Goodness. And for rational man, made in his Maker's image, endowed with mind and soul to know and choose, allied to angelic excellence and celestial orders, the recipient of Heaven's most exceptional favors and the lordly head of all sublunary creatures, for man, with powers to soar and climb to Jehovah's everlasting seat and live on in God and His blessing as long as the Eternal lives,—for man to know that he has such a great and good Father in heaven, on whom his being and all his blessings hang, and yet carry in him a soul that never moves in loving and adoring effort to glorify and please the sublime Parent of his existence, nor fears the eternal Arbiter of his destiny,-presents a picture of inexpressible unsatisfactoriness, stupidity, and guilt.

But, whether it be from a dead faith or a positive unbelief, the soul that fails to seek fellowship with God must needs live a mutilated and disabled life, miss the proper goal of its being, and inherit an ever-greatening wretchedness.

"Then launch through being's wide extent;

Let the fair scale with just ascent

And cautious step be trod,
And from the dead corporeal mass,
Through each progressive order, pass
To instinct, reason, God."

LECTURE FOURTH.

Religion.

MATT. 4: 10: For it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.

R

IGHT LIFE must be a religious life. If there

be an infinite and eternal God, from whom all things proceed, then He is entitled to our consideration, and life to be right must be adjusted to Him. But the setting and keeping of ourselves right with God is religion. And this I propose to make the subject of the present lecture.

According to Cicero's derivation of the word, religion is the serious and practical consideration of what relates to God and his service. According to another etymology, it is the bond which holds us under obligation to some divine Power to which we stand related. But in either case the subjectmatter denoted is essentially the same.

Religion may be hard to define. It relates so much to the attitude of the soul and the motions of spiritual consciousness that it is difficult to tell just what it is. Perhaps we may come near a compre

hensive description of it to say that it is the exercise of a certain potential function or energy of self-consciousness by which man apprehends the Infinite, groans to conceive and realize it, and longs and loves to be in communion and fellowship with it. It respects all our faculties in search for the true ideal in which the full harmony of things. resides and the supreme good is realized. It is not a mental or moral philosophy merely, for a man may be an able metaphysician and still be profane, or an austere moralist and still be far from being religious. It is not a thing of mere æsthetic feeling or emotion, for the artist may make his canvas glow and breathe with pictures of divinest beauty, or the mystic work himself into many an ecstasy, without at all entering into the true spirit of religion. Nor is it a mere devotion. It is most of all a life, a spirit, an attuning of soul to the divine, a spiritual sigh after God, an opening of the being toward the heavenly, a living to God, for God, with God, and in God. Hence it has been called "a general pervading tendency of the soul, which, while it appropriates the divine elements contained in speculative and practical reason and in feeling, makes them all converge to one end, life in God"—" a form of thought, feeling, and action which has the divine for its object, basis, and end."

Many make light of religion, and have a strong aversion to it and the mere mention of it. With some it is only another name for hypocritical pretension, self-deception, fanaticism, superstition, or a hateful interference with the proper freedom and enjoyment of life. And some who regard it with respect still contemplate it as a sort of by-thing to itself, which a man may take with him as a companion in the journey of life or lay aside and leave behind as his liking or particular genius may be. But all this rests upon a misapprehension, of which people's minds need to be disabused.

It is sadly true that humanity has turned out many religious zealots, fanatics, quacks, clowns, mountebanks, and pretenders, leading captive " silly women" (of both sexes), and stocking the world with all sorts of religionists who have more emotion than sense, more unruly conceit than fear of God, and very much more zeal and enthusiasm than knowledge and real piety. Taking these as the representatives of religion, it is not to be wondered that some sensible and sober-minded people should be disgusted with it. But when we consider the very exalted place which the best of men have always assigned to religion, I cannot see how we can avoid being impressed with some sort of reverent respect for it.

I doubt if there is anything, next after the universal