XCIX. The essential Christian worship is faith, hope, love; and for its instrument Christ has instituted the fellowship of word, prayer and sacrament.

C. These means, put into operation by believers, and adjusted according to the circumstances of time and place, in their natural relation to contemplative and active life, the general and personal interests, constitute Christian worship in the narrower meaning of the term.

ART. VI.-SOURCES OF DIVINE KNOWLEDGE.

A Posthumous Fragment, by the late ELIAS J. RICHARDS, D.D., Reading, Pa.*

(a) NATURE.-The created universe is a manifestation of Deity. The book of Nature is a material revelation,-God represented to the eye and the ear and the senses. From the earliest dawn of life Nature lies close to our senses. Our first ideas and impressions are derived from things seen and heard. We know the language of a mother's eye and the tones of a mother's voice long before we can interpret the meaning of words. We hold mysterious communion with earth and sky, with cloud and rainbow, with bird and flower, before any interest is felt in the printed book.

What an endless variety of objects of profound and curious investigation does the visible world present. Why did God create such a world and place man in it? Why should he make it so beautiful? Why lavish upon it such infinite wealth of adornment? Why should the fields be enameled with flowers, and the trees fragrant with blossoms? Why should the waves make music with the shores, and the winds with the forest leaves? And, above all, why should the starry heavens bend with such infinite majesty and glory? Another kind of world would have answered as well for a garden and a grainfield. No such display of material splendor and beauty was needed for subsistence, labor, or intercourse. But these attractive surroundings were

* This article is a portion of an unpublished work left incomplete at his death, entitled The Higher Life, or Religion in its Essential Nature."

not created in vain. They are designed to awaken thought and inquiry, to excite wonder and admiration. Here man is born, and, amid these scenes and surrounded by these manifestations of divine glory his inner life is unfolded. The world was not designed simply to secure bodily ease and comfort, but to inspire, expand and enrich the soul. It is man's nursery and school. Nature offers herself as a picture, a poem, a glorious epic, waiting to be read and admired. The whole of our inner being is in correspondence with the objective universe. Everything around is meant to move us, and to move us towards God. Wherever we look suggestions meet our eyes, offering to lead us to the unknown; all the finite and visible refer to the Infinite and Invisible. The profit we derive from the study of nature depends not more upon our mental than upon our moral qualifications. Man can be taught only what he is prepared to learn. If he does not find God first in his soul, he will find no God in the universe. Nature may conceal God as well as reveal him. While to one she is a pillar of fire, to another she may only be a pillar of cloud. It is sad to think how many pass through life without inquiry or reflection. They are as little moved by the marvels and mysteries of nature as the brute creation. Even their first emotions of childish interest and wonder, awakened by singing birds and opening flowers, by the lightning and the thunder, by sailing clouds and twinkling stars, soon subside by unreflecting familiarity. Dimmer and darker grows the eye, duller and more heedless becomes the ear, and more and more does the heart lose its susceptibility to impressions as life advances. With how many does the journey of life degenerate into a struggle for bare subsistence? Intellect is harnessed to instinct, and doomed to drudge in the service of appetite. The highest exercise of reason is summoned only to solve the problems of loss and gain. Utility determines all labor and study with the multitude. Health and riches, and the gratification of the appetites, are the chief and final good. "What profit shall we have in our labor," is the grand inquiry. The good they covet is present and material good. The highest end of creation is to subserve present convenience and comfort. They study nature only to learn her uses and how to subdue and control her forces. Grandeur is nothing, beauty is nothing. Save for light, warmth and guidance, neither sun nor star would be anything to them. The re

volving seasons are only marked for the blight or bloom which they bring. The shifting glories of the sunset are observed chiefly as the prognostic of the next day's toil or travel. In the hills that skirt their horizon they see only possible quarries and ore beds, in the mysterious ocean a highway for trade and travel, in the broad and billowy prairie cornfields and pasture lands, in the grand old forests a covert for game or material for warmth and construction. Science is useless if it be not practical. Steam, light and electricity are mere utilities. It does not occur to them that nature was also intended to elevate and inspire the soul as well as to gratify the lustful eye of gain. "People speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands, food and raiment, were alone useful, as if sight, thought and admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their own way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they draw are better than the pine forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like his eternity."

