intuitive truth; but on precisely those axioms rest the inferences of free-will, responsibility, and the existence of a personal First Cause.

Plaintively wrote Aristotle, after mentioning self-evidence, necessity, and universality as the traits of intuitive truth, that they who reject the testimony of the intuitions will find nothing surer on which to build.

3. A distinct definition of the word natural ought to put, and ultimately will put, all science on its knees before a personal God.

Charles Darwin and Bishop Butler define this fundamental term in the same way; and that not the obscure, heedless, misleading, outworn, and fathomlessly vexatious way common in our brilliant periodical literature. It is a fact in which much solace for timid Christians, and much taming anodyne for audacious small philosophers, lie capsulate, that the foremost naturalist of our times, and the greatest modern Christian apologist, explicitly agree in affirming,

(1.) That "the only distinct meaning of the word natural" is stated, fixed, or settled;" and,

(2.) That "what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent mind to render it so that is, to effect it continually or at stated times — as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once."

These far-reaching propositions consist wholly of celebrated words from Butler's Analogy (part 1, chap. 1), the book which Edmund Burke used to recommend to the acutest of his friends as a cure for scepticism. Barry, the artist, for whose varied and invete

rate spiritual sickness Burke prescribed only the study of this volume, was so much benefited by it, that, when he made a painting of Elysium, he placed Butler in the foreground. In our haughty day this renowned passage has become in a new degree famous by being adopted through numberless editions as the postulate motto on the titlepage of Darwin's Origin of Species. It stands there as a head-light. The agreement of Darwin and Butler as to the meaning of the word natural is a beacon which ought to be kept steadily in view by any who grow dizzy as they float, perhaps anchorless, in the surges of modern speculation. Butler's and Darwin's definition is Aristotle's and Kant's and Hamilton's, and Newton's and Cuvier's and Humboldt's, and Faraday's and Dana's and Agassiz'. Just this definition has for ages been the established one in religious science. Of late, as if it were a new discovery, it has appeared as the inspiration of the loftiest portions of modern literature. The vision of what lies behind natural law constitutes the hushed "open secret," which throws the Goethes and Richters, and Carlyles and Brownings, and Tennysons and Emersons, and ought to throw the whole world, into a trance.

4. A miracle is unusual, natural law is habitual, Divine action. The natural is a prolonged and so unnoticed supernatural.

Professor Asa Gray maintains that Charles Darwin is guiltless of all atheistic intent; that he never denied the possibility of creative intervention in the origin of species; that he never depended exclusively on

natural selection for the explanation of variations in animal forms; and that he never sneered at the argument from design, to which John Stuart Mill advises philosophers to adhere in their proof of the Divine Existence.

If religion and science are once agreed in adopting Darwin's and Butler's meaning of the word natural, all that either of them has to do is to become, in Coleridge's phrase, intoxicated with God.

5. It follows, however, as a minor result of this definition, that it cannot be dangerous to religion to inquire whether the origin of species is attributable wholly to natural causes; that is, to habitual Divine action. Is it a terrifying thing to ask whether life itself and all its modifications originated in unusual Divine action, or in habitual Divine action, or partly in one, and partly in the other? It is difficult, and to me impossible, to see what ground for disquietude religious science has in the prospect that either of these propositions may obtain proof. What harm, we may say with Charles Kingsley, can come to religion, even if it be demonstrated, not only that God is so wise that he can make all things, but that he is so much wiser than even that, that he can make all things make themselves?

The distinction between mind and matter stands like a reef in the tumbling seas of philosophy; and its roots take hold on the core of the world. In matter there are definite qualities, such as weight, color, extension. In mind there are none of these: it is absurd to speak of the length of an idea, the color of

a choice, the weight of an emotion. When Tyndall and Bain, and other revivers of the Lucretian materialism, attempt to make the qualities of matter and mind, which differ as diametrical opposites, and by the whole diameter of existence, extension and the absence of extension, color and the absence of color, weight and the absence of weight, inertia and the absence of inertia, co-inhere in one substratum, and talk of a double-faced somewhat, "physical on the one side, and spiritual on the other," they are self-contradictory. It is upon the hungry tusks of self-contradiction that whole Armadas of materialistic fleets have been wrecked age after age; and here Tyndall's barge of the gods, which, like Cleopatra`s,

"Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that

The winds were love-sick with them,”

only yesterday sank among the mists. But until this reef is exploded, until the distinction between matter and mind is given up, there will very evidently be adequate proof of Design in creation.

Daniel Webster, when once asked if his political opinions on an important topic had changed, wrote to his questioner to look toward Bunker Hill in the morning, and notice whether, in the night, the monument had walked into the sea. If any do not care to puzzle themselves with either the shrill and shallow, or with the more quiet and profound voices of modern speculation, and yet wish freedom from mental unrest, let them not take alarm as to the

argument from design until the Aristotelian and age-long monumental distinction between matter and mind has moved from its base; for, until that shaft walks into the sea, Theism is logically safe. "If," says Kingsley, "there has been an evolution, there must have been an evolver." "Faith in an order, which is the basis of science," says Asa Gray, "cannot reasonably be separated from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion." The law of development explains much, but not itself.

6. As science progresses, it draws nearer, in all its forms, to the proof of the Spiritual Origin of Force; that is, of the Divine Immanence in natural law; that is, of the Omnipresence of a personal First Cause; and the religious value of this proof is transcendently great. Wherever science finds heat, light, electricity, it infers the motion of the ultimate particles of matter as the cause; wherever it finds motion of the ultimate particles of matter, it infers force as the cause; and, wherever it finds force, it infers, or will yet infer, SPIRIT.

"God is law, say the wise, O soul, and let us rejoice;

For, if he thunder by law, the thunder is yet his voice.

Speak to him thou, for he hears, and Spirit with Spirit may meet:

Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and

feet."

TENNYSON.