spiritual. It is the soil in which grow the shoots which are to be transplanted to the paradise above. Millions of just men made perfect began life here, and millions more are to be added. And for aught we know a like process may be going on in the other orbs of immensity, to make the spiritual creation more vast than the material, as God who is Spirit is greater than all his works. Where it is said, "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created," it must be considered that this ascription of praise is from the four living creatures representing all who are capable of praise, all who know and enjoy God, showing that the end of redemption, as of creation and providence, is to indefinitely multiply beings capable of sharing in the happiness of the Infinite Mind. God's pleasure can only find increase in distribution, as the sun in the worlds reflecting his beams and sharing their life-giving power. A boundless spiritual universe into which the glory and honor of world-nations are ever flowing, exceeds all our conceptions of material vastness. It is flooded with divinity as seen in clearer visions than here, is radiant with glory, exultant in happiness, and destined to endless progression. This is the new creation and the final cause of all God's works. "I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

The Beformation of the Family.

A DISCOURSE

By Pere Hyacinthe, DELIVered in the WINTER CIRCUs, Paris,
APRIL 22, 1877.

[TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY Rev. Leonard W. BACON.] LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: The importance of questions affecting the family becomes enhanced in the presence of institutions of popular government. Over against that growing and agitating individualism to which it ought to act as a counterpoise, unless the family represents the force of a wise and liberal conservatism, it becomes the instrument of the most dangerous and obstinate reactions. And if, unhappily, its influence should cease, or rather should decline, for the family is incapable of being wholly destroyed-the order of society would find that its natural foundations had given way, and the impotence of political forces to stand alone would be laid bare to the eyes of all. The question of the family, then, a question of all ages, is peculiarly the question for the ages and lands of popular government.

Now, it is a fact, which unfortunately needs no proof, that the family is impaired everywhere, and, I think, particularly so in our own country. I do well, therefore, to take up the question of its restoration. I did this ten years ago in the pulpit of Notre Dame. My point of view has not changed since then; my convictions have only been developed and strengthened, and I shall speak to you from the same principles, and sometimes with like expressions. Less than ever can I take part with those chimerical, if not perverse minds which propose to better the family by a course of headlong innovation. I hold, on the contrary, that the maxim of Macchiavelli is here peculiarly applicable, that "institutions are to be reformed only by carrying them back to their original."

What, then, is the original of the family? Is it a sort of legalization by the State and by religion of the baser instincts of human nature? I blush to put the question, but I am forced to do so, because the moral sense of some men is so gross as to make it necessary. If the family were nothing but this, generous souls would turn from it in scorn, and adopt that ancient motto out of Homer, " Live wifeless and die childless." Christianity has planted itself at quite another point of view, and if it has proposed to exceptional persons in exceptional circumstances the type of absolute asceticism, it has, at the same time, glorified the family, and opened it to all, not as a refuge permitted to the weak, but as a sanctuary consecrated for the strong.

Thus, then, the original of the family, and of marriage which is the basis of it, is not to be sought in those lower planes upon which I do not wish to detain your attention. Shall we find it in fatherhood? Of all the heights of human existence, fatherhood is one of the sublimest. In contemplation of it St. Paul exclaims, "I bow my knees before the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named!"* Fatherhood is a lofty height; but it is not lofty enough. It is not there that the human family has fixed its throne. That, if you will, is its glorious footstool, but not its royal seat.

What, then, is the original of the human family? Doubtless, fatherhood is a fact of capital importance, but it is an extrinsic fact, and consequently does not constitute the inward essence of wedlock. Ask of reason, and you will learn that there is one law of love for persons and another for things. We love a thing for our sake, but a person for his own sake. If fatherhood was the prime and absolute end of marriage, the wife would be lost in the mother, the companion of man would be only a means to an end - a noble and sacred means to the perpetuation of our race, but still a means. Asia would be in advance of Europe, and Mussulman barbarism of Christian monogamy. That be far from us! The family must rest essentially on the disinterested love of two human beings, loving for love's sake, taking each the other for their mutual end, and finding in the unselfishness of this choice the fulfillment of their moral nature. For just as when man loves his God, loves truth, righteousness, absolute and living-for this is God-it is for the very excellence of this sublime object, and yet he receives of Him, out of measure, overflowing, never-failing, the joys of reason, conscience, heart and all His being; just so in wedded love, there is the devotion of each to each, but at the same time they become each the complement and so the felicity of the other. For the man is not humanity; the woman is not humanity; but man and woman are the two fragments, the thesis and the antithesis, if you like the phrase, that unite in the sublime synthesis of marriage, at once human and divine.

