serve for the perfect cducation of the spirit; and when this knowledge is secured, the thoughts, and desires, and passions, and appetites, all of humanity, shall move in complete harmony with the divine. law; when the man shall know fully his duty and ever live up to its full performance; and the result of such a life must be love, which is declared to be a fulfilling of the law; and love is happiness; since happiness follows necessarily, when the soul lives up to the law of its own being, which is also the law of God. God formed the soul for such a life; hence in it there can be no jar, or discord, or conflict, wherein lies all our misery, since misery necessarily follows when the soul fails to live up to the law of its own being. God lives His own life; He works out in His own life the truths original in himself; hence He is perfectly happy; since no conflicts or discords can arise in His being, no law of it being violated. Man lives God's life in his own life; he must work out in his life the truths which originate in and come from God to the spirit; through these truths, taken up into the soul, he lives a divine life; since he lives by the same truths and laws as God does in some faint degree; hence it may be said that man's life is hid in God; since God's life in its fullness includes all life, the life of humanity entire as well as of each individual man. All men will in this ideal state live upon God's truths and laws, so far as their capacities can take them in and work them out in life; and yet all humanity can exhaust but a fraction of that infinite fullness of life, which is found alone in God. The ideal man can never be learning, and his life ever be

fully developed; he must be ever coming, ever growing, ever enlarging like that endless river, which, ever gathering volume as it flows, can yet never equal that boundless ocean from which all its waters come.

This unity of life is entirely consistent with distinct personality; it by no means destroys either man's or God's individuality. Each lives his own life, though all live the same life. God has His own ideas and laws, by which He lives; and man, receiving some few of

these truths, takes them up into his mind, makes them his own by an act of reason and faith, and then shapes his life by them, as though they were his own truths and laws, drawn from his own nature; for his own nature has been made in reference to them and adapted to them, as much as the nature of God is adapted to His laws and truths. With God they are original; with man they are not; he derives them from God, as just what is necessary to his full spiritual development, and moral growth and perfection.

In this explanation is seen the error as well as the truth of pantheism. God does in one sense live and work in humanity, but yet in entire consistency with the distinct personality of each. God lives in humanity only by His truth; and the life of humanity is God's life only by being inspired by the same truth, only by being wrought out on the same plan and by the same laws. In this sense, the teacher lives in his pupil. The pupil adopts his views, his truths, his laws, and his thoughts, and moulds his life upon them, upon the plan of the teacher; so that there is an identity in their lives, with distinct personality. The identity is in the thoughts, and yet the thoughts of each are his own thoughts, distinct, not common; cach thinks his own thoughts, and works out with them his own life. While all truth is the same, each mind has to make it its own by some act of its own, by an act of reason and faith. Unless this is done, the pupil can never live the life his teacher lives; he must adopt as his the beliefs, the faith of the teacher, or he cannot in any sense be said to live his life. We see the truth of this view every day in the lives of children; though there may be exceptions, but these will prove the correctness of the law; since the child of vicious parents, if he is not like them, becomes so, because he does not accept their teaching; because he has got new and different teaching from other and better teachers. So God is the teacher of humanity, either directly or indirectly. He has communicated His truth to mankind, and it has been transmitted from mind to mind as the

true source of spiritual life; but man can live God's life only so far as he adopts God's truth as the ground of his own life; man must, in some degree, ever adopt this truth; life were impossible on any other condition; but his spiritual life will not be God's life, if he fails to recognize and by faith make God's truth his own; for surely the wicked, the vicious, the criminal, do not live God's life. Surely the life of the murderer cannot in any sense be said to be a life in God, or God's life; God cannot live in him, since the law by which His life is shaped is inconsistent with murder; hence God cannot live in such a life. The murderer is such, because he has rejected the law and truth of God, and therefore lives a life without God, and hence is capable of doing such work as God cannot do, the works of wickedness, the working out of human misery, instead of human happiness, of his own misery as well as that of others. The life of the bad man is not, then, in any sense, the life of God; it is not wrought out by an application of God's law, but of man's laws; and hence such a man lives his own life. There is still in the general tendency of humanity evidence of the ever acting influence of divine laws; to such an extent that it can be seen that this world is still under the divine administration, working from less to more, from bad to better, from ignorance to knowledge, from vice to virtue, from immorality to morality, thus affording a well grounded hope of a future full of promise, rich in all the possibilities of humanity, when all its virtualities shall have become actualities, and peace and happiness-perpetual peace and perfect happiness, shall be the final portion of humanity; but this vision is possible only to those whose lives are hid in God; misery and conflict must be the result of a life without God.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

SOCIAL PROGRESS.

"Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns."

SUCH is the language of the poet in reference to human progress, and it is no less the doctrine of the schools. The fact that humanity has a course to run, a destiny to accomplish, is now admitted; and the influence of this idea is seen in the manner in which history is now regarded and written. There is a something which nations or society do transmit from age to age to their successors, which is never lost, but which grows and continues as a common stock, and will thus be carried on to the end of all things. For my part, says Guizot, I feel assured that human nature has such a destiny; that a general civilization pervades the human race; that at every epoch it augments; and that there consequently is a universal history of civilization to be written. M. Guizot calls this result of social progress, civilization; a fact which exists as undisputed and as undebatable as any other fact in history; a fact more noble and interesting than any other fact in history, because it comprehends every other. Civilization is, as it were, the grand emporium of a people, in which all its wealth, all the elements of its life, all the powers of its existence are stored up. It is as they contribute to the progress of social life, of civilization that all other facts find their true value.

Two elements are said to be comprised in the great fact which is called civilization; two circumstances are necessary to its existence; it lives upon two conditions; it is revealed by two symptoms-the progress of a society and the progress of individuals; the amelioration of the social system, and the expansion of the mind and faculties of man. In this idea of civilization is also included two things-the continuity of society, and its improvement from generation to generation. In order to justify this doctrine of a continuous life in society, an unbroken progress in the working and development of society, there must be a transfer of the life of one generation into another; the succeeding generation must live the life of the preceding, and something more; for whenever a succeeding generation lives only the life of a preceding, society becomes stationary, as it has been for centuries in China, and when it does not live up to the past generation, society becomes retrograde, goes back, as it has done in India; still, in such cases the fact of continuity must be kept up, or one of the elements in this problem is untrue. But that this identity of life is kept up from generation to generation in society, stationary or retrograde, is apparent from the fact that the Chinese of to-day is identical with the Chinese of three centuries ago, and the present Hindoo is the same as his ancestors, with a slight abatement. The same is true, also, in reference to savage tribes; the Indian of to-day, so far as he has not been affected by contact with Europeans, is the same as the Indian of three centuries ago. Each generation has grown out of its predecessor, and become the root of that which followed. The fact, then, is apparent that this continuity does exist; and a fact which is universal and uniform in social progress, must be founded in humanity itself, and therefore exists of necessity. There must be some natural adaptation in humanity for this purpose; it cannot be the result of will or accident; it must originate in a law of human development, which acts with the certainty and precision of the law of gravitation, or