mind in its highest relations, than the use of an image (an idol or a picture) which is used simply as an emblem. For Divine qualities are supposed by it to inhere in and cling to an inert, inanimate, material substance. The Ritualists, we infer, do not believe formally in transubstantiation; but by what we can gather from their writings, they must hold something like impanation, or the theory that the bread and the cup are permeated with the body and blood of the Lord, and therefore are to be adored as if His actual self.1 They, equally with the Romanists, teach that the Sacrament has become Christ, and is to be worshipped like Himself in His Divine personality. Practically, on this point, the difference between the two doctrines is reduced to almost nothing. The effect upon the consciousness and the religious life must be very much the same.

In view of that presence of Christ in the Sacrament which has been advocated above, no such consequences are involved. The Sacrament does not become Christ personally. It is not affirmed or implied that the body and blood of Christ are mingled with, or made to pervade, the elements. The presence is perfectly distinct and distinguishable from the Sacrament. Christ is not, as it were, enclosed within it. That which is present is His body and His blood; or such a virtue of them as went forth from His person to heal a timid yet genuine believer. Where His body and blood are, or where their virtues are immanent, we may be well assured He is not Himself absent, or accessible only in figure or scheme or fancy. And still we are not compelled to locate Him upon the altar in propria persona. The presence to the eye in the "Sacrament of our Redemption," is a symbol or representative of such a personal presence; so that then and there one may have a consciousness of His presence not realized under other and lower circumstances. Doubtless, there may be a depth and fervor of devotion before an impressive celebration of the Eucharist, when the symbols of a Saviour's "precious bloodshedding" are before the eye of love and gratitude, which can hardly be equalled in the solitude of the closet, on ordinary and humbler occasions. But the soul's most earnest worship will not be addressed to the things seen, but to Him who is invisible, like the Father on high. Under the veil of these earthly elements we shall rather worship Him only in whom, as an Apostle says, though now we see Him not, yet believing, we can rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

So lofty and touching a subject refuses to be judged, measured,

1 We have in mind the letters of Dr. De Koven to Dr. Craik.

and appreciated by the cold, hard syllogisms of a prying, unsympathetic metaphysician. To treat it in this way would be like applying logarithms to those glorious aspirations, breathed forth in the eighth Psalm, where David appears not as a mathematical, but a spiritual astronomer. The Eucharist is a mystery for the spirit, and for the spirit in its highest flights of devotion. It is not a problem of austere logic or of recondite philosophy. It is not to be looked at in what Bacon calls "a dry light." And yet it is the dryest of dry lights-the dry light of logic in its harshest form, and of philosophy in its most abstract mood-which have produced the chief and the worst of the influences attending the scholastic doctrine of it, till it has become to multitudes not "a form of godliness,” but an enslaving superstition. Romanists stand aloof, and look at it as something severely and darkly formidable. They receive its elements-no; one half of them-once a year! We are not astonished. Scholastic wonders are justified by their hoodwinked children.

P. S.-Selden was accounted a Puritan, by many, because he was a member of the Westminster Assembly. He was perfectly familiar with controversies about the philosophical character of the elements of the Eucharist, and perfectly able, by his scholastic and judicial learning and discrimination, to appreciate them. It may gratify the curiosity of not a few, to know what the exact theory of such a man might be. Fortunately, he has left it for us, in his "Table-Talk," under the title, Transubstantiation. It is as follows: "The best way for a pious man, is to address himself to the Sacrament with that reverence and devotion as if Christ were really there present." This is enough for any grade of piety, however high; and if all would stand on Selden's platform, controversy might end evermore! As to transubstantiation, considered scholastically, no man has defined it better, or in shorter compass, than this great lawyer. He says it is rhetoric converted into logic. That is the exact truth, and the whole of it.

EFORE Sir Isaac Newton had reasoned out why an apple falls from a tree, the universe was a riddle. When he discovered the law of gravitation, he released astronomy from its swaddling bands. Before his time, if any one had been asked why the apple fell, he would have said, because it was no longer supported in the tree. But Newton pushed the inquiry farther, and sought to know why the apple fell, when it was no longer supported in the tree. He saw that the failure of support was but the occasion, not the cause, of the apple's falling; the cause he sought in a law. The discovery of this law extorted from nature her long and zealously guarded secret. The key to the motions of the universe was found at last. All the wonderful discoveries that have been made since his day, by means of the telescope and spectroscope, have served only to add new confirmation to his illustrious guess; none of them have in the slightest degree impugned it.

