purity, and holiness, may perhaps without impiety be said, during their earthly pilgrimage, to have walked with God. It has likewise humbled itself and become the inmate of the meanest cottage, and cheered the labourer in his labour, the poor man in his poverty, the sick upon his bed; it has been the friend and the support of the widow and the fatherless, and those who had none to help them; it has wiped away the tears from the eyes of affliction; it has comforted the despairing; it has seated itself where all other succour would be vain, beside the couch of the dying, and smoothed their pillow and mitigated their pangs, and poured the oil of gladness into their souls, and become their counsellor and advocate and surety with God. And shall we fear for religion? Shall we entertain apprehensions for that which can never cease but with the total extinction of all finite, or at least of all rational and intelligent creatures, which must leave the Deity alone in the immeasurable universe?

But not only was Locke under the influence of the religious spirit, he embraced precisely that modification of it which constitutes Christianity; and everywhere, in the midst of the profoundest speculations, suffers to appear manifest indications that he possessed his soul in pious humility, and above all knowledge prized that which has been through Jesus Christ revealed to mankind. Indeed, the Essay on the Human Understanding may be

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regarded as a religious book. Throughout, together with an ardent love of truth, we find the most earnest inculcation of contentment and holiness of life. Our faculties, feeble and limited as he shows them to be, are always represented sufficiently powerful to discover the track of duty which he believes us able and free to follow; and no one, perhaps, ever perused attentively the chapter on infinity without being smitten with involuntary awe; without intimately experiencing the truth uttered by the apostle, that in God we live, and move, and have our being; without feeling himself borne beyond the utmost limits of the universe, into those immeasurable realms of space, where the Spirit of God still appears to brood o'er the vast abyss and make it pregnant. Passing from this sublime subject to the consideration of power, of which the human mind seems incapable of conceiving any other than a very dim and obscure idea, he demonstrates that our notion of spirit is certainly not less if it be not more clear than our notion of body; and in a brief passage, not perhaps wholly free from inconsistency, drops the first hint of Berkeley's theory, according to which nothing exists for us but as it is perceived.

Nevertheless, not being able to deny that irrational animals think; and being unwilling to suppose in them a spiritual soul, or impiously to conceive a limit to the power of God, he expresses his

belief that the Almighty might confer on matter the faculty of thinking. Hence the cry of irreligion which was raised against him in his own times, and has, among certain persons, been kept up to the present day. But, in pretending to decide what God can or cannot do, we make very free, as Butler observes, with the Deity; and, perhaps, in pushing our inquiries into these awful questions, are not altogether free from impiety: very little reflection would, at least, serve to show that, in all such conjectures, we are endeavouring to pass the bounds which the Almighty has prescribed to our understanding, and must therefore for ever be baffled in the vain attempt.

It is very different when we reason on the matter of fact. Setting aside, for the present, that portion of the inquiry which relates to the inferior animals, it seems capable of demonstration that the human soul is a monad, indiscerptible, and, as far as our experience extends, unchangeable. All philosophers, we believe, agree that the material particles or atoms which compose our bodies are in a state of perpetual change, something new being constantly added, while, what previously formed a portion of our system, detaches itself and passes away in insensible perspiration; so that in seven years, according to some calculations, the matter of which our bodies consist is wholly renewed. In this mutation the brain, of course, participates;

consequently, in the man of to-day there remains not one particle of the matter of which his body, seven years ago, consisted. In this respect he is as different from his former self as from Eteocles or Polynices. Yet, though all the matter in his organized system be changed, there is something in the man which remains unchanged; something that links him with his youth, with his boyhood, with his infancy, in which memory and consciousness inhere, which survives the repeated vicissitudes of his frame, and properly constitutes himself. This something cannot be matter, for it has already been shown that, under this supposition, there could be no identity, and consciousness would be impossible. For, allowing, for the sake of argument, that it is the brain which receives from without ideas of sensation, and within forms those of reflection by contemplating its own operations; the impressions made on it could last no longer than itself: but it is admitted that the material particles composing the brain are in a state of constant flux, and come, in the course of years, to be wholly changed; the material particles which depart would, therefore, were they the depositaries of our ideas, carry away with them all the impressions they had, while in the brain, received; it would in fact be palpably impossible these should remain when the substances on which they had been impressed were detached: but we find that ideas are

not thus fleeting; that they continue to exist in the mind forty, fifty, nay, in some men, a hundred years: the substance in which our ideas are deposited remains, consequently, the same from youth to age; but the matter of our bodies is perpetually changing; therefore the human soul is not material.

Another view of the question may equally serve to convince us of this truth. If the soul were material, it must, like all other material substances, consist of extended solid parts, and might be divided ad infinitum. Suppose, however, it consisted only of five parts, corresponding with the number of the senses; each part would receive its peculiar ideas; but being separated from its neighbour by the infinite gulf which divides plurality from unity and diversity from identity, it could never communicate what it had received, unless we erect each portion of the soul into a distinct intelligence, endued with separate consciousness, and means of imparting thought; which, in reality, would be to imagine so many souls, and to destroy the oneness and individuality of man. For, how could part A obtain cognizance of what part B experienced? There would be an absolute necessity to suppose another intelligence, apart from this cluster of material souls, and essentially one and indivisible, in which might centre, as in a point, the converging rays of intellectual light; or, to speak without a