gentle cow becomes a wild and dangerous creature, whose chief value is in her hide; the house-dog turns into a wolf; the horse parts with both his beauty of form and his noble disposition. There is neither plant nor animal on the face of the earth that will improve without man's assistance, and every rare and choicest specimen will sink into wildness and worthlessness if that help be withdrawn. Now, here is an agency, practically of the very highest importance, but of which the mechanical theory takes no account. Can any one doubt, who views creation as a whole, that since life first appeared after the azoic time, there have been interferences of a controlling Intelligence, to rectify and to improve, at various periods, the rich varieties of life? The agency of man is but a feeble image of this process in the Divine Hand; but both show that there is nothing in living things themselves, no inherent power or sagacity, that can bring them even to their natural perfection without this external assistance.

It is obviously quite needless to enter upon any polemic defending the words of Holy Scripture anywhere concerning creation against the assumptions of evolutionists. Their threatening but lubricious theory' can array no wellsettled fact in science against the plain narrative of Holy Writ. But what has just been said suggests a fitting answer to the audacious sophistry that would derive man's highest powers, by which he discerns abstract truths, his morality, and his religion, out of the filthy débris of beastly ancestors. First, remember that man did not come out of any animal-monkey, seal, or any other: this point

Christ. and Gr. Phil., Ch. I., p. 19. N. Y., 1870. He refers for authorities to Carpenter's Comp. Phys., p. 623, and Lyell's Princip. of Geology, pp. 588, 589.

I justify this language by the authority of ex-President Porter of Yale College: "The evolution that we criticise," he says, "is a composite of scientific theories-some true,

others doubtful, and others false— which are held together and wrought into a fanciful philosophy by the very slenderest threads of analogy, and elevated into a negative theology by a daring flight of professedly modest or agnostic reserve."-Lecture on "Evolution," read before the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, May 25, 1886.

is perfectly agreed upon by intelligent anthropologists. Next, in the vast majority of cases, communities of men have not advanced but deteriorated. China and India are no less striking instances in proof than the Bushmen of Africa. Next, even among barbarous tribes, the surprising discovery is made, that whatever the nature of the development they have undergone, they still possess certain traits that mark a high civilization, in a higher degree than many, for instance, of the civilized communities of Europe. A striking example may be seen in the politeness, the modesty, the sense of honor, in some of the Polynesian tribes. The most striking examples of the advance of human beings out of barbarism into civilization, which are perhaps furnished by Europe during the last twelve hundred years, are very far from being cases of unassisted development, but always start with some vigorous impulse from without-the introduction of Christianity; the decree of some powerful ruler who, like Peter the Great, brought in by force the arts and mechanical inventions of the West; or the enforcement, as under the Fredericks of Prussia, of discipline, of industry, of economy, and subsequently of education. These were distasteful to the respective peoples, who, however, having received them, obtained their benefits. The wisdom to which we are sometimes invited now to listen is something like the profundity that would evolve the diffused popular intelligence of Prussia out of the cane with which the irascible father of Frederick the Great tyrannized over schools and schoolmasters as over most other persons and things in his kingdom.

And here we naturally recur to that illustration with which two years ago we began these lectures. The Jews are an eternal witness against any merely mechanical or materialistic explanation of the peculiarities of the races of man. The Jew is a physiological paradox. He has survived unchanged the most powerful disintegrating in

'See De Quatrefages's Nat. Hist. also Miss Yonge's Life of Bp. Patof Man, Lect. V., pp. 133, 134. See teson.

fluences-war, captivity, dispersion, relentless and persistent persecution-before which every other variety of the human species has vanished. Here is a physiological fact, the most remarkable in the world, yet having no physiological factors that can account for it. The persistency of the Jew, it is certain, is connected in some mysterious way with his religion. The Jews now scattered over the earth are mainly from two tribes. The ten who threw away their religion in captivity lost also the physical differences that separated them from the heathen. Moreover, while the Jew remained faithful to his God, his nation was graced with a fair line of prophets and heroes; and books were produced there, which, though not strictly literature, because divine oracles, yet surpass all the literature of the world in sublimity, in eloquence, in pathos, in religious depth. But since the Jews rejected the true Messiah, though their physical endurance continues, their power to produce literature has departed from them as from a withered stem. To seek to account for such results by any theory of self-development is too violent an absurdity. We might as well seek to ascribe the firmness with which during more than three thousand years, amid every form of surrounding heathenism, they have asserted the unity of God, to some one of the pagan corruptions in which that unity is denied. Their history exhibits the usual weaknesses and corruptions of human nature—a tendency to forget their high vocation, a willingness at times even to throw away their chief treasure, the religion that had been revealed to them. They are at various times rescued from extreme peril by a mighty hand put forth to draw them out of the pit of their own degeneracy. "He made a covenant with Jacob, and gave Israel a law, which He commanded our forefathers to teach their children. . But they kept not the covenant of God, and would not walk in His law, but forgat what He had done, and the wonderful works that He had showed for them."

'Psalm lxxviii.

There is this analogy between the supernatural life of God's Church on earth and the appearance of living forms in the natural history of creation: the origin of neither can in any way be accounted for, but by the immediate agency of an Almighty Creator; the tendency of plant and animal life, left to itself, is to degenerate and to perish; thousands of species appear to have thus utterly passed away in the Church, in like manner, individuals, parties, factions, passing into schisms and heresies, have testified to the downward trend of human nature when

not upheld and restored by divine grace. At long intervals in the natural world a creative word is uttered, and new and more attractive forms of life appear. This is the image of that renewal, at fit and appointed times, of the call to faith, the return to duty, the restoration of religion, amid busy, worldly, sensual, ambitious populations, who for a time seem to dwell amid a new creation. In the natural and in the supernatural realm, it is God's Word alone that can give life, that can preserve it, or that can make any form of it blossom and bring forth its choicest fruit.

LECTURE IV.

"MORALITY."

"IT is a law of revelation," says Neander the historian, "that the heart of man should be tested in receiving it." "In God's word, as in His works, we find contradictions whose higher harmony is hidden, except from him who gives up His whole mind to reverence."

This converted Jew, when he gave up to the Christian religion his great heart, his extraordinary attainments, his devout spirit, was unfortunate only in embracing a shadowy mysticism instead of the substance of the Catholic Church. He resolutely devoted himself, however, to the defence of Scripture against the cavils of the rationalists, with a learning quite equal to, and with a gentle and religious spirit infinitely beyond, theirs. In such a contest the world deems the unworldly champion feeble and ineffective; nevertheless, we believe that in God's good time his triumph is sure.

Confining ourselves to a single branch of a large subject, we propose to devote two lectures to the objections made against Scripture morality. In this lecture I will review some leading instances. In the next I propose to suggest some general answers to this class of objections, and to speak if possible to the spirit that prompts them.

There is a singular monotony in the matter and manner of these objections. From Celsus and Porphyry of old down to Tindal in his Christianity as Old as Crea'Life of Christ, Preface.