PREFACE.

THE Directors of the Brooklyn Institute have much pleasure in presenting to the Public, the Graham Lectures, thus far published, on the POWER, WISDOM, AND GOODNESS OF GOD, AS MANIFESTED IN HIS WORKS.

This course, by Professor Huntington, was very fully attended; so much so, as to make it very desirable that we should have a larger room than the present one for the future lectures of the Institute.

These Lectures were intended by Mr. Graham to treat of the works of God, separate and apart from polemic theology, or the peculiar doctrines of the sects into which the religious world is divided.

The whole of God's works may furnish the subjects of these discourses, whether in their greatest or most minute forms; their simple or their complex organizations; their adaptations, their laws, their skill, their wisdom, their harmonies, their divine character. The lecturer, therefore, stands, as it were, in

the presence of the great Architect, to expound that portion of the creation which he has chosen for his theme, and thus to exhibit the "Power, Wisdom, and Goodness" of the Creator, as teaching the sublime sentiments of justice and benevolence to all His creatures, and of love and reverence for the Universal Father.

The Directors feel gratified with the success of these Lectures, and shall continue, from time to time, as funds arise from the noble endowment of Mr. Graham, to endeavor to procure the requisite talent and accomplishment for future courses of lectures; such as shall gradually form gradually form a series of publications of sterling character, eminently useful, elevating to the public taste and morals, and honorable to our Institute.

PETER G. TAYLOR, President ;
OLIVER HULL, Vice President;

JOHN W. PRAY, Secretary;

THOMAS ROWE, Treasurer.

GRAHAM LECTURES.

LECTURE I.

SOCIETY A DIVINE APPOINTMENT.

HERE, on the scene of his industrious and beneficent life, among his fellow-citizens who knew his virtues so well, who reap a daily advantage from his liberal foresight, and who honor his memory faithfully, it is not for me, a stranger, to eulogize the man who laid the foundation of these Lectures. When he provided, in his last testament, that their ever-recurring subject should be the Wisdom, the Power, the Goodness of our God, he neither over valued the inexhaustible richness of the theme, nor mistook the first need of his age. Of all his enterprise, his integrity, his success, that thought for his Creator's honor was the crown. In that provision, according to the terms of it, his laborious career rose into the region of worship.

In the particular line of thought through which I

am to attempt to aid in carrying out the noble purpose of the Founder, it is among my satisfactions that my choice falls into an orderly connection with what was so ably and brilliantly presented by my only predecessor in the series.*

The Lecturer who went before me exhibited the illustrations of those Divine Attributes as they lie in the "Constitution of the Human Soul." From that, what so natural as to proceed outward into the attitude and offices of human beings toward each other; to contemplate the wonderful texture, the manifold elements, the living powers of the Social Body; and to trace the marks of a Heavenly Parentage and Providence in the universal association of man with man? Uniting the Founder's general testamentary precept with my own special selection, and giving my whole subject an express statement, it is THE WISDOM, POWER, AND GOODNESS OF GOD AS MANIFESTED IN THE STRUCTURE, THE OFFICES, AND THE RELATIONS OF HUMAN SOCIETY.

It will not be supposed that any formal attempt

*Rev. R. S. Storrs, Jr., D.D., of Brooklyn. The place he occupies in that community will justify the personal reference, if I express the joy I feel in adding to many earlier bonds of attachment between him and me, this coincidence of studies in the common prosecution of one of the most munificent public designs that any single American benefactor has initiated. The Lectures of Dr. Storrs were published by the "Institute" in 1857.

is to be made to demonstrate to a sceptical understanding the fact that there is a God.

Not only that primary religious truth, which even Revelation assumes in its first sentence, is supposed to be granted, but many related and dependent truths besides. The real infirmity of Christian faith is not that the being and attributes of the Deity are denied, but that they lie off from the living apprehension of the spiritual nature. Much as we distrust the religious competency of the intellect, the brain does not play, by any means, the worst part in atheism: its most frequent error in that respect is, that it fancies itself an atheist when it is not, but is only playing atheist, at the instigation of pride, or appetite, or disappointed ambition, or some other demagogue in the rabble of the passions. The grand necessity of religion at present, I conceive, is not to find out whether God is, but where he is: that is, to apprehend his immediate activity and Lordship in the world of our life, so joined with it as he could only be through the incarnation. I take one of the

departments of that life, lying midway between the individual consciousness or personality and outward nature :—Humanity in its social combinations; and with the twofold object of gaining a rational interpretation of society itself, by investigating it from its only centre, or point of original power, and of