be examined carefully. After the resurrection of our Lord, he claimed all power in heaven and on earth, by virtue of which he sent his Apostles to convert all nations; this proclamation was to be made first at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. The church of Christ was to embrace individuals of all nations- Jews and Gentiles. A system of religion embracing these was never published till the day of Pentecost. Peter had committed to his trust the authority to open the kingdom of heaven, (a comprehensive phrase for "the church") which he never was prepared to use till that day; he and his fellow Apostles being ignorant of the nature and object of that kingdom prior to that time. But when the day of Pentecost was fully come, Messiah having ascended on high, bestowed gifts that not only proved his resurrection, but abundantly accomplised his promises of the coming Comforter, and capacitated his Apostles for the duties of their wondrous commission. Messiah had not only promised "I will build my church"-" I will send you the Comforter"-"I will give you the keys of the kingdom"-" You shall be my witnesses to the end of the earth," &c.-but he had emphatically declared, at a time when he was surrounded by the most extraordinary circumstances that ever attended his personal ministry—at a time most fitting for such a declaration, when claiming all power in heaven and earth—that it should begin at Jerusalem, when he would invest the twelve with the power of his Father. This was fulfilled at Pentecost. So that truly upon that day, the Christian church was built, to which additions have been made in all time. I know of no moral demonstration so conclusive as the evidence upon this point. The prophets point out Jerusalem as the place, and the Pentecost as the time. Peter received the keys which he used upon that day. Upon that day for the first time a system of salvation embracing the Gentiles was made known. The Messiah in Jesus was never understood till then-then were all his full and gracious promises to his Apostles fulfilled. Then commenced the reign of heaven, which will not be finished until the enemies of the King are made his footstool, the destroyers of the earth are destroyed; until men shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks, when peace shall extend her blooming olive, and all the nations, people, languages, and tongues, be given to the saints of the Most High for an everlasting possession. J. B. F MORAL GREATNESS. MORAL greatness is the only elevation and distinction worthy the name greatness. This side of heaven, it is the highest life of our race, and that which is alone worthy of recognition and reverence. It alone satisfies the demands of our nature--it is the only perfection of which we are capable— it is the only worth which returns its value, and which never grows dim by diffusion or age. Men grow in knowledge and advance to towering heights of intellectual developement-but this growth is only an increase in the stars. knowledge of our ignorance. We learn to know the limited character of our capacity, and the bounded extent of our observation. The wide fields of truth spread out before us in enlarging dimensions as we advance to possess them. Perfect knowledge and wisdom are not to be found beneath the The wisest men are outgrown in a few generations, and school-boys learn to laugh at the folly of those who had filled the world with their names. What was known, and known very imperfectly to the greatest minds of the past age, is now taught in every infant school, and men learn to look down upon ancient wisdom as upon the pastimes of men of amusement. not so with the morally great-not so with the good men of any age. path of their history seems to grow brighter and brighter until the perfect day. When will the names of Abraham, and Samuel, and Elijah, and Daniel, and Stephen, and John, be forgotten, or be remembered without a grateful recollection of their moral achievements? What man has ever outgrown them? Is not their character as bright and as lofty as itwas on the day of their death? But The There can be no greatness without goodness. There can be goodness without faith, hope, and love. The prizes of this greatness are held out to all. The honors of intellect and wealth are not always found by the sincere and meritorious seekers. Many fail of obtaining-some from lack of capacity, more from lack of disposition, and most of all from lack of opportunity. But in moral goodness there is an open and an honored field for all to enter upon, and in which all the sincere can obtain the prize. In the life of the affections will be found the equalizing of all conditions and the ennobling of all necessary and useful avocations. Moral greatness is the time-levelling principle. It is open to the beggar and the prince. It is not limited by hereditary birth—it is not bounded by a golden circle of wealth, nor overshadowed by the mountains of military eminence, nor circumscribed by strength of limb and physical proportions. These have been, and many of them are still, the metes and bounds of human greatness, but let us anticipate a brighter era for the future efforts of our race, an era illuminated, not by the dim tapers, or bursting meteors of intellectual greatness, but with the light and glory of the sun of civilization, liberty, and love. This is the noble estate and high destiny appointed for man in the counsels of the divine mind, and which have been seen, far back in the world's infancy, by the vision of the holy Prophets, and which already gleam from the future; and as the rays of twilight are seen upon the higher clouds of heavens, so the glory of day sheds its splendor upon us. Hail, thrice happy era! J. B. F. In the affairs of human