from love!

These leaves are leaves of light. They are lessons bright as silver, valuable beyond all price, from the Great Physician of the universe the cure is certain. Oh! let us not refuse their invitation. Love and light, in all their manifold truths and illustrations, will chase away the demons of discord, cruelty, and crime, substituting health, happiness, and blessing: minds at peace, homes like heaven; and these the ante-chambers of unending bliss. These leaves are for the healing of the nations.

UNITY NOT IDENTITY.

THE saddest chapters of Church history are those in which professing Christians have wrangled on points of doctrine, or fiercely disputed as to forms of church order, government, and discipline. The so-called "religious wars," which have ravaged and depopulated whole districts of country, invariably have had for their questions at issue doctrinal tenets and ecclesiastical forms. Men, unwilling to see, or incapable of seeing, more than one side of a controversy, have taken up arms to defend, and to enforce, their one-sided view, until it has become too true that "the history of the church is the contentions of Christians." To coerce or to persuade men into uniformity as to ritual, as to discipline, as to dress, as to doctrines, has been the ambitious dream of spiritual tyrants in every age. They have often laboured, first to drive those who differed from them out of the pale of the Church, and afterwards to rid the world of their presence. They have exalted their own enemies into being enemies of God, and have then thought that they did God good service, in sending such wicked people to their last account as speedily as possible. Although the power to proceed to such extremities of enmity has happily departed, the same spirit still burns in the hearts of the children of men. Hereditary evil is not got rid of, however much the circumstances of national life, the development of education, and the obligations of social order may impose restraints on its manifestations.

The present generation is capable of perpetrating any enormity which previous generations, its forefathers, may have committed. The entail of propensities may be hidden because of many repressions; but it cannot be cut off. Only regeneration can subjugate the evils, which motives of prudence are sufficient to only restrain. In order that an evil may be subjugated, it must be perceived. That which we do not discern, we can never fight against and overcome. Therefore, it is

valuable to consider what may be termed the root of contention in the Church.

Every evil is expressed by a falsity; that is, whenever an evil is stated affirmatively, the statement is a lie. Thus, a wicked man does practically assert, "it is good to do wickedly"; which is a falsity. The falsity on which all persecutions for the sake of religion have been based is this," that all men ought to think alike in reference to spiritual things." Believing this, as persecutors must have believed, if they were sincere men, they have striven to reduce all, in regard to such matters, to one uniform size, complexion, disposition, and practice. They may have justified themselves by such a sophism as this:-“ My view is right; your view differs from my view; therefore, your view is wrong. What is wrong is wicked. What is wicked ought to be suppressed. Therefore, it is proper that my right view should suppress your wrong and wicked view. There ought not to be, there shall not be, room enough in the Church, no, nor in the world either, for my right view and your wrong view. My right view shall prevail: your wrong view shall perish." It is not difficult to see how far this sort of foolish falsity seems to prevail among many denominations, even in our own time. One answer is that unity is not identity. The union of men in church fellowship implies some differences in those who are thus united. Christanity is adapted to all men because it is capable of comprehending all men who agree on a few cardinal and vital points, however much they may differ in other respects. It is capable of being wide-spread because it is so inclusive. The unity of Christians can only at best resemble the unity of the heavens, where, instead of identity, the most marvellous diversity prevails. This diversity is seen in the fact of there being three heavens, in the character of the heavens, in there being innumerable societies in each heaven, in there being various members of each society, as well as manifold functions, relations, and uses belonging to each and all.

There is in all things a necessary, an inevitable tendency to the heterogeneous: a tendency in everything to be unlike any other thing. This tendency is so truly universal that it may be regarded as a great fundamental principle, or as the term is, "law," of all created things. One reason is because the state of homogeneity is a condition of unstable equilibrium. The slightest thing will disturb it, and when once disturbed, the divergence will ever tend to increase rather than diminish. The highest reason for this fact is, because the Lord is Infinite as well as One. The unity of the whole universe pictures forth

His Oneness the diversity of things in the universe pictures forth His Infinity. Whatever the cause, the fact is certain,-men and things are diverse the sole unity which can be established, or which can prevail among men, is one which must furnish free scope for their differences.

To apply these thoughts to questions of doctrine and ecclesiastical order, discipline, ritual goverment, and practice, what comfort can an earnest mind derive from such statement as the following, from Swedenborg's treatise on the "New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine: "

"If good were the characteristic of the church, and not truth without good, thus, if charity were its characteristic, and not faith alone, the church would be one, and differences with respect to the doctrinals of faith, and external worship, would be accounted as nothing." (No. 246.) J.

ON THE BEARINGS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY ON RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.-POSITIVISM. (Concluded from July No.)

In the last article, we entered on the consideration of the Positive or Comtian philosophy, and of the Comtian religion. With regard to what Mr. Lewes asserts, that Comte was a dotard, or in a state of mental derangement, when he concocted his religion of humanity, we do not think that Comte manifests this state of mind in the positive religion any more than in the positive philosophy. The one is clearly the natural and logical result of the other. If we become positivists in philosophy, in the same sense in which Comte was one, and if we remain true to these principles, and at the same time recognise a religious nature in man, we must adopt or accept some such religion as that which Comte offers us.

