see God, either in this world or the next, cannot be to see a visible shape, or bodily presence. Unquestionably, as I have contended, God to be seen and worshipped must needs be manifested, concreted in some form perceptible to the heart; but he himself has no more form or bodily configuration than the human soul, or to take a stronger case, than a thought or a feeling. The Jews were, therefore, forbidden to make of him any graven image, or to undertake to represent him by any likeness which could be produced by the chisel or the pencil. They might as well attempt to bring out of the marble or the canvass an image, not of the lightning, as it appears to our senses, but of its occult power or force, as an image or likeness of God. God has no form, or shape visible to the outward eye. He is in all forms and all shapes, but is none of

them.

But God is nevertheless visible to the spiritual eye, and may be as positively known as any object of knowledge whatever. Thought has no form or shape, but what is more cognizable? You know your own thoughts, take them as objects of new thoughts, and make them the subject-matter of discourse. You at this moment take cognizance of my thoughts. My thoughts are now passing from my mind to yours. You perceive them with none of your outward senses; nevertheless, you take note of them, converse with them, and are now comparing them with your own, in order to ascertain their worth.

You cannot see love, and yet you may know it, and recognise it as readily as you do your friend's face. Moreover, that which you love in your friend, is not that which your outward senses take cognizance of. One may say in sober truth, that no man ever saw his friend. Friendship belongs to the soul, and can no more be seen than the soul itself. Outwardly love cannot be seen, but whoso has ever loved knows it, and recognises its voice. Only they who have never loved are ignorant of love. So of truth, justice, goodness. We possess good feelings, we delight in certain feel

ings, are averse to certain other feelings. The soul knows its own feelings, yet these have no outward, visible shape. The outward, visible shape then is not essential.

The way in which the soul knows a thought, feeling, or sentiment, is by possessing. It knows thought by thinking, love by loving. Two lovers understand one another, because there is but one spirit between them. Love is the same in them both. The soul of one, so far as love is concerned, knows what the soul of the other knows, because it is identical with it. Could we assume two individuals between whom the likeness should be complete, both intellectually and morally, we should find that one would know precisely what the other would. All that any man wants, in order to know all that another knows, is an entire sympathy with him.

We

In this same way we know God. God is love. know love by loving, and know it to the full extent to which our love is pure and perfected. To the full extent then to which our love is pure and perfected, do we know God. God is holiness. The soul knows holiness by being holy; just so far as it is holy it knows what holiness is, and just so far it knows God. So may we say of wisdom, truth, beauty, goodness. We know God by having his attributes developed within us. When they are developed within us, we know them by our own immediate consciousness, and know them just so far and no farther than they are so developed.

God

We know God by possessing him. The pure in heart possess him, and therefore know him. dwells in the heart of every good man, and is his goodness. He that loveth dwelleth in God and God in him. The wicked know not God, and simply because being wicked, he does not dwell in them; there is no sympathy between him and them. God is love, holiness, truth. But to love, holiness, truth, the wicked are strangers. They have no inward experience of them, and cannot be made to know them. No one can know love who has not loved. No description, howev

er striking or graphic, can convey to the soul, as yet untouched, any conception of it. But when you have once loved, once had the sentiment kindled up within you, when once your hearts have been drawn to, bound to, intertwined with, nay fused into the heart of another, you know what love is, and know too whether he who speaks of it, speaks from his own inward experience, or from imagination or mere hearsay. Who again that had never grieved, never wept over the loss of that which was to his heart dear, beautiful, and good, could understand by the swollen eye, sunken cheek, heaving breast, broken words, sobs and tears, that heart-rending tale they reveal to him, who is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief? Other examples, innumerable, I might bring to prove that we know only by possessing, or, as our religious friends say, "by experience; but it is unnecessary. As we know love, friendship, justice, holiness, sorrow, grief, by possessing them, and only by possessing them, so know we God by possessing him, and only by possessing him.