If the great Newton had pursued the subject no farther than to reach the mere generalization that all unsupported bodies fall, and had thence proceeded to enunciate, as a law, the simple fact that they fall, he would have taught the world nothing that it did not know before; and would have been guilty of a mere trick in the legerdermain of words. But when, instead of calling the mere fact of falling a law, he showed that a force pervades all nature, of which falling is the result, and demonstrated the rule according to which this

force invariably acts, instead of uttering a platitude, he made known a discovery. The law of gravity, that all bodies attract each other inversely as the square of the distance, was all that made Newton's speculation more than a guess.

Is the attraction of gravitation an ultimate physical law? That is, is it a law itself, and not the result of another physical law? It is believed to be such, and as such mankind will continue to receive it, until a higher physical law shall be announced and demonstrated. In the meantime, since the discovery of the correlation and conservation of forces, it is, perhaps, not altogether certain that the attraction of gravitation is the only ultimate law with which we are acquainted. If it be true that all known forces are modes of motion, then it may possibly follow that motion itself can be traced back, for its origin, to attraction. The nebular hypothesis almost assumes as much. And it may be shown that even molecular attraction is the same law in its minute application; for by the application of heat molecular attraction can be so far overcome as to change any known substance into gas. The spectroscope teaches us that the most obdurate substances of which we have any knowledge exist in the form of vapor in the atmosphere of the sun, and of other central stars.

Now, if the doctrine of the correlation and conservation of force be true; and if it be true that the attraction of gravitation is the ultimate form of force, giving rise to motion, into which every other force may be transmuted, then it would follow that all the material force in the universe is the exact reciprocal of that attraction of gravitation exerted upon star-dust in the beginning. As a name for the law by which all this has come about from the beginning, the term evolution has been used. The fact of evolution, however, must be carefully separated from the many theories entertained of some of its subordinate workings. Over and above all these partial theories stands the great fact,-that if the doctrine of the correlation and conservation of forces be true, and the attraction of gravitation be acknowledged as the ultimate form of physical force, then there is some law that governs all mutations, and is the exact correlative of the attraction of gravitation. This law has been called, comprehensively, evolution. And the very pertinent question here to be asked, is, whether or not this term is a mere jugglery with words, and instead of being the name of a law, is only the name of a blank generalization. If a law, then it has definite conditions, like the inverse ratio of the law of gravity. If it has no such definite conditions, then it is a mere generalization. Such definite condition is found in

the law of the correlation and conservation of force; and the question of the truth or falsity of evolution as a principle must be fought out on this ground. Nor do we conceive that spiritual force is implicated in the question, inasmuch as the premises in the outset include only physical force. Unless it can be shown that a spirit is subject to physical laws, it can never be shown to be the product of physical energy. There is nothing in the present state of science that renders the proof of this possible. Neither do we believe that it ever will be proved. It might not, indeed, be a violent presumption to suppose that, whilst the attraction of gravitation and evolution may be supreme laws in the domain of the physical universe, so, in like manner, there may be laws supreme in the spiritual universe, which we cannot understand in this present state of existence; and that the two domains, the spiritual and the physical, may be but parts of a grand whole, results of higher forces and higher laws, which, perhaps, angels and archangels may not be able to fathom. By an ultimate physical law, therefore, we mean a law supreme in the physical domain, but which itself may be the result of other and higher laws, at the basis of loftier generalizations which it is impossible for us to comprehend. Such being the case, it is evident that it would be in the highest degree unphilosophical to endeavor to stretch a law belonging to one department of the universe over other departments that are governed by their own laws. We see, therefore, that the materialistic theories of evolution which have brought it into such great disrepute, are as illogical and unphilosophical as they are repulsive and alienating to every unsophisticated intellect.

Having now, at some length, shown what we understand evolution to mean; and having, we trust, also shown that it has acquired a bad name only by reason of the marplots that have laid hold upon it and endeavored to compel it to do their bidding, but in whose hands it has proved recalcitrant, we shall advance to the chief purpose of this paper; which is, to show that this idea has high value in philosophy; that it renders signal service in a department of abstruse speculation, where very unsatisfactory results alone have hitherto been attained. This department, now a hardly-fought battle-ground, is a correct theory of causation, which, owing to the persistency of those by whom it has been debated, seems by all parties, tacitly, to be recognized as the true philosophical dividing line between theism and pantheism on the one side, and personal theism on the other. And it seems to us that this theory of evolution has, for the first time in the history of speculation, rendered a solution possible; and that, too, a solution in the interests of truth and righteousness,