Christians; it was the common ground they held with them.

While, then, the Heathen and the Christian schools had so many grounds in common, where was their point of divergence? We shall find it fairly expressed in the dying words of Plotinus, the great father of Neoplatonism: “I am striving to bring the God which is in us into harmony with the God which is in the universe."

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To that Pantaenus, Origen, Clement, and Augustine would have answered: "And we assert that the God which is in the universe is the same as the God which is in you, and is striving to bring you into harmony with Himself." There is the vast gulf between the Christian and the Heathen schools, which, when any men had overleaped, the whole problem of the universe was from that moment inverted. With Plotinus and his school, man is seeking for God; with Clement and his, God is seeking for man. To those old Alexandrian Christians, a Being who was not seeking after every single creature, and trying to raise him, could not be a Being of absolute Righteousness, Power, Love.

"Of.

If Clement had asked the Neoplatonists: "You believe, Plotinus, in an absolutely good Being? Do you believe that it desires to shed forth its goodness on all?" course," they would have answered, "On all who seek for it, on the philosopher." "But not, it seems, Plotinus, on the herd, the brutal ignorant mass, wallowing in those foul crimes above which you have risen." And at that question there would have been not a little hesitation.

Again, the Neoplatonists said: "There is a Divine element in man." The Christian philosophers assented fervently, and raised the old disagreeable question: "Is it in every man? In the publicans and harlots as well as in the philosophers? We say that it is." And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over hard to assent.

The Heathens were content that the mob, the herd, should have the husks. Their avowed intention was to leave the herd in the mere outward observance of the old idolatries, while they themselves had the monopoly of the deeper truths. The Christians boldly called vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and there gaze on the deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They owned no ground for their own speculations which was not common to the harlots and slaves around. Their ground was moral and not merely intellectual; they started from the inward conscience, that truly pure reason, in which the moral and intellectual spheres are united, which they believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in every human being, capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to a noble and heroic life. They concealed nothing moral from their disciples; only they forbade them to meddle with intellectual matters before they had had a regular intellectual training. Reason and conscience were sufficient guides for all men, and at them the many might well stop short. The teacher only needed to proceed further, not into a higher region, but into a lower one, namely, into the region of the logical understanding, and there make deductions from, and illustrations of those

higher truths which he held in common with every slave, and held on the same ground as they.

In time, that peculiar subtlety of mind, which rendered the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world, allured the Christians away from practice to speculation. Moreover, the long battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them the spirit which cannot assert a fact, without dogmatizing rashly and harshly on the consequences of denying that fact. Their minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness. They began fighting each other; excommunicating each other; denying to all who differed from them any share of that light, to claim which for all men had been the very ground of their philosophy.

And why did this befall them? Because they forgot practically that the light proceeded from a Person. They had forgotten, that if He was a Person, His eye was on them; His rule and kingdom within them; and that if he was a Person, He had a character, and that character was a righteous and a living character; and, therefore, while defending notions and dogmas deduced from the notion of His personality, they were not ashamed to commit acts abhorrent to His character. Kingsley.

As Abausit says of the interpretation of prophecy, there is but one circle whose circumference will pass through three given points, and when that one is drawn, we need not seek for another. We propose now to draw a circle through the first of Genesis, the twentieth

of Exodus, and the gospel of Matthew, in such wise as to show that no other centre can be found than in the revelaWhen the idea of God

tions of the Almighty.

had been fairly apprehended by the Jewish people, then came the law from Sinai. When the idea of law had become familiar to men's minds, and they perceived enough of the holiness of the moral law to understand their own guilt, they felt also the need of forgiveness. But whence could they obtain it? There was no promise of mercy on which the soul could rely until the coming of Christ.

These three ideas, of the existence of an almighty, allwise, and eternal God, of an immutable law founded on His will, of the free forgiveness of a transgressor upon his repentance, are ideas which could scarcely have entered the soul without a revelation, and are, at all events, historically traceable directly to three revelations; that in the first of Genesis, that in the twentieth of Exodus, and that in the gospel of Matthew. The fulness of time for the advent of the Mediator was reached, when a sufficient number of men, Jews and Gentiles, were impressed with the sense of the holiness of the law, and of their own inability to keep the law without transgression. The fulness of time to proclaim the law from Sinai had come, when, by revelations from Himself, and miraculous providences, God had made His own existence a reality to the minds of the sons of Abraham. Quoted from Benjamin Peirce, in the Christian Examiner.

If the meaning of our being is education, the meaning

of the universe is education too. Here it stands, an eternal deep, with its infinite music singing its own infinite poem of creation, glorifying its wondrous sculptures and paintings forever. And what is it? An outworking of

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the eternal spirit, a divine language, a word," by which He expresses Himself, and becomes Himself in all his fulness. If the universe may not be called the education of the Divine spirit, but only His effusion, it is because he could have nothing from without to draw Him forth; He must put Himself forth from within. The universe embodies that great fact with regard to the Infinite spirit, of which education in our spirits is the earthly antitype. And then the universe is also the very means of this education. It is, first, the embodied thought and emotion of an infinite mind; and, then, secondly, it stands to draw forth the thought and emotion of finite minds.

The Scriptures are beginning to be no longer thought of as the great landmarks, which, far back in the past, show the nearest approach which God has made to man. Their inscriptions are not absolute truths standing between God and man, obviating any further necessity of our recurrence to God's living teachings. They are wondrous suggestions and shadowings forth of truth, a collection of spiritual influences intended to educate our own spiritual life, quicken the intuitions, and bring us to feel the present contact and seek the present communion of the eternal spirit.

This idea of education, is the very basis of our nobler