are our literary compositions; such are all the beneficial employments of our social life. Plan and purpose; directing mind; a selected process, or connected and adapted series of means and movements, and an end continually in view, and pursued until it be accomplished, characterize all the varied business and manufactures of human society. This being our perpetual, and natural, and unavoidable practice, we may be sure that omnipotent wisdom is not less sagacious, or less active and provident. We may therefore adopt it as one of our safest and most certain deductions, that plan and purpose accompany, in every part, the Divine economy of human life; and that the habitual course and sequences, the laws and agencies which affect or govern human affairs, have been arranged and are constantly regulated so as to realize in due order the Divine intentions, and to be always promoting and contributing to produce his ulterior determinations.

It is with these plans and purposes that the sacred history of our social world is more immediately concerned; for its chief aim will always be to discern and describe them. It is indeed a subject to which no individual is competent to do justice. From their very nature; from the greatness and remoteness to us of the omniscient Director; from the invisibility and intangibility of the agencies by which his guidance and ruling interferences are carried on; and by the very intellectuality of the process he is pursuing, and of its effects; the delineations and history of his administration of our world, and the investigation of the plans he is executing by it, and of the purposes which they accomplish, must have difficulties, and darknesses, and perplexities peculiar to their recondite nature, and very often insurmountable by any one.

On these themes no one must expect the same success as attended Sir Isaac Newton's study of the grand physical agencies which unite the sun and planets into a sublime fraternity with our globe. It was finely said of him, by one who wasted a genius of much promise and power by perverse applications of it;

"Whose eye could Nature's darkest veil pervade,
And, sunlike, view the solitary maid,

Pursue the wanderer through her secret maze,
And o'er her labours dart a noontide blaze."

But no brilliant result like this will yet reward our study of the moral and providential system by which human nature. and its operations, and concerns have been and continue to be regulated and carried on. Our attention has been, hitherto, too much directed to the perceptions of our material sense for our being yet able to explore, as we desire, what lies beyond it. The Divine is always the superhuman; and whatever is superhuman has been too much avoided and decried by philosophical inquirers to be at present understood as it ought to be. What is neglected is never much known; and what is little known is little valued, whatever its real excellence may be. Hence, although what is beyond the reach of our eyesight exists as certainly and as perpetually as what is within its compass, yet the science of the supernatural has been so depreciated and often contemned by those whose power of thought and wide range of knowledge might have thrown many rays of light upon its laws and operations, that we are still involved in as much ignorance and doubts concerning it as our ancestors under the Tudor reigns were of chymistry and electricity, and of the greatest truths of anatomy and astronomy. We know as little of the moral philosophy of the universe, and of the Divine plans concerning it, as they did of fluxions, galvanism, and ærostation.

But there is no just reason that we should continue in this hostility or indifference to it. We have been made capable of understanding it. The Deity has avowedly granted to us, in our divinely-originating and heaven-destined soul, such a participation of his moral and intellectual nature as to have attached to it the noble possibility of being his image and likeness. We must never forget this dignifying benediction. By this he has himself characterized our created nature, and he has signified his desire that we should regain this perfection; he invites us to pursue it; we are every year becoming more fit to do so, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that, the wiser we become, we shall more strongly feel that no inferior objects ought to prevent us from realizing such sublime anticipations. There is a spirit abroad which desires to elevate the condition of human nature. There is a spreading impression that it is yet highly improvable. A progression in it which we cannot stop steadily advances, and urges all into the invisible current. There is a generous ambition in many of raising both their own mind and that of

others to a nobler character, and of effecting this by increasing the moral influences upon the world. We may trace this in all the professions and in the educated classes; and in the diffusing desire of educating and of being educated. The individuals are becoming more numerous and decided in all stations who feel that the union of knowledge, virtue, and religion produces the most delightful and the most lasting enjoyment of which the human mind is susceptible; and that it is our most desirable, and will become our most valuable possession. They seek to acquire this for themselves. They recommend it to others. I read such effusions as these, to my own surprise, from the recollections of a very different spirit in my younger days, in our periodical works; and I rejoice to find that such a new sunshine of British mind has begun to illuminate our social horizon before the infirmities of age and ailment have withdrawn me from it.

