vent of Socrates. In these vast cosmical interchanges of elements and principles universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, employing everything, losing nothing, sewing an animalcula here, a star there, dissolving all except the geometrical point, the I; bringing all back to the soul-atom, unfolding everything in God. A machine made of mind,—enormous gear whose first motive power is the fly, and its last wheel the Zodiac."

But none of these deep questions are sustained through the work; they are a kind of make-believes without any actual import. Not that M. Hugo would willfully practice imposition upon his readers, but that the character of his mind leads him naturally to attempts at philosophy in all his compositions. He plays with thought as it were, and besprinkles with it his romance. But M. Hugo's sentiments, which have run through various orders, such as Vendean chivalry, ardent republicanism, religious faith, and metaphysical skepticism, Saint Simonism, socialism, etc., are hardly to be dreaded or welcomed either way. M. Hugo treats all such questions as an artist treats his subjects; he studies them not for their own intrinsic value, but for what can be made of them by a skillful hand; it is their external beauty he considers, and which he endeavors to bring out, heaping upon it, as a matter of course, all the resources of art. Alas for art that it has come down to become mere imitation, to cover nakedness and poverty of thought, and be but the gaudy vestment of mere insignificance. Since the days of Praxiteles and Phidias its kingdom has suffered violence and the violent have taken it by force. The spirit of enterprise that accompanies progress has substituted the useful for the beautiful, and man stept from contemplation into action; but this is only a certain phase of the age. The same Progress in its revolutions will bring about new phases again, minglings perhaps of old and new. Let us hope in its ultimate good.

But to return to the main subject in hand, "Les Miserables," we look in vain in it for any powerful dominant idea, pervading the whole and resolving itself into a determinate form. It seems from beginning to end, and throughout all its characters, plots and counterplots, but a painful endeavor on

the part of the author to incarnate his favorite system, to draw sweetness from bitterness, such as he has himself revealed it to us when he laid bare the machinery of his "Lucrezia Borgia."

"Take," says he, "the most hideous moral deformity, place it where it is most appalling, in the heart of a woman, and then mix with this moral deformity a pure sentiment, the purest that woman can feel, maternal love, and you will have a monster that will excite your pity even to tears; the deformed soul will appear beautiful, the moral deformity will be purified by maternal love." But M. Hugo can never convince us with such a priori conceptions. We all know what constitutes maternal love; there must exist a certain amount of spirituality in that sentiment, otherwise it is nothing but a brute's instinct. The wild beast loves its offspring, but that does not redeem its ferocious nature. A monster like Lucrezia Borgia is utterly incapable of love of any kind; her nature is altogether bestial, and the apparent love she manifests towards her son is nothing but animal instinct-it has no spiritual source whatever. How faulty, and little, and absurd do all such conceptions as these appear to us when we contemplate the great creations of the immortal Shakspeare! How the monster "Macbeth" is redeemed in our eyes by the fearful remorse that preys upon his ill-gotten success? How the great poet has chastised that "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself!" When Macbeth dies he excites all our sympathy. The death of Lucrezia Borgia excites nothing but disgust; we take no account of that so-called maternal love by which the author fancies he has saved her. In addition to all these juggler tricks with which he amuses the multitude, he seems to have had another object in view, something that looks very much like a personal revenge. The Government banished M. Hugo, and M. Hugo returns the blow by attacking its political economy and abusing society. His revolutionary character caused him to be banished during the eventful days of December, 1851; he then retired to the Jersey and Guernsey Islands, from where, "nursing his wrath to keep it warm," he wrote those later works, in which he indulges his resentment against society and attacks it at all points. Alas! that great men will so

often do little things! M. Hugo, with his powerful talent and a genius a little more submissive, might have been one of the beacons of his age. He commands all the means to secure just celebrity, and perhaps immortality-power of diction, wealth of ideas, grace and vivacity of manner-all but a sufficiently high motive. What childish thrusts at an enemy that will never deign to notice them! Do we not know what society is and probably will be, judging from the even tenor of its course? Through the heavy sea of life it has ploughed its painful way, midst storms and calms, and shoals and cliffs, taking advantage of each favorable wind, accelerating or slackening its course, according to tides and gales, rising again from each storm, with renewed energy and fresh determination.

