and glories of Divine things just where and just so far as they have strength to go and power of vision to see, powerful and judicious minds are entirely indispensable. Such minds by means of their knowledge of the capacity of the pupil intellects committed to them, and by means of their skill in conducting their inquiries, will clear a pathway through many profound speculations, and over many high tracts of thought where otherwise they would have been in thick darkness and confusion. Thereby will they make them possessors of many rich, lofty and momentous truths which without this assistance would never have been attained. Religious instructors and guides must be accurate and skilful mental philosophers. Preposterous it would be in the business of secular education, to send dispensers of knowledge abroad so ignorant of the popular mind as to propose the doctrine of fluxion when they ought to teach the multiplication table: to unfold celestial mechanics when they ought to acquaint men with the value and relation to themselves of the simplest laws and agents of nature. Equally absurd would it be for Christian educators to attempt religious inculcations without such a deep insight into men and such a teaching skill as shall enable them to discourse their holy lessons with ingenious adaptations to intellectual capacity and spiritual want, and also with most luminous and attractive elucidations. Nothing less can make these lessons understood, welcome, powerful, transforming.

The teachers of religion should be able moral philosophers, skilful anatomists of the human heart, profound students of human obligations. Men have their religious prejudices and religious idiosyncrasies. These are by no means to be countenanced or cherished, but, in order to bring religion into full and legitimate action upon those under their influence, must be carefully studied and consulted. One class of men, in consequence of a peculiar pride of intellect, are wholly impregnable to religion by any address, however powerful, made to their understanding. No logic, human or Scriptural, can force a passage to their consciences. But through their hearts these persons may be the most quickly and easily accessible of all to whom the advocate of Divine truth brings his messages. The moment their sensibilities are appealed to, the full depths of their spirit are opened in living warmth to all the announcements and claims of God. There is an opposite description of men who are capable of being influenced almost solely through their mental faculties. To be dictated to and ruled by anything so inflammable and variable and ungovernable as human feeling, they regard as unmanly-ignoble. They bow only to unimpassioned intellections, to sober, solid thought, to clear, pure reason. The former of these classes thirst for the pathetic rather than the deliberative, the practical rather than the theoretical. Their souls are a life rather than an existence, an excitement

rather than a character. An hour at the cross originates in them a more effective impulse to duty than all the philosophizing upon the atonement ever given to the world. A brief experience of the joy and profit of the sincere worship of God, is more valued by them than libraries of metaphysical theology concerning the Divine attributes. The latter of these classes are at home in the bosom of the Westminster Catechism. Their hearts become most deeply moved in the presence of the sublime doctrines of Christianity, divine justice, divine purposes, divine sovereignty, divine law! Their moral temperament is a philosophy rather than a feeling, an obedient principle rather than a spontaneous enthusiasm. They turn to the crucified Jesus with the profoundest emotion at the end of a clear, cogent, naked argument on human depravity; they come to their firmest resolves to duty under the thunders of Sinai; they lift up the highest thanksgiving to the Almighty under the exhibitions of his eternal power and godhead. The chief business of Christian instruction is to reach the human heart. Here the grand effect is first to be produced. If teachers fail here they have done nothing; if they succeed here they have done everything. Carrying this is carrying the great central power, all that wait upon its influence go along with it; is carrying the capital, and the government with all dependencies are included in the capitulation. The surrender and consecration of the heart to the piety of Christianity, will invariably commit the understanding to the theory of Christianity, as also the physical man to its prescribed and visible labors. If the moral spirit of man occupies a position so vital, issues influences on our intellectual, religious and physical being so elemental and controlling, then is a profound study and full knowledge of this busy inner world, radical and most efficient in pushing the conquests of religion out upon mankind. The heart has a surface and a subsoil culture. The unskilled often waste labor by efforts upon the outside of the soul. The wise, spiritual sower, valuing little the premature, scorching, brief productions overgrowing strong places without much depth of earth, seeks to go down with his seed into the moist, nutritious, unexhausted depths. Germinated, rooted, nourished there, plants of righteousness spring and grow under his hand, thrifty, stable, luxuriantly fruitful. Dropping this figure, the intelligent moral instructor creates moral sensibilities, and works other renovations in the warm, prolific, protecting centre of the soul, where there is less liability to those untoward influences which efface superficial impressions. The introduction into this rich interior of the spirit of a religious infusion and power which shall outroot the corrupt, assuage the excessive, resuscitate the dead, refresh the parched and sterile-this is an accomplishment in which the student and teacher of the heart finds room for all his possible skill, and ordinarily, no doubt, the Holy Spirit, other things being equal, pro

