able, that orders of subordinate ministrations are in attendance to convoy and convey the help where the death is most urgently felt. He Who provides these succours for the lilies of the field, teaches thereby that He provides them for all willing mankind. He provides them immediately, but mediately also by the higher and lower brethren in either world. For all words now, following the Word, come from without; to the simple by wise simple teachings; to others, by other monitions from more recondite sources. Ministration of the higher to the lower is thus universal for men; and ministration or service from the Highest is the perpetual ground of it all.

So far the fact, parable and myth of the great Naturalist holds good throughout. We say advisedly and repetitiously fact, parable and myth; for the natural world is all these three in every detail. That nature is a fundamental fact all men allow, and the idealist acts upon it like other men. That nature is a teaching parable few allow, because few care about it as such, and therefore will not go to the school where they can learn it. That nature is a divine myth fewer still will own. Yet as nature proceeds from an Infinite Love and Wisdom, it images His attributes as men's works image the minds of their authors. So the age of Mythologies is past, because nature as a given fact will become our Mythology. But this, by gradual stages; and future Darwins unearthing pregnant hieroglyphs will help to found this spiritual-natural science.

We have somewhat anticipated that other realm in which the planes of mutual service,--the higher ministering to the lower, and the lower substantiating the higher, are still exemplary necessities. Close above nature and resting upon it there is a spiritual world which contains all the departed from the beginning of times, and it is linked to this world by consanguinities of affections. It has part of its life in our very wills and hearts. It is a world potential and capable of presences beyond all mortal imagining; transfluent on its

heavenly side from the One Lord throughout; and ministering, as was mentioned above, under His direction to our humanity. It too all lies in planes of inductive affections, with divine truths embodied also in ministries apportioning and uniting them. Use and service are the keynotes of the heavens. They are to our world what just and orderly Society from above downwards is to itself, and what the kingdoms of nature are to her order and maintenance by creation. Infringing no freedom, if they find us dead they would fain make us alive. All that is good in us, all the secret thoughts and inspirations of our minds and hearts, pass through them on the way to us, and are held by permission momentaneously in their hands. However high they are, we are their brethren, though our time-state is immeasurably below their spiritual state. The interval, however, between them and us is filled by a love and mercy which is adequate to these necessities. Its wings as of the Holy Dove are over us, and foster in us the heavenly implanted by the Word in the earthly.

LIV. DARWINISM CARRIED OUT.

It is remarkable that Darwin, so acutely observant in regard to one plane of fertilizations, should not have generalized its facts to the next orders of nature above plants and insects, and inferred that birds and animals also function in imparting fresh potencies to the lower series and to the atmospheres and cosmos around them. He has indeed shown this of earthworms, but there must be higher forms of it. For nature repeats herself with variations suitable and correspondent to all stages. Not much is observed in this field save that the excreta and exuviæ of living creatures, including man, enrich the ground, as dead leaves and trees also enrich it. These are farmers' truths. We may also note the treatment of seeds eaten in pregnant berries by birds, in which the bird serves

as a hothouse. But the fertilization of flowers by insects is so much higher and more active than these functions that one must expect that in the lives above insects other and important planes of service are indicated. They are somewhat visible in the destruction of noxious insects and even reptiles by birds; also in one tribe feeding upon another; and in the limitation of the procreant animal world by many "selective" means. This is a purging ministerium. But what we intend is not so visible, and therefore easily scouted by the senses. All natures have their own spheres about them, and these bulge out into space. They keep the tracts the creatures inhabit modified and comfortable for them by emanations from themselves, and so by mediations: even the breathing of living organisms by its motion and modified air, and the more subtle pulsation of their hearts, have this result. There is vegetable air, and air almost non-vegetable. In spring and summer and autumn the air is variously filled with effluvia from the varieties of the seasons. In the Mammoth caves the air is almost mineral. Those who have sensed it, know. There is also animalized air from the effluvia of many animals together. But this is not the sphere of which we are in search. It is a subtler influx impinging upon external ether, and sending through it the impact of the character of the animal itself: letting nature feel in her depths that the creature is her ward and domestic. There is a scientific view extant, that every vibration penetrates through space to indefinite distances, as a blow is diffused in sound from a vibrating drum. To those who hold this theory the present subject may be commended for amplification. The view of the benign effect of good animal spheres commends itself to me for a practical end; as a plea against the destruction of animal life, wild and tame, and especially wild, wherever it can be prevented, or avoided. Kill nothing good, except for good use; kill nothing recklessly, lest the murder destroy a harmonic medium, and make “a gap in nature." Avoid extermination as a horror. I am prone to believe that the

