which the impress of the present and presiding Deity is visible; it is like this temple not made without hands, this earth, with all its awful garniture of life, beauty, and sublimity, crowded with mysterious small things and little interests, and yet overwhelming in its magnificence; plain in its many meanings to those who can read purposes in appearances, and yet so incomprehensible that the best informed can only pray for more intelligence as they grow in knowledge. Here the very elements ordered to maintain life, health, joy, become enemies to them all. Atoms endowed with power to propagate death float in our life-breath ready to destroy us. Earthquake, pestilence, tempest, and war, are ministers of the same Power that moulds the mother's heart, and says, Love one another. He that would walk rightly finds a spring of wrong within him and a foe for ever in his way. Why and whence this contrariety and conflict? Why does the invisible behind the visible mould dead matter into the living body of man only to die, while man thinks of immortality and life eternal? What a puzzle to philosophy is this orb of light and darkness, rolling in immensity with good conformed with evil on its surface! Where is the inspiration that can interpret the enigma without the Bible?

Who can explain why the Bible as a whole is accepted as divine by the highest intellects of Europe as well as by the lowest, that think of God with man? True, it has made the high intellect that most admires it. The lofty civilisation that has produced such men as Newton

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and Bacon, not to mention equal minds now working out among us the problems of science and philosophy, is a civilisation due mainly to the Bible. But the book -and here is the telling fact for our philosophy—the book civilises everybody who believes it. The outside. branches of mankind, the outcasts and the vagabonds, if recoverable at all, settle into order under its influence, with purer thoughts and better manners than the ancient Grecians ever realised. And he must be mentally degraded and far embrutalised who cannot be brought to feel the force of its human details and the divinity of its doctrines. Whatever the conventional tastes of men a to outside beauty, whether agreeing with those of Esquimaux, Negroes, or Englishmen, every mind awakened by the statements of that world-wide book becomes conscious that there is but one moral beauty-God-likeness; and he is the best man who possesses most of it, whether his skin be white or black. The Gospel makes that man most humane who best obeys its teaching, for its whole doctrine embodies the fact that justice is one with love.

That the Bible, when rightly taught, has the same civilising effect upon all races of men is, then, as we view the subject in its moral aspects, evidence in favour of the unity of mankind. But as this view of the subject admits of the most entire and direct denial by those who deny the value and admit not the authority of that book, it might be well to take a cursory review of the physiological and other physical reasons for believing it possible that every race of men may have been derived

from such a man as described in the preceding pages. But as such a review would too much interrupt the argument attempted in this part of the general subject, it may suffice in this place to quote the words of Professor Wagner, who has, from his position as a teacher of comparative anatomy for many years, had the fullest opportunity, as well as disposition and ability, to investigate the question as to the unity of mankind. In a lecture on Anthropology delivered at the first meeting of the thirty-first assembly of German naturalists and physicians, at Gottingen (Sept. 1854), he says: If you ask me, on my scientific conscience, how I would formulate the final results of my investigations on this subject, I should do so in the following manner:-All races of mankind can (like the races of many domestic animals) be reduced to one original existing, but only to an ideal type, to which the Indo-European type approaches nearest.' To this conclusion, Waitz, to whom we owe the most elaborate cumulation of facts in Anthropology ever collected, has also arrived.*

* See Waitz's Anthropology of Primitive Peoples.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

HUMAN FREEDOM.

IN descanting on the claims of human brotherhood, we bave not wandered so far as it might seem from the divine idea of man as we suppose him when first introduced to this wondrous world. A perfect man, dignified with personal beauty and endowed with all the faculties and affections that might render him worthy of admiration and of love, is a being which genius cannot fully bring before the eye of the mind. The poetry of language, of chiselled marble, or of pictured light fails, unless the words, the sculpture, or the picture, over all that else is noble, gives us in that Presence a face radiant with the conscious love of freedom. The especial personality of the first man must have been imbued with the sentiments of free will most perfectly, for that is the most essential of all human prerogatives. The self-formative faculty of the soul, by which each man becomes improvable in knowledge and virtue, in a manner peculiarly his own, requires a consciousness of freedom in will and action, so far as that freedom interferes not with the law of his own well-being and that of his fellow-man. Each man is an original, so

far as he is free to choose for himself how he will exercise his instinct for instruction; he cannot call any man the master of his faculties. In accommodation to this implanted feeling, every thinking man finds an experience and an advancement in a path along which he is conducted by God alone. Feeling this, no man with enlightened reason and conscience can be at heart a slave. 'He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves besides.' Therefore the first man was free to learn any truth he could, in obedience to necessary law, for necessary law is necessary only because it is good, and cannot be broken without evil. Even now the sun shines equally on the evil and the good, to make the evil good and the good better. That was the meaning of all fostering influences, when man knew nothing of religious and civil despotism; and they who would rule man without enlightening him have the Spirit of Darkness as their ruler. Unnatural restraints are lawless forces that may produce deformities and monstrous developments. There is no authority but in love-free and freedom-giving love. Any attempts to compel men to think alike till equally intimate experimentally with the same truths, would be like making a Dutch garden, where trees and shrubs are trimmed into quaint shapes, pleasant only to minds so distorted as to find no loveliness in the flowers that grow, bloom, and blossom under the Spirit that first formed them. Created uniformity is that of life and freedom, where every kind of being is developed into a form of beauty belonging to the nature of its kind.