carefully rendered as the important, but who turn from preference to the evil, the ugly, the repulsive as an unworked field of reality capable of yielding new and striking results. In this loss of all sense of discrimination and selection as to its subjectmatter, realism becomes a path no less fatal to art than the opposite path of idealism. I have said that art deals with absolute truth; a word as to its mode of doing so. The absolute presents itself to man under three aspects, correspondent to his three-fold constitution ; it is to reason the true, to imagination the beautiful, to will the good. But as human spirit is one in its triune constitution, so the absolute is one in its three-fold relation. Philosophy, art, and religion are but the same thing under different aspects,man's elevation to the absolute, in which, being himself spirit and partaker in the absolute, he comes fully to himself. The natural man beholdeth not the things of the spirit, neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. The spirit, that is, is the idealist proper. As merely natural, man's life is a delusion and a disorder. Philosophy, art, and religion have this one common aim, to lift man above the facts of his natural existence to the truth of his spiritual life. Philosophy lifts him from the blindness of sense and the antinomies of understanding to the clear vision of truth. Art lifts him from devotion to the worldly and the vain, to luxury and fashion, to adoration of that beautiful which is "the splendor of the true." Religion lifts him from the sway of selfish passions to the infinite peace of communion with the divine. Each in its sev eral way leads him toward the full self-consciousness in which he knows, feels, and lives as a being that shares the divine nature. It is then a low and false view of art which would make it servant to an idle dilletantism. Art is an entirely earnest thing. It is to make us pure and strong and free; it is sacrilege to make it pander to our weakness, our vanity, or our vice. There is not much genuine art in the world, but there is more than can be mastered in a life-time. It is these great works of genius that have made the thistle-bearing earth more habitable and the gift of life more welcome to us. And great work was only done by men who greatly thought and wrought. These knew their art for one among the potent agencies of spiritual culture. "For Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters Living together under the same roof, And never can be sundered without tears." Art is the necessary complement to philosophy and religion, and a necessary co-worker to their common end. It is related to one of the three equal parts of man's nature, as they to the other parts. It is one equal strand of the triple cord of vision, love, and obedience which make up the spiritual life. And that spiritual life is cur organic union with the Absolute. Truth, beauty, and goodness are no abstractions; they live in the character of the Living God. The beauty that dwells in outward nature, the beauty wrought by human hands is but the faint reflection of the glory of the Majesty Divine. The Madonnas of a Raphael, and the Symphonies of a Beethoven are but broken lights and far off echoes of His ineffable harmonies and the loveliness unpicturable. Thus all art is a hymn of praise. Its aim is to lead the soul through avenues of sense and outward things, refined and spiritualized, to where it shall catch some glimpse of the beauty of the Highest, of that Light which being compared with light is found before it,-more beautiful than the sun and above all the orders of the stars. And this the heathen Greek well knew. The speaker in the old dialogue exclaims: "That life only is the true life which is passed in communion with Beauty. But if a man had eyes to see the true Beauty, I mean the Divine Beauty, pure, clear, and unalloyed, no longer dressed by human fancy or clouded by human coloring, how splendid the destiny of that mortal to whom, thither looking and holding converse with Beauty in its own infinite majesty, it should be given to become immortal and the friend of God." ARTICLE IV.-SCIENCE IN THE PENTATEUCH. WE have often met with the assertion, very confidently made, that the writer of the Pentateuch, however well versed in the academics of his own time, was wholly ignorant of the true sciences so well established now. More definitely: It is often stated, as if a matter beyond doubt, that Moses, the Hebrew prince, knew nothing of true astronomy, nothing of geology, nothing of analytic chemistry. We think that this opinion is emphatically expressed alike by eminent students of the Hebrew Scriptures and by adepts in natural science. We do not call it in question. On the contrary, we accept it. We shake hands over it. We wish to stand on the same ground with those who hold it. We wish to have it distinctly understood, as we start upon a short meditative excursion, that it shall be mutually held as if an opinion demonstrated. Upon this premise we state our purpose. We propose under its light quietly to examine a few statements which we have culled from the many remarkable ones which distinguish the books of which Moses is the reputed author. We say "reputed," because, by some literary men whom we respect, he is thought to have been a compiler, to some extent, of the writ ings of others. We cheerfully concede this point because, as will be seen, it can only give to most of our citations the prestige of a greater antiquity, and therefore will not detract from any possible force which there may be in our course of thought. Our first selection is this writer's description of a day: "There was evening and there was morning-one day." This description is emphatically the writer's own. It is peculiar to this one page of his writings. We have not met with it elsewhere, or heard of it as from any other source; and we firmly believe that its like has never been found on any other page of human literature.