All such aspirations and intentions are indications that human nature has the capacity, as well as the desire, to comprehend and to appreciate its Maker's works and ways, and will endeavour to do so. Indeed, his past conduct towards us encourages us to hope that, in this path of study, the effort to trace his mind and meaning will accord with his own wishes, and receive his favouring aid. He must desire to be known by his human race as fully and as extendingly as they become qualified to do so. In all his communications to us, he has treated us as if we were able to understand him. He repeatedly calls upon us to acquire a knowledge of him; and declares that one of the later perfections of our ulterior posterity will be the enlarged and universal attainment of this intellectual progression. On every occasion which has been recorded in his revelations, we perceive a rational and moral being, reasoning as such on his own wishes and meaning. In this character and manner he repeatedly addresses his human race as those whom he has enabled and considers to be, or who ought to be and may be, rational and moral beings likewise. He imparts ideas from himself to us to become ideas in our mind, as if we were as capable of receiving them from him as from nature or each other. He gives us commands to understand as well as to obey. He pleads and expostulates with us, exhorts, entreats, counsels, urges, and persuades in the same manner and by the same means, that is, by intelligible and appropriated language, assuming frequently the phrases of the

most impressive eloquence and the most convincing ratiocination as the finest intellects which we are acquainted with in human society endeavour to interest and influence our intellectual sympathies and faculties by such effusions.

The prophecies of Isaiah, delivered in his name, are splendid instances of such addresses. What, indeed, are all the discourses and lessons of that Great Instructer whom we most venerate, and by whom the human race has been most benefited, but so many communications and appeals from a Divine intelligence, breathing heavenly wisdom and goodness to creatures whom he had made to be intelligent, sensitive, and discerning likewise. He thinks and speaks like man talking to man, notwithstanding his exalted nature; and thus he manifests and acknowledges that degree of similitude between the human spirit and its Creator, in the intellectual capacity of our nature, which enables us, from what we experience in that, to understand and know him; to comprehend his meaning in all that he expresses; to imbibe whatever knowledge he pleases to impart, and to think and reason justly about it. It is unfortunately true, that every one does not avail himself of this Divine capacity, which he inherits as his birthright when he begins to breathe and live; but all possess it from their Creator, and may nurse and train it into activity and improvement if they choose, or shall be actuated to do so.

There cannot, therefore, be any reasonable doubt that we are able to comprehend and to discern those plans and purposes of our Creator in which we are concerned. Further than this, it is not necessary that we should be acquainted with them. But our external nature, our history and our current life should be viewed and studied with a constant recollection, with the perpetual impression, that Divine plans and purposes, specifically directed to them, preceded the beginning of all earthly things, and have been constantly regulating and accompanying them. From these all nature has originated; according to these every part has been created; and by these, in every age of our world, have its course and conduct been superintended and governed.

But all plans are proportioned and adapted to their intended objects and ends. There are always the greater and the smaller; the general and the particular; the subordinate ones, and those which command and actuate them. With the mighty plan of universal creation we have, in this stage

of our existence, no direct relation, nor with those of the starry orbs beyond our system. It is true that, as a part, however inconsiderable, of the wonderful whole, we must be in some respect affected by what affects that; and our astronomers have suggested that the innumerable hosts of radiant worlds above us have, besides their separate and peculiar laws and systems, some vast general movement, around some unknown centralization, in the depths of unfathomed space.

But no perceptible consequences flow from this to our human world or to its social constitution. Satisfied that other planets are governed by plans which, though essential to them, are not extended to us, beyond our general relations with them of distance, magnitude, and movement, our attention need never be turned towards any other schemes and designs than those which have operated on our nature and on our, to us while on it, most precious world; precious from its beauty and benefit to us, and probably not inferior, in the benefactions we receive from it, to the comforts and advantages in any of our sister planets. There is a glorious future promised to those who may be admitted to it; but as that will be a special kingdom, specially created for its immortalized inhabitants, it will probably be different from any that now exists. I cannot, therefore, avoid believing that we are as happy at present in our minor globe as our fellow-creatures are in the greater masses of Jupiter and Saturn. But be this as it may, our interests now are confined to our own earth, and to the plans and purposes on which that has been formed, and by which the economy of our social life is governed.

I am particularly anxious that you should feel and believe that creation must have been made in all its parts upon an intelligent plan, by its intelligent Creator, and should always study both material nature and human history with this fixed impression, because both will be more instructive and useful to you, as you read and think upon them with this pervading and guiding principle. You will then become more interested with them, and cannot otherwise properly and sufficiently understand either. Both will appear to you under very different lights, and present very different prospects, and excite very different thoughts and feelings, according as you cherish or omit, in your meditations, this enlightening and directing truth. It will be an improving exercise of your discerning faculties, and a constant pleasure to your best sensibilities, to give them this employment.