is trembling to its depths-to be squabbling over uniforms and rations when the very citadel is being sapped!"

The writer then proceeds to show the cause of this state of feeling. He says: "The curse to the American mind, as we believe, has been the aspect presented in a portion of our Theology of DEITY. The God of some of our theologians is not a Being whom the human heart could either respect or love. Men have ascribed feelings to HIM which they would utterly revolt at in themselves or in their fellows. We are not overstating. We know those with whom the memory of family prayer, early religious teaching and Sabbath sermons is so entwined with the picture of a hateful and repellent Deity,that they loathe and reject, in consequence, the whole religion of their childhood. To them always the first unconscious thought which enters the mind, of God, is the dread thought of the God of their Theology. Along with this, on every side weakening human faith, is the Formalism of present Christianity."

Yes, this is it and what is it all but the natural result of an advanced state of cultivation and development of mind, which can no longer content itself with dry, unintelligible and con

tradictory creeds! It is the spirit of earnest, free inquiry, which is as a voice crying in the wilderness. The friends of Truth cannot but rejoice to see it progress-to see obstinate prejudices wearing down-old errors falling away -the spirit of bigotry subsiding--and the spirit of tolerance and liberality extending. In some portions of the community it may be called skepticism, and it may sometimes be that—but it is only the skepticism of reaction—the commotion of waters by which they are purified.— Neither a state of unbelief nor of doubt is pleasant to man. He cannot rest contented under it. Christianity has nothing to fear from skepticism-nor from investigation. Creeds only have worked it injury--but they are already relaxing their grip upon its throat and are being shaken off.

The deadness that is in the church is but a result of the slow and silent working of God's spiritual chemistry, that is working there as his physical chemistry works in the fields of nature. It is the deadness of the buried shell, the decomposition of the worthless husk. It is a deadness from which life shall spring forth, as from the perishing yet fructifying seed. Out of the dismal darkness, out of decay, up into the

glorious light and sunshine and air, shall rise and expand and blossom, that great tree whose leaves shall be for the healing of the nations and under whose broad branches every family and kindred of the earth shall sit-a type of the true Church Universal.

V.

THE DIVINITY IN MAN.

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?-1st CORINTHIANS, iii, 16.

AID a certain saint, I think it was Chrysos

tom, speaking of the Shekinah, the Ark of Testimony, the visible revelation of God among the ancient Hebrews, "The true Shekinah is .man." And so it is. We need no outward proof to convince us of the fact. A still small voice rising from the inmost depths of the soula voice that the clamor of the vain, suspicious world cannot silence-forever whispers to us that we are divine; that the I AM, the will to do and dare, the spring of all heroic endeavor in these moving, breathing tabernacles not made with hands, is a breath of heaven, a revelation of the true God.

There is but one temple in the universe, says Novalis, and that is the body of man. Noth

ing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this revelation in the flesh. We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body.

This truth was impressed as with letters of fire on the mind of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. If ever a man entertained a true idea of the importance and dignity of his race, that man was Paul. He looked upon his fellow creatures not as merely human--as machines working their allotted time and then falling to decay--but as embodiments, individual organizations of matter pervaded with and glorified by an intense spiritual life that could not die-a life forever unfolding and reaching forward into the Infinite. His great mind wonderful alike for its vigor and intensity of conception, was all alive with the thought. He had been a worshiper at the Temple's inner shrine--he had drank in streams of light from the living Fountain itself until dizzy with excess of glory. The mystery of life and of death lay unveiled before him—and how majestically in his first Epistle to the men of Corinth, does he discourse upon the resurrectionthe uprising of the divinity from its riven, crumbling temple! "Behold, I show you a mystery-we shall not all sleep, but we shall