elevate the man only as it proves to him the relationship of his own mind to the Person who made the human mind capable of perceiving His mode of operation, and of working with Him by obeying Him.

Now, a lone man, sole heritor of earth, with no instructor, would have been a poor orphan indeed, and little fitted to make discoveries of the meaning of things and the purpose of his own existence. But the first man was the son and heir of God, and we are constrained to believe that the Father personally instructed him in all that was necessary to the satisfaction and happiness of his heart and reason.

The eye in smiles may wander round,

Caught by earth's shadows as they fleet;
But for the soul no help is found,

Save him who made it, meet.

KEBLE.

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CHAPTER XIX.

MORAL LAW.

AMONG the earliest necessities of man as a moral agent, would be the knowledge of the nature of moral law. Any law known to be from God is a moral law, because it demands obedience from reverence to His unerring authority as man's Maker. There must have been, therefore, in some early period of man's history some arbitrary law imposed on him, demanding entire confidence but yet involving a penalty in its breach. This was necessary for the exercise of man's moral faculties under sense of responsibility, as a free agent in relation to a positive and unquestionable authority. Beyond that purpose of exercising free will in respect to God, we need not now enquire into its nature. Of course that law meant self-control, something desirable but not to be done, yet without the sacrifice of enjoyment, only with the exercise of a perfect faith in the wisdom and love that enjoined its observance. Before any such injunction could have had value as a teaching test, the moral influences pertaining to the love of approbation, love of knowledge, love of power, love of self, and that higher reflex of self-love-affection for another as the

complement of a man's own being-must necessarily have been experienced. As humanity is not complete but in the union as in one flesh of man and woman, so the test by which the nature of parental authority as requiring perfect obedience as from a child, not knowing why, but in reliance on proved love, must have been imposed on the united nature that was to become parental.

The life-union of man and woman in a common interest, implies the previous acquirement of language as the vehicle of thought and feeling. The imposition of a law that we must suppose orally expressed, also implies a language as its vehicle. This possession of language by man will demand our consideration as we proceed, but as we have now the first arbitrary moral law and its effects before us, it will be well first to reflect on its operation.

The possibility of obeying or disobeying the first command of God must determine the course of human destiny. The divergence in perpetuity between right and wrong is seen in any small act of will as much as in all history; the divergence begins at a point anywhere, but where does it end? It is the point at which the self-will turns away on its own centre under a force that operates for ever, unless some other force meet and overpower it. A direction taken at variance with the Divine will runs on in the same line as long as thought exists, and can know no turning unless Divine interference produce repentance and so recovery.

In thinking of law and faith, we are thinking of that which distinguishes man from brutes, that is reason and

all that it includes. Of course those philosophers who find no essential difference between the minds of the lower creatures and their own, deny that reason, implying apprehension of moral law, is a characteristic of man; they contend that the difference is one not of kind but degree, a conclusion perfectly unavoidable if man be but a more highly developed brute. But a conclusion that involves the necessity of regarding brutes and all creeping things as sinners, or tending to become so, in however slight a degree, certainly disturbs our prejudices if it does not wound our pride. However, if that be a truth, we are only the more to be pitied the more we feel disinclined to believe that criminality, enthusiasm, virtue, vice, conscientiousness, morality, and religion, are to be imputed to brutes, as some say. Moral and immoral dogs, cats, and horses! Fido, poor fellow, is afflicted in his conscience and ashamed of his misdeeds! How we sympathise with Fido! he appreciates the majesty of my ideas' of right and wrong-a little. 'The rapacious tribes are evidently in a low moral condition;' and, alas!' they ever will remain so, as the necessity of their organisation and of the limited extent to which it is possible for man to influence them' with moral consideration.*

6

The writer quoted asks- Who can draw the line of distinction between the love of a bird for its young and

* See The Moral Faculties of Brutes, by Shirley Hibberd, in the Intellectual Observer, October 1863.

the love of a human mother?'* Certainly the human mother's love is only a little more intelligent, but not a whit superior in power, unless with the life laid upon her bosom she recognise the Love that made and watches over herself-unless she feel that her offspring partakes of immortality, and belongs to God for ever. The bird's love is just as beautiful in its strength as hers, perhaps, but there is a vast amount of difference between a praying mother's love and the bird's. But terrible is the difference when a human mother having in her wretchedness neglected or forsaken her child, afterwards awakes in conscience to the feeling of that sin as against her nature and her God.

Animals, or at least dogs, it appears from the authority quoted, have religious sentiments appealing to their moral nature: The dog worships man, but it is man's privilege to worship his Maker.' The dog's veneration, however, cannot be very discriminating, for it is as worshipful of Bill Sikes as it would be of William Wilberforce. Hereditary original sin belongs also to brutes, according to the same authority: Some men are born criminals, and so are some dogs and horses.'† Poor creatures! Who can convert them?

6

'The range of brute faculties is by so much narrower than the range of human faculties as this or that order is farther removed from man by inferiority of organisation, but the mind is of the same sort in both cases;