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whether he seek vice or virtue. It will find God in boundless and unceasing love making man as happy as man himself could do with omnipotence. It will find that there is no sigh of the heart nor quiver of the lip that God would not hinder were it possible. It will find that the finite, now and forever, must have its trouble; but that no joy shall escape us which omnipotence can compass in our behalf. It will find man's highest earthly hopes to be courage, pride, health, knowledge, reason and charity,—and his highest hope for all time eternal progression towards an unattainable perfection of wisdom and serenity.

From the first recorded times man's ignorance of the future has clothed God with terror, and knotted his brows with admonition. Yet all ages have said God is good; there is an ingenuity, and a beauty, a utility, a variety, a mitigation, a compensation in all nature, which men have indeed confessed, but partially—for the old question returns. Why are we not continually happy?—and even if such is God that we might be happy if we would, why have we not that wise disposition? Between these two facts: that we injure ourselves in part, and that God is good in nature, and especially to all those creatures wanting in man's high and seemly responsible intelligence, there has arisen a morality in our notions of action which has made us fear God as the master rather than love him as the lover of our race.

Moderns have found much in the Christian Scriptures (especially those written by the apostle Paul) to relieve this terror of God and the future. It is

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