essentially a brute. The dog indefinitely changes his structure, but in his function he is everywhere unmistakably a dog. Yet here is a being in human form indeed, but deaf and dumb, sightless, destitute of smell, and almost of taste, shut up, and, as it were, fast locked out from the outer world and from her fellow beings. But oh! wonder of wonders! by a series of intellectual bounds she learns to converse, to read and write, to acquiring algebra, geometry, physics, compute, - to investigate, and gradually to use the abstract terms of the language and to deal with the highest human themes. Thought after thought flashes up in that corporeal prison house, illuminating its recesses within, and beaming from her face without, till at length she says to her teacher: "Man has made houses and vessels, but who made the land and the sea?" And when the answer came, "God made all things," what a commotion rose in that pent-up soul !-thought crowding upon thought and question piled upon question: "Where is God?" "What is the soul?" absorbing the time of her daily lessons and intruding into her walks and talks, till mind and heart found rest in all the hope and trust of an earnest and intelligent piety, brightening her darkened life and saddened lot.

Now one obvious effect, if not aim, of the confusions to which we have alluded is at least in some quarters to confound moral distinctions and obligations. Right and wrong are made factitious things. The highest relationships are shaken by the denial of their sanctity. Human life and hope are cheapened by

the alleged meanness of human origin. The grandeur of human destiny is darkened by the eclipse of the future. Free will has been openly denied, and the great God dethroned. When such assertions and denials are brought to the test, however, we find that before men can put in practice these extreme fanaticisms, the good providence of God fortunately puts on the chain and the clog. Society is compelled to trample many of these follies under foot. It cannot even parley with them. Human freedom must be asserted at all hazards; human rights defended at whatever cost; human obligations enforced, and the great human relationships maintained though the heavens fall. Man's life, whatever

Society cannot be

his pedigree, must be held sacred. held together under the abrogation of the decalogue; the court needs God for the solemnity of the oath, and the criminal is often overshadowed by a terror more appalling than an instant's pain of the nerves. When man, whether or not under pretense that he has come from the brute, would sink to the level of a brute, God's providence vetoes the movement with its "everlasting No."

III. But the indispensable condition on which we have the privilege and the duty of putting all things to the proof is that we "hold fast that which is good."

This proposition but brings us face to face with first principles. We are not to be forever filling the same leaky vessel. We are not to be always proving, but to have some things proved and settled, firm and fast. It is the necessity of thought and knowledge. In

reaching to the unknown we must begin from the known. If nothing were settled, nothing could be settled, or unsettled. Holding fast is not only the starting point, but the goal of all investigation, truth certainly attained and firmly held, on which mind and heart and life may rest. We reach out for something which we may grasp and cling to. This it is which alone justifies the expenditure of time and treasure, and sometimes of life, in the struggle, and vindicates the real martyrs of science.

Such again is the law of our nature. It is the solemn prerogative of humanity that it cannot excuse itself from cleaving to the right and the good, once thoroughly apprehended. From Galileo recanting in sackcloth we hide our faces, and Socrates with the hemlock receives the suffrages of the race. There is scarcely a greater curse to humanity or a more lawless brigand in the realm of thought than he who, with brilliant powers and restless activity, spends his whole force of intellect in loosening the foundations and never laying a solid stone.

Do you ask me what is good? I answer in general, that code of life and conduct which is sustained by evidence, such evidence as forms the basis of all wise human action, especially when it has been not hastily but maturely adopted, overriding objections. It is good, not till some passing cavil be raised, or some novel theory thrust against it, but till it be fairly borne backward and laid low by some mightier array of solid proof. If, moreover, being experimental, it has

been tested by a wide experience in all ages, lands, and conditions, that surely is good. If, still further, it be something that in all its course has shown its purifying and elevating power; if its individual trophies are numbered by myriads and millions, and its benign effects permeate society; if it be such that a full conformity to it would make a pure, yea, a perfect being and a perfect society, that must be good, supremely good. It bears the image and superscription of God. It is bound up with the transcendent interests of humanity. It is the supreme law of our being, towering over all speculations, difficulties, or objections. In spite of everything-question, cavil, temptation — we are bound to hold it fast with the whole energy of mind and heart.

IV. The legitimate issue, when we have thus proved and held fast, will be "that which is good."

No doubt there will come many a reversal of popular opinions and current estimates. A good sifting leaves more chaff than wheat. There are fashions in speculations as much as in clothes. A French modiste sets the one, and perhaps a German the other. The multitude follows its leader. But time tests all things. The speculative craze passes by. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, each had his day and his following. The peculiar Darwinism of Darwin had to be changed before he died. Pessimism has charms for the bad, and doubtless to the bad it will go. What mountains of hypotheses are buried deeper than the fossils of the Tertiary extinct species! Some of them were

deinotheriums, "dreadful beasts," long ago stone dead. Others of formidable size, mastodons of speculation, perished in the general freeze. Clumsy dodos flopped and hobbled round the old Dutch navigators, and great auks of science flew away within the memory of man. Doubtless there are plenty more to follow the trail of the departing buffalo. And how the latest form of speculation commonly splits into schools! Yet all these testings of error bring us nearer to the truth.

For amid all the risings and the fallings, the comings and the goings in the empire of thought, there is one thing that stands the test, that holds fast on its way, and is to be held fast to the end: "good" in every way, sustained by the evidence of the ages, tested by the experience of the world, purifying and ennobling wherever it has gone. I need not tell you what it is. On the open plane of evidence it has stood the test of nigh two thousand years, under every conceivable form of attack, from the great concentering batteries of the heaviest ordnance down to the sword and spear, the hand grenade, the tomahawk and scalping knife. It stands unshaken. Its multitudinous spires, pointing upward to their origin, are steadily belting the earth, and its facts and influences have become factors in all modern civilization. The anti-Christian lecturer in the date of his announcements must commemorate the birth year of Christ.

As matter of experiment, its witnesses rise up through the ages past; they come thronging from all parts of the globe, from the Malagasy, the Choctaw,