flashes. For a moment, whether in the body or not, I knew not and heeded not. There seemed to be a blending of this world and that, and I knew what angels knew. The awaking of morning on the hills, "the blue and green glad together," the sound of human voices coming out of the stillness of the night, the morning salutation of some of the nearest and dearest in the world, and as they came to my bedside for the "what-cheer?" their faces seemed glorified with the light that is neither on land or sea. That morning is in memory a compensation for the fearful illness. That is the permanent, in that it is connected with ideas, with the unseen realities that are indistructible. I have a choice new engraving—Aurora-a graceful maiden reaching up and drinking from a morning-glory cup from a vine glorious with its opening wealth. Somehow the picture always reminds me of that rare morning, and I shall frame and hang it, as a memorial picture, in my chamber that has the sunrise look-out.

Among all our present-day writers I think none is throwing us so many stepping-stones as E. E. Hale. His quaint blending of the poetical and practical, are unsurpassed. In an old "Rose of Sharon," one of the annuals that for eighteen years was the "bright consummate flower "of our denomination, Horace Greeley-green be his memory-has left a short, comprehensive article, "The Unfulfilled Mission of Christianity." I think Mr. Hale's stories are illustrations of the same idea, with a difference-the gradual certainty that the beginning of the end had come, in that a a cup of cold water given "in His name," is becoming the acknowledged test. In his "Ten times Ten," where the club is formed by Harry Wadsworth's friends after his funeral, taking his rule of life for their motto, and reporting to each other its yearly results on their lives and actions, until at last, looking through time's telescope to somewhere, I think, near the year 1880, a grand peace convention meets on one of the Sandwich Islands,-in this we see the

aim of the writer. And a peace convention on the old Cannibal Islands of the Pacific may well be conceived as the result of whole communities living out the idea of the Harry Wordsworth motto. It should be framed in illuminated letters and hung in our breakfast-rooms for daily food, "Look upward and not downward, outward and not inward, forward and not backward, and lend a hand." And then Mr. Hale's Christmas story of this year, published as a gift-book for the subscribers of the "Old and New," a charming, quaint story of the old mediæval times, is another illustration of the fulfilling mission of Christianity in the application he makes of it on the closing page. I wish the book were by me, that I could quote its few last paragraphs, but it is so good I have sent it among my neighbors, and so I can only ask my readers to get it and read it all through. It is entitled "In His Name." It is full of old lore and we almost catch the song of the troubadours, even through these panic times, and the pass-words of the early Protestants may be as potent now as then, for it is the root of all Christian fraternities. "For the love of Christ one whispers his needs to his brother, and "In His name 19 comes mes the aid he seeks. With these pass-words well rooted in the heart, the world will need no other fraternities or bonds of brotherhood outside the Christian Church.

As I close writing this for the pages of the REPOSITORY, the fresh new number for January 1874, in its new cover and abbreviated name, full of good readable matter is just received. In looking over the Editor's Table, or By-hours, the more suggestive name she has now given it, I see something from her pen in the same line of thought that first suggested what I have now written. "How much happier this world would be if people only knew half the good they do to other people! And let us not be too shy in telling each other of it, in confessing if one has given us a stepping-stone.

E. A. B. Lathrop.

"F

IRST the natural," said Paul, "afterward the spiritual." His statement had special reference to this life as related to that which follows it. But it is universally true. In all life, that which is natural, animal, sensual, precedes that which is rational, moral, spiritual. The order of creation conformed to this law. In the first chapter of Genesis we have vision views of the formation and peopling of the earth, not scientifically exact, but scenically correct. The seer who wrote this chapter, ignorant of the results of modern research, describes, in the language of his time, the process of creation as it appeared to him, as one ignorant of astronomy would an eclipse of the sun, as one ignorant of the stage would a drama, describing the characters as they come to view in the consecutive acts.

