I1

tame.

T is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite We have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History. Intellect.

A

CERTAIN tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if "blasted with excess of light." The trances of Socrates; the "union" of Plotinus; the vision of Porphyry; the conversion of Paul; the aurora of Behmen; the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers; the illumination of Swedenborg; are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment has ¦ in innumerable instances in common life been exhibited in less striking manner. Every

Spiritual
Riches

Vision

Spiritual
Reports

where the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic Churches; the experiences of the Methodists—are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.

The nature of these revelations is always the same. They are perceptions of the absolute law: they are solutions of the soul's own questions. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul, the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall be their company, adding even names,

and dates and places. But we must pick
no locks.
We must check this low curiosity.
An answer in words is delusive; it is really
no answer to the questions you ask. Do
not ask a description of the countries towards
which you sail. The description does not
describe them to you; and to-morrow you
arrive there, and know them by inhabiting
them. Men ask of the immortality of the
soul, and the employments of heaven, and
the state of the sinner, and so forth. They
even dream that Jesus has left replies to
precisely these interrogatories. Never a mo-
ment did that sublime spirit speak in their
patois.
The Over-Soul.

I

LEARN the wisdom of St. Bernard: "Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain, I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."

But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labour, which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a

The Soul

Gives

Value

Love

Levels

ities

good I do not earn-for example, to find a pot of buried gold-knowing that it brings with it new responsibility. I do not wish more external goods-neither possessions, nor honours, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent, the tax is certain.

Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. Almost he shuns their eye; almost he fears they will upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a great injustice. But face the facts, and see them. Inequal nearly, and these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them all, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbours, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and

envied is my own. It is the eternal nature of the soul to appropriate and make all things its own. Compensation.

WH

HEN the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, the foolish person-however neglected in the passing-have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak the severest truth, we should say, that we had never made a sacrifice. Spiritual Laws.

Memory Ennobles Experience