marred as helped it. If they have sought to heighten the sense of its presence, they have gone far to destroy its perfection. The ideal has sunk beneath their touch. In the very manner in which they have. brought it to bear as an external authority, they have, in the rudeness of their efforts, defaced its finer lineaments. It is of the very essence of such an authority that it should move from within and not from without; that it should penetrate by moral enthusiasm into human nature, and not by priestly dictation be enforced upon it. Such a process is necessarily slow and subject to frequent reactions; but it is at least religious in a true sense. It comes from above; it has its source in a living Personality, in which we recognise the sum of all spiritual excellence; it operates on a free will which chooses the good set before it, and which finds in a higher Will than its own a supreme power of grace-at once the satisfaction of many necessities and the strengthening of conscious weakness. We do not undervalue the inspiring influence of the idea of Humanity. We should wish to see the service of Humanity more thoroughly recognised, and purified from all motives of self-interest. But when the choice is put before us of God or of Man— of Christ or of Humanity, we can have no doubt which is the higher idea, or rather which is the higher reality. Humanity is a noble conception, and we cannot raise it to a too lofty ideal; but its actual history is defaced by many disfigurements. It is glorified in Christ, and in Him alone, who took human nature upon Him. All its moral activities are in Him in perfect development. There is no spiritual beauty, no excellence, of which human life has showu itself capable, and which is fitted to build it up into nobleness, which does not appear in Him. Positivism would have us turn away from the perfect Light above us to the dimmed lights around us; from the Life "holy, harmless, undefiled the Brightness of the Divine Glory," "full of grace and truth," to the fair lives beside us-poor, weak, faulty in all their fairness. It would divert us from the supreme Loveliness to an attractive wife, or mother, or daughter. The impiety of the suggestion is but ill hidden beneath its seriousness. It is astonishing that the vaunted scientific enlightenment of our time has come to this; that men, who are panting to be of service to their generation, should see no better manner of serving it than by propagating what must appear to all sober-minded people as a wild delusion, as well as a dismal and monotonous superstition, for the superstitious features of the system are quite as marked as its priestly pretensions. We may well ask if this is to be the final purification of religious worship-a worship of the lifting up of the hands and of the closing of the eyes, of the multiplying of prayers and the keeping of festivals, of banners, processions, images, and temples. Truly if Humanity has no higher prospects than those which await it from the service of its modern worshippers, its prospects are dark indeed. Its "normal state" is a vague and distant future. But better things may yet be hoped for when the true Light from Heaven shall enlighten every man, and the love of goodness shall everywhere come from the love of God, and nobleness of life from the perfect Example of the Lord. THE AUTHOR OF THORNDALE' AND MODERN SCEPTICISM. THE HE author of 'Thorndale' should not be forgotten. A more thoughtful, graceful, and wellinformed writer has not adorned our recent literature. Comparatively with some names occupying intellectual prominence, William Smith is peerless in the quality both of his thought and style, and it is strange therefore that he is not better known, and his writings more widely appreciated. This is the more strange that, as a writer, he is essentially modern, closely allied to all that is best in the present tendency of scientific culture, and inspired by its highest spirit of progressive hopefulness. The author of 'Thorndale,' of 'Gravenhurst,' and of the later Essays on 'Knowing and Feeling: a Contribution to Psychology,' is not merely a thinker of rare subtlety and richness of philosophical insight, but he is a thinker steeped in all the new scientific ideas, and capable of handling them with the easy, expansive grasp of a master. But then, as he himself said, |