From the Mosaic account we learn that the first life upon the earth was vegetable. "God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree fruit after his kind," and the earth obeyed the divine fiat. This was on the third day or period of creation. In the fifth cycle of time, God said, "let the waters bring forth the living creature," and river and sea teemed with fish. Later in this cosmic day the feathered race appears, a higher type of life than the fish. In the sixth period God made the creeping thing, beast, cattle. Up to this time the quadruped was at the summit of the series. We do not know how long he ruled, how many ages he waited for a superior, but, at last, in the sixth cycle God created man in his own image, and made him lord of all terrestrial things. Before man's advent was the natural, the sentient only, with him came the rational, the spiritual.

Such is the order of creation as revealed in Scripture, an order confirmed in outline, at least, by science. There was a time, says the geologist, in the history of the earth when, in air, water, or on land was no living thing. It may have been millions of years since. How long this condition lasted is unknown, but ultimately appears the radiate-polyps, jelly fishes, star fishes,

sea urchins, the lowest forms of animal life. These are followed after an indefinite period by the mollusk, snails, oysters, cuttle-fish. The world has no inhabitants higher than these; they reign for centuries. There was an age in which the fish proper was introduced, higher in structure and intelligence than the preceding members in the series. Then flourished the sturgeon,

shark, asterolepus, many species now extinct.

The age of fishes was followed by the dynasty of the reptile-the serpent, turtle, lizard, crocodile. Then were produced the ichthyosaurus "with the snout of a porpoise, the teeth of a crocodile, the head of a lizard, the breast of a bird"; the megalosaurus, a land animal thirty feet in length, allied in structure to the crocodile. In its teeth were combined the knife, the saw, and the sabre. Its principal food, we are told, was crocodiles and tortoises. Then lived the iguanodon, pterodactyl, and other reptilian monsters. They were the monarchs of their times.

After the reptilian,came the mammalian age-the sheep, cow, horse, creatures since domesticated, - came the tiger, lion, elephant. In the early part of this period flourished the mammoth, mastodon, megatherium, dinotherium, compared with which the hippopotamus, rhinoceros and elephant are relatively small. This was an era marked by the number of its mammalia, many of which were gigantic, and when they stood at the head of creation. This age was recent, compared with that in which the radiate and mollusk were regnant.

But the order was not yet complete. At last came the dynasty of man, the era of mind, spirit. Man is the terminal link in the chain, united on one side with every creature beneath him, but opening on the other toward the infinite and heavenly. Geology thus agrees with Scripture in affirming that the natural precedes the spiritual. Life begins with the polyp, that which is sensual, it ends with man, the rational, divine.

The order of civilization is from the natural to the spiritual. Scientifically we do

not know how our race began; whether man came to his present status through evolution from lower forms of life, as maintained by Mr. Darwin, or by a special act of creation, the direct moulding of the divine hand, as represented in Genesis. If our race began with the polyp, and through an ascending chain reached manhood, the first pair could not have been greatly in advance of their bestial progenitors. And just here is one of the weak places in the evolution theory; for Mr. Darwin admits that the distance between the highest brute and the lowest man is immense; and Mr. Huxley confesses that the difference between them amounts to an "enormous gulf," to a "divergence immeasurable-practically infinite"; and it has not been shown how this chasm was bridged, nor how it could be done. But however man got here there is reason to believe that in his early history he was more natural, animal, less rational and spiritual than he is now.

Every race of men has had a prehistoric life. We trace our ancestry, for instance, to the Englishman, he to the German, the last to the Teutons. But these doubtless had inhabited the banks of the Elbe centuries before they assailed the Roman empire and so emerged into history. Modern investigation renders it probable that the Teutons sprung from the Aryan race which at an early age dwelt in central Asia, but the beginnings of the latter are in darkness. Egypt, centuries ago, produced an advanced civilization. Art, science, religion, obtained there a very considerable elevation, but we do not know where her people came from, nor what they did in that long interval of darkness which stretches beyond history. We trace the Nile upward three thousand miles, but inhospitable climate and peoples have hitherto prevented our penetrating to its source. Doubtless the tireless spirit of our day will discover the Nile fountains, and dispel the mystery which has so long hung over this river. But the stream of humanity, through what soil it run, its sinuosities, its bayous, the islands within it, the rate of the current through the first periods of its coursethese cannot be accurately known; for as

the adult can have no remembrance of his birth, swaddling clothes, and cradle, so the race can have no certain knowledge of its infancy and early childood. But that childhood must have been, as with the individual, relatively ignorant and undeveloped.

