respect to it must, therefore, be of a progressive nature, and with a gradual operation; producing such immediate results from time to time as were meant in each generation to follow from them; but acting steadily onward, to effectuate their grander purposes and more perfect creations.

We are living now in the thirty-eighth century of the operation of this process, or nearly so; and in what the world now is collectively as a whole, and most strikingly in some of its most prominent countries, we see the admirable effects which have thus far been produced; and we are enabled to discern that others far more brilliant and ennobling are coming into birth, and will be the possession and inheritance of our yet distant posterity.

From this contemplation of what has been designed and of what has been effected, and of what is still pursuing by that Divine agency which alone can accomplish the purposes of Divine foresight, let us now advance to a further consideration of the course and principles by and on which what has been done has been effectuated.

If the human mind has been thus improved, man has been and is an improvable being. Improvability must then be a quality of his essential nature, and he has been created to be of this character. He has not been created a perfect being at his first creation, but as a being that was to become such at a future period, and to be continually advancing to it, by a progressive series of moral meliorations and mental enlargements, until his nature should at last attain the assigned completion. If man had been created to be perfect at the time of his creation, there could have been no subsequent improvement, and no reason for it; nor could he have been improvable. All change of what is complete could only be for the worse. He would, if he had ever been in a fullformed state, have been definitely what he was at once, and so have remained for ever. From that condition he neither could nor would have advanced or altered. But it is manifest that he has been and is an altering being; and therefore he was never intended to be such a fixed and completed being at the commencement of his existence, and has not yet become of this final and stable character.

The very system of his birth precludes the possibility of such perfection. What Adam was we do not distinctly know, though we may assume that he was as complete and perfect

as a first-made being of the human species could be; but what Adam was none of his posterity could be.

For as to them it was made the law, which has never altered, that they should be born in a baby state, and therefore totally ignorant of all things; feeble, helpless, and with all parts of their body only a portion of their intended size. No infant is in any respect a complete or perfect human being either in frame or intellect and all mankind being appointed to be born as babes, none were meant to be perfect at their birth; but all come into life on the principle that they shall be improvable into what they ought to be, as far as they are able to advance in their worldly life, and under the circumstances which would individually accompany it.

The consequence of this unvaried law as to our nativity is, that every one is born, and now as much as all were 4000 years ago, an imperfect being-imperfect in all respects when they begin their human life, but continuously improvable from the first moment they breathe and see. They are meant to acquire all that they are deficient in at their nativity as soon and as largely as their country, era, and surrounding society, education, custom, and means of self-formation allow.

Improvability is therefore the law and designation of our created nature; and to improve is its perpetual tendency, and should be regarded as its perpetual duty; for it was manifestly made improvable, in order that it might improve. It was born incomplete with the express purpose that, as it lived, it should gradually attain the completion of what it was capable of. The full formation of our body and limbs our Creator has taken into his own care, and, by the plan and law of our frame, has always secured the performance of that effect. Under these the body grows of itself, without our agency or consciousness, into what it is to be for its temporary earthly life.

But the improvement and completion of our mind or soul he has put into our own power, and required us to attend to and promote it. In this he only aids, and provides the means and materials for us to make use of, but he leaves it to ourselves to seek and apply them, and to acquire the additional qualities and excellences which we ought to possess. Revelation teaches and urges us to attain the largest portion of them that the position of our social life admits of; and also to make the required improvement the principle, the aim, the

leading habit of our lives. It intimates that, in proportion to the degree of attainable completeness with which we die, his future favours will be administered to us.

But what are the improvements which we have to acquire, and what are the aids which he supplies to us in the attainment, and what are the means and materials of improvement which he has provided for us?

Born in total ignorance of all things, we clearly have to acquire the knowledge of all that we ought to know. Born atheists from that ignorance, we have to learn his existence and relations to us, and all that he has communicated concerning himself, his creations, our fellow-creatures, and ourselves, and the counsels and commands which he has expressed on all these subjects. Born with quick sensibilities, we have to train these to the right moral feelings. Excitable by everything and to everything, and with limbs capable of every kind of motion and action, we have to perceive how we ought to use all our faculties and powers, to what we should direct and apply them, and from what we should restrain them. We have to learn all the rules and attain all the habits of selfregulation throughout our whole earthly life, so that, as each occasion arises, we may not do to others or to ourselves what will be injurious or offensive, and that we may do in every circumstance what we ought.

