a diseased frame, and a wounded spirit.-We sigh, and pass on. We enter an hospital; and walking from ward to ward, and marking the pale face, the hollow eye, the look of pain, the expression of anxiety, we sigh deeply, and wonder that the Father who has all power does not prevent this: but some one whispers something about discipline and chastening, and we try to feel satisfied. We next take our stand on an eminence commanding an extensive plain, where tens of thousands are shooting and cutting each other down, till one party has gained the victory and marches off in triumph, leaving thousands writhing in agony and weltering in their gore. Is the great Father aware of all this? we ask. And is he able to prevent it? Why then does he suffer his children thus to shoot and stab one another, filling we know not how many homes with anguish, as wives are made widows, and children orphans?

After

We enter the Inquisition; and in dungeons of terrible gloom we see men, and women too, and maidens, chained and fettered; we see them stretched upon the rack, till every limb is dislocated; we hear their deep, deep groans; and their piercing cries make us sick at heart. months of various and ingenious torture we see them brought forth to be burned alive! We stand next, between the decks of a slave ship, and find hundreds of our fellow creatures manacled, and crammed into a space that is to be measured, as to height, by inches; the loathesomeness cannot be spoken, while the sufferings endured cannot be conceived. After numerous deaths we see the wretched survivors sold like beasts, and worked like them, and flogged and tortured at will, till they drop into the longed for grave. We take the history of one wretched slave, and find from the history of past years and ages that we could multiply it by hundreds of millions, till there is presented to the imagination a mass of wretchedness that is all but infinite. The sighs, the groans, the burning tears, defy the utmost power to realise them; and the mind breaks down in the attempt.

But every one's knowledge of what has been the state of the world for these six thousand years, renders it unnecessary to present the facts which show that the human family has from the beginning (no matter just now how it is to be accounted for) been in some way or other subjected to every form of ill. We have only to think of what, our

own memory can supply as to the state of things in different countries, and through all ages; the public calamities that nave overwhelmed nations, and the private afflictions and wrongs that have filled to the brim a cup of bitterness for individuals; and then do we not feel that while there are abundant proofs of God's goodness, (and some reasonable account may perhaps be given why things seem allowed to take their own course,) our idea of the paternal character has to be somewhat or even greatly modified? Are we not compelled to acknowledge that if we still call God 'the universal Father,' there are evidently some other elements of character beside the paternal, and quite as marked, or even more so? For what father, having the right and power to interfere, would stand by and see his child racked, tortured, through long long months, and then burnt alive, and not indignantly snatch him from the grasp of brutal tormentors? What father, possessed of sufficient power to prevent it, would listen to the groans and cries and shrieks that have filled the air for ages, till every atom of the atmosphere we breathe seems to one who knows the case, impregnated with woe? That God sees all, and hears all, and could prevent all, if he deemed it wise to do so, none that believe in the being of a God can question.

Must we not then seek some other answer to our question; or else greatly modify our ideas of the import of the term, if we still retain it as the one title which, above all others and exclusively, we select to denote the relationship in which God stands to his creatures? For certainly when we think of a father, we instinctively picture to ourselves one who has a particular and equal affection for each member of his family. Nor would the amiableness of the best of sovereigns, who strove to show himself' the father of his people,' nor the considerate benevolence of the most kind and generous of masters, who made the interests of his domestics his own, at all approach to our necessary idea of the love which fills a father's heart; which is not a vague and general benevolence towards all creatures indiscriminately, whether intelligent or irrational, but a special love for the individual, which can never no never decay, and which under all possible circumstances, and through all conceivable changes, will yearn over the child, and unceasingly exert itself at any cost for his individual happiness, which the father will even prefer to his own.

History, indeed, tells us of a father who finding his sons guilty of treasonable practices against Rome, and being himself the judge, sternly ordered the lictors to do their duty, and looked on with unaverted and unmoistened eye, while their backs were torn by the scourge, their heads stricken from their bodies, and they lay headless carcases at his feet. But assuredly it was not as a father, but as a judge, as a governor anxious to discharge impartially, and without respect of persons, his duty to the commonwealth —that he condemned them to die, and saw the fearful sentence executed. Parental feelings were kept in stern abeyance, while the one idea of justice filled his soul and ruled the hour. Nor do we ever think of such a one as Brutus when we form our notions of the paternal character.

