that self-satisfaction and inward assurance are strongest in presumptuous spirits, and the most subdued in humble ones; as the scrupulous and the delicate in spiritual structure will mourn over shortcomings which never ruffle the peace of the robust in selfconceit.

Two reasons may be mentioned for the disuse of the habit of keeping religious diaries. First, they were, for the most part, written only for the perusal of those who, in them, revealed their inmost hearts with all their humiliating confessions and selfreproaches. The writers wished to have the means of referring back from time to time to stages and incidents in their religious experience, to read in the calmness of after years what they had recorded in the fervency of an early zeal, and to trace the course of their impressions, the losses and gains of their spiritual conflicts. The diary was a sacred repository, to be hid from every other eye save that which saw it take its record, and to be committed to the flames when it had served its temporary use. Unfortunately, many of them have been rescued from obscurity, and appear in print. They have met with an unfavourable reception from many readers. The writers have been harshly blamed, perhaps unjustly censured; their self-accusations and confessions ridiculed, or interpreted as indications of spiritual pride, hypocrisy, and weakness; while their fervours, or the unstable variations of feeling, have been regarded as proofs that piety had not a healthy, strengthening, moderating influence over the writers. The dread of having the records of their religious experience thus rudely exposed and treated, has induced many persons to abstain from keeping diaries. This is one reason. Another is, that it is considered unwise, and almost always dangerous to the sincerity and injurious to the humility of those who make daily or occasional jottings of their moods and feelings. The very intention of sitting down in order to describe one's state of mind will naturally lead to assuming or putting on an artificial condition of feeling and thought, just as a person when sitting for a portrait, in the effort to look easy and natural, is almost certain to look anything but natural. So it is feared that the moment one proposes to record his thoughts, feelings, emotions, hopes, fears and faith, he is likely to be misled by a thousand little biases, and to set himself down more or less favourably or unfavourably. Perhaps, also, it is unsafe to give a permanent impression to ever-changing moods of thought, and unsatisfactory and useless to mark the incessant fluctuations of the spirit, or the rising and falling of passion, of self-satisfaction and misgivings. The danger on the one hand is of hypocrisy, and on the other of morbid and despondent feeling. Few, it is said, will deal in all honesty with themselves in these heart

searching processes, the results of which are committed to a written record. Certainly not many have calmness and balance of soul enough, or comprehensiveness and discretion of judgment enough, to allow for all the films which may gather on the mental vision, or harmonize all the discordant tones which come from a poor, distracted human heart. There is great weight in this latter objection to recording one's religious experience; it is liable to all the risks of insincerity, unfairness, and damaging to practical usefulness. Evidence might be easily cited from numerous diaries to prove how the writers favoured or wronged themselves; how they exaggerated or smoothed over their faults; how they called up sickly fancies from their hearts, or deepened a natural despondency, or nourished spiritual pride, or read falsely the language of their own souls. Still there are many diaries; and we think a large majority, which give proof throughout, of a most faithful self-scrutiny, plain, honest, self-dealing, pursued in a right spirit, and to the very best effects, in gradually moulding the character aright, and resulting in a most healthful tone of practical religion.

We cannot allow this part of the subject to pass without giving one or two examples of the homeliness or truthfulness of diaries. The first extracts are from an old diary of 200 years ago. John Rutty, a Quaker, was the writer. "1 Day of month. The day concluded badly, in inordinate passion on a sudden attack." "8 Day of month. Snappish." How brief

and honest are these confessions!

In the diary of one of the greatest and best of England's philosophers of the last generation, Sir James Macintosh, we find the following record made, after reading "The Sermon on the Mount:"

"For a moment, O Teacher Blessed! I taste the unspeakable delight of feeling myself to be better. I feel as in the days of my youth, that hunger and thirst after righteousness, which long habits of infirmity, and the low concerns of the world, have contributed to extinguish." The man must have been wiser and have felt better after writing that; nor does it harm his memory, that what he penned in some holy midnight hour alone, searching his heart, should be published from his private papers to the world. It was a sacred throbbing of the heart, felt in Pagan India, as a reminiscence of a pious education in Scotland. And what an echo that silent throb of one heart awakens in other hearts! Take another record from the same pen,-as candid a self-revealing as the human heart can make:-"I am sure I should not esteem my own character in another person." This sentence is a whole volume of self-knowledge, and is the briefest and best response to the ancient advice, "Know thy

self." How full of charity it is too. For if we only learn by faithful self-scrutiny to know ourselves, we shall always discover traits which we should not like, and do not like in others; and if, nevertheless, we can live in peace with ourselves, and think tolerably well of ourselves, should we not try to live more peaceably with others, and to think more charitably of them?

