domestic virtues. The relation of Jesus with his family seems to have been hardly domestic; we have no record of any communication between him and Joseph; in his last hour he provides a retreat for his mother.

We cannot appeal from reason to faith. Faith is confidence, and for confidence there must be reason. The faith to which appeal is made is in fact an emotion rather than an intellectual conviction.

But apart from the Bible, have we any revelation of the nature, the will, the unity, the existence of deity? It must apparently be owned that, though we tremble at the thought, we have none. We are left upon this shore of time gazing into infinity and eternity without clue or guidance except such as we can gain either by inspection of our own nature with its moral indications and promptings or by studying the order of the universe.

We find in man, it is true, a natural belief in deity, which we might think was implanted by his creator; but it is not found in all men, and in the lower races it assumes forms often so low and grotesque that we cannot imagine its origin to have been divine. Between the God of the Christian and the god of the red Indian there is, saving mere force, no affinity whatever. This we must frankly own to ourselves. The god of the Mexican demanded human sacrifice.

On earth the creative power seems to be, as it were, contending against itself. Good of every kind is in conflict with evil. Slowly and fitfully, with many reverses, good seems to prevail. Humanity as a whole advances, and if we could believe in its collective advance toward an ultimate perfection which all who have contributed to the advance should share, we might have a solution of the great problem. But of this we have no certain assurance. Multitudes come into being who to progress can contribute nothing. There is evil of all kinds that so far as we can see can be followed by no good effect. Plague and famine, with a great part of the common misfortunes of human life, seem merely evil. So, plainly, do the sufferings of animals, sometimes on a terrible scale and apparently quite useless. As long as effort, even painful, is the price of perfection the price must be paid and we acquiesce. But in innumerable cases there appears to be no room for that explanation. The rocks display the fossil remains of whole races of primeval animals produced apparently only to become extinct. Of the earth itself, man's destined habitation, large portions are utterly uninhabitable. The legendary war between the powers of good and evil, God and Satan, Ormuzd and Ahriman, was a fable naturally devised, though the birth of the two powers and the division of existence between them is inconceivable. Can anything like a clear line be drawn between good and evil?

Effort and resistance to temptation may seem necessary ingredients in the formation of a virtuous character. So far we may think we have the clue. But what is to be said of the myriads of cases in which virtuous effort seems to be morally impossible; in the case, for instance, of barbarous or corrupt and depraved tribes or nations in which general example is evil? What is to be said of deaths in infancy, when there has been no time for character to be formed? To suppose that the Creator could not have helped it, that this was his only way to the production of virtuous beings, is to deny his omnipotence. A Satan with horns and hoofs, struggling against the power of good, used to be the solution of the problem, but belongs to the simple religion of the past.

A plan of which we are ignorant, but of which the end will be good, is apparently our only explanation of the mystery. The earth is beautiful; we have human society with all its interests; we have friendship, love, and marriage; we have art and music. We must trust that the power which will determine the future reveals itself in these.

The belief that man has an immortal soul inserted into a mortal body from which, being, as Bishop Butler phrases it, "indiscerptible," it is parted at death, has become untenable. We know that man is one; that all grows and develops together. Imagination cannot picture a disembodied soul. The spiritualist apparitions are always corporeal.

Free will surely we unquestionably have. Necessarianism seems to assume that in action there is only one element, motive. But reflection seems to show that there are two elements, motive and will; and of this duality we seem to be sensible when we waver in action or feel compunction for what we have done. Is it possible to explain moral repentance or morality at all without assuming the freedom of the will? Habit may enslave; but to be enslaved is once to have been free.

What is conscience? When we repent morally are we looking only to the immediate consequences of the act, or are we also looking to the injury done to our moral nature? If the latter, does it not appear that there is something in us not material and pointing to a higher life? Much of us, no doubt, is material. Memory and imagination often act unbidden by the will; imagination often when we are asleep. We may find a material element even in the character as moulded by physical or social circumstance or need. But is there not also a conscious effort of self-improvement not dependent on these? That all is material, nothing spiritual, does not seem yet to have been proved.

It is by close examination of our own nature and its workings, perhaps, that we are most likely to solve the enigma of our being. The word spiritual surely has a meaning; it suggests self-culture not only for the present but for a higher state.

Evolution is a great discovery. But evolution cannot have evolved itself, nor does there seem to have been an observed case of it. Points of similarity between the ape and man are not proofs of transition. Has any animal given, like man, the slightest sign of self-improvement or conscious tendency to progress?

The putting on by the mortal of immortality, it must however be owned, baffles conception. In the apologue of Dives and Lazarus the dead appear still in their human forms and talk to each other across the gulf, apparently narrow, which divides the abode of the damned from that of the blessed. This clearly is the work of imagination. Nor, seeing the infinite gradations of character and the frequent mixture of good and evil in the same man, can we understand how a clear line can be drawn between those who are admitted to heaven and those who are condemned to hell.

Mere difficulties of sense or intellect on mundane questions might be met by appeal to the mysteries of a universe which may conceivably be other in reality than to us it appears. But it is to be supposed that divine beneficence would give its creatures all powers of intelligence necessary to their moral welfare, above all those entailing reward or punishment in a future life.

What is to be said in this connection of man's aesthetic nature, of his sense of beauty and melody? Can they be the offspring of material evolution? As they meet no material need, we might almost take them for the smile of a beneficent and sympathizing spirit. The basis of the gifts no doubt is physical, but we cannot easily understand how they can have been developed by a purely physical process.

To ghosts and apparitions of all kinds, spiritualism included, we bid a long farewell.

We turn to the universe, of which while we believed in the Incarnation our earth was the central and all-important scene, but in which it now holds the place only of a minor planet. We see order and grandeur inexpressible, but with some apparent signs of an opposite kind—the conflagration of a star, a moon bereft of atmosphere, errant comets and aerolites. In our own abode we have variations of weather, apparently accidental and