Our present age is in a state of ebullition. The various ele ments and divers human interests thrown into that vast form the world, and which are to work to some happy end and fuse into one great whole, are still in a state of fermentation, and must go hrough the fiery furnace of probation before they attain the proper maturity to allow the casting. What the cast may be futurity alone can reveal. May it shell out from its long prison house like that bright bell of the great poet of Germany, clear and perfect, revealing its entire purity on its smooth surface, the finer works the Master wrought upon it, and ring out Concord to the future ages!

ARTICLE III.-INFANT BAPTISM PROVED FROM THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH IN ALL AGES.

OUR aim in this Article is to show, first, that God has had but one Church in the world from the days of Abraham to the present time; secondly, that this Church has ever been under one and the same covenant, unchanged; and, thirdly, that while the ordinances or sacraments of the Church have been changed since the coming of Christ, those now in use have the same meaning with those in use before his coming, and are not more restricted in their application.

I. What was the beginning of the Christian Church? Did it commence with the baptism and public ministry of Christ? Then it did not begin with John the Baptist, for the baptism of Jesus occurred in the midst of John's ministry. And if any claim that the Christian Church commenced with the preaching of John the Baptist, we point to the words of Christ, (Matt. xi. 11.), "Notwithstanding, he that is least in the kingdom of Heaven, is greater than he," as conclusive evidence that John belonged to the old dispensation, and not to that of the Gospel. The Gospel dispensation, we believe, commenced with the death of Christ, or in connection with events transpiring about that time. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was instituted the night before his crucifixion. The ordinance of Christian Baptism seems to have been instituted after the resurrection of our Saviour, when he commanded, "Go ye therefore, and disciple all the nations, baptising them unto the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." (Matt. xxviii. 19). And this dispensation was fully set up and established in power, when the Spirit was copiously dispensed on the day of Pentecost. Then and not till then was the Gospel dispensation completely inaugurated. (See Acts i. 4-8).

But the beginning of the Church of God is another matter. David belonged to that Church, and Isaiah, and Daniel, and Abraham. And our position is that the Church, in its formal and outward aspect, began with Abraham.

We must distinguish between the Church visible, and the Church invisible. The Church invisible consists of all those, in every age of the world, who truly love God, repent of sin, and believe in the Mediator between God and man. Adam, we trust, belonged to this Church, after his fall, and after Christ was preached to him as the Seed of the woman, who should bruise the serpent's head. Enoch, we know, belonged to the true Church, the Church invisible; for he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Noah was doubtless a worthy member of this invisible Church; and so is every one who is born of God, whatever his professions, or failure to profess.

But God has set up a visible Church on earth. One Church amid all the varieties of form and organization; and that Church is composed of all who profess and call themselves His people, and on whom is called the name of the Lord. Now in order to a proper organization of any Church, two things are indispensable, viz.: a Covenant, and Ordinances, or something in the nature of a Sacrament. And we are ready to admit, that in a certain sense there was a Church visible on earth before the days of Abraham. God did virtually enter into covenant with Adam, Abel, Enoch and other good men, that if they believed on the promised Seed of the woman, they should be saved for His sake; and that covenant, moreover, was ratified by sacrifices. To that extent there was a Church visible even then. And yet from Adam to Terah-the father of Abraham-in other words, for some two thousand years of the world's history, there was, so far as we can know, no formal covenant* entered into between God and man, and

It is hardly necessary to remark that the "Covenant" spoken of in Gen. ch. ix, has nothing to do with a Church covenant, which implies mutual obligations. The family of Noah may indeed be considered as constituting a visible Church. But it has no visible, progressive history as a Church. If continued at all, it was doubtless in the line of Shem, as given in the 11th chapter of Genesis. But of the religious character of those whose names are there recorded we know absolutely nothing, except from Josh. xxiv. 15, where they, or some of them at least, figure as idolaters; nor is there any evidence that any of them, after Shem, entered into covenant with God, or observed any religious ordinances. In the family of Abraham, on the other hand, the Church has a continuous, progressive history, until it merges into the Christian Church,