recognising these, will answer them aright. Impediments in the way of any force do not destroy that force, and thus the force of soul is manifest when obstruction is removed. But brutes are not imprisoned men-they need no schooling to instruct their instincts: but man is unmanned without divine and human teaching; all his faculties lie waste unless brought into relation with that discourse of reason intended for them, which teaches love and moral beauty, and without which man is a terrible being to his fellow-man. If man's distinctive characteristic be that of a being endowed with language and thought, it follows that his destiny is connected with the ultimate purpose of thinking and speaking. We know that ideas are preserved in memory, and become operative as human motives, and are conveyed from generation to generation, in words which are not limited to the uses of this world, but intimate, however vaguely, our interest is a life beyond, and in some degree prepare us for it by imparting a faith that already conquers death. Thus reason sees the end of teaching in that religion which connects the everlasting future with the past and present, and thus begets a feeling of man's moral and spiritual relation to his eternal Source. And that science which excludes this view of man's will and thought in estimating man's place, excludes all that is really manly, and reduces him to a specimen of anatomy fit only for a museum of natural history. But as long as men do not mistake their bodies for themselves, they will look for a higher destiny. Reason, when rightly instructed,

unavoidably assumes that the truths we know are to conduct us onwards to the enjoyment of truth for ever. We cannot believe that this mental, moral life, this faith, this foreseeing, anticipative energy, this inspiring, prophecying hope, full of immortality, is to find its end in darkness and in death. The antecedents must be in harmony with the coming and close future. Bending with solemn, longing, lingering gaze over the silent beauty of the dead, with whom an hour since we whispered words of love and living faith, we feel that death is an intolerable, a terrible, a degrading interference with the purposes of humanity, until the Spirit within us bids us look beyond the horizon of clouds to the home of light, where we behold a glorious anastasis, in which the divine mystery of godliness is revealed through a humanity made safe and perfect.

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CHAPTER X.

LIFE, BREATH, SPIRIT.

THE simplest form of words in which the creation of a living being can be described is that a body was made and life breathed into it by the Creator. Every derived life is embodied, and yet the body neither produces the life nor the life the body. Life is that something superadded to an organised mass which enables that mass to breathe. Let us suppose the simplest body that can live—a mere cell, a monad. This is an organised creature consisting of different forms of matter in ordained relation each to other. It may be a mere bag, or closed fibrinous membrane, containing a solution of albumen—an egg of the least complicated construction we can conceive. But it is constructed that is, built up together-both by life and for life. Being alive, what is its action? Undoubtedly first of all to breathe. A breathing power is the essential characteristic of every living thing. Its life-gift is breath. This word 'breath,' however, is not to be restricted to the idea of merely inhaling and exhaling air through an especial organism, as by lungs. It means this and much more. It signifies also a

capacity to act upon the fluid elements amidst which any living creature is adapted to exist, and that in such a manner as to draw from those fluids, whether aerial or aqueous, whatever is requisite for the maintenance of life in action. The breath is the means of interchange between the living blood and the vital air, oxygen. This action stirs every atom of the body, and is essential to the soul's operation in the body. Without it there can be no manifestation of emotion, thought, idea, or desire. As in breathing the whole frame becomes one living body, so without breath the spirit's selfhood ceases to operate in connection with the bodily life, and life and soul together depart to some other sphere. Thus, it is not a mere figure of speech which connects life, soul, spirit with the term breath; nor is it a metaphor, but a fact, to say that when God conferred life on the soul and body, He imparted it with an initial act, a divine afflatus. A body produced without birth, and complete without growth, could have no connection with breath and life but direct from Him who made it. The breath-organs were ready, and God alone could inspire the first breath by which man became a living soul. This is of course true in fact, in relation to all life; but a life underived from a preceding life of the same kind, as by birth, is a life immediately inspired by God Himself. To live actively is to breathe, and to breathe is to set all the functions of the living organisation to their work, as it will do if all the other conditions of their working be normally present. With lungs or without lungs, everything that lives thus

breathes. The egg of each insect breathes as truly as a full-grown man. Some breathe in air, some in water, but all that lives and moves breathes just as the egg breathes through its shell, and would die if deprived of air. Whether in egg or seed, the act of germinating is the result of breathing. We see, then, that the idea of life as an active agency is necessarily associated with the idea of breathing. Therefore even Darwin, in order to find a first impulse for his primordial germ, demands that it should be inspired with breath. How? Simply and necessarily by saying that the Creator breathed life into it. Life is breath, with assimilative power, or force to draw out of the elements what is necessary to continued action, growth, and development. This can be nothing less than the impartation of Divine breath, or, in other words, the direct action of the underived spirit. Life is subjected to the laws of all nature, which are those of orderly action and reaction, all the elements being regulated in their reciprocal influences for the maintenance of life. All the conditions of time and space, all affinities and operations, all the laws of physics and of chemistry, all the working of Omnipotence as manifested on earth, seem to be carried out in their present order for the sake of sustaining successions of every possible form of vital activity. All the opposing energies in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, while involving the necessity of death, result in the multiplication of life, as if the production of living beings to the utmost extent were the especial purpose for which all

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