instantaneousness of the intuitions," against their mob of materialized sensations. That "irresistible force," as Taylor calls it, can alone overcome this material and most powerful force. It is of God the Holy Ghost. He and He only can conquer this spirit of evil, who bewilders our minds with his materialistic powers; who sometimes in the lower manifestations chooses to call himself spiritualist, but who assumes this disguise of words only the more easily to dupe his disciples with their physical propensions; who makes these persons in their low estate perform gymnastic tricks with shadowy hands and tipping tables and other gimcrackery of matter, and still fool themselves with the fancy that the manifestations are spiritual. From such spriitualisms, good Lord, deliver us! The devil laughs at their trickery. His higher worshipers, also, mock at them. The high-priests of his temple never delude themselves or their disciples with such folly. They are consistent. Be it Tyndall or Huxley, Fiske or Draper, Spencer or Buckle, Hume or Hobbes, Mill or Bentham, they are all ready to affirm with their first and still greatest master, "Every thought of man is a representative or appearance of some quality without us."

What shall overcome them? Faith and free-will; God and your own consciousness of God; God in Christ and your will in Christ. Fight not carnal weapons with carnal, or you will be spoiled of all your powers; fight carnal with spiritual. You can never answer these foes on their own ground. You can only answer them from your ground. "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." "Ye have an unction from the holy One, and know all things." They are masters of the lower sphere. Some younglings in theology, not always younglings in years, fancy they can answer them from their own stand-point; that they can take evolution and make it serve Christ the Lord; that they can concede blurs, blunders, misconceptions, ignorance, every thing weak and false in the Word of God, and still hold on to the Bible; that they can accept protoplasm and the first chapter of Genesis. Vain effort. You are their prisoner, their slave, the moment you enter their circle. Faith, spirit, unseen forces, conquer them, and they only. "Through faith we understand that the worlds. were framed by the word of God; so that things which are seen

were not made of things which do appear." That is the war cry, that the war weapon. By it conquer.

Thus, too, we see how every revival is an utterly insoluble problem to a materialist. Wesley is the father, under God, of these mightiest of miracles. What know Spencer & Co. of Moody and Sankey? What knows the most astute of them. of the least act by which the soul is changed from nature to grace, from the power of sin and Satan unto God? They cannot understand this mode of spiritual life. Until they are transformed by its power they never can. It is the highest reason in its highest act. It is the soul of man in conjunction, deepest and most vital, with God, the Soul of souls. It is the fountain-head of all philosophy, the source of Platonism, of Descartism, of Coleridgism, of the best and truest in Emersonianism. All these are lower branches of that lofty experience which cries out in more than Coleridgean, Wordsworthian, or Socratean power:

"What we have felt and seen

With confidence we tell;
And publish to the sons of men
The signs infallible.

"Exults our rising soul,

Disburdened of her load,

And swells unutterably full
Of glory and of God!"

Thus descends the mighty river of grace upon all the thought of the world; from God out of heaven, upon its highest philosophies, upon its deepest necessities, upon its poetry and dogma, upon its politics and philanthropies, upon its business and homes, upon education and invention, upon literature and art, upon colonization and civilization, upon all and every the thoughts, sentiments and deeds of mankind.

See Leckey confessing this marvelous life in the philanthropies, creed, and politics of England and the world. John Wesley, he declares, after much false and foolish belittling, "has had a wider constructive influence in the sphere of prac tical religion than any man who has appeared since the sixteenth century." He might have said since the sixth, and in theoretical religion, and all else beside.

The realm of philosophy, to which Wesley has given the last. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXI.—15

and best law, still struggles against his mastery. Its prominent representatives are to-day too often of the school of Hobbes rather than of More, of Bentham than of Coleridge. But if Methodisin is faithful in preaching its founder's truths of "divine realities;" if it still continue to lead "the great spiritual counter movement" which he inaugurated, it will certainly bring down those high heads, as it has leveled all inferior towers. If Brougham brings parliamentary reform; Sharpe, and Clarkson, and Garrison, (who was Wesley's pupil, though he confess it not,) abolitionism; Neal Dow, prohibition; Cary, the missionary movement; Cowper and Wordsworth, and all their followers of to-day, the poetic power, and lay them all at this apostle's feet; if all these, as well as many other masters of men and ideas for the last hundred and fifty years, accept, as they must, John Wesley as their master, then, too, will the scientist, last of rebellions thinkers, because most materialistic, immersed in the matter which he seeks to know, "subdued to that he works in, like a dyer's hand," and his co-ordinate, the materialistic philosopher, also make like acknowledgment, break their wands of mere naturism, and accept the sovereignty of soul in man, of God in nature. Thus shall Plato and John become one in the Spirit and in every believer. Thus shall all thought accept with gratitude the service wrought out for it by this Oxford scholar and tutor, who, when his seat of philosophy brought him into bondage to the sensational school of thought, left it, to find the true light and the true heat in humble. faith in the divine Saviour. And when he had thus found this pearl of infinite price, he sold all that he had, and for joy went preaching and teaching every-where the central truths of Christianity and philosophy, until all the world has heard, and much of it has obeyed. So shall it be preached and taught till all the world shall receive of its fullness, grace for grace, and truth for truth, to the uplifting of all thought to its true position and power in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We have thus endeavored to show the relation of modern intellectual activity to John Wesley. That literature which concerns itself with religion and reform can be traced clearly and directly, on the best authorities, to this fountain head. All confess that religion was revived through this instrument. The highest names in literature are his. Macaulay's zeal for