Our own well-being is put into our own care, as well as the welfare of those with whom we may be socially connected; and we have to learn to know what we ought to do or avoid for our own sakes, as likewise to live friendly or in peace with others. We are born with a fine intellectual capacity; but which at first is vague, unformed, and general power; and we have to form and exercise this into correct observation and perception, just reasoning, and right judgment. We come into the world without any opinions at all, and we have to acquire right opinions on all things of which we shall become conscious, and on which we shall have to think and act. We have all these things to learn, and to learn for ourselves in the best way we can, from teachers, from example, from customs, and precepts; by observation, imitation, comparison, reading, thinking, judging, and acting, until we become spontaneously, and in our instructed and improved nature, and by practised habit, and by immediate and voluntary self-government, all that we ought to be, do all that we ought at every time

to do, and know all that we ought to know, in order to have the continual rectitude of mind, feeling, desire, will, and conduct.

Now, as every child has to learn and to acquire all these improvements in our present families, so had every one of the generations which have preceded us upon our common earth. If they had made their full measure of these improvements, we should have come into a rich inheritance of them. But they have left so large a proportion of them unattained, that human nature is still full of deficiencies, which it is advancing onward to supply, and which every individual now living has to lessen in himself, as far as he may have the opportunity or the ability.

But the chief basis of all these in every age is knowledge -that knowledge which we all ought personally to acquire; because without it we can never be, or think, or act as we should do. Just as the child cannot act or judge properly without it, neither can the man.

In proportion as any are deficient in what they ought to know, they are so far still in their baby state. They have their born ignorance and darkness about them, and must think and act correspondently with that destitution.

But this knowledge must, like every other improvement, be a gradual acquisition: what is most immediately essential should be first attained; what becomes necessary in due succession afterward should be sought for in the proper course and order; and if this were regularly and fitly done, and the actions made conformable to the progress, the human mind would grow up steadily to all its required qualities and excellences, as the body does under the guardian and guiding laws which form it, and as the stately tree advances with uninterrupted certainty and expanding efficiency; never vacillating or inconsistent, but reaching in due time its ordained perfection, and retaining it unchanged as long as it is its settled nature to last.

But who must be the first teacher, and what the first knowledge to acquire? In our late epocha of the world, we have streams of knowledge of all sorts flowing about us and to us in ten thousand currents, and bringing with them all sorts of things, good and bad, the workmanship or effusions of our predecessors and of ourselves. The primeval ages had none of this. They had everything to find out or learn, and they could have no instructer but nature, which is passive and

dumb, and was always to be observed, studied, interpreted, and understood; and THEIR CREATOR, who began to teach and meant to teach them, but from whom mankind so early turned, and with such determined and persisting alienation, that from him they would learn nothing. This compelled him to choose his own means and process for their improvement and benefit against their will; and to lead human nature, notwithstanding its aversion to the teacher, to the progressive and ulterior completeness which he meant it to attain. To these means and process let us now direct our thoughts.

LETTER XXXIX.

A Delineation of that Part of the Divine Process which was comprised in the Formation, Establishment, and Instruction of the Jewish Nation.

MY DEAR SYDNEY,

The process adopted by the Deity for the benefit of his human race, after their defection and alienation from him, is displayed to us in the Hebrew Scriptures, from the account of his address to Abraham to the last enunciation of his will and purposes by the prophet Malachi.

The Divine communications to mankind closed with this prophecy in that period of the world, and no further Divine interposition or supernatural agency was perceptibly exerted on our earth until the appointed time of our Saviour's birth approached.

A new series of Divine agency then commenced, which the Christian Scriptures narrate to us. They disclose a new and extended process of the Divine wisdom as then put in action, which has since been in constant intellectual operation, and under whose continued agency we are now living. We see not the directing hand nor the influencing power by our material organs of vision. But the mind that duly studies the effects which arise may trace and discern them, and will find daily delight in contemplating their widely-augmenting efficiency.