neither please the one nor attain the other of himself. Hence the necessity of the great scheme of redemption, with all its explanatory doctrines of incarnation, atonement, and trinity. The Anglican then proceeds to show that God has established a certain set of means and ministers, to maintain and propagate these doctrines, and serve the ends for which such doctrines exist. Sacraments and church institutions are thus presented as the grand supporters of the holiness, faith, and hope of human nature. The Catholic, the Independent, the Wesleyan, all take, I fancy, nearly the same course, only, I presume, respectively recommending the institutions they reverence as those established by God, or as those best fitted for the end."

Elwood." And what is the result?"

Marsden.-"The result assuredly seems to be, that whatever real spiritual value there may be in these various doctrines, institutions, and observances, it seems to be brought out and continually kept in view. None of these things seem here to be superstitiously valued for themselves, but for their moral significancy. With the utmost regard for forms, there is still no formalism. Our churchmen seem to become churchmen after the model of Heber; our Catholics, Catholics, after the model of Fenelon; our Independents, to be Independents like Watts; and our Wesleyans, to be Wesleyans like Wesley himself."

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Elwood.-"Well; in almost all respects you seem to begin at what many must think the wrong end of the course. have hitherto always been accustomed to think of religious culture as beginning with doctrines proceeding to faith in God and eternity, and aspiration for excellence, reverencing all other beings in proportion as they bear the image of God's nature, and descending, at last, to the idea of duty, as the will and appointment of God.”

Marsden." And when the mind has passed through the upward course to its final stage, it does begin again and descend, as you describe. Nay, at every stage upwards it descends again in the reverse order, and finds a new significancy in what it has left. There is a reflective force in religion of every degree. It is our own little light by which we first see. This is reflected in the concave mirrors of great spirits, ranging from man to God. Without our own minute light we should see no reflection; but the floods of

reflected light, especially when we reach the overarching majesty of deity, are so much vaster than our own little light, that it is both natural and wise that we should forget, to some extent, the latter, and walk chiefly by the former. That reflected light, converging upon noble actions, makes them tenfold more noble; and converging on the solemn conscience within, invests it with a more awful authority-a radiance not its own. We may also compare the new power attained by the mind, looking back from each fresh point of moral ascent, to that of a traveller, who can ascend a mountain side in no other way than by passing through many a green field and shady wood. He sees and enjoys these as he passses; but when he is far above them, he looks down upon them with far more perfect apprehension of their form and arrangement than he could attain when among them. The misfortune is, that persons misread the history of their own consciousness, and take this reflective descent as the first and only course of the mind's progress; and hence they are always attempting to begin at the wrong point in teaching others, trying to make minds perform the descending course from the highest religion, when, alas, they are far below the capacity for religion itself."

And now, at last, Mr. Marsden led the way into the inmost sanctuary itself, and they stood at the western end of the choir, beneath the great central tower, whose supporting arches sprung far aloft above their heads.

It was then evening, and the sober light which stole through the rich windows, seemed to make a solemn silence that might almost be felt. No sound was heard by the two but the echoes of their own footfalls. The feeling of a surrounding vastness and awfulness, superior almost to anything which he had ever before apprehended, came upon Elwood. He looked round in that vast court, whose severe simplicity was broken only by a few lines of low seats, of Gothic workmanship, up to that distant vault, following it as it stretched far away on each side into the mighty transepts, and his mind seemed prepared for any grand or elevated idea. Mr. Marsden now whispered to him, that if he would only wait a little, he might have an opportunity of hearing one of the lessons of the choir, for which the evening hour was usually selected, as being the time when the passions are often quieted, and the mind, sympathising as it were with the sabbath serenity of nature,

seems more disposed for tranquil thought. He accordingly waited, using the opportunity for a little silent meditation on the thoughts which he had gathered this day.

