which he designs to bestow for ever on each of His disciples. And the depth and quality of each man's daily happiness now is the best indication of his prospect of being " for ever with the Lord."

THE KEY OF THE KINGDOM.

E. W.

WHATEVER commands ingress or exit anywhere, in the world of matter or of mind, is a key. Thus there is a key of a country, harbour, instrument, military position, policy, language, science, &c. There is a key to everything, and everything opens to him who has the key. How then should it be matter of wonder or perplexity that Jesus Christ, in forming the first missionary band for the conversion of the world, should have specified this very test, when to Peter, and afterwards to the other disciples, He signified the work to be done under that conspicuous symbol of power, the key to the kingdom of heaven? Skilfully and deceptively has the Romish Church, loving images, seized on this most striking one. In apologue, engraving, or picture, who has not seen its favourite apostle standing at the gate, deciding who should go in or must stay out? What an important part the figure with the keys, ecclesiastically propagated, and never without some apology for a descendant, has played in her schemes, and in that of pseudo-papacies! We believe in no such design of the Founder of Christianity to appoint pseudo guards for His Church. We hold as illegitimate that splendid proxy for the poor fishermen, who has so long given his absolute sentence and casting-vote among the seven hills to decide the empire of the world. Still the old type of power bespeaks its true interpretation, nay entreats a universal application at the world's hands. It is questionable whether poetry or parable, is equal to produce another emblem of the Church's office and function so just and comprehensive as the key. The reason of this is obvious. We account our souls as chambers, both deep and inaccessible save to those whom we suffer to come in. If any one has an experience like to and deeper than ours; if he have thought, aspired, felt, and suffered in the same direction, with a force and vividness that put our vitality to shame, he

has the key to our bosom; all our secrets are at his mercy; he has only, as in the familiar story with the password, “Open, Sesame!" to touch the spring, and all the folding-doors of the heart, tight as we may have shut them, expand under his finger, like city-gates to a triumphal conqueror. What then, it may be asked, is that key by our possession and effectual handling of which alone we can vindicate our connection with God's Church on earth? This is the question, a question too which suggests that there may be dangers to which the Protestant Church may be exposed, of mistaking the key quite as seriously, if not as absurdly, as Rome. It is a matter of life and death to note these mistakes, for their longer continuance will seriously injure, and certainly retard, the progress of true religion in the church and world. Following the example and practice of the scholastics of the middle ages we propose to show what the key is not, before affirming what it is.

In an age of sharp and decisive criticism, of keen controversial acumen, when intellectual greatness is recognized before goodness, it is not strange that many should have assumed the key to be criticism. The ability to show that other believers are wrong will never lift up for the critics or the criticised, those everlasting doors to let the "King of Glory" in. We do not advocate any disallowing of criticism. It is indispensable, and has a province and use by no means unimportant or despicable. To detect and eliminate error, to try in a hotter than chemist's fire the strange mixture that would pass for truth, and separate the most fine gold; to watch at our post against the intrusion of error and heresy, and to own and to honour those falsely stigmatized as heretics, as perhaps the best believers; to clear away the rubbish from the avenues, and mark the pilgrim's path, may be, nay is, the function of criticism; but it is not to open or occupy the kingdom of heaven. Religious editors, writers, and teachers are not unfrequently, and certainly not unfairly, regarded as by way of excess, critical, and whether, consciously or not, they often appear to justify the current opinion. The whole body of Dissenters are critics of the Established Church. The Independents, Baptists, Wesleyans-all the comers-out from a State Church—the cream of dissent, have performed what may be called a critical worknot yet finished. Doubtless such was, and may be still, necessary; but showing other denominations to be at fault doctrinally or ecclesiastically is not the key to the Kingdom of Heaven. The themes for criticism to handle are the most numerous and momentous;-documents of the faith, authorships, tongues, translations, history of the Church, creeds, enlightenings and sophistications of philosophy; yet it is inadequate to open the hearts of men, because it is altogether but a preliminary and an

inferior development of our proper religious nature and in certain circles we have already relatively too much criticism. Everything is criticised-even God himself. Reasoning is the definition of something, the opposite of which may be equally well defined and stated; and it is a diseased mind whose chief attitude or instinctive tendency is to find faults, pick flaws, and throw stones. Never will the ear of man or the heart of the world be reached by criticism. Not only is criticism an inferior, but it is altogether a negative action of the understanding. The negative understanding of man can never attain unto faith. Separately, and in its own virtue alone, the understanding is not a believer. The negative is a healthy brace for the positive, but the negative intellect is an infidel. Goethe, who has painted the most real and veritable devil that any artist has given us, with profound discernment makes him to be" a denying spirit!" The Psalmist warns us not to fret, even because of the wicked; and to dispute and wrangle all our time against error and errorists is an unfruitful bestowment of our editorial and ministerial functions. Criticism is a club, a pruning knife, an axe to clear the forest and fell trees that are in the way, or a fire to burn the baser growth and underbush, but it is not the key. The mere mention of some names will at once reveal the distance between the critic and the Christian-Strauss and St. Paul.