liberal English politics was due to his father's influence, who was a direct descendant of Wesley. So are Dickens and his school. The later poets all fall at Wordsworth's feet, and Wordsworth is Wesley.

Spiritual philosophy, which is the only "divine philosophy," alike recognizes Wesley as its restorer. Only as all philosophy accepts his central principles will it be accepted of men. The gross reign of material philosophy has come to an end. The world is revolting from Spencerism, the last utterance of Hobbesism, and our own schools are leading the battle for intuitionalism, which is Wesley. The most pungent and potent defender of Wesleyan philosophy is in the chair of metaphysics in our youngest university. Not unnoticeable is it that the chief representative of the opposite opinion, the philosophy of unfaith and anti-reason, is seated close at hand in the chair of the oldest Calvinistic university. Though it has revolted from Calvinism, it has not from fatalism. It yet lacks faith, and, therefore, has no real philosophy. The leading defender and the leading opponent of Spencer are thus set over against each other to wrestle for the man-soul in its deepest goings. May the professor of the intuitions reign till he sees the overthrow of the hostile, sensuous, mechanical system, and the making of all philosophy by the confession of all its professors, common sense, spiritual, Wesleyan, Christian.

Let us not err nor despair. The good and perfect gift of God, guessed at by Plato, is revealed unto us. Let the old experience still be preached, not of flesh, but of the Holy Ghost. By that our fathers did "attain to more than a prophetic. strain." So shall all earthly thoughts be lifted up to the same empyrean; and he whom we have followed, and after whom we have fought and won this hundred and forty years, will stand forth more and more the deliverer of modern thought in its deepest seekings from a philosophy "fast bound in sense," its uplifter into the realm of faith in God the Spirit, and of sight in faith, and of joy in sight, leading every mind and every soul to our only Center and Source, the eternal Spirit, the Lord our God.

ART. II. SOME OBJECTIONS TO THEISM.

A Candid Examination of Theism. By PHYSICUS. English and Foreign Philosophical Library, Vol. XIII. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1878. THE first impression which this book makes upon the critic is that criticism is useless. Its fiat science and fiat logic are such as to convince him that the author is beyond the reach of argument, and that discussion with him would be as fruitless as with certain sectarians who base their dogmas on a few obscure texts which no one else has ever noticed. Its fiatism further convinces the critic that criticism is needless, for no thoughtful person will be any more likely to be influenced by it than by Millerism or spiritualism. From another stand-point, however, an extended criticism may be excused. The work sums up in a short space a great many current objections to theism, and, as such, furnishes a good text for some general exposition. Finally, too, criticism may be regarded as a duty. Ignorance alone may be excused, for it often results from causes, subjective or objective, for which the person is not to blame. Modest ignorance, even when dense, should be tenderly dealt with. Insolence, also, may be excused, when it is based on a respectable amount of knowledge. But ignorance and insolence combined make a nuisance which it is a positive duty to abate; especially when they claim to be philosophy and science.

Some authors are said to suffer from excessive self-depreciation. The author of the "Candid Examination" is not of this class. He claims for his work great logical rigor and scientific precision. Finally he expresses his own estimate of it as follows:-

At a time like the present, when traditional beliefs respecting theism are so generally accepted, and so commonly concluded, as a matter of course, to have a large and valid basis of induction whereon to rest, I cannot but feel that a perusal of this short essay, by showing how very concise the scientific STATUS of the subject really is, will do more to settle the minds of most readers as to the exact standing at the present time of all the probabilities of the question, than could a perusal of all the rest of the literature upon this subject.

This occurs on page 112, in a general summary which begins on page 102. Hence the author has succeeded in condensing