And this leads me to remark that I have often observed great confusion to arise (in some instances, perhaps not quite unpurposed), from the pertinacious use of this one title as that which best, and above all others, and even to the exclusion of all others which would serve to modify it, exhibits the true idea of the relationship that God sustains. With myriads of such facts as I have adverted to, (to say nothing just now of scripture,) they who cleave the most fondly, and in many instances with the best intentions, to this term,―as the one epithet which shall be applied to the Great Supreme,—are constrained to give such an account of what a wise father would do, how he would maintain right at any cost, that their explanation, when they are pressed, exhibits after all a father from whose heart are banished all those peculiar parental yearnings which we cannot separate from our thoughts of a human parent, and one who resolutely maintains law, involve what it may; so that the true idea, after all, is to a great extent, that of a governor or ruler, though a benevolent one. If, then, with such an explanation, we consent to retain the term 'father,' we are called on, ere long, to forget the modification agreed on, and again to form our notions of God as 'the universal Father,' exclusively or chiefly, from those soft and endearing associations which are so indissolubly connected with the title. The previous admissions, which made father identical, or nearly so, with governor or ruler, are dropped, and God is re-invested, if one may say so, with those very qualities of human paternity which it was mutually agreed could not apply: so that when induced by

their explanations we have consented to retain the title, they leave out of sight those very modifications, and bid us ask ourselves whether a father could act in such and such

a way.

We have looked abroad among men, to see what obtains, and as yet our conclusion is that we have still to seek the true answer to our question; for that the paternal, as commonly and naturally understood, is not the only nor even the chief relation which God sustains.

Let us look forth once more, glancing for a moment at the Home in which man is placed.

'Once have we heard this, yea twice, that power belongeth unto God,' and truly we everywhere see the sublimest illustrations. But do we see anything beside power? Undoubtedly we do. We see wisdom directing power in all its efforts; so that power is never exerted for its own sake, but subordinated to the counsels of perfect wisdom. What glorious worlds fill the heavens; what mighty material masses; and all poised in empty space, and never since the day of their creation swerving a hair's breadth from their prescribed line of orbit. Worlds, and systems of worlds, revolving round their own suns, as our earth and her sister planets revolve round our sun; many such systems forming one grander system, and many such grander systems again forming one system yet mightier still; and, so on till all form one glorious whole, revolving altogether through space, round some central point, it may be, whence issues the invisible influence that holds all together in one sublimely beautiful whole.

Now we are overwhelmed, possibly, with the sense of power; and yet the conviction of presiding wisdom is still more thoroughly present to our minds, and we exclaim in delighted homage, 'in wisdom hast thou made them all.'What exquisite perfection of beauty! well may the Hebrew Psalmist talk of the morning stars singing together; well may we speak of the music of the spheres;' for, to the cultivated mind, the countless worlds that God hath formed, moving as they do so harmoniously through space, seem in graceful chorus to praise their great Creator. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmanent showeth his handy work. Now that unseen influence which is found to act wherever man has been able to explore, acts so invariably everywhere, producing such constant and uniform

and palpable results, that men have given to it the name of law; and they tell us of the law of gravitation, and of centrifugal motions, or forces,' and ascribe thereto, as the divinely appointed secondary cause, all the perfection of order of which we have been speaking; and every single atom, as well as every rolling world, obeys this law. The stone which you cease to hold falls to the ground, and falls by the same law which secures the order of all the heavenly bodies.

And as we look yet further, we find everything subject to law in like manner. A great part of our globe, for example, is occupied by water, which comes before us in various forms. Let us think of it for a moment. The ocean, with its rolling billows, filling the soul with the sense of vastness and power-the waterfall-the majestic river-the bab bling brook—the calm smooth lake, reflecting the clear blue sky-the mountain rill, like a silver thread-the gushing fountain: behold one form it assumes. Look again and it is solid rock; clear, transparent, crystal rock: again, and that rock has changed its form and is floating in the air as vapor, and forming clouds of every shape, and colored by the setting sun constituting the glory of the heavens. Look again, and in the form of sparkling dew it gems every flower and every blade of grass; or it descends as a refreshing shower, and in falling presents us with the rainbow. But in all its wonderful and beautiful changes, whether you gaze on foaming billows, or listen to the music of the murmuring rill; whether you watch the regularly recurring tide, or trace the raindrop down a pane of widow glass;— every particle of it is influenced, in every form it assumes, and at every instant, by invariable law.

It is so with the productions of the vegetable world, or as naturalists prefer to speak,-the vegetable kingdom and men of science delight to dwell on what they call 'the laws of vegetation;' by means of which whenever not interfered with, the highest perfection of which the plant is capable is beautifully secured. And just so with all other departments of nature; not a single flake of snow was ever formed, except in harmony with pre-established and invariable law: the breath that by night in winter has assumed such beautiful crystallized forms on your window, has been in every particle obeying law. And so everywhere. Man is placed on a world, every atom of which, and every atom of