* Its salient peculiarity, we need hardly say * In Dan. vii, 14, 26, the two words (p) "evening" and "morning” appear in the same order. In the first case our version renders the two by "days," and the Septuagint inserts pépau. But in neither case does the Hebrew word Dy appear, nor do the two stand as descriptive of "day." is this: that it presents to us a natural phenomenon which never has been apparent to any human eye and never can be― the phenomenon of day having its evening before its morning. This remarkable monography was no accident. It was no slip of the pen. The writer presents the fact as a characteristic of each of the six serial days which he brings to view. With this series the description ceases. In all the five books it never occurs again. From all this it is evident that upon this particular occasion he considered it to be of special importance that his readers should recognize this particular feature in these particular days, whatever they might think or not think about any other days. This six-fold repetition is, therefore, a six-fold emphasis. Not only does he present the phenomenon of evening in advance of morning as characteristic of each day (as we have already noticed), but he also makes a six-fold declaration of the characteristic itself. Another point: Common courtesy requires us to understand him as describing successive days of light, and not as describing some other possible days, or some other days which we may conjecture to have been possible-such, for example as timedays, or as æonic days. Common courtesy requires this, because he expressly tells us so by citing their divine definition before introducing us to the first day. His "evening," therefore, we must in courtesy hold to be an evening or waning away of light; and his "morning" to be an increasing of light. That is to say: He does state distinctly, and with six-fold emphasis, that the decrease of daylight, during the creative series, was uniformly in advance of its increase. But if Moses was the original writer of these words, we owe him another tribute of courtesy: To accept his remarkable collocation of words as accurately expressing an idea in his own mind. That is to say: He understood his own words. If, however, he was only a transcriber of some other man's writing-of some anterior generation--the same courtesy is due to that some other man. What was the idea of the writer? We must get at it by his words. Was it that of an alternating influx and efflux of light from some imperceptible source: growing by slow degrees, and, by the like gradation subsiding? This would have corres ponded, indeed, with his description of successive days of light, and with such days having evenings and mornings. But in no sense could he have conceived of the gradual efflux of such a day as being in advance of its influx. Each being light and the first day being the coming of light, its first morning must have been, in his mind, in advance of its first evening and not after; we mean in respect to time. As for place, he could have had no idea about it, because, by the supposition, its source was imperceptible. The point of our enquiry is not what was his idea about successive days of waxing and of waning. It is, simply, what must have been his idea about their waning being in advance of their increase. Again: Suppose his idea to have been that of the alternating efflux and influx of light from some perceptible source. Could it have agreed with an opinion that the sun, being that source, was in circuit around the world, the world itself remaining motionless? Not at all. Because, although in such a case he would have held as naturally as we do the idea of a day having morning and evening, yet he could no more have conceived of evening first and morning last than when thinking the light to have come from some imperceptible source. The truth is, in no sense whatever can the evening of a lightday be in advance of its morning, or even be imagined to be so, except in the case of exactly such days as we have, the light coming from a fixed source and the world always revolving upon itself and in one direction to get that light. In such a case, the fact is very simple and very apparent, not, indeed, to the eye, but to the mind. Evening always has been before morning, and always will be, and always must be, while the sun endures and the world rolls. With only one possible exception, in case of another shrouding of the world by a “cloud,” so that once more "thick darkness should be its swaddlingband." Therefore, in no sense whatever could the writer of these remarkable words have had any idea of a phenomenon such as they describe, unless he did conceive, when writing of this the only way in which such a phenomenon was conceivable, of the very way by which the evening of a day is before its morning. Consequently, the persistent and emphatic repetition of this precise phrase does show clearly that the writer, |