A tradition had come down to the Latin poets that the first men were dwellers in caves, that they, armed with clubs and the simplest weapons, disputed with the beast the sovereignty of the earth. This tradition is confirmed as to civilization in Europe by scientific research. Anterior to history was what is called the first stone age, when the best and highest implements in use were made of chipped stone. Art was then primitive, man beginning to exercise his faculties in invention. Later we find him using ground stone, introducing higher processes of manufacture, with more ornamentation. This was the second stone age. Succeeding this was the bronze age. Men got better than stone tools and weapons by mixing copper and tin, and out of this making their axes, plows, spears and swords. But in time man finds something better than bronze, and the iron age is ushered in, and with it came at first rude instruments, but later the finished tools, machinery and arms of the nineteenth century.

The inhabitants of the stone age dwelt in caves; the first houses were built like the cave. The conflict with the ferocious beasts of that period taxed man's strength and skill far more than it now does. The stone and bronze ages were prehistoric. Men had no written language, no method of transmitting the present to the future, and so left no annals of their time. With the use of iron came such mental activity as begot letters, and history.

The cave dweller was a grown up child, immensely superior to the bestial creatures about him, but less reflective, less observant of the moral law, less religious, than the modern European who has succeeded him. First the natural, afterward the spiritual.

But we have a more familiar illustration of this law in the Scriptures. The Jew, whom Moses led out of Egypt, was de

graded, was low in intelligence, in morality, in spirituality. Four centuries of bondage had inevitably wrought this result. Moses had to adapt himself, his teachings, his law to the people of which he was the leader. Hence he represents God as having the form and mental attributes of man; as talking with himself face to face, as jealous, as burning with fierce anger against Aaron and those who had worshipped the golden calf.

The rewards he promised the Israelites for obedience, and the punishments threatened for disobedience were altogether of a temporal nature. For obedience they would have abundant harvests, numerous flocks, children, houses, health, long life, victory over enemies. For disobedience they would have mildew, caterpillars with failure of crops, destruction of cattle, unfaithful wives, childlessness, disease, subjugation by the odious foe.

sensuous,

The Mosaic worship was animal sacrifices on the altar. No one except the priest could go into the holy of holies where God dwelt. Now this was a government and a religion suited only to a rude and uncultured people, sentient, not reflective, natural, not spiritual.

In contrast to Moses is Christ. With the latter God dwells not especially in Jerusalem, nor in Mt. Gerazim; he is a universal spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, without priest, without ritual, without a pilgrimage to a shrine, in the closet; and the reward is not houses, lands, long life, victory over enemies, but simply this, "Ye shall be the children of the Highest," like God.

This would have been no incentive to the Jew, just delivered from Egyptian slavery. He had not reached that state of spiritual culture where he would appreciate it. It would have been casting pearls before swine. Unless the Jew had progressed immeasurably from the days of Moses, the teachings of Jesus would have been ill adapted to the people which he taught. And this is only another way of saying that between Sinai and the Mount of Beatitudes the world had greatly advanced rationally and spiritually.

In a night vision the Assyrian monarch

saw the image of a man. Its head was of gold, its breasts and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of brass, its legs iron, its feet partly iron, partly clay. A stone cut out of the mountain without hands smote this image on the feet, overthrew it, and ground the whole to powder. The prophetic interpretation was this: the golden head symbolized the Assyrian empire, of which the dreamer, Nebuchadnezzar, was king. On the ruins of this empire was to arise the Persian, silver, inferior to the Assyrian. A third empire, the Greek, would succeed the Persian, but it was to be still more inferior, brass. The fourth empire, Roman, would be yet more interior, iron, and the terminal period of the fourth empire quite degraded, a mixture of iron and clay. But at the last God would set up a kingdom more glorious than all the rest. It should fill the whole earth and have no end.