The intellect, with the law that governs the relations of person to person-the law of finality and not utility; the heart, with the law that governs all great affections, friendship as well as love, the law of self-devotion; the intellect and the heart both answer us by showing us the essence of the family in that bond, pre-eminently a moral bond, which unites forever in one being a man and a woman.

And now suffer me to interrogate the Bible. I did this in last Sunday's discourse, † and we saw what profound philos

*Ephesians iii: 14, 15. See the Greek.

†On "Respect for the Truth."

ophy is hidden in its neglected pages. We observed the harmonious and progressive development of the material creation up to the unfolding of man, spirit in flesh, flesh in spirit-the crown in this world of the completed work of the creative thought. Now, Genesis tells us also of the creation of woman and the duplication of human nature in its two parts-the masculine and rational, and the feminine and affectional. Genesis carries us back to a scene which it calls Eden.

What wonder that mankind begins in Eden! Understand me at the outset, I do not attempt to define exactly the historical value of the narrative. My reason presents no objection to it, for there must needs, at the origin of species, have been some strange transactions in the world, and miracle for miracle. I like the Bible story better than the hypotheses of some men of science. But I am not unaware that in dealing with the mysteries of the beginning and the end-mysteries beyond the reach of our reason and our imagination, and of all our present faculties both Genesis and Revelation make use of symbols that are not to be taken literally, lest we belittle the things, not less real but more vast, which the letter unveils to us by veiling them.

I say, then, that for my part I find it no wonder that the Bible story makes man begin in Eden. Is it not thus that all of us begin? Is not man born into the midst of the scenes of nature as into an enchanted garden, whose forms, whose colors, whose perfumes have for his infancy and childhood charms, delights and revelations which by and by he will cease to find in them? Every life has its dawn, its spring-time-dawn and spring-time that seem destined to be eternal. Even until now, life begins with a never-to-be-forgotten dream of innocence and bliss!

Here, then, we find ourselves, with Adam, in Eden. The whole scene shows us that we are in the ideal regions of human stature, and that we have nothing to do with the instincts of a weak and fallen creature. We are in Eden. Human nature stands before us, not finished, but magnificently roughed out, in that being who has retained more especially the name of man; and in him the thing that shines most obviously and conspicuously in his face is the power of thought and will. The apostle Paul, unconsciously commenting on Moses,tells us that "the husband is the head of the wife." Behold that dominating and commanding brow! Beneath his penetrating gaze creation is displayed. It appears before him in its noblest works-those that come nearest to man himself-the animals. The lips of Adam move, and he gives them names. There, O philosophy, you see the difference between man and brute-it is found in speech. Let science compare the species to its heart's content, and liken man to the lower beings. Speech remains, not

as a shade of difference, a gradation, but as a great gulf. between him and them, for it is the sign and instrument of abstract, free, reflective thought. And not until you shall have succeeded in evoking smiles and language from the sluggish lips of the brute will you have so much as brought near each other the edges of that yawning chasm that separates forever the thinking being from that which cannot think.

Man called the creation by its name; he conceived it; he commanded it. And yet amid all this happiness, despite this power and this intelligence, he was not happy. Adam found no helpmeet for him. His reason was seeking for life; his head was inclining toward his heart. At this point begins the second scene of the drama of creation.

He sleeps a deep sleep. Ah! once again suffer me to exclaim, "Oh,the philosophic depth of the thoughts of Holy Writ!" Come away, my friends, withdraw, like the first man, from this common-I had almost said this vulgar scene, into which we are ushered every morning and in which we abide till evening; this scene which we call the real world, but which is only the apparent world, the world of phenomena, paivóμɛva, of passing forms, not of abiding substance, of sensible effects, not of the causes which produce them and which escape the scrutiny of the senses! Withdraw from this waking scene and enter into the slumber of the senses-into that immediate intuition, that deep contemplation, that trance of the understanding and the reason in which we behold the inmost depths of things. “And Adam slept a deep sleep." It was there, at the fountain head of being, and not in this common world in which we dwell, that the primordial reduplication of human nature was effected for all the coming time.

The woman is not a being alien to the man. She is not to be animated by a breath different from his. She is not to be formed, like him, of lower substances, as of the dust of the earth. She is to radiate from the man like his consciousness, or, as St. Paul says, like his glory. "The woman is the glory of the man."* She is to radiate from man, but not from his brow-the brow is the seat of thought. Ah! this splendor, this flame, this glory must go forth from the heart. There it is that the story of Genesis shows us its origin. And when the mysterious production is finished, man also is finished, and the Creator, so far at least as concerns this globe, may enter into His triumph and His rest. Man exists now in his completenessthe head, the heart; the heart that thinks in the head, the head that loves in the heart; head and heart, man and woman, united in supreme harmony and bearing a single name. "In the day that God created man, male and female created he them, and