But there are finer keys, which are supposed to be able to open, but they cannot unfasten the wondrous lock, or make the door of the kingdom give way. The yea of criticism is science. The affirmation of divine things is theology. But we need not insist upon it, that this noblest of sciences, whose matchless mission is to tell God's truth to man, how little it possesses the mind of the world, and how the dissensions and discussions of its professors have wearied into sickness the hearts of the thoughtful and earnest. To a large extent it is painfully true that natural science, and not theology, interests the young intelligence of this country. Not a few minds who belong to, or would naturally fall within the domain of religion, are trying to substitute science for religion trying to make science the key. It cannot succeed or answer; it is a key to the kingdom of nature; but the kingdom of nature and heaven are not, to any ordinary conception, the same. Advocating and admitting no theory which opposes them to each other, declaring their real inseparableness and mutual pervasion, yet according to no common opinion ever formed of them do they change places, or are of equal value. The human mind, in accordance with the powers it puts forth, has the choice to be in the one or the other. In the possible but rare ecstasy that lifts and melts clearly together all its manifold capa

bilities, an individual mind may be in both at once. But with the majority, a million to one, the practical limits of human faculty or voluntary attention make science only the outer court of the temple; and how plain is it that many prefer to stay in the vestibule, and do not go into the sanctuary! Now, as of old, do we speak of philosophy as a porch, each school having its own entry or ante-room where it lives, caring not to sit in the inner chamber, or to kneel with bare head and worship under the glorious dome of the building! What a large portion, not only of the general crowd of students and neophytes in learning, but of the most eminent names in various departments, are incurious of the great-that greatest problem of our relation to the Infinite, and who even protest against the introduction into scientific generalizations and deductions of any religious considerations as an incongruity, nay, an apostasy from science, and who would abolish all religious mention of cause and effect out of their societies! A man of unsurpassed eminence in original research, whose name is associated with great intellectual and philosophical efforts, himself a noble exception to this melancholy condition of the philosophers of the age, remarked, when speaking of those able physical philosophers abroad, whose censure he was momentarily expecting for having presumed to find in the forms of nature thoughts of God, made for them this apology-that he did not think that they, after all, meant to resist the notion of Deity, but that they were so absorbed, as to drop down exhausted each in his own furrow, and so were indisposed to pursue any truth or track of investigation to its end, in homage of faith to the Most High! But, thank God, no sharply drawn line of any speciality of science is pre-requisite to this end! No minute abstrusity of microscopic examination commands the goal. Every stalk that grows in the field, every straw that lies on the threshing-floor, the wing of every bird, and every fin that oars the deep, help us just as well. The creeping, chirping, gliding, flashing myriad life that faces us in every walk answers, and is enough. "Science is religious-its union with religion is not optional, a thing to be attempted or avoided. It is." Still, in itself and studied of itself, it is not the key of the kingdom. There is a way of looking clearly, and after a fashion, thoroughly at the facts of nature, without even so much as touching the borders of that kingdom. It is to view those facts as the senses show them, superficially related to each other, and as calculation may disclose them, adapted to certain successive appearances and results, with a plea of ignorance that they have any beginning, purpose, or spiritual bond; and branding as sheer presumption

• Man, and his Dwelling Place. By James Hinton.

any pretence as to a knowledge of their cause. This is Positive Science, to which Comte, the French philosopher, has given a name, but which has many professors, and very many followers, who would not care openly to take the lead in such a bold and godless philosophy. Key to the kingdom of heaven indeed! On this ground there is no key to heaven at all. What need of a key without a door? The facts of nature need not be-nor is it according to the nature of the soul that they should be-contemplated in an isolated and mechanical manner. A man who should attempt a perfect exploration of the human frame by a survey purely of its cutaneous and muscular surfaces, having first carefully cut the nerves that lead to the battery, and which convey the wonderful, incomprehensible spiritual electricity of the brain, would succeed as well as those do who disown that creation has a commencement, spiritual cause, and Designer. There is another reason why science is not the key to the kingdom, and it is this: the kingdom of heaven is not a kingdom of perceptions only, high or low, but of sentiments, resolutions, faith, and actions. It is not simply admiring the will-the perfect, the beautiful will of God, as He goes forth in His power to give and to execute His own general orders throughout the universe. It is not admiration of God's power, but a conforming ourselves, our heart and will and life, in all moral diligence and patience, to His most particular pleasure concerning us, in our whole sphere and destiny; and this is a sanctity of aspiration, a sublimity of endeavour, a worth of attainment, a quickening of faith, that no science whatever can reach, however arduously pursued, and however perfectly mastered. This opinion does not invalidate science or make it vacate its own proper place. Instances of wisdom and goodness to suggest an original mind, and to be fuel for worship or material for a house of prayer, are plenty on every hand. Science, in fact, multiplies and discovers in them. unsuspected abundance and startling novelty. But Science, furnishing the timber, is not the architect of the temple. Science is positive in what it works in and with-deserves to be well honoured with all costly instruments, ample conservatories, collegiate chairs, "Royal Societies," and to be thanked for its contributions to our language and illustrations to our ideas, and for all that it has done, whether in creating or awakening the multifarious hints and satisfactions and feelings of the soul. Willingly avowing that it can do a great deal, we cannot allow that Science can pierce the lock of the kingdom. To use Science as the key to the kingdom is to attempt to open a door with a wrong key; we may be strong, and the key may be good, but we are wrong, and the key is not the right one. And here too a comparison may not be ill-timed or inapt. The great names in