cruel and wasteful destruction of the buffalo has deteriorated the climate and serenity of the United States, and that the murder of the seal in the sea and on its islands, and of the walrus and white bear, makes the polar cold more intolerable and inhuman; that the extermination of the whale, "the king of the sea," will unship a Zooarchy, a spirit in the waters, and ordained by a divine Neptune.

Darwin might have drawn some of these conclusions, and lent his weight to the practical recommendation here indicated. He might have done so had he, like Swedenborg, believed in Ends and Uses as an evident chain and harmony in things. Not believing in this, but in the force of life, availing itself of circumstance, his fruitful "fertilization by insects" yielded no inferences; and in his hands it remains as a comparatively solitary and thus piteous fact; when yet the two worlds of matter and spirit, earth and heaven, are ready to accompany it with a shining train of corroborations. "The Lord's Kingdom is a kingdom of Uses."

Confirmation of the above position which deals with the invisible may be had from the earlier stages of the earth in regard to development of life upon its surface: in particular from the huge animal forms which then inhabited it. The ground and the waters teemed with these monsters, and a series of organisms led up to them and succeeded them. We ask, why was this? The question involves for its first answer that a divine end existed for such creations. It is illegitimate unless we may affirm that final causes produce all the effects in nature. A further answer is that all previous forms are preparations for the human form; for Man. How are they preparations? Analogously as the human fœtus is a series of organic stages leading to the birth of man, to the perfected infant. Nature in this respect may be regarded as a scaffolding of instincts, as one organism with man at the summit. The special services or Uses ministered by the advancing lower to the higher are a scheme of planes

in a manner opposite and complementary to the services of the higher to the lower. Not much can yet be seen or said upon them excepting in the merest generalities; for they are not scientific but primarily theological entities, which however may ultimately enter science from above. However, they are not yet in it. As we have already hinted, they are ministries of life with its instincts and magnetisms pervading mother earth and nature, and suiting her or making her good for coming implantations. They are to the general system what the mould and the soil are to the vegetable. They are ground raised higher towards life, rendered quasiliving, and made moveable, so that the brood of life finds ready a floating nest from life to be reared in. This is a function not depending so much upon decay, as in the vegetable case, as upon perpetuation of exterior and lower movement; as it were a lung-function; for the lungs move all, and thus effectuate all things even in the body beneath them. The eye for this function lives from faith in God as always regarding ends, and therefore doing nothing in vain; and also as placing end within end in a wise or everlasting series. It is a heavy argument, and of right overbears science. It is also to be observed that the vegetable has a like preparatory magnetism with it for the cosmos; the mould being only its material ultimate. Such heavy arguments, against which there is no appeal, are indispensable for the religious mind. Another of them is brought to bear in the religious doctrine of the inhabitation of the planets by men, women and children. No telescope confirms this, and there are strong scientific reasonings from material heat and cold against it. Yet nevertheless it is heavily true from enlightened religious faith, because the human race, and a heaven formed from it, is the purpose of the creation, and God does not make suns and systems for anything less than the omnipresent end of ends.

To this it may be added for argument that universal nature is telegraphic, teledemic, telepathic and telephonic;