"Self-government arises from foresight of results."

"It is the neglect of science, the refusal to study the surrounding creation, that is irreligious."

"Misery is the highway to death, while Happiness is added life and the giver of life."

"All evil results from non-adaptation of constitution to conditions, and perpetually tends to disappear."

"A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind."

"Man is an agent through whom nature works; and when she gives birth in him to a certain belief, she thereby authorizes him to profess and act out that belief."

No one can, without substantial profit, follow him as he traces out, in his "Morals of Trade," the chief cause of commercial dishonesty; defines, in his "First Principles," the nature and meaning of Law; explains, in his "Principles of Psychology," the essence of reasoning; or illustrates, in his "Social Statics," the respective provinces and obligations of negative and positive beneficence, — negative beneficence comprehending those minor restraints dictated by passive sympathy, positive beneficence comprehending those modes of conduct dictated by active sympathy, which imply pleasure in giving pleasure. We think of him, with his vast outlook over the realms of science and his piercing apprehension of their contents, as the minister and secretary of nature, who has possession of her enactments, and is empowered to draft her statute-book of principles.

But in the pages of Martineau are to be found expressions at once the finest, wisest, and holiest of all; and we think of him as the confessor of nature, who has the keys of her mind. and heart, and is in full sympathy with her most sovereign and divine moods. In such a style he says,

"Beneath the dome of this universe, which is all centre and no circumference, we cannot stand where the musings of the Eternal Mind do not murmur round us, and the visions of his lonely loving thought appear."

"All visible greatness of mind grows in looking at an invisible that is greater."

"The huge chasm which Protestantism usually sinks between the creature and the Creator, has ever affrighted me with horror; and I have clung to the Catholic truth, that our veneration for the saints is a minor form of piety, akin in type to the devotion that passes finite

bounds."

"God has stationed us at the intersecting line between the known and the unknown; he has planted us on a floating island of mystery, from which we survey the expanse behind, in the clear light of experience and truth, and cleave the waves, invisible, yet ever breaking, of the unbounded future."

"Religion in the soul is like a spirit hiding in enshadowed forests: call it into the staring light, it is exhaled, and seen no more."

"Conceptions born in the quiet heights of contemplation will precipitate themselves on the busy multitudes below: this principle interprets history and presages futurity."

"The dry glare of noon-day knowledge hurts the eye, by plying it for use and denying it beauty; and we long to be screened behind a cloud or two of moisture and of mystery, that shall mellow the glory and cool the air. The world can never be less to us than when we make it all in all."

The style of cosmic contemplation, the order of thought, the quality of sentiment, imparted to the disciples who thoroughly adopt the spirit that reigns in the respective writings of these three masters, diffuses a peculiar aspect over the universe, and makes the spectacle of material nature and the experience of human life a very different thing to each of them. Emerson starts from his marvellously keen and varied personal experiences, and proceeds with the quickest intellectual and emotional consciousness of them, to the half-poetic and half-metaphysic, but wholly literary, generalization of them in the most condensed and forcible forms. He will have no representative system. According to him, "souls are not saved in bundles." We are indebted to him for truth rather in the form of mental condiment than of mental food; for an opalescent purity of beauty; and for a frequent moral tonic of the rarest order, notwithstanding the fact that he so often mounts into that region of free ideality, where an impulsive spontaneity takes the place of volitional conformity to law, and he can say, "The yoke of conscience, masterful, galls not

me." He will live at first hand from his own centre, from nature, from God, and no hypocritical or mimetic life. It is he who says, "When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence."

The method of Spencer, on the other hand, is to advance from the observation of facts, through the analysis of facts, by the classification of facts, to the systematic definition and synthesis of principles or laws. The didactic stores in his stupendous system of knowledge bestow an unrivalled satisfaction for the words of the understanding. And, possibly, when the system has been developed in its real æsthetic and religious possibilities, it may afford as full a satisfaction to these wants also. He strikingly says, "The nebular hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending the mechanical God of Paley, as this transcends the fetish of the savage." But, for the present at least, the teachings of Martineau are unequalled in the completeness of their ministrations to the needs of the soul, taking the soul as it has thus far been educated. Without neglecting or violating our logical and practical faculties, they supremely stir the springs of our higher nature, evoke and guide the aspirations of conscience, direct and appease our restless cravings, feed the sacred passions of the imagination, stimulate and assuage the thirst of reverence, play over the haunting sense of mystery with solemn delight, and make a musical chord of the awful relation between finite and infinite. He says,

"Those simple faiths that come, we know not whence; those dim suspicions of conscience, that creep upon us with authoritative awe; that mysterious sense of an overarching infinitude, pierced with bursts of light when the clouds of our lower mind clear off; nay, the common promptings of disinterested love, the call to self-sacrifice, the reverence for nobleness and beauty, what are they but the awakening touch of God; the movement of his Spirit among the trembling strings?"