Others have ends and aims purely scientific. They are inquisitive and curious to find out the reason of things. The universe is the great sphinx-riddle which they seek to solve. Whence is it? what is it? and how does it consist? Its wonders

and mysteries fascinate them. For six thousand years they have been busy interrogating Nature, with what measure of success we may learn from the crude cosmogony of the ancients, and the vaunted world-theorems of the moderns. Intellect is their chief organ of knowledge, and its methods are the logical and inductive. They have higher objects in the study of Nature than use and gain. Knowledge they seek for the love of it; science they pursue for its own sake. They find a glow of excitement in the search, and a glad surprise in the discoveries. But science unbaptized knows not God. Nature, like the Bible,

No wonder

is a book of symbols, which only faith can read. that the natural and scientific man, who reads it literally and slavishly fails to realize its true significance. The chasm between Nature and spirit is deep and wide. It can never be bridged by the stepping stones of logic and reason. Astronomers have been undevout, naturalists irreligious, physical philosophers skeptics. The argument from design is as clearly stated by Plato as by Paley, but its value after all rests upon an assumption. It may prove that the world must have a Creator, but it does not prove that we have a God. Because every effect must have a cause, the conclusion is not immediate or necessary that the universe is the handiwork of a Being who is personal, selfconscious and infinite. Everywhere in the world's well-ordered frame may be seen the evidence of vast power and intelligence, but who will say infinite power and infinite intelligence? From the natural must we necessarily infer the moral No wonder working of power, no marks of design or lines of beauty, can prove the existence of holiness in God, or justice, or mercy. But these supernatural attributes are essential to, and really constitute his Divinity. Though natural theology has its important uses, from it come not our deepest convictions of the Divine existence. Whence then comes the idea of God? Is it innate and congenital with the soul? Is it necessary and undeniable? or is it by an immediate glance of reason? Who shall decide? Yet all men hold to the idea, though ignorant of its origin, as something more than a logical inference. Men pray before they reason; they wonder and worship before they master the argument from design. The world's obligation to revelation is often ignored by those who deny its necessity. Nature offers illustrations rather than proofs. Assume the Divine existence and Nature serves to correct and enlarge our conceptions. and to justify the intuitions of the heart. But though Nature is the mirror in which God's perfections are manifested, the sage and philosopher miss the revelation. Nature is the garment which conceals God from their unanointed eyes.

Speculative philosophy takes the high a priori road to discover the essence of Divinity, and starts with simple, absolute being. Thence it descends the ladder of causation to the facts and phenomena of the universe. Subject and object are one and the same, and on the bosom of this eternal ocean of being all things

rise and float like bubbles, only to burst and be reabsorbed. All things are constantly ebbing and flowing. We live in a phantom world. Nothing is real and fixed; all is phenomenal and illusive. The universe has no actual existence; it is only the projection and shadow of our own thoughts. If we did not exist, the universe would not. The universe is God externalized and man is God coming to consciousness. God is not personal, self-conscious and independent, but the ever streaming immanence of spirit in matter. The highest conclusion of this vaunted philosophy leaves us orphans. The only Deity is an abstraction -"power without personality, essence without feeling." The weaving of such webs is a melancholy amusement. Though the intellect may be beguiled the heart utters its protest.

Not any more satisfactory are the conclusions of the Inductive or Positive Philosophy. Pursuing the opposite or a posteriori course, it seeks to ascend from particulars to the general. It is essentially empirical, busying itself with the analysis of nature, with its mere organism and mechanical adjustments. Of laws and forces it discourses elegantly, and attributes to their operation all manner of wonders. The material universe, it holds, is the only reality existing above, beneath and around us. It is a huge machine, self-existing and self-adjusting, without soul or intelligence, spinning round in obedience to mere material laws. Observing a variety of facts and phenomena, it arrives at some general law, and there rests satisfied. It regards the laws of Nature not as things conceived merely, but as entities; not as effects of divine working, but as real, independent forces. Unaided, this method of philosophising never rises into the supernatural. From a mere law it never infers the lawgiver. Mere scientific men, who recognize physical truths in their most liberal forms, commonly lose themselves among the windings of Nature. Their God, if, indeed, they acknowledge one, is little else than a grand law, into which all other laws are resolvable. He is not the life of all that is, a being who feels and is felt, who loves and is loved. Science does not always awaken devotion. If the ignorant are inclined to superstition, the learned are not less to infidelity. Unquestionably the tendency of physical science has been to materialism. While sages lose the idea of an Infinite Spirit in their subtleties, the lowly "feel after him and find him." Only from the Christian