what we mean by the divine life is no empty illusion, but a substantial truth, the grandest of all spiritual prizes, steadily inviting the bestowment of our affections, augustly demanding the consecration of our thoughts. The earliest impediment on the way is the pitiable fact that so many are contented to remain in a selfish or traditional life, in a rooted indifference to truth, nobleness, and concord. When this carelessness has been removed, and an eager thirst for something diviner awakened, the next obstacle is the dark power of unbelief which disheartens and stops them. The victim of this painful distrust exclaims, sometimes, in secluded hours of celestial visitation and tender overflow, exclaims, "Oh, peerlessly beautiful and commanding is the ideal of the divine life! Floating before me, it attracts the profoundest yearnings of my soul. But I cannot believe it real on earth. It is an unsubstantial vision of the imagination, a heavenly deception, begot by chaste and hallowed fancy and desire, to mock the vanity of our proud aspirings, and the lowness of our poor estate. Such an experience as is thus mirrored in the glass of meditation is not to be known amid the rage of these vile passions, and the turmoil of this sinful world. I recognize it afar, I adore it, oh, I desire it! But it is a dream which I cannot think will ever become a reality here." And then he sinks in discouragement to his earthly grovellings again. All progress obviously is at an end, until he obtains faith that the desired object is real, and that he can reach it. How, therefore, we must ask, can these sceptical misgivings be destroyed? There are three considerations which will prove to him who adequately ponders them, that the divine life, as it has been described, is no fanatic excitement or delusion, but a rational experience and a solid verity.

First, the unquestionable facts in the nature of the case. There are no two men or lives exactly alike, or on precisely the same level. An announcement which, made to one person, strikes him lifeless to the floor, made to another person, does not cause him to lay down the newspaper he is reading. There are different degrees of degradation, insensi

bility, brutality, crime, and misery. With all their horrors and agonies of evil, they form a descending scale of woe that reaches from the unhappy restlessness of the common worldly man, to the anguish that owns no hope and utters no groan in the profoundest depths of perdition. There are, likewise, different degrees of purity, sensitiveness, virtue, freedom from fear and trouble, favor with the Holy Spirit, and unadulterated satisfaction in the immutable love of the Maker and Friend of all. The mingled repose and rapture of these experiences form an ascending scale of blessedness that reaches from the humility of the common good man in his labors, by the rare ecstasy of the saint in his devotions, to the unruffled perfection of bliss that streams through the heights of the heart of God. The self-evident facts of the case, traced in their rising gradations, demonstrate that there is, far up at the summit of the soul's climbing, a beckoning reality, the divine life, composed of the best ingredients of consciousness in their happiest combination. He who does not feel that he has attained all the elements of inward blessedness vouchsafed to man, and developed the experience of them to the limits of their possibility, must acknowledge that there is a choicer life above him claiming his allegiance, and waiting to enrich him with the gift of its imperishable joys.

Secondly, A man may prove the reality of the divine life by examining his own soul. His own occasional experiences imply it. None so low, so wicked, or so superficial, as not to have some memories of innocence and sanctification, hallowed hours and sinless hopes; some knowledge of the untainted rewards of disinterestedness, self-sacrificing toil, and personal goodness; some glimpses of spiritual glories, unattained, inviting his service and promising to bestow themselves on his love. Even the guilty, wretched slaves of the earth have revelations enough made to them of the nature of these spiritual experiences to prove, when duly considered, how true are the descriptions of the peaceful delights and inexhaustible profundity of a pious life in God. Let the appeal be made to any one. Have you not known moments of undisturbed content, of perfect health, of an ethereal satisfaction,

when the measure of every desire was filled to the brim, and it was luxury enough to exist; and, if you could be sure of the endless perpetuity of precisely that frame of feeling, you would wish no more? Have you not known a solitary hour when the unprofitable fret and stir of the world died away, your soul was in conscious harmony with the infinite flow of things, all sorrow and anxiety vanished, and the UNSEEN himself seemed to come into your breast with the full and sweet serenity of his bliss, and you said, "Ah that I could but preserve and dwell for ever in such a mood as this!" Experiences of this kind, more or less marked and frequent, come to all. They demonstrate the reality of the divine life, and point to the peaks of its beatific perfection, projected, roseate and immense, on the azure background of infinity. For if it can be transiently seen, it may be permanently possessed. If you can experience it for one exalted moment, you may uninterruptedly experience it for ever. Each man's own experience, therefore, may demolish his doubts.