Whatever opinion may be entertained about the wisdom or the utility of making a permanent record (for our own eyes, or to aid and cheer another) of our private religious experience, our heartsearchings, our communions with our spirits, the subject which we have been considering must at least remind the reader of the fact that each individual has the materials furnished daily for such a record. There is a diary written in each heart, whether we leave it in its original hieroglyphics there, or copy it on the paper page. Each soul has a religious history. There may be difficulties in the way of our writing it out fairly, or of using it to edification should it be written: just as when an invalid attempts to count his pulse, the very effort to do it alters the beat of that sensitive register of the vital forces. But the heart has its diary. There are recorded faithfully, deeply, permanently, the histories of our spiritual experience, the sugges tions, appeals, opportunities, visions, resolutions, compunctions, triumphs and discomfitures, which, with more than the variety and the inconstancy of the weather in one year, or in a score of years, have been entertained within the secret recesses of our being. There can be no question of this fact. Philosophy even accepts and asserts it, as it compels our belief through force of the natural constitution of man. It may startle us to realize this fact; for it is saying a great deal more than if we affirmed that the sand on the sea-shore preserves a trace of every impression from every beating wave, or that the well-worn highway of a city keeps a memorial of every foot has trodden it. To say that a human heart preserves a record of every influence that makes up its religious history, is to assert a fact which we can credit only when we know how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. The evidence of the fact appears in many marvellous tokens, revealed in dreams, in memories, in the return in age of feelings left far back in youth, in the utterances of delirium, in the failing and yet renewing consciousnesss of the last hours of life. Then the heart signifies that it has made a record of all that has religiously concerned it, and that it has committed to the Spirit the keeping and the renewing and the reperusal of that record. Now come into dread significance the words about the "books to be opened in the judgment," from which every man is to be judged. What may these books be but the opening of man's heart-diary? The book of life-man's heart purified by

the truth-the book of death, the record of the heart unregenerated and full of dead works. Dreadful and hopeful books, and in our own keeping! A diary is made to be used; we call it to remembrance in the night, in the night of each day, or in the night of life. It is our history. No eye but our own may ever read it. We may lock it up in inviolable privacy; but it is all there within us, and we cannot alter a line in it It began when our lives began, and before we began to think; for the spirit has the start of the mind. What the eye first saw, and the thought first wondered over, and the heart first loved, was entered on its earlier pages as the elements from which more distinct and intelligible impressions were next to be derived. Every thought and feeling which have taken their substance, as it were from religion-every serious emotion, every anxious questioning, every remonstrance of conscience, every echo to the knock at the heart's door,-has been entered on the soul's diary, and left its record there. It has all been recorded to be preserved, and preserved to be read again and again. And this is the irrepressible and irresistible conclusion: that the whole religious or irreligious experience of every human being is on record, registered in the deep places of the soul. Retrospects and self-reckoning call it to remembrance. Surely there is something solemn and deeply penetrating in the thought that each reader bears with him this register, which while it contains the history of his soul, may be also the doom book of retribution for him! Faithful beyond all other registers is that of the heart. Faithful and secret too. But "nothing is covered which shall not be be revealed and nothing hid which shall not be brought to light."

G. B. P.

THE PRESENT COMPREHENDED IN THE ETERNAL.

THE popular notion that death first brings us into connection with eternity has no ground in Reality; it is not with things present that things eternal stand in contrast, but with things visible. Seen things are temporal; unseen things are eternal. All men are as much in the midst of Eternal Realities now as they ever will be. Indeed, all visibilities are but the results of permanent Invisibilities. Mankind is itself a portion of the abiding Spiritual Entities which Eternity comprehends in the Imperishable Existences.

God-awakened men find their true home in the spiritual universe the Kingdom of the Invisible, which transcends the senses of men, and all the objects of which those senses take cognizance. The unseen spirit of Man as completely grasps its proper objects as the hand that upon which it lays hold, or the eyes a scene or a landscape; as completely as the physical powers are adapted to the earth upon which man dwells, the spirit is adapted to the spiritual substances which compose the invisible kingdom of God-the Righteousness, Peace, and Joy, which are some of the constituent elements of His own Being.

God's revelation to men, outworking itself in the Holy Scriptures, which are a consequence of that revelation, is our warranty for asserting the existence of the spiritual and universal kingdom which comprehends the spirits of men, and which they are formed to comprehend. Scripture teachings and Christ's work harmonize in directing human spirits to converse continually with their proper objects. For Christ and Scripture unveil God-open to men His nature. All that is Right in human life has its source in the living righteous God. Wherever man has exhibited truth in conduct, courage in conflict, peace in trouble, or joy in sorrow, he has, after the manner of Christ, set forth the Divine Author of all things visible and invisible. Christ's life interprets every other life-the good, by showing the fountain of goodness; the evil, by making manifest what the evil is a departure from. Goodness is no mere quality in the minds of men, but the very essence of God; evil is the perversion of powers derived from Him. The Man of Sorrows poured into the hearts of Prophets, and after them into the hearts of Apostles, all the joy, which they ever experienced in the progress of truth and righteousness, whether seen in the life of individuals or in the advancement of nations. The Eternal sustained the Spiritual Temporal.

The trumpet-tongued tent-maker of Tarsus, himself possessed by the Spirit of Christ, gives us guidance in our attempts to form an estimate of the value of all things as they are seen revolving in the light of the Eternal. His declaration is, "We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." This is the law of spiritual life. Being so, let us consider

I. How to contemplate the vicissitudes of Life and Death.-We find ourselves in the midst of boundless Beauty, of vast variety, and, withal, of continual change; but we never find annihilation of anything. The new ever succeeds the old; the death of the old is accessory to the birth of the new; and there is beauty in the arrangement. The brightness and glory of Creation are