lotment of the common necessaries of life, with few or none of what society calls indulgences, to the hum and bustle of his college, where friendly rivalries with each other give a keener edge to ingenuity, and serve to stimulate lagging resolution, we shall then see something of his distinctive characteristics. Trace his toilsome pathway along the rugged brow of the hill Difficulty, which he too has to climb; and mark the hue that flits across his face while he feels the secret pang of conscious inferiority in being outrun by minds of higher stamp than his own. Then realize as he does, the felt subordination to domineering professors, who wish to drive, and not to lead along the footpath of systematic thought. Add to all these, the assiduous aim to grapple with and master the intricacies of philology, by a patient study of the tongues of antiquity-the strife of words raised in defining with precision the boundaries of mind, the perception of the Absolute, the domain of the Infinite, and THE THEORY OF KNOWING AND BEING-the semi-pagan effort to fix and enforce a science of morals divorced from the science of Christ-the taxations on mind and memory in threading the labyrinths of the exact sciences, solving the problems of mathematics, weighing the orbs of the planets, or examining the structure of the human body-and the analytic experiment of untying the ligatures of air, earth, and sea, and by the sun-light of science exhibiting the primitive elements of which all things consist. Having conducted the experiment on such broad principles, you will then, with the evidence presented, be in a position to pass a verdict on the case at issue.

No one, we presume, who is competent to form an opinion on the subject of university training, will be bold enough to affirm that the circle of study prescribed covers too large a surface of the field of human inquiry. The leading-strings by which the child learns to walk are of no avail after it has acquired the use of its limbs. Instead of promoting strength, they tend rather to foster weakness. So, also, is it with mental

discipline. It is prospective and progressive in its character, not stable and stationary. The prelections of the class room, however erudite and elaborate they may be, are but the text-books of study, in many cases merely title-pages. There is therefore to the student of mind who quits his college, ample scope for mental analysis. The linguist will not feel circumscribed in his researches into the analogy of human languages by the labours of those who have pre-occupied the field. The student of natural science will ratify the deductions of others, or explore new phenomena for himself. In short, the university course is but the unrolling of the map of science and philosophy, the great lessons to be learned from it being reserved for a future day.

We have already said, though the statement may be but vaguely applicable after such an extended parenthesis, that the life of a student is not of a kind that is likely to find much favour in the eyes of a large class of readers. There is a community of thought and feeling peculiar to students. They occupy a middle position between schoolboys and mature men. They are therefore regarded with something of a fictitious disfavour, which is not generally entertained towards advanced students in the higher walks of science and theology. The eccentricities, elastic temperament of mind and buoyancy of feeling and emotion which take possession of the incipient frame, and find a dwellingplace in the youthful bosom, are tabooed out of sight, while in the case of the advance-guard of students, such abnormal manifestations are treated with a forbearance which often attains to the stature of absolute veneration. At this distance of time, and in a brief sketch like the present, we cannot lay our finger on a sufficient number of salient points in our college experience to warrant that cordial reception and geniality of response which, in other circumstances, we might have expected from our readers.

Before closing this chapter, we shall notify one or two incidents in our his

tory that gave a colouring to our future course. Memory yet retains the strange medley of thoughts and fancies that visited us on entering the ancient city of St. Andrews for the first time. In this time-honoured place we had determined to pass the required period of study. It was a day in October we journeyed nearly thirty miles on foot to take up our abode for the winter. The brown leaf had fallen from the trees, and the "field and forest" were alike bare. The day was short and dull; the evening long and dreary. Darkness had to some extent overtaken our footsteps. At last the grim ruins and the tall spires of the city, that had put to death the great and good of former times, rose into view. Stealthily we passed through the massy porch that forms the entrance to South Street. Not a face, that shone in the reflection of the shop windows and street lamps, could we recognize as that of a friend. For city or town life we had had no past experience from which to draw, coming fresh as we did from the retirement and inartificial life of the country. We had not on any occasion looked on the outside of a college building, and our conceptions regarding its interior were as crude as they were original. All our bluntness and awkwardness of manner and method hung heavily about us; but we were resolved to act only according to the strength of our ability, and not in any way to seek an elevation above which our head could carry us. In our intercourse with our classmates, in our interviews with our professors, in the tea party, and at the public dinner, in the debating society and in the prayer meeting, notwithstanding a strong undercurrent of blushes and unavoidable predicaments, we eschewed all finesse and formality, and thus found that to be true to oneself is to be true to society.

