gives them luminous reality in its own ideal conceptions and no doubt one of the noblest exercises of this faculty is, to employ itself in reading and studying those symbolic characters wherewith God has engraven the antitypes to things eternal upon the interminable scroll of the visible universe. But as soon as ever we we attempt to fix these twilight apprehensions of ours in material images, we darken them altogether: when we petrify them, by putting them in forms of stone, they at once take their place among the dead. Suppose it were Charity we wanted to picture to ourselves, how superior to any material symbol would be Danté's vivid description of it

"So ruddy that her form had scarce

Been known within a furnace of clear flame."

Man's mind was endowed with complex powers, in order that it might be self corrective. The Imagination, the Feelings, and the Reason have each their truths; and it is in the Unity of this Trinity the perfection of religious worship consists.

There is a verbal deception often by which we are imposed upon between the form a thing may take, and the belief that may be superinduced upon it. Form every created thing has, and a name, but not every form has life, except such as the Imagination can give. Religion suffers more from the want of Imagination than from too much Imagination. Without this Divine faculty it grovels down into Fancy, and gives to abstract ideas some personal form out of pure weakness. It is the

Imagination that really elevates it above all material restrictions. Fancy (which is an unfeeling faculty) materializes what is spiritual; Imagination, on the contrary, spiritualizes what is material. But the Imagination must be left perfectly free, if it is to fulfil its creative functions with living power. And as to scope for it, there is a wide and magnificent field for its highest office, that of tracing similitudes of Divine things, in the varied creature forms, and scenes, and lambent, almost spiritual images, which present themselves to its solemn gaze everywhere around in Nature. These are the proper objects on which for it to exercise itself, and not on any human embodiments of the ideal; for these are the only types and symbols of heavenly things which are at all fitted to be resorted to for so Divine and elevated a purpose. The instant you seek to enshrine even its own warm fancies in a material form you freeze them, and, like frozen rivers, they become arrested in their

course.

The mind, we know from our own consciousness, is ever reaching forth to catch at whatever is a type or semblance of the Divine attributes, or of those sublime relations of man which are to be eternal. This argues its affinity with Godhead, and is an assurance. of our being destined ultimately to hold converse with Deity, not through the darkened manifestations, as now, of this lower world, but face to face, in that world where man shall "see even as he is seen, and know even as he is known." And it is an observation worthy of being made, and with which we may fittingly conclude this Essay, as evincing the inferiority of

Symbolism to the immediate visions of the mind, and its insufficiency for the highest order of worship, that the heavenly state is described in the Book of Revelation by the absence of all those material objects which here are the brightest symbols of the Divine glory-the sun, and the moon, and the visible temple: "And I saw no temple therein," says St. John, "for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof." If material representations were necessary or helpful to men in the worship of Him who is a Spirit, it must follow that those who are in a disembodied state, as the just are after death, cannot worship Him so well as when they were in the body, which is absurd.

Without, however, going into the disembodied state for an argument against material Symbolism, we may find a yet stronger one in the contrast which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews draws between the visible and the tangible that marked the Mosaic economy, and the invisible and intangible which he makes the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian economy, even in regard to the Church militant here on earth (Heb. xii. 18-24), "For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, &c. But ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, &c." That consisted in things which might be seen and touched; this consists in things which can neither be seen nor touched-in other words, in pure spiritualities: as Chrysostom well remarks (Hom. xxxii. in Ep. ad

Hebr.). “Πάντα τοίνυν τότε αισθητά, καὶ ὄψεις, καὶ φωναί. Πάντα νοητὰ καὶ ἀόρατα νῦν.” It follows, then, that it must be a more Christian and more spiritual mode of worshipping God to do without sensible aids than to depend upon them.

THE TRUE CROSS.

IN those ages of unchristian Christianity which preceded the Reformation, the cross either in material form, or as a visible sign, was made so common that it lost all its sanctity, even as an emblem and memorial of those sufferings by which the world was saved. Instead of being regarded as the mere sign of pious tribulation, it became the actual idol of blind devotees; while the worldly, who wanted only a sentimental religion, used it as a pious plaything. The monkish orders of the Church of Rome expended their devout raptures in incessant praises of its mystical virtues; though their lives, as well as the lives of others of the same church, abundantly proved that this material symbol of Christianity conveyed none of the true virtues of Christianity. With them, indeed, the Cross was converted into a myth; it was made the Fetish of an idolatrous worship; they bowed before it; they knelt to it; they kissed it-kissed a visible and palpable deity!

In many parts of Christendom there are exhibited still, for the excitement of pious emotion, or, it may be for some less spiritual purpose, pieces of wood, which, they assure us, are portions of The True Cross! So large