duces saving and sanctifying results proportionate to the amount of it which he employs.

The passions of the soul have their own appropriate language. In this, when free, they always speak: when addressed in this, they listen and wake and respond. The heart has no appreciative ear to the nomenclatures of the exact sciences, to the delicate distinctions of metaphysics, to the statistical accuracies of historic narrative. These are as illy fitted to arouse and instruct as Hebrew or Arabic lessons to effect the pleasure and education of the nursery. The human affections lie cold, unstirred, unheeding, until those chosen voices fall upon them in which they were ordained to breathe, and be addressed. "A stranger will they not follow, for they know not the voice of strangers." Here is presented a large opportunity for the use of intellectual furniture. To know thoroughly the best language of the passions, so as thereby to exert over them the highest acquirable power, is an attainment indispensable, rare and invaluable. The affections of the heart are reached and influenced through appropriate objects, made to be their stimulant and their food. At the presence of these, invariably they kindle, grow, control, impel. Proportionably as these are unfolded, augmented, exalted, emotion rises to affection, affection to passion. When, on the contrary, these are removed, obscured, depreciated, feeling cools, sleeps, passes into a mere susceptibility. In graphic detail, in descriptive amplification, develop to a neighborhood a deep, unprovoked, irreparable injury, and then, in full life and light, picture the malicious injurers. You have waked a turmoil and a fire which are almost uncontrollable. The excitement grew as you proceeded, first to indignation, then to resentment, next to rage, at last to active revenge. In the same manner before benevolence, present its own peculiar objects; call up for its charity the virtuous poor in their uncomplaining, unpitied sufferings; set down under its eye, for its sympathy, fellow-men in deep ignorance, in irrecoverable corruption, in despairing wretchedness. That benevolence is powerfully stirred; so stirred as no direct appeal and exhortation could at all succeed to stir it. It has become an augmented philanthropy, which many waters cannot quench. It is out and abroad, against all obstacles, with both hands full of blessings for them that need them. With what religious power is the advocate of Christianity invested, by means of a superior intelligence which first acquaints him familiarly with the large circle and variety of scenes, subjects and objects fitted to act thus almost irresistibly on the heart, and then endows him with a gift of living and life-giving description, adapted to develop and present in their full character and impressiveness, these exciters of the soul.

The heart is a crowded world of antipathies and inclinations, repulsions and propensities, hates and loves, fears and aspirations,

apathies and sensibilities, self-approvals and moral regrets, sadnesses and joys, angers and gratitudes. Almost innumerable are its susceptibilities of emotion. These multitudinous capacities and states of the moral spirit are deeply and somewhat obscurely involved with each other. Each is a power influenced and influencing, whereby essential modifications are induced upon all of them. Öften before a given and desired state of the moral spirit can be produced, powerful antagonist emotions are to be cooled and hushed. In some instances, an affection can best be reached and nourished by means of an influence on some cognate and sympathizing passion. Frequently a heat in one portion of the heart creates a fire in its immediate neighborhood, and at the same time a chill in a remoter region. Some passions seem born to rule, others obsequiously to obey. Some are excessively and dangerously combustible. Others are cold, heavy, phlegmatic. The human heart is a legion of powers, capabilities, appetencies, sedatives, explosives; it sets on fire the course of nature: it is set on fire of things visible and invisible, things real and unreal, things corrupt and incorrupt. What advantages has he, who is deeply read in the mysteries and capacities of the inner spirit, in bringing the revelations and interests of religion to bear on its character, to mould it into holy sympathy with God.