No one who has spent any length of time in the hall or lecture room of a college, can soon forget the joyous scene of which he then formed a part. The schoolboys that sit on the same forms, read the same lessons, contend in the

same games for distinction, may cease to cherish the same warm glow of brotherly feelings they had when at school, after years have carried them as widely apart as the poles themselves. But the hallowed ties of feeling and friendship that have been knit together during our college days, can only be sundered when the cords that bind us to earth are broken. And, as one after another of those with whom we started in the race drops down from exhaustion and disappears from our view, we cling with increased fondness to those that are still left. The mind, on recurring to the sources whence it derived pleasure in the past, finds too frequently that they are dried up, and irstinctively seeks for solace in those that remain. Yet even these pleasures "are of the earth, earthy;" they have their foundations in the dust. The prize for which the Christian runs is "the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." So far from sitting down with folded hands and brooding over the breaches of friendship, and the disappointed hopes that have chequered bygone days, he is to "forget the things that are behind, and reach forth to those that are before;" and, amid all discouragements in labour and in all the sorrows of life, still "to press on." While others fall, he must be

Up and doing

With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labour and to wait.

Time has wrought many vicissitudes both in us and our associates since leaving St. Andrews. The classes are now made up of strangers; the societies for mutual improvement have strangers in their management; and strange professors are seen entering St. Salvador's gate. There is one face there, however, which we shall never forget-a face characterized by Dr. Chalmers as possessing "a cold immobility," but which for a lifetime Chalmers loved to hail as the face of a friend-we mean that of the kind, canny Thomas Duncan. The Chair of Greek, long occupied by one who is proud to identify the names of Drs.

Lindsay Alexander and the gigantic apostle Duff with the students of his class, is now under the care of another. To us St. Andrews is "the same and not the same." From the first morning we entered its college to the last lesson we received from the lips of its teachers, our sympathies were entwined around its venerable and classic shades; and

THE GRAND DISCOVERY; or, The Fatherhood of God. By the Rev. George Gilfillan. London: Blackadder & Co., 1854. THIS little volume is the first of a series of short popular dissertations on a variety of important themes. The subject is one that would demand a much bulkier book for its full discussion; and this treatise, accordingly, must merely be regarded as containing germs of thought, and presenting a brief but beautiful outline of the various trains of argument that may be pursued. At the present day, when our popular literature is flooded with a marvellous medley of old heathenisms and new transcendentalisms--when Emersons, Parkers, and Newmans innumerable, deify themselves and the universal soul of man--and when "peripatetic blasphemers" of the Owen school are striving as eagerly to erase the very idea of a Supreme Being from the human heart, as Lady Macbeth, when asleep, strove to wash out the "damned spot from her hands; there is nothing so much needed by the masses of the people, as clear popular expositions of the leading truths of Christianity, and especially of that greatest of all truths-the Fatherhood of God. We cannot but regard the publication of this treatise, then, as singularly welltimed; and both from the widely-known literary power of the author, and the great excellence of the little work itself, we confidently predict for it an extensive circulation. Mr Gilfillan can enrich a theological treatise with that glow and vigour which lends such a characteristic charm to his literary productions. The poetical genius of Emer

the Biblical discovery of the paternal character of God. It abounds in fine thoughts and imagery eloquently expressed; and while stoutly defending the great truths of Christianity, it is free from that spirit of bitterness and uncharitableness which too often characterizes theological publications. We now proceed, after these few preliminary remarks, to give a rapid analysis of this little volume, and to present some specimens of its ability and beauty. Passing over the first chapter, which contains an outline of the paternal character, and which is barer and harder than the author's wont, we find more to arrest our attention in the substantiation of the statement, that there is no discovery of God's paternal character in nature.* Creation may prove the existence of a Creator-and a succession of subsidiary causes may lead us up to the great first cause of all; but they cannot reveal the face and features of a Father. Nature can only speak of nature's God. Addressing her, Mr Gilfillan finely says-" Eloquent babbler, magnificent mute, wilt thou never speak plain? Wilt thou never shape us out some distinct utterance from those vague sounds of song which tremble or tumultuate over thy lips? But no; thou art for ever unable. Thy winds, amid all their varied voices, cannot say, 'We are winged by a Father's power.' Thy waves, amid all their mighty murmurings, cannot tell that they are held in the hollow of a Father's hand. Thy stars, amid their perpetual wanderings, cannot say, 'We are rolling round a Father's throne'; and thy thunder cannot from its cloudy chariot proclaim, I am the echo of my Father's voice.' Nor are thy organic and living creatures able to utter this great truth, any more than thy inorganic and inarticulate products. The cattle do not low it out in

the meadow; the bird does not sing it in the brake; the eagle does not scream it up to the sun; nor does the lion

This doctrine has also recently been finely expounded by Henry Rogers in the Eclipse of Faith

utter it in the rich thunder of his awful voice to the listening desert."