life, there seems to be a more equal distribution of rewards and punishments from the hand of Providence than many suppose. Those who meet not with great afflictions, are beset with petty grievances which make up in number what they lack in asperity, and seem thus to disturb the serenity of their victim as much as the greatest calamities. SPIRITUAL LIFE. RELIGION is a matter of life and death. Hence it is that these terms occur so often in the Scriptures. Life and death are also the things commemorated in the institutions of the gospel. Christianity, indeed, may be truly regarded as a system of life elevated, transcendent, and glorious beyond conception-whose corresponding death is equally profound, humiliating, and ignominious. Its themes are, therefore, of surpassing interest to the human race, since it is adapted to man alone, and alone fitted to bestow upon him "honor, glory, and incorruptibility." Nothing, indeed, can be so dear to man as the objects it presents for his acceptance -nothing so fearful as the alternatives it announces as the consequences of its rejection. There are various kinds of life in the universe already known to man, and as many corresponding varieties of death. We have also an existence which is not life, but which is often most improperly confounded with it. Upon some of these ideas, therefore, and the terms used to express them, we desire to offer a few reflections. can they appropriately have the same contrasts. The opposite of life is death; but the opposite of existence is annihilation. Hence death can never be a proper antithesis for existence, nor annihilation for life. Yet it is not uncommon for men to confound the "second death" of the wicked with annihilation, though there is nothing in language, analogy, or reason, to justify such an interpretation. We say of a rock it exists, or of a rose that it exists. But we can say in addition of the rose that it lives. Even when deprived of life, it may continue in existence for a time as a dead rose, and when finally resolved into its elements, it is destroyed, but not annihilated. When, however, we say that matter ceases to exist, we assert its annihilation, its reduction to its original nothingness-an event which has never yet in any case occurred. All life, then, is founded upon existence. If nothing existed, nothing could have life. Existence is the basis-life, the superstructure. Again, we have various kinds of life, which seem to have a certain mutual and invariable relation to each other, and to be founded the one upon the other. The lowest life is vegetative -the next in order is animal. have then what is termed the intellectual system and the moral ntaure, to which is finally to be added the spiritual life. The vegetative life is founded upon the existence of matter We We would remark first, that existence may be predicated of anything whatever, whether animate or inanimate, created or uncreated. Matter exists as well as spirit the natural body as the spiritual- the unorganized dust beneath our feet, as the delicate and complicated framework of the human soul, or as its Creator, the intellectual upon the animal the infinite and unoriginated I AM. Life, on the contrary, belongs to particular things or classes of things; and in reference to this world at least, so far as human experience extends, is never found except where there is organization, or a special arrangement of matter for vital purposes. Existence, then, is a general-life, a special attribute or condition; and these terms cannot, therefore, be used interchangeably as synonymes, neither nature-the moral is built upon the intellectual, and the spiritual upon the moral system or life, if we may, from analogy, be allowed the expression. Of all beings known to us, man alone may possess this existence and all these systems or varieties of life. The materials of his corporeal nature enjoy the common existence of material things. Like the plant, he possesses a vegetative or organic life, to which is super-added a nervous or animal life, which by its senses connects him with surrounding nature. Thus far he is accompanied by the inferior animal tribes, who, like him, enjoy this organic and this nervous life, and are thereby put into precisely the same relations to the material world. But, upon the animal life in man, is erected an intellectual nature, with its appropriate powers of apprehension, comparison, reason, and judgment. Upon this, again, there rests a moral structure through which he is introduced to new relations, and gifted with new sensibilities and powers. And upon this moral, may be engrafted a spiritual life, by which he is introduced to different and still more glorious manifestations of the Divine Creator. It is in the order in which we have related them, that these different natures, or systems of life, appear to rise in importance, dignity, and value -the vegetative being the lowest, and the spiritual the highest of all. In point of fact we find them dependent upon each other in this order, so that the loss or absence of any one involves the loss of all that are above it. Thus, want of morality necessarily involves want of spirituality; the absence of intellect implies also that of morality and accountability. So, if animal life be wanting, the lower or vegetative alone remains. The difference between these systems are clearly marked, so that it is not difficult to distinguish them from each other. Each has its own functions-its own objects-its own appropriate sphere of action. Each one, consequently, in a deseending series, may be absent without impairing the integrity of the rest. We may have men who have intellect without morals, and both intellect and morals without spirituality. Again, we may have, as in sleep or