instance of it. The love of an abstract God seems to be as little natural to the ordinary human constitution, as the love of an abstract sun or planet. The true humanity and true divinity of the adorable Saviour, is a truth equally receivable by at once the humblest and the loftiest intellects. Poor dying children, possessed of but a few simple ideas, and men of the most robust intellects, such as the Chalmerses, Fosters, and Halls of the Christian church, find themselves equally able to rest upon the man Christ, who is, over all, God blessed for ever.

"Of this fundamental truth of the two natures, that condensed enumeration of the gospel which forms the watchword of our faith-Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved'—is a direct and palpable embodiment, and Christianity is but a mere name without it. How or on what principle the Father was satisfied I know not, and may never know. The enunciation regarding vicarious satisfaction may be properly received in faith as a fact, but, I suspect, not properly reasoned upon until we shall be able to bring the moral sense of Deity, with its requirements, within the limits of a small and trivial logic. But the thorough adaptation of the scheme to man's nature is greatly more appreciable, and lies fully within the reach of observation and experience."

Such is an epitome of Hugh Miller's confession of faith. Its great merit is its harmony with the oracles of divine truth; and, though the doctrine of the incar

nation " squares not with the blowing clover nor the falling rain," it is not, therefore, as some of our transcendentalists insist, to be discarded as incredible. Man's relation to the infinite is not to be learned from the book of nature alone, nor is the fatherhood of God to be discovered from the mere material universe. God's creative energy and omnipotent power are, we know, inscribed at once on the curtain of the heavens and the caverns of the earth, but his paternal character is taught elsewhere. It is the lack of any light to disclose the heart of Deity that is the key to the coldness with which the pantheism that has enamoured not a few of the more eminent of our modern litterateurs, is so justly charged. The material of which it is made up is perhaps fitted to form that kind of character Campbell has so well hit off in a single line of his "Gertrude of Wyoming,"

"A stoic of the woods, a man without a tear."

But it is utterly destitute of all those sympathetic elements which form the peculiar glory of Christianity, and which shall ultimately realize in a higher and holier sense than poet or patriot ever dreamed, that reign of liberty and equality for which the nations thirst.

Pantheism, of old the creed of intellectual and imaginative dreamers, its resurrection and popularization by great names may, indeed, float it again for a time over the surface of society, but it will bear no

higher fruit in modern than in ancient days. It is a system utterly unfit to combat the many evils existing throughout the world: indeed, why should it seek to combat that which it does not recognize in any proper seuse as an antagonist force? It has nothing of the Christian sense of evil about it; it sees not that in every garret there is either a "haill Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained;" its ethical theory, notwithstanding the snaky fascination with which the magic of genius and the glitter of antithesis have invested it, is a meagre and jejune substitute for the morale of the Sermon on the Mount. That compensatory system with which some of its votaries are so much charmed, and which Emerson has so adorned that the dread bird of destiny which hovers over it is not once perceived by its disciples, was preached of old to that man of Uz, who, perfect and upright, feared God and eschewed evil. The consolation it brought near to Job in the midst of his cumulative calamities, extorted from even his patient spirit the upbraiding cry, "Miserable comforters are ye all." In a certain weakness of the human mind lies the power of the pantheistic system; for that large class who dislike a dogmatic theology, it has a certain nameless attraction and indescribable charm. It is precisely the kind of thing for those who prefer to look at their relations to the infinite through a subdued and coloured medium, rather than in the white light which a definite theology sheds on man's nature and destiny; and it is only natural the predilections of this class

should go with a system which disports itself with the imagination, rather than one that addresses itself to the conscience, and which just sheds over earth enough of the hues of heaven to impart thereto a diviner beauty and more intense fascination.

G

CHAPTER VII.

POETRY AND A PATRON.

FOR several months after his return to Cromarty, Hugh Miller continued in a delicate and rather precarious state of health. The stone-cutters' malady had made deeper inroads upon his system than he at first supposed; ultimately, however, his constitution threw off the disease, and he began to experience the quiet and exquisite pleasures of convalescence. An ornate stone dial which he cut for his uncles at this time still exists, a memorial of his superior skill as a workman, even in the more elaborate and ornamental department of the craft. When health had become more fully established, he set about executing sculptured tablets and tombstones in his native town and neighbourhood, becoming, in point of fact, a sort of improved edition of Old Mortality, minus the pony; only that it was for money rather than love he gave what immortality his iron pen could bestow upon many whom, probably, the satiric couplet of Byron might correctly have described,—

"When all is done, upon their tombs are seen

Not what they were, but what they should have been."

The style in which this work was executed was of a