Such was to be history in the foresight of the seer. But we have the advantage of him, we are able to see clearly what to him was dim, and we can measure results in detail which he could discern only in outline.

In outward splendor the Persian empire was not inferior to the Assyrian; nor was the Greek inferior to the Persian. No monarch of the ancient world shone so conspicuously as Alexander. And Augustus Cæsar at Rome ruled an empire greater and stronger than had Nebuchadnezzar, Darius or the Macedonion. Nor was Assyrian civilization superior to that which succeeded it. It was inferior both to the Greek and the Roman.

But while the prophet was wrong as to the superiority of the old empire, he was right in placing the true golden age in the future, in the Messianic reign. Christ's kingdom is not temporal; it "is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost," and its progress is the growth of the spiritual. With its triumph reason and conscience rule that which is animal in

exercise for muscle. The cry of the infant has reference only to bodily wants or conditions, uneasiness, pain. The first faculties developed are selfish; the child is interested exclusively in his own comfort, the gratification of his own desires. It takes him time to learn that others have rights he must respect, that everything and everybody are not his to command. It requires training to make him willing to share his blessings with another, and then everything goes by caprice. He is ready to defend and fight for his own, and perhaps for what is not his own. He is an imitator, and at this age will pick up a vice as soon, nay, sooner than a virtue. You teach him by showing him the thing you want him to learn, by appeal to eye or ear or hands. The perceptive faculties which he shares with the lower creatures are now dominant. The moral sentiments are not of quick growth. Time is requisite to make a child understand right from wrong, to distinguish between "mine" and "thine," to use the first and let the other alone, to see the merits of the "golden rule," to feel the force of "ought." He early shows a sense of shame, later a sense of guilt; the blush comes sooner than a twinge of conscience. Healthy children are not technically religious; they think more about creature comforts than about the Creator, more about the present joy of stilts and ball, sleds and skates, than about the felicity of heaven. But as man advances in years he becomes more reflective. His eye is no longer exclusively fixed upon earth. He looks upward and asks himself, How came these things? who made them? what and where is He? what am I? whither am I going? and what am I to be when this body returns to the dust? These questions crowd themselves upon his thought. The rational and religious come as inevitably in the experience of the individual as the animal and sentient, but come later. First natural, then spiritual.

The selfishness of childhood, its readiness to appropriate the vices, have been adduced as proofs that the human heart is primarily corrupt, that man is constitutionally totally depraved. Original sin, it is said, thus asserts itself. The error of VOL. LL 13

this view is, spirituality is the fruitage of a life, the concomitant of manhood. Because apples are not produced in a nursery but from the transplanted and grown tree, the sappling is not at fault though it bears only leaves. If the theologians want the rational and religious at the outset of man's career, they must contrive some way to get rid of childhood and youth. But until they discover a process of furnishing the adult at once we will say with Paul, not only does the natural precede the spiritual, but it ought to.

It is desirable that our children should be early taught the rudiments of learning, the rational early stimulated, but it must be remembered that the physical goes before the intellectual, that children have bodies as well as minds, and as the animal is first so it should first be taken care of, provided always with pure air, nourishing food, suitable clothing, abundant exercise, things he needs as a mere creature. Education must not be purchased at the price of contracted lung or curved spine; brain must not be developed at the expense of stomach and muscle.

Nor do we want any piety in childhood that interferes with its corporal welfare, that makes it too sober to indulge in the indoor and outdoor activities and pleasures which give strength to limb and color to cheek. Precocious piety is abnormal and must not be sought. Memoirs of young saints are not the best kind of literature.

Children often display a wonderful insight as to divine things, faith in God, in angels, in heaven. So far as this consists with a healthy body and brain it is beautiful and desirable, but when it is attended with "the pale cast of thought," and nervous condition, it is preternatural and deplorable. Let us be satisfied it our children well begin that higher life which mature years may bring to completion.

We return to the Pauline idea. Man begins in this world an existence essentially animal, to continue it in the resurrection state, essentially spiritual. Here the earthly enters more or less into all our feeling and thinking. We get no complete emancipation from the thralldom of the flesh. "A law in the members ever wars against a