apoplexy, a suspension or total extinction of the nervous life which connects us with surrounding objects, so that not one of the senses shall be active; yet the organic or vegetative life may proceed as usual and fulfil its various functions, such as respiration, circulation, and nutrition. Or we may have, as in a plant, an exhibition of vegetative life, wholly disconnected from the animal nature, and flourishing in its own distinct and independent character. It is in the order also in which we have enumerated these systems, that they seem to increase in complexity in their power of communicating happiness, and in their delicacy and susceptibility to injury. The organic, which is sooner developed, is also more vigorous and durable than the nervous life. Yet we are indifferent to this vegetative system of whose motions we are unconscious, and would care but little, if at all, to possess it, could we, without it, continue in the enjoyment of that animal life which, by the senses, connects us with the world. Could we hear, see, touch, taste, perceive odours; could we have communion with the things around us by means of this sensitive nature alone, we would be perfectly indifferent to the possession of heart or lungs, or any of the other organs of our mere vegetative system. This system, then, affords to us little or no enjoyment. But the animal life, which is built upon it, opens to us through the senses great and varied sources of pleasure. In innumerable modes, simple and complex, it enables us to perceive, to relish, and to delight in the things of the material universe; to rejoice in our own conscious being, and to receive those lively impressions which constitute the basis of all our knowledge-the materials of intellectual action-the elements of moral perception and the symbols of spiritual illumination. No wonder, then, that while our vegetative life is disregarded, this animal life is so carefully cherished and so reluctantly relinquished. The former is the unconscious vigor of the oak-the latter, the exuberant gladness of the immature infant, or the wild joy of the untutored Indian. Yet when we compare this animal with the intellectual nature, we find it surpassed and overshadowed. The new and peculiar enjoyment to which mental perception and reflection introduce us, are far above the grosser pleasures of sense. More sublimated and refined, more pure and elevated, they are also more limited in duration, depending upon a mechanism more complicated and more fragile, more easily disordered and more quickly consumed. But no one who has once tasted the pleasures of the intellectual life, could willingly renounce them for those of sensuality, or fail to acknowledge their superior excellence. Sensual enjoyment, indeed, is but the happiness of the chattering idiot; but intellectual pleasure is the lofty and sublime delight which enrapt the soul of a Newton amidst the revelations of nature. Still, when we proceed to place the intellectual in the scales with the moral system, we quickly perceive the preponderance to the latter. With enjoyments far more exquisite, with an organization still more delicate the moral life unseals the deep-welling fountains of feeling, and pours upon the soul a flood of sensibilities and affections as novel as they are delightful. The charms of nature revealed to the animal life, and contemplated by the intellectual powers, become now but the types and figures of moral beauty, the cold and lifeless representations of warm, and living, and breathing emotions. Such, too, is the delicacy of the moral frame, that the slightest cause disturbs its healthful action; the most trifling circumstance mars its harmony, and the least touch infixes a stain upon its purity. Intimately connected as it is with our other natures, co-operating with them, and modified by them, it scarcely admits of a distinct exemplification. Yet if the history of an unhappy but gifted Byron may serve to illustrate intellect without morality, the pure, perennial, and ennobling joys of a philanthropic Howard may display the superior character of the moral being. - When, however, we contrast the moral with the spiritual life, it becomes necessary to assign to the former, with all its excellency, an inferior position. However noble its powers and capacities—however lofty and pure its enjoyments, it falls infinitely short of that higher life which unites the soul to the spiritual system of the universe, and admits it to a sublime and mysterious communion with its Creator. It is here that there is a "joy unspeakable and full of glory"-a bliss ineffable beyond conception. It is here that the finite merges in the infinite that the human blends itself with the divine nature, and that the feeble rills of mortal life mingle their waters with the boundless ocean of being and blessedness. And oh how inconceivably delicate these unseen bonds of union by which the human soul is allied to God! How mysteriously complicated the organizations and the movements of that eternal life! And how speedily those movements are disordered, and that union impaired, by the unhallowed touch of guilt! Yet how superior the nature, and how transcendent the joys of this life, which is truly life alone !-to which all other life can lead us-of which all other modes of being are but faint and shodowy images! It is in the person of a rational and philosophic moralist, such as HUME, that we may contemplate intellectual and moral life without religion; but it is in such a one as PAUL the Apostle, taking pleasure in infirmities-in reproaches-in necessities— in persecutions in distresses for Christ's sake-or caught up into the unspeakable communion of the third heaven-or receiving from the Righteous Judge an unfading crown of glory, |