We

We are misled on this point, because we take for God, not the living spirit, but the dead letter, the lifeless words in which we have sought to embody our conceptions of him. These words perplex us. find God everywhere, we see him in all that is living, hear him in all sounds, from the gentle whisper of the evening breeze to the loud-speaking thunder, feel him in all just sentiments and pure emotions; but we do not recognise him, do not own him to be God, unless we find him marked and labelled, as an antique in a cabinet of curiosities. We dare not say to ourselves that he is God, the true, the living God, unless beneath the picture on which we gaze, we find the priest, in a plain, round, sacerdotal hand, has so written. Many a poor man has gone through the world fancying himself an atheist, while all the time he was one of the devoutest of God's worshippers. Definitions deceive us. God is the Indefinable. He cannot be compressed within a form of words. Always will he leap the bounds we prescribe; always he surpasses the utmost limits of

thought. Let us then cease to seek him in words, or fancy, because we find him not in this or that form of words, we find him not at all. We should have more confidence in our own spiritual discernment, and dare believe that all that we see and know of truth, beauty, love, goodness, is so much of God. Look deep enough, and you will find God everywhere. Look deep enough, and you will see God at the bottom of every thought, of every emotion. He will shine out to you from all nature, sing to you from all voices, and speak to you from all pure and noble hearts.

The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him. They who fear the Lord are the pure in heart, the upright, the true, the self-denying, the disinterested, the heroic, who wed themselves to all that is pure and lovely, beautiful and good, and follow it through good report and through evil, in life and in death, time and eternity. They possess, in themselves, truth, beauty, holiness, love; and to possess these is to possess God. Whoso possesses these knows them, and, therefore, knows God. If he knows God, he knows his relation to God, the secret of God's covenant, what God demands of him, and what he will give him.

The great practical truth implied in all this is, that we know by sympathy, and by sympathy only. God is unknown only to those who have no sympathy with him. Whatever we would know we must first love. Nature keeps her secret from all who love her not. She throws aside her veil only to the soul that loves her. She is veiled to whomsoever would scan her features for the sake of pointing out their defects. Go forth with an open soul, a genial heart, and she will meet you with a like open soul and genial heart. Love is the key to her mysteries. To love all is open, penetrable, living, radiant, tuneful, loving. To the unloving all is silent, dead; nature is a charnel-house, cold, and damp. Whoso sympathizes with nature gains her heart. To him a new world opens; to him there is no solitude, no desert waste. Blest beings everywhere hover over him, come to him in the glad thoughts of

his waking, and the sweet visions of his sleeping. The spirits sing to him, angel voices everywhere greet him, soothe him, inspire him, wake the music of his own. soul, and dissolve the universe in melody. Would we know God, nature, man, we must place ourselves in harmony with them, yield to their influences, and entwine our affections with theirs; we must grow into what we would know. We must be heroic to know the hero; we must throw off the artificial, and become one with nature to know nature; and to know God, we must, as it were, become God.

Knowledge and wickedness go not together. The truly intellectual man is always a great and a good man. Whoso has penetrated into the mysteries of the universe has done it only on the condition of placing himself in harmony with its laws, or, in other words, with the will of its Creator. He has in him an open soul, a loving heart, a genial sympathy, a nature which has an affinity for truth, beauty, and goodness. He is then a prophet, priest, king, a revealer of God, and a redeemer of

men.

In seeking, then, to know God, do not begin by cavilling, do not begin with a dry, hard, dead, and deadening spirit. Be assured, that all you can ever know of God will be simply what you yourselves possess of him. Go neither into yourselves nor into nature with a critical, cavilling spirit, but with a broad, generous nature, ready to yield to whatever strikes your admiration or raises your wonder. Go with a hungry soul, that would take up into itself all it finds, that will let nothing that really is escape it. God will then reveal himself always and everywhere to your admiring, your reverential hearts.

Admitting this, I may conclude by saying, that as we know God by possessing him, and that possessing him is precisely the same with possessing moral goodness, truth, beauty, and excellence of soul, it follows, that the more we possess of these, that is, the more really excellent we become, the more do we possess and know of God, the deeper do we penetrate into his secret, the