Thirdly, The same thing is most conclusively proved by the testifying examples of saints, the explicit declarations of the choicest members of our race, the unveiled experience of heavenly-minded men of whom the world was not worthy. These men claim to have attained the blessed life, and to have dwelt in it. From their canonized elevation, they call on others to do likewise. To all, except the dead in trespasses and sins, how powerfully they plead, in such electrifying sentences as that of Francis of Sales, "The measure of the love of God is to love without measure"! They were too clear-sighted and calm, too patient and wise, to be deceived. They were too humble and sincere, too good and pure, to deceive others. There could be no motive for deception in the case,-every motive against it. If the testimony of any men may be trusted on any question of experience, theirs must be in relation to this: and with one accord, with singular agreement as to details, they declare themselves to have lived the divine life; to have reached, through religious faith and organic attunedness, an experience of quiet delight which words could not express, nor the world shake, nor time

exhaust. Francis of Assissi says, "Knowing myself to be nothing, and wishing to be so, God becomes mine with all his infinite riches, and I have no need either to deprecate or desire any thing more." Fénelon exclaims, "Oh! if men did but know what the love of God is, they would not wish any other felicity." And Bernard of Clairvaux cries, "All other joy is but sorrow." These wonderful utterances of the saints may seem to degraded earthlings delirium, and to slaves of selfish ambition folly; but to those called to be the peers of the saints, they are echoes of the most authentic oracles of divinity, blasts from the clarions of the cherubim, that make every faculty of their attentive souls leap and burn. That they had this experience, cannot be doubted; and who shall dare to call it a deception? No: every thing else may be false, but this is true. Based on immediate intuitions of consciousness, established by conclusions of reason and observation, fortified by the evidence of the greatest and best of men, pre-eminently exemplified by Jesus, and urgently proclaimed by every inspired Scripture, it must be accepted as a reality.

That it is not a tangible thing, outwardly approachable by the senses, but a spiritual truth, to be spiritually discerned, is really the great sign of its solidity and value. For the inward realities of experience are, to us, the only certain presences, the only sure enjoyment. These, in distinction from sensible objects, can only be perceived and appreciated after conscious processes of preparation adapted to them; and then all outward things are, in the comparison, illusion, dream, disappearance. A man of transcendent wisdom and excellence, long since risen to heaven, said once in his prayer, "My God, I see only thee: all other things vanish as a shadow before him who has once seen thee." And so it is. Before the intense realization of interior life, — faith, joy, communion with the Divine, absorption in the Divine, -external things fade into nothing. But, while sensual pleasures and earthly objects pass swiftly down the annihilating steep, the reality of a religious experience, to him who has once found it, nothing shall ever wear away. On its undiverging current floats the bark of our hopes, the bark of existence

itself, over the crystal depths, by the blessed isles, beneath the cloudless infinite, towards the everlasting haven.

He who has got thus far, has fulfilled the preliminary conditions, and is ready to take the third step; namely, the commencement of a course of discipline and culture with reference to the gradual preparation of his consciousness for the gifts God waits to bestow on it. First, having awakened an anxiety concerning his condition and fate, then having arrived at a belief that there is before him, within his reach, an experience adequate for his profoundest wants, he must next labor to obtain that experience. Just here, in this requisition for persevering effort, is the obstacle before which more persons sink in failure, than from all other causes. For there are very few whose souls are not sometimes roused to a trembling interest in their destiny by the stirrings of fear in view of evil, and of hope in view of good; few who do not sometimes rise to a belief in the reality of God, and in the active nearness of his Spirit, and feel that full satisfaction is to be found only in the fruitions of an exalted moral experience, an experience based on a religious interpretation of the realities and laws of being. Few indeed are there who have not gone as far as this in the way to the divine life; but an innumerable multitude have never gone any further, because, from lack of earnestness, they were unwilling to pay the price of continued progress. Time need not be spent in showing, that, unless this third step be taken, all that has gone before is useless. It is evident of itself, that the awakening force of fear or hope breaking the lethargy of content, and the revealing force of faith. showing the vision of desire ahead, are antecedents valuable only as they serve to remove hinderances, and prompt to the use of the means which will lead into progressive possession of the end.

The substance of all the guiding precepts that can justly be urged on a man who fervently desires the saintly experience, and has a clear belief in its reality, is this: Truly work for it; acquire that habitual mode of thought which furnishes the genuine foundation and nutriment for it; strengthen and purify your intellect and sensibility; cultivate the