from its office, and giving the place to some other faculty? Precisely so is it with conscience. The theory of its legiti mate supremacy asserts not that it does not err; but it affirms that, in all circumstances, it is the faculty to decide on duty. We hold this precisely with the same degree of tenacity with which we hold the conviction that, though reason may err, intellectual skepticism is intellectual suicide: conscience may not be infallible, but rejection of its authority is moral skepti cism, that is, moral death. Butler shows the highest point on which man can stand, in order, with his unaided powers, to see God; but can we for a moment allege, that the author of the Analogy did not perceive the fact that this is but climbing to the top of a ruined tower, and that, though from its head we can see farther than from the plain below, the only hope for man is, that, gazing thence, he may see the dawning of the Sun of Righteousness?

The above is, strictly speaking, all that Butler has done. The distinct and verbal testimony he bears to the fact that conscience naturally refers to God, is in itself of great value; but it is of the nature of a testimony, not a proof; it has all the weight that the deliverance of the individual consciousness of one of the clearest and strongest thinkers that ever lived must be allowed to possess, but this is very far from equivalent to a demonstrative dictum of the universal consciousness. Morality he demonstrated: to godliness he bore witness.

The numerous expressions of agreement with Butler in his belief that conscience naturally spoke from God, can not be considered, more than his own, as constituting any such proof of the point as he offers for the supremacy of the moral faculty. Dr. Chalmers, perhaps the ablest of the writers who have thus recorded their assent, does, to an important extent, suggest the mode and indicate the materials of this proof; his

reference to the phenomena of remorse and self-complacency is a very valuable hint; and his assertion of the fact that conscience points to the being of God as "with the speed of lightning," shows at least what has to be proved; but even he makes no stated attempt to connect the truth he asserts with the consciousness of the race, and thus vindicate for it a place. in that fortress whose assailing is the assailing of the possibility of truth. Perhaps the greatest achievement now possible in ethics is to connect indissolubly with the universal consciousness the fact that the moral faculty speaks by a delegated authority.

We shall not pretend here to draw out the demonstration which we believe to be possible. We shall merely offer two considerations, without fully unfolding either. We think that the second admits of being shown to be of itself conclusive.

I. The human consciousness, as revealing itself in history, has borne witness to the fact that it is natural for man not to regard the voice of conscience as final. We here point to no particular system of belief; we care not even though the name of the religion was pantheism. We point simply to that one fact, whose exhibition seems co-extensive with history, that the human race has not worshiped itself. There has ever been manifested an irresistible conviction that the phenomena of conscience were knit by a whole system of relations to somewhat beyond and external to the breast; that their meaning and efficacy were thus essentially affected. Did remorse cause the soul to writhe in hidden anguish? The hecatomb was straightway piled, the altar smoked: some external power believed capable, in what way soever, of sending forth a gentle wind to calm and cool the troubled spirit, was appealed to. Did a feeling of mild satisfaction breathe through the breast, in the consciousness of duty performed or noble

ness evinced? The present reward was not deemed exhaustive. Before the eye, resting afar, as on the still evening horizon of a troubled day, there beamed out softly the Elysian fields, with their tranquil rivers, on whose banks rested heroes, and their unfading flowers that breathed balm odors through the cloudless air. Every Pagan nation has had its mythology, and each mythology is essentially an attempt of the mind to shape out in visible form the several relations in which it believes itself to be joined with some external but invisible power. In one word, the conception of man as self-complete, as all in all to himself, as his own God, has been in all ages foreign to the mind of the race; perhaps of no phenomenon could it be more confidently asserted that it is a universal habit of mankind, than of the tendency to associate internal monitions with some great external reality or realities.

II. This seems to be a necessary and demonstrable case of the action of the great mental law by which a cause is demanded for every effect. As if impressed by God with a necessity of bearing testimony to His existence, every thing within the realm of finitude, from Arcturus and the Pleiades to the tiny moss that clings to the ruined wall, presents itself to us with an irresistible power to compel reference to a cause. If we are to retain faith in mind, we must believe that, in the region of the finite, this urgent necessity has a significance. Now, if the voice of the moral faculty is heard by the human soul as final, it is the one phenomenon within the bounds of conception which claims exemption from this law; it alone breaks the bonds of finitude. No such exemption can be pleaded; as surely as a monition of conscience is a phenomenon, so surely does it impel the human mind to seek its cause. The great historical fact we noted is thus at once confirmed and explained. It is seen that it was a resist

less necessity which in all ages urged the human mind to seek its Deity without. We do not hesitate to go further. We think it would admit of being shown that the law here acts in its most express form, and with clearest suggestion of intent. All nature bears the stamp of its Maker; but conscience names His very name.

The above proofs, we are well assured, admit of being elab orated into an irrefragable demonstration, that consciousnes: teaches us to refer the commands of the moral faculty to an external authority; and if this is so, it will not be disputed that there is but One authority to which they can be thus referred. We conclude, then, that the doctrine of the delegated nature of conscience is grounded on evidence, of similar nature and like conclusiveness with that of its supremacy among our faculties: godliness is natural to man in the same sense as morality.

Pantheism is a theory of God, man, and the universe, which can not be denied to contain elements of great sublimity; atheism can say nothing of the world, but that, for the living, it is a workshop, and for the dead a grave; nothing of the soul of man, but that it is the action of organism, and that the possibility of its separate existence is a dream; but pantheism, whether delusively or not, and at least in its popular representations, admits a theory of the world which is sublime, and a theory of man which is exalted. When clothed in the chastened beauty of the language of Fichte, or wrapped in the poetic gorgeousness of that of Carlyle, these can scarce fail to awake enthusiasm; and it is when, with express intention or not, such writers cast a passing glance of contempt on the apparently dead and rigid universe of one who refuses to say that the All is God, that an entrance is apt to be found for those general modes of thought which are of

the nature of pantheism. It were well, therefore, to look fairly in the face the express or tacit assumption of the pantheist; to contrast, with all impartiality and calmness, his universe and his God with those of the Christian.

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Ye make the great All a machine, say the pantheists, a dead piece of very superior mechanism; the tree Igdrasil of the old Norsemen was better than that; to look on the universe as godlike and god, how infinitely better is that? Let us consider. One mighty tide of force filling immensity, its waves, galaxies and systems, its foam sparkling with worlds, one immeasurable ocean of life, swelling in endless billows through immensity at its own vast, vague will; such is at once the universe and the God of pantheism. The pantheist is himself one little conscious drop in the boundless tide, in the all-embracing infinite. In the branching of the stars, this infinite rushes out; in the little flower at your feet, it lives. In all the embodying of human thought-in the rearing of nations and politics, in the building of towered cities, in the warring and trading of men-it finds a dim garment; in the beauties, and grandeurs, and terrors of all mythologies-the grave look of the Olympian King, the still and stainless beauty of the woodland Naiad, the bright glance of the son of Latona, the thunder-brows of Thor, the dawn smile of Balder-it is more clearly seen; the beauty which is the soul of art—the majesty that lives from age to age in the statue of Phidias, the smile that gladdens the eyes of many generations on the perfect lip and in the pure eye of a Madonna by Raphael-is its very self. You may look at it, you may, by effort of thought, endeavor to evolve it within you; but the drop holds no converse with the ocean, the great rolling sea hears not the little ripple on its shore; you can hold no converse or communion with your God; your highest bliss is to