a few rushlights taking their gleam from those universities, themselves illumined by the fire that fell at Pentecost? What if Peter, afterwards standing on Plymouth Rock, had seen these rushlights kindling others, and a line of rushlights, representing the same illumination of the Holy Spirit, go out into our wilderness until they glass themselves in the Connecticut, and in the Hudson, and in the eyes of the wild beasts, of the murmuring pines and hemlocks, and in the eternal roar of Niagara, and in the Great Lakes, and in the Mississippi, and in the springs of the Sierras, and at last in the soft, hissing foam of the Pacific seas? What if, beholding these rushlights, thus carried across a continent by Divine guidance, Peter had stood here, would not the force of his word "therefore" have had new emphasis, as he should have said: "He hath shed forth this; therefore, let Boston, let New York, let Chicago, let San Francisco, let the surf of the Bay of Fundy, let the waterfalls of the Yosemite know assuredly that God hath made him Lord"?

But what if, when a tempest sprung out of the south, and these rushlights were, I will not say extinguished, but all bent to the earth, and painfully tried, some of them blown out; he had beheld the lights, little by little, after the tempest had gone down, begin to be carried southward, and at last glass themselves in the steaming bayous and the Gulf; what if, although some had been extinguished for ever, he had seen them shining on the breaking of the fetters of three million slaves; what if the churches, when the tempest ceased, grow brighter in their assertion of the value of their light, and are filling the land with its influence, and, if God continues to illumine them, will make the rushlights glass themselves yet in all the streams, in all springs, and in all the sprays on all the shores of all the land—could not he, looking on such results, in a territory greater than Rome ever ruled over, have said: "He hath shed forth this; therefore, let America know assuredly that God hath made him Lord"?

But what if, lastly, Peter had beheld a rushlight taken across the Pacific to the Sandwich Islands, and one to Japan, and one to China, and one to India, and had seen the soft-rolling globe enswathed in all its zones by rushlights, bearing the very flames which fell at Pentecost,

and beaten on, indeed, by persecution here and there, but not likely to be beaten on ever again as fiercely as they have been already; not likely to be blown out everywhere, even if they are in some places; and thus ensphering the globe, so that it is not probable at all, under the law of the survival of the fittest, that they will be put out; could not Peter, then, looking on what God has done, and what he therefore intended to do, looking on the incontrovertible fact that the islands of the sea and the continents have been coming to prefer Christian thought, and seem likely to remain under its influence; could not he, while standing on scientific and biblical ground, at once have affirmed, in the name both of science and of Scripture, the transfiguring truth: "He hath shed forth this; therefore, let Asia on the Himalaya tops, let Europe in the Parthenon and Coliseum, let London's mystic roar, let the New World in her youthful vigour, let all the islands of the sea, know assuredly that the fittest has survived, and that the fittest will survive, and that God hath made him Lord who is fittest to be so"? All the seas, in all their waves on all their shores, would answer to such an assertion: Hallelujah! So be it! The influences of the Holy Spirit are Christ's continued life.

I OPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY.

BY THE REV. JOSEPH COOK.

GOD punishes sin no longer than it endures. Many of the evils of disloyalty to the nature of things may continue even after the soul becomes loyal, as many of the evils of secession persist even after a state has returned to allegiance. But, so far as is possible, the forces which were punitive to the disloyal commonwealth become healing to the loyal; and those that are healing to the loyal become punitive to the disloyal. A personal will has proclaimed an unbending enactment, which we call the law of causation; and out of that free, holy law arise all the blessings and all the pains of the universe. Sin's punishment is sin's effect. It is far more wise, therefore, to ask how long sin may endure, than to inquire how long its punishment may last. Of the two methods, the scientific and the biblical, by which an answer to this majestic question may be sought, I am here shut up to neither the one nor the other; but I prefer always to put the scientific method in the foreground. Let me say, once for all, that I do so not because I undervalue the biblical, but because in our time the wants of many minds are best met by combining scientific and biblical evidence, and by making now the scientific the edge, and the biblical the weight of the weapon behind the edge; and now the biblical the edge, and the scientific the weight of the weapon behind the edge.

According to my view of the Unity of the Divine Nature, God is one, as we meet him in the Old Testament and the Oldest, in the New and the Newest. There are four Testaments-an Oldest and an Old, a New and a Newest. The Oldest Testament is the Nature of Things; the Newest is Christ's continued life in the present influences of the Holy Spirit. The Oldest and Newest are unwritten ; the Old and the New are written. But the voices of the four are one. Singularly enough, too, the scenery of the four Testaments is one and the same Holy Land, and he who does not feel at home in them all may well suspect the thoroughness of his knowledge of either. Carlyle calls Luther what the future will call Carlyle: "Great, not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain; unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the heavens, yet in the clefts of it fountains, green, beautiful valleys, with flowers." This is a good map of the human conscience as we know it scientifically. This, too, fairly understood, is a good map of the Old Testament, and of the New and

of the Newest. If the Old Testament Scripture is at once severe and tender; if in all its gnarled, unsubduable heights there burst out springs of crystalline water; if in the inaccessible ruggedness of its peaks we find green places, soft with celestial visitation of showers and of dew; if there is in the Written Word a combination of the Alpine and of the Paradisaical, unfathomable justice, matched by unfathomable tenderness; so in the Newest Testament and in the Oldest-that is to say, in History and in the Nature of Things-we find in the deepest clefts the springs that do most to quench our thirst! I, therefore, shall dare to ask you to hang over the great chasms in the nature of things, because at the bottom of these spring up the waters which are the healing of the nations.

Agassiz, wishing to study the glittering interior of an Alpine chasm, allowed himself on one occasion to be lowered into a crevice in a glacier, and remained for some hours at midday at a point hundreds of feet below the surface of the ice. After gratifying his enthusiastic curiosity, he gave the signal to be drawn up. I heard him tell this himself, and he said: "In our haste, we had forgotten the weight of the rope. We had calculated the weight of my person, of the basket in which I rode, and of the tackling that was around the basket; but we had forgotten the weight of the rope that sank with me into the chasm. The three men at the summit were not strong enough to draw me back. I had to remain there until one of the party went five miles-two and a half out, and two and a half back-to the nearest tree to get wood enough to make a lever, and draw me up." When habit lowers a man into the jaws of the nature of things, it is common, but it is not scientific, to forget the weight of the rope. That weight is a fact in the universe, and the importance of not forgetting it is one of the most haughty and unanswerable teachings of science.

Character does not tend to final permanence! You have a large task on your hands, if you are going to prove that. You have all the great literatures of the globe against you, to commence with. All the deep proverbs of all nations, and kindreds, and tribes, and tongues are against you. All the established truths relating to habit are against you. All the instincts in man, which forebode terrible things when we let ourselves sink far down in the practice of sin, are against you. All subtlest sorcery, by which we forget the weight of the rope, is against you. The Oldest Scripture and the Old, the Newest and the New, are against you. The law of judicial blindness, not one proposition or illustration about which do I take back, the world will understand by-and-bye as well as Shakespeare understood it. In that day your proposition that character does not tend to a final permanence will