There is one spiritual attribute which more than any other renders a deep acquaintance with the powers and workings of the human soul essential in giving religion its highest power-we mean its susceptibility to sympathy. Than this no feature of the moral spirit is more marked and apparent, more inseparably part and parcel of our spiritual being. No one renders us so susceptible of being radically and powerfully influenced, and also capable of effecting transformations elementally in the hearts of other men. The soul seems to be but a congeries of sympathies. Sympathy is a part of all its parts, an attribute of all its attributes. Emotion is no sooner manifested than it is reproduced. Whether the manifestation be in the way of a description, or of a witnessed ebullition, the moment a passion is apparent, it is rekindled in other hearts, just as a luminary suddenly out in the heavens is instantly seen in the waters underneath. Joy in one heart, spontaneous or induced, has its echoes and re-echoes in as many hearts as can be placed within its electric circle. So grief witnessed, at once passes to be grief experienced, anger developed, to be an ger provoked, gratitude visible, to be gratitude kindled, hope demonstrated, to be hope caught. So beyond the meaning of the apostle, as in water face answereth to face, does the heart of man to man. The resuscitation of a fervor in one spirit will be the first fruits of a wide resurrection of kindred feeling. He that can from himself evolve deep moral elements, or picture the powerful stirrings of others, has a key to all the hearts which he ad

dresses, and the means of setting fire to every passion of which they are capable. He wields a power over human character and human worth in the hands of no other reformer. Shakspeare was superior to all other men chiefly in his life descriptions of the heart, whereby he reproduced that which he delineated. His passages, which have never been equaled, and which will never cease to be read as miracles of genius and eloquence, are his true and touching paintings of the deep heavings and breathings of the spirit of man in the great crimes, exigencies, ventures, fortunes of life. So various, so faithful, so graphic, so powerful, so human are these records of the soul's inner workings, more efficient if not more numerous lessons on moral philosophy may be drawn from the British dramatist than from any professed treatise on that science at present existing. The skill of this great master of the heart, possessed and employed by those charged with the propagation of religion will arm them with an influence more truly elemental, irresistible and abiding than any, than all other intellectual furniture within their capacity.

The value of a high appreciation of Divine Truth and a deep knowledge of man as qualifications for the business of inculcating Christianity and giving it power on man, may be illustrated by a reference to a few of the ordinary topics of religious teaching. One of these is the total corruption of mankind before God. In the hands of such mental endowments as have been already referred to, this becomes a fact far more fearful, more eventful, more impressive. True, the most feeble and sterile mind might announce from the Bible, "There is none that doeth good, no not one," "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually." Numerous similar solemn, graphic, alarming Divine declarations of human depravity might be announced and reannounced. A few persons might be disquieted and bestir themselves to obtain pardon and cleansing. Most, however, dead as they are in trespasses, would sleep on in their cold graves undisturbed. This doctrine fundamental, most important, from a mind in its best state of discipline, of treasured knowledge, of susceptibility, of action, may receive such establishment, unfolding, illustration, urgency, as to startle the most palsied population and turn the most ungodly and hopeless to the immense and amazing interests of salvation. If man's depravity has not a full and faithful exhibition, Christianity is largely robbed of its rich meaning, its plenary mercy. Measurement of the soul's leprosies is measurement of the gospel's remedies. Preaching the fall is preaching redemption. The minister of religion, possessed of a powerful mind and a large intelligence, is enabled to carry a revealing light into the regions and sepulchres of moral death which will be likely first to wake and alarm even lifeless corpses and perished bones, and then to prompt, to Him who is the resurrection and