After a short time there entered a band of very interesting looking youths, frank, open, youth-like, yet most of them with that unmistakeable mark of reflection and self mastery which those qualities soon stamp on the countenance. Elwood thought he had never seen a more intelligent or more noble looking band. Even features that in others would have been termed ordinary, seemed in them to be made beautiful by the light of superior thought and feeling which shone through them. They seated themselves on the benches, and to the surprise of Elwood, Mr. Marsden, who had left him for a time, made his appearance from the vestry, clad in the garment of the church, and took his place at the desk before them.

CHAPTER V.

LESSONS IN THE CHOIR.

LESSON I.

"My beloved fellow learners," he commenced, "in our work of building up the temple of the soul in truth and beautywe gazed long and lovingly together from yonder porch on the great and glorious spectacle of nature; there we have learnt to prize that spectacle, and what deep meaning we have found in it, I need not now remind you. We have learnt to look on that magnificent and beautiful spectacle, as an intellectual ideal or model, the image of a great and perfect intellect, after which the inward world of our intellect must be built up. And in this view-what love, what passion, what intellectual aspiration, what almost worship that spectacle has awakened in us! I have often been sharer of your emotions, when you have looked forth as at this hour into the quiet evening, and watched the beautiful shadows creep down the hill side, and the distant mountains become more like ethereal piles, and the more distant clouds put on their celestial radiance and the vast sky its softest and soul-melting beauty. I have shared your emotions when you have roamed amid the quiet woods, and marked well the exceeding beauty of form and colour of the smallest flower or leaf that lay beneath, or of the rich umbrageous masses that hung above us- -I have shared then your feelings and your worship for the BEAutiful.

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I have shared your emotions again when you have stood at night beneath the starry heavens, and your imagination has travelled away among the mighty masses and interminable spaces around us, as upon some mighty comet, careering by the sister spheres that accompany our earth in its revolutions, and on again, through millions of kindred systems, all revolving round their central and glorious suns, and on still through systems of universes-each that we left behind, though apparently infinite while we were in it, yet dwindling to a hazy point as we left it in the distance. I have shared your emotions, when you have stood, amid yonder giant mountains and looked around upon their ponderous and awful magnificence, and then gone back in imagination into

immeasurable antiquity, beheld their forms slowly rising from the primeval ocean, and listened to the roar of the volcano as it heaved and worked below, and then, at last, burst forth hurling its sublime artillery to the sky, while amid the earthquake, mountains were rent asunder and towering peaks swept with deafening crash to the plain. I have then shared your emotions of AWE, at the vastness— the ineffable grandeur and power of nature.

"Then again we have looked together into this glorious nature, and known well that it is not a world like that which the poet saw in his vision

"Where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars and by confusion stand."

"It is a world of all prevailing law and order, such a world as we would have our minds to be. Upon every phenomenon, and every atom of this boundless whole, aud throughout this endless time, of which we only exist but an instant, is inscribed universal law, which all must obey. Above, below, within, all is method, mutual adaptation, regular procession. And now a sublimer emotion still has arisen within us-a desire to read this wondrous law, a desire to know the har monies and connections of things, to possess ourselves of TRUTH or KNOWLEDGE. And precious and soul elevating have we found the few secrets of wisdom, into which we have been able to penetrate.

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But fellow-learners, you know how we have everywhere been stopped in our enquiries. Everywhere we have come to the surface of an infinite depth, where all is hidden, and invisible to us. All our knowledge is indeed but the knowledge of laws (and of these laws few indeed can be known by us,) but what it is itself that works in these laws we cannot know. You have seen that the very matter which swells out into all these various forms of our mother earth, though it resists and supports our forces, yet when we ask what it is indeed in itself,-baffles all our conjectures. We know of it only that it is a mighty never relaxing POWER, refusing admission to our forms, and to the beams of light.

"We trace again the laws of that attraction which binds together all the atoms of this globe, which forms our habitation, and the frames which form the garments of our spirits,