Man must worship moral excellence in some concrete form, and where can he look for moral perfection,-for this ideal of virtue and goodness (after he has excluded from his soul all belief in Him who is the Author of all goodness) save in the wise and the good of the human race, with a few of the domestic animals? Surely it is not in stones or trees, in solids or in fluids, in science or in art, that we can look for moral virtue. We believe that Comte was intellectually consistent throughout, and morally insane from beginning to end. But, after all, what has Comte revealed to the world, in his "Positive Philosophy," that we should be called upon by his English admirers so earnestly to accept it as a great boon, giving unity to our life, intimating in unmis takable language that it is something very original and profound, and

that we ought not to allow the puerile and absurd teachings of the positive religion to interfere with our reception of the positive philosophy. Now, to be plain, it appears to us that Comte's positive philosophy is characterised generally by shallow negations, and that it shows unmistakable signs of having proceeded from a disordered and conceited imagination. What it possesses of truth and positive value, had been taught by other philosophers long before his time. The doctrine of the verification of the truths of science, on which he insists so much, is at least as old as Lord Bacon; and traces of it can be discovered as far back as Aristotle. But these wise thinkers only insisted upon the verifying process being adopted when it could be applied. They were aware that there were truths more deep, more important, belonging to the spiritual region of God's universe, necessary to be believed, which could not be testified to by any observation of the bodily senses. The only thing new, therefore, in the positive philosophy, as taught by Comte, is that we ought not to believe in anything but what is capable of verification by the sense. This of course is new in Comte, but it is absurd. We call this element new in Comte, just as we call the inductive philosophy new in Bacon, because he was the first who systematized the inductive method, and gave to it the character of a philosophy.

Still, the principle of induction in physics, as taught by Bacon, or the reasoning from particulars to generals, which is the verifying process, and the materialistic doctrine of exclusive sense-knowledge as taught by Comte, are almost contemporaneous with the dawn of philosophy itself, and have been given to the world at different times, and in various forms. The only difference, therefore, which we can see between Bacon and Comte is, that the former systematised a good and a useful method, as applied to the physical sciences, whilst the latter misapplied that method, by pushing it too far, by teaching that nothing was to be believed but what was capable of induction and verification, by being made an object of sense. Again, all mental science, according to our positive philosopher, is vitiated in proportion as it departs from this objective method. All subjective analysis, in fact all philosophy, based upon the datum of consciousness, is false in principle, and mischievous in its results.

The test of verification cannot be applied to consciousness, we can neither see, smell, handle, nor taste it. Besides, this subjective method leads men into all kinds of spiritual speculations regarding God, the human soul, and a life after death; whereas the objective method of verification puts a stop to all this, by showing you that in reality you

know nothing regarding these subjects. Psychology, therefore, as usually taught, must be given up, for the enlightened positive stage of thought can have none of it. The existence of mind, however, Comte could not with any plausibility deny. Still, mind was an ugly fact in nature for Comte, which he could not ignore, and which could not be made to fit very well into the positive philosophical groove. Of course

the subjective method of mental philosophy which led people to believe in spiritual entities, could not go along with Comte's positive method, for such things could not be verified in the laboratory, nor proved in the dissecting room. Yet, mind was a fact, and ought to be studied somehow. Comte looked about him, and saw that phrenology was the only system which he could adopt as a philosophy of mind, for it dealt with mental phenomena as an objective quantity. The brain and the organs of the head can be seen and felt, consciousness cannot; no man can see or feel any other man's consciousness; consequently phrenology was the only mental science which Comte could allow. In this we perceive the weakness of Comte's system of exclusive sense-verification, or that which he calls positivism. Mental science of some sort could not be segregated from the hierarchy of the sciences, for the phenomenon of mind exists as a fact, and Comte thought that by substituting phrenology as a science of mind, instead of psychology, he was adopting the pure scientific or objective method, in lieu of what he called the metaphysical. He could not, however, receive the phrenological chart as Gall marked it out, but he must create a new map for himself, altering many of the organs in their relative positions, and supplementing what he considered Gall's deficiencies.

Let us for a moment glance at the way in which Comte set about this, and, indeed, the way in which all phrenologists must proceed; and we shall see whether it be possible to adopt what is called the purely objective method, in building up a science of mind on phrenological principles, to the entire rejection of what is called the subjective method. Suppose we were to begin to construct, for the first time, the science of phrenology, we observe, in the first place, that a man is very benevolent, hopeful, firm, or conceited; we then observe the form and size of his cranium, along with, it may be, his temperament.

collect many facts of a similar kind, and after we find these facts all agreeing with each other, and pointing to a certain conclusion, we make an induction that all heads with a form, size, and temperament like to or nearly identical with those we have observed, must contain and will manifest in an especial manner the qualities which we found in con