It is difficult for the Christian who, from childhood, has regarded the world as reposing in the arms of an Infinite Father, and who has been taught to perceive a meaning and mysterious beauty in all the creeping things of earth and ocean, to divest himself wholly of his mature ideas and early associations, and so become convinced that God's paternal character is not revealed in nature. The sunbeams that sprinkle the earth with beauty, and make even the waste wilderness rejoice, seem to him to be the radiating smiles of his Father's face; the winds that wander softly abroad at the rise and fall of day, he feels to be his Father's blessing breathed around the world; and even in the far roll of the thunder he hears nature praising aloud the might and majesty of her Father in heaven. But let him place himself in the condition of one to whom the Bible revelation of the Fatherhood is unknown, and endeavour to interpret the language of nature without the interlinear light of Christianity. Flowers and stars, evening odours, the voice of the turtle, and days of surpassing calm, may seem to whisper of celestial love; but the earthquake, the pestilence, the hurricane, the volcano, the thunder-storm

still

do not these now appear the ministers of vengeance, and reveal the Almighty as a "dreadful king of furies?" The God of nature seems cold and distant, arbitrary in his laws, and cruel in bis judgments; and, although he has hung the earth like a procreant cradle in the blue of heaven, and clothed it in a garment of softest green, rounded the daily struggle of life with a sleep, and afforded evidences of creative tenderness in the mild eye of the dove, and the innocence of the lamb-has He not also

barbed with poison the serpent's forked tongue, made the teeth of the tiger and crocodile terrible round about, and sent clouds of rapacious locusts warping on the eastern wind ?-has he not formed "deserts of interminable length and unsearchable desolation, surrounded,

like the dying scorpion, by a ring of impassable fire, hostile to man, and peopled by monsters?"-has He not arrayed the elements in deadly enmity around the beings whom he has endowed with energy and daring, only that they might be tempted into paths of danger, and rush into roaring maelstroms of death? does he not slay thousands of innocent children, change the bridalrobe into the winding-sheet, smite with madness the brightest brain, roll the resistisss avalanche over the peaceful hamlets of Alpine shepherds, send famine and plague together, those two wierd sisters, into the most populous baunts of men, and strike sudden sterility into the most fertile soil? Such are the doings of the God of nature; and it is a remarkable fact, that where men have been left to discover the Deity by their own unassisted reason, they have almost invariably clothed him in garments of darkness, and believed him to be a consuming fire. Our modern spiritualists regard those passages in the Hebrew oracles that describe Jehovah descending from heaven in smoke and flame, and marching in indignation through the land, as conceptions contrary to nature and consciousness, and worthy of the creators of the monstrous Hindoo mythology. In opposition to this, we assert, first, that the Hebrew Jehovah, coming with clouds and girt with fire, is a faithful personification of the God of nature; and, secondly, that had the consciousness of the spiritualists themselves not been purified, and their knowledge enlarged, by contact with Christianity, their conceptions of the Creator would have been essentially of the same character. But how those who reject the Christian doctrines that alone reveal the fatherly features of God, can still persist in asserting, on naturalistic grounds, that God and love are convertible terms, is beyond our power to divine.

Mr. Gilfillan, after comparing the principal points of the paternal character with the discoveries of nature, and proving that in no single particular do they coalesce, proceeds farther to show that

there is no discovery of God in man, in his science, philosophy, history, heart, or in any of his relations. This chapter, brief, and necessarily imperfect as it is on such an important theme, is compactly and ably composed. Man, he finds to be the most mysterious of all mysteries. His history in the past is a "blood-died chaos"-a "wild hurrying torm," with no progressive current "perceptible to the eye of sense and calculation." His science has spoken of law, but has said nothing about the lawgiver. His philosophy is a chaos of contradictions-it has discovered many truths, but the greatest of all truths has remained secret to its search. His heart is a bottomless pit of darkness, and is rather an argument against, than in favour of the existence of the Father. His religions in all ages have represented the Supreme Being as possessed of all features and qualities except the paternal. There are springs of nobleness, indeed, in the human heart; history has been gilded with gleams of supernal light; and religion has at times had lofty conceptions of God; but a shadow never, theless has ever brooded over all, and the face of an Almighty Father has been shrouded from view. Such is a summary of the argument pursued in this chapter. If man's religions have for ever been unable to make the great discovery which revelation unfolds, we may readily believe that his sciences and philosophies must have proved still less adequate to the task. When in the religions of Greece and Rome, and of other lands, God is spoken of as the universal Father, we are to understand the term as simply synonymous with Creator, and as enshrining none of those ideas of benevolence, disinterestedness, and goodness which are contained in its Christian application.

We now come to the fourth and most important chapter-the Scripture discovery of the Father. The points which the author proves and illustrates with much vigour and beauty are the following :-"This discovery is a full-length one. It is common to both the Jewish and Christian dispensations; but has