All three are great and dedicated spirits, and living on an uncommon height. But one seems to be snatched up to his elevation with laurel and lyre in the wild chariot of a god;

the other seems to reach his by laborious climbing, loaded with a pack of instruments, and carrying something of the dryness of every-day affairs; the last appears to be lifted into the solemn infinite by the free flight of his native wing. In the highest utterances of Emerson there is alternately a stoic frostiness of pride, a glow of mystic awe, a tone as from the grove of Dodona. He speaks of the "One," the "Same," the "Over-soul," the "Superincumbent Spirit," who writes in

the

"Mind's transparent table

As far as the incommunicable."

In the favorite movements of Martineau we trace that saintly mellowing of reverence, that sweetening of temper and modest security of trust, which, flowing from the conscious presence of God, steal into experience simultaneously to enrich its colors and deepen its perspectives. In the chosen exercises of Spencer we recognize an almost passionate sense of justice, and regard for the welfare of his fellow-beings, together with the soberest instincts of scientific reasoning to guard against errors and reach true conclusions for the guidance of human conduct. That contentment which Emerson apparently finds whenever he reaches the thought that every thing is but a shimmer of differences on a ground of identity, and which Martineau feels when the consciousness of self is taken up into the consciousness of God, Spencer wins whenever he can refer any given proposition back to the universal postulate or primordial law of certitude, - namely, the inconceivableness of its contradictory: that is, whenever he can deduce a given phenomena from that law of the Persistence of Force, which he holds to be the last resting-place of human knowledge. With Emerson, duty alone is clear; no other certainty is possible: all is a flux of contradictions, a glimmer of delusions, based in a boundless Something, "well-known, but loving not a name." With Martineau every thing is certain in God; and we, as children or finite images of God, can share in that certainty. With Spencer, all finite phenomena can be known in clear accuracy, and with rigid certainty; but all are at bottom modes of an infinite and absolute Unknowable.

The true relation of this latter method of thought and belief to religious experience, is a most interesting inquiry. Religion is the sum of feeling and conduct attendant in man on the relation between finite and infinite. Human nature is such, that some sense of that relation cannot be escaped. The substance of a relation is not destroyed by a change in the explanation put upon it. A religion is therefore an indestructible necessity of man, though its quality may vary with the varying interpretations he gives to the relation between his individual being and the universal Being. Let not, then, the philosophy which affirms the interior or "noumenal" unknowableness of the infinite be stigmatized as necessarily irreligious. It may be religious, only differently from the current intellectual conceptions or dogmatic moulds of religiousness. Many an earnest thinker, free from the conventional authority of the special beliefs of the past, will maintain that it is religious in a manner far more advanced, profound, and pure, than any that has hitherto been recognized. Such thinkers hold, that to insist on giving to the Godhead the type of our human personality, and then to limit the meaning of religion to the emotional re-actions of the soul on that idea, is an illegitimate procedure; a procedure essentially allied to superstition and poetry, unsustained by philosophy, and repudiated by science. If we rightly understand Spencer, he thinks that the feelings engendered in accordance with an interpretation of the phenomena of the universe by the idea of a God who is a perfect man on an infinite scale, have composed the inevitable and useful, but incomplete, religion of the past; but the feelings developed in accordance with the interpretation of all phenomena by an orderly system of principles, in terms of Force, Matter, and Motion, as manifestations of an absolute and indefinable Being, whose reality is forced on our recognition by a necessity of thought, whose benignity we must assume by an act of faith, though it may be sustained by induction from the beneficent tendency stamped on the whole evolution of life, and whose authority it is impossible to question, these will constitute the unalloyed and permanent religion of the future. Vast as the difference between these