ing; to quicken us to Faith, and nourish in us Piety.

And these results-these practical resultsof knowing God, spring not from the clearness, but the dimness rather, of this our knowledge. It is from our sense of ignorance and littleness that they spring;-from mystery they take their rise, and by mystery they live. All religion, like all philosophy, begins in wonder; and its issue is to make us wonder more.

For what is Faith but the sense of the invisible, the assurance of things which we see not and cannot understand,-the reaching and grasping of the mind after something beyond its present ken, which it cannot logically prove to itself, but which, it knows, must be. "The strength of faith," says Hooker, "is tried by those things wherein our wits and capacities are not strong." And what, then, so necessary to quicken and to nourish Faith as the mystery which invests the Godhead ? We are born into the world in darkness and in gloom: we travel on in darkness through the world: some faint reflections from the things around us quicken our attention, awaken in us thoughts of beings more and other than ourselves; we

pause; we think; we find we are not All; we feel our ignorance, our dependence, and our nothingness; and thus we learn to believe that there are mysteries above our comprehension. And what is Revelation for? To efface this humble, child-like feeling? to remove this salutary faith? Nay rather, but to deepen and to cherish it to open out further glimpses, indeed, of the unseen world; but by this very opening-while it strengthens faith, while it confirms our first assurances, and gives them certainty-yet to furnish still more scope for its exercise. As the wondering ignorance of the child, to the equally wondering knowledge of the sage, so is the faith of the natural mind to the faith of the Christian man. The dark veil which is spread before us, glows and brightens with the light which streams from the inward sanctuary of God; but that veil is not withdrawn, nor will it ever be! Faith is the proper feeling of a creature-mind, and Mystery is the very life of Faith.

Nor is this less salutary, or less necessary to the nourishment of Piety. For what is Piety? It is a specific exercise of the general sentiment of Veneration. And Veneration depends on the

mysteriousness of its object. All experience, from childhood to age, from the old world to the present, tells us this.

Do we not, from our earliest infancy, love the inscrutable above all other things? Is not that delightful feeling Awe, which, while it humbles, yet at the same time elevates, most experienced by the youthful mind?—because to its opening faculties every thing is new and every thing surprising. Whence the thrilling sacredness of the forest glade, stretching out in its long vistas beyond our baffled sight? Whence the fearful grandeur of the mountain height piercing the clouds and shrouded in their gloom? of the great broad sea stretching out in sacred mystery before the eye, and still at what might seem its farthest bound, extending yet, and melting into air? and of the dazzling sun, which sheds a flood of splendour on our countenance, and by that splendour baffles our examination? All is sacred, grand, and venerable, because it is mysterious and escapes our grasp. Universal Nature has been reverenced just in proportion as she has been veiled from vulgar curiosity. I refer you further to the contrast of the ancient world with the present on this one point. The sages of old felt the mystery of Nature, and they were

content to feel; they saw that all around them was appearance, mysterious appearance, and they did not cheat themselves into the vain imagination that they could explain it they paused in admiration and were silent.

And what is the contrast of the present day? What have we gained, brethren, so far, I mean, as the best and holiest feelings of the mind are concerned,-by the discoveries of restless science, and the sharp-eyed accuracy of Modern Philosophy?* Men have pryed into Nature till they think, most vainly think, that they can scan and measure her: they have removed one more of the many folds in which she is enveloped, and they proceed to talk of her as a familiar thing ; till at last where are we? where now is childlike awe, and simple reverence? where is the sense from which all Piety must spring;-the knowing that with all our knowledge we know nothing still?

I say all Piety for Piety, as I have said before, is the exercise of that same reverence towards God, the All-mysterious, and the Allsublime, which from our earliest youth has

* Let me not be mistaken here. The ardour of devout investigation I revere: I would only have it remembered that "all knowledge is to be limited by Religion."-BACON.

been maturing in us, by the things around us. Piety is religious reverence; and piety therefore, equally as general reverence and awe, depends on the mysteriousness of its object on the mysteriousness therefore of the GOD we worship and adore. Explain away the sacred mystery in which religion and its grander doctrines dwell, and you lessen the most efficacious feeling of the mind, a pious awe. What, for example, so effectually deprives the blessed Jesus, the author of our faith, of reverence and obedience due, as the stripping from his person that mysterious veil which Scripture throws around it? And what again does GOD become to us-the great First Cause himself—when precisely defined and scientifically talked about! God, the subject of a proposition in scholastic Theology-of a definition-of a laboured description,--no longer rouses in us salutary feeling, but is reduced to words, mere words; a congeries of attributes-a merely logical existence ---a mathematical point-a nonentity.* But

*The bane of Theology has been the treating it logically, as an abstract science. The Scriptures treat it humanly accommodating themselves to our business and bosoms; and representing divine things, and the Divine Being himself, analogically. The Bible speaks throughout avoρwоals, in harmony with human sym