phere, so the sun of Truth gets clear shining through the dissipating power of Controversy. Truth is elicited by the collision of opinions, as fire from the striking together of flints. In every subject,—in politics, in ethics, in law, in medicine, and in physical science, quite as much as in theology, Controversy it is that eliminates error and establishes Truth. Christianity itself was planted, and has grown up, amidst storms. Controversial discussion has ever been favourable to it; so much so, that it has never retained its purity, nor made any solid advances, but where that has been allowed. To that, beyond a doubt, it owes its chief, its brightest conquests.

In fine, to be satisfied of the force of Controversy, we have only to call to mind what it has achieved. It has won for us and stereotyped our noble creeds; it has exploded the false systems which once held rule in Philosophy as well as in Religion; it has dissipated the moral darkness which for ages hung over the whole of Christendom; it has laid open the wide universe to the free explorings of Science; it has banished deformities from the gallery of Art; it has broken off the chain of Popery and Tyranny, and won for us our glorious Magna Charta of civil and religious Freedom; it has shivered to atoms the pretensions of despotic Power; it has burnt up Persecution, so to speak, in its own fire; it has wrenched off the manacles of man-degrading bondage from the slave; it has vindicated equal justice for all classes; it has secured protection for the weakest, provision for the poorest, of our country's population; it has inscribed upon the doors of all our institutions of Charity the

magic word Liberty; it has cradled, by its rough rocking, our national energies into manly strength; it has raised us into the erect position of independence; it has forced Law to enrobe itself in the pure ermine of its equity; above all, it has rescued Truth from the down-treading of Error, and enthroned Her in Her own bright, serene, rightful majesty, as the only guide to man, the Pharos tower to all the nations of the earth, the great Saviour of the lost in a word, it is to Controversy may be traced the whole of Truth's Triumphs.

RELIGION:

AND ITS DANGEROUSNESS.

THE instinct of Religion in mankind is universal. There never yet was a people found upon this earth, however ignorant, sunk, and degraded, in which there was not some consciousness, or at least the capability of being made conscious, that there is a Higher Power -a great Invisible Ruler of the universe-in other words, a God. So strong has been this inborn conviction, that no nation has ever been able to rest satisfied without some system of religious worship, as the expression of its felt dependence upon some mighty unseen Agent. Even the false Religions that have in different ages and countries existed, hideous as most of them have been, are all witnesses to this unextinguished sense in human nature-this "feeling after" something outside of itself, higher, greater, stronger than itself, upon which it depended, and to which it might pay a trembling homage. For this purpose, man, conscious of his own moral nakedness, seems to have seized hold of the first rags he could find, to hide himself from himself, and to make himself presentable to his Maker in the way of worship.. Viewed in his highest state of intellectual advance

ment, without the enlightenment of Revelation, as well as in the groping blindness of his natural ignorance, we see him recognising the existence of a God, as the Athenians did of old, even by building an altar to "the unknown God."

Here, then, we have one great fact regarding human kind. For this sense of Religion, be it observed, is not the idiosyncrasy of a few with a peculiar temperament; it is the normal feeling of the many, of whatever order of mind they may be: it haunts the philosopher in his scepticism, as well as the peasant at the plough; it operates in all ranks and classes of mankind with such force that it must in some way find an object; and this it is that lays men open to all kinds of deceits and impositions, leading them to adopt false modes of worship, under the ideal that what they thus do constitutes Religion. Out of this psychological fact certain moral issues and consequents naturally follow, where men are without the corrective power of Truth in a Divine guide. Unknowing the true God, and yet being unwilling to be without a God, man invents gods of his own, which are always the counterpart of himself. So far he recognises that he was originally made in the image of God, in that, when he makes a God, he makes him after his own image, not realizing that he has lost the Divine image, though, as if conscious of it, he usually so decks and disguises his

So strong and insuppressible is this feeling in man, that even such sceptics as Comte and Stuart Mill have been driven by it to substitute for the Christian's God, as the object of adoration, what they term "Collective Humanity."

idol by factitious adornments, when he carries it in pompous procession for the view of the world, as to make it look, as he thinks, divinely beautiful. Feeling that he ought to worship, and must worship, something as the great object of his fear, and yet being unable to conceive of anything above his own corrupt nature, he erects his vices into divinities, and puts devotion in the place of morality. Hence, man's Religion by nature is commonly a worse thing than no Religion at all; for it palliates his corruptions instead of correcting them, fosters their worst forms, and so becomes the heaviest curse to him of all the evils that afflict poor fallen Humanity.*

Christianity, wherever it has gained an entrance, has banished these false creeds, and corrupt systems, and has introduced at once a true Faith, and a pure worship, for man's recognition, through the medium, and in the form, of a written Revelation. Outwardly, this is recognised as the Truth of God by most men, in all evangelized countries. But this external system of Truth, though recognised, by no means alters the internal disposition of man's heart. He is still as prone as ever to idolatries. Out of Christianity he proceeds (unless indeed he has the spirit of Truth in him from God) to manufacture a Religion after his own liking; and whether he manufactures it out of Christianity, as a system supplied to him from with

Such exceptions as Plato and Socrates among the Greeks, Numa, Antoninus, and others, among the Romans, only go to prove that men were good among the ancient heathen only so far as they separated themselves from the corrupt systems of Religion that were around them.