worthiness in us,-He only asks for willingness; that He will be found of all who approach Him in earnest penitent prayer, for He will revive the spirit of the humble, and the heart of the contrite ones. How great a means also of realising His nearness should we find it, if we were to bear before us the thought of His greatness and omnipresence! What a reality would it throw into our prayers, either in public worship or in private, if we forced upon ourselves, as we bow the knee in supplication, the thought of Him whose presence we are invoking! How would it hallow our lives if we possessed within us, amid the pressure of business or the whirl of fashion, the vision of the infinite God; if we remembered that no fretting cares, no innocent excitement, need shut us out from His presence; nay, that from amid the hurry of the multitude and the tumults of life there is a hearing for every humble heart in the heavenly temple; that the unuttered breathings of the most secret wants of every contrite spirit are seen, and known, and heard, and answered afar off, in that place where the Babel tumult of earth is hushed, and the stillness of the sacred presence is unbroken save by the seraph chaunt of "Holy, Holy, Holy," or by the chorus of reverent praises, which rises from the ten thousand times ten thousand of the redeemed spirits of the just made perfect!

It is indeed a joyful thought that God so inhabiteth eternity, that travel where I may in unlimited space, I can never reach the lonely spot where He is not present as my guardian, never find the solitary scene where He is not as watchful over me as if the universe were a void, and myself its sole inhabitant; and, therefore, I know that though I may live among the humblest, I am as much observed of Him as a monarch on his throne; that when I go to my daily toil, or say my daily prayer, when I lie down or rise up, I am cared for of Him; so that I cannot weep the tear which He sees not, nor feel the pang which He notes not, nor breathe the prayer which He hears not.

NOTE,

On the Theological Ideas of some early Greek Philosophers.

It has been stated in a note to the preceding Sermon, that the writer of it has been subsequently led to alter his views in reference to the tenets which some of the old Greek philosophers named in it, entertained on the subject of Deity. He thinks that he had attributed to them more than they consciously knew. He had made them think on theological subjects in too modern a spirit. It is important to remember that the study of those early thinkers is like the study of a fossil world. The same words which we now use were used by them, but with wholly different meanings. The difficulty is really not to find dissimilarities between them and ourselves, but rather to find points of agree

ment.

The points, accordingly, in which the preceding Sermon appears to exceed the limits of fact are:

1st. In attributing to Thales, on the strength of Plato's remark in the "Philebus," conscious attempts to speculate on theology; whereas his speculations partook rather merely of the character of ontology or cosmogony, and can only be regarded as relating to theology in the single point where he touched on the idea of power or efficient cause, and identified it with the material cause, making both reside in Water, thus attributing a kind of soul to

nature.

2nd. In making the Nous of Anaxagoras' system to be a personal intelligence, whereas it was probably hardly more than the idea of order or law, presiding over nature, in contradistinction to Heracleitus' view of constant flux in phenomena.

3rd. In making Plato to have regarded Deity as a person, and interpreting the term ȧyalòs in his description to refer to moral qualities. His God was rather the mere principle of Divinity, and the goodness of his Deity was only order or harmony. The supreme idéa seems to have been at once the supreme type of goodness and the supreme formal cause, GOD, So that the 'Idéa, arising first in Plato's mind as a mode of accounting for reminiscence (as in the "Meno"); then becoming a mode in controversy for refuting scepticism (as in the Theætetus); next, regarded as having a real existence in nature and in knowledge (as in the "Republic"), analogous to our "law of nature" or our "hypothesis "; lastly (in the "Philebus") came to be regarded as the supreme cause, the most abstract harmony, the GOD. The whole account of the Deity in the "Republic" (b. ii.) is explicable on this hypothesis.

Thus all philosophical theology in Greece was Pantheistic, i. e. if Pantheism be made to mean any theory which admits an impersonal first cause, and to include, (1st.) the theory which teaches an anima mundi; (2nd.) that which regards God as the sum total of all that exists (Pantheism proper); and (3rd.) that which regards Deity as an abstraction, synonymous with the idea of perfection. Thales might possibly represent the first of these views; the Eleatics the second; Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, the third.

SERMON II.

DIVINE PROVIDENCE IN GENERAL LAWS.

(PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY, DECEMBER 13TH, 1857.)

ACTS xvii. 28.

"In him we live, and move, and have our being."

ST. PAUL'S visit to Athens, on which occasion the speech was uttered of which these words form a part, is one of the most interesting passages of apostolic adventure which Scripture history has preserved to us. If St. Luke had merely informed us that the Apostle in the course of his missionary travels visited the two great centres of ancient power and civilization, Athens and Rome, but had omitted to record his acts and speeches under those circumstances, we should have been probably more disappointed by the omission of such a narrative than by that of any other portion of his eventful life. We should have wished to know how St. Paul felt on those occasions as a man, and how he acted as an Apostle. We

could even be content to have lost the narrative of his visit to Rome, rather than that of his speech at Athens; for when we had heard that Rome was visited by him when a prisoner, we might be certain that this circumstance would interfere with his freedom of action, and with the expression of his missionary sympathy. But we should have earnestly coveted to know what the Apostle did and said in bringing Christianity for the first time into contact with the religion and philosophy of Greece. And, therefore, we must set a special value upon the precise narrative which St. Luke has left us, which in thrilling interest equals all that we could have anticipated.

The Apostle visited Athens in circumstances which (as we have already hinted) were wholly unlike those which characterised his visit to Rome. He entered Athens as a freeman, happy in the joyful recollection of escape from recent perils in Northern Greece. He was unattended by companions. He wandered alone through the city, undisturbed in his examination of it. And then, after his day's wanderings, he is described as betaking himself to the Agora, and breaking out into a public address to the gathered crowd. It is Paul the traveller no longer; it is Paul the Apostle. The thoughts, struggling like a pent-up fire, now express themselves in words. It is Paul trying to do his Lord's work