known to us; we therefore know not in what way spirits are individualised. If this were known to us, we might

be able to approach somewhat nearer to the characteristic distinctions of the three persons of the Godhead. The utmost point to which we can now attain is, that there must be some analogy between spiritual and human personality. There must be individuality, however constituted. For whatever may be the nature of the analogy between our future persons, when this mortal shall have put on immortality, and the persons of pure spirits, or between the persons of pure created spirits and the three eternal Persons of the Godhead, it must at least be inconsistent with any conception of personality derived from the light of reason to deny that individuality is its inseparable adjunct.

Prior to the publication of "The Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles" by the Rev. E. H. Browne, I was walking, like Cruden, in his Concordance, by the light of the Bible alone, for I could find but little satisfaction in the variety and depth of conjectural illustrations with which previous expositions abounded.

This defect Professor Browne has amply supplied. He is profoundly learned, without being obscure, and my position with respect to him shall not prevent my saying that his work places him at the head of modern divines. Nevertheless I think him inferior to the "Author of the Concordance," for the reason, as I believe, that Cruden was not in the situation of an advocate for the Articles of that Church, which, however admirable a branch of the universal Church of Christ, is neither infallible, nor without fault.

By the aid of Professor Brown's Exposition it is easy to see the dilemma in which the most objectionable clauses in the Athanasian Creed-those, namely, which respect the three divine persons-originated.

"The Fathers," he tells us, "who used the language which has been inserted in the Creeds and generally adopted in the Church, never thought, when they used to speak of three persons in one God, of speaking of such three persons as they would speak of persons and personality among created beings. They did not consider, for example, the persons of the Father and the Son, as they would have done the persons of Abraham and Isaacthe persons of the Holy Trinity, as they would have the persons of Peter, Paul, and John, which are separate from one another, and do not in any way depend on each other for their essence."

Now what is the conclusion to which Professor Browne has himself come with respect to the persons, however intimate may be their "inhabitation?"

After showing with irresistible perspicuity, from Scriptural texts and contexts, that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet that there are not three but one God, he proceeds to show with the same Scriptural erudition, and with equal perspicuity, that "the Father is a distinct person, the Son is a distinct Person, and the Holy Ghost a distinct person."

Why, then, does not the Creed end here, since the individuality of each of the three divine persons is as clearly set forth in the appropriate texts, as their inhabitation in the Godhead is in others? Why, but because, forsooth,

display of the same argument, and talks of the body as possessing scarcely more fixedness than the fleeting cloud, or the accents of a Roundelay; but Lord Brougham dwells with the utmost precision upon the argument derived from the ever changing elements of our bodily frames. After noticing the manifest distinction between the mind and the body, that the former, for instance, has no parts, but is one and simple, and therefore incapable of resolution or diminution, since these words, and the operations or events they refer to, have no application to a simple and immaterial existence; he concludes a long and varied display of reasoning, by pronouncing that "The strongest of all the arguments both for the separate existence of the mind, and for its surviving the body, is drawn from the strictest induction of facts. The body is constantly undergoing change in all its parts. Probably no person at the age of twenty has one single particle in any part of his body which he had at ten; and still less does any portion of the body he was born with continue to exist in or with him. All that he before had has now entered into new combinations, forming parts of other men, or of animals, or of vegetable or mineral substances, exactly as the body he now has will afterwards be resolved into new combinations after his death. Yet the mind continues one and the same, without change or shadow of turning."

Thus his lordship fairly and unanswerably contends that the perpetual change of the elementary particles of the body, which is going on throughout life, affords complete

* Discourse of Nat. Theology, p. 108-121.

evidence that the mind does not perish with the body, since "death itself does not more effectually resolve the body into its elements, and form it into new combinations, than living fifteen or twenty years does destroy, by like resolution and combination, the self same body. The two cases cannot, in any soundness of reasoning, be distinguished."

If I were professedly writing ad clerum, an apology might be required for my having quoted so largely from Sir Thomas Brown; but there are probably many into whose hands my lighter lucubrations may fall, who may scarcely have heard his "Religio Medici" spoken of, and who may not dislike some little further acquaintance with him. I will, therefore, let them see what this great ornament of a profession, which he nobly vindicates from the charge of Atheistic principles, says, in conclusion, about dying daily.

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"We term sleep," he says, a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. 'Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death; for every man truly lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself; Themistocles, therefore, that slew his soldier in his sleep, was a merciful executioner; 'tis a kind of punishment the mildness of no laws hath invented; I wonder the fancy of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that death by which we may literally be said to die daily; a death which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers, and an half adieu unto

the world, and take my farewell in a colloquy with

"The night is come, like to the day,
Depart not thou, great God, away.
Let not my sins, black as the night,
Eclipse the lustre of thy light.
Keep still in my horizon; for in thee,
Not in the sun, the light of day I see.
Those whose nature cannot sleep,
On my temples sentry keep;

Guard me 'gainst those watchful foes,
Whose eyes are open while mine close.
Let no dreams my head infest,
But such as Jacob's temples blest.
While I do rest, my soul advance;
Make my sleep a holy trance;
That I may, my rest being wrought,
Awake into some holy thought;
And with as active vigour run
My course as doth the nimble sun.
Sleep is a death; O make me try,
By sleeping, what it is to die;
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe'er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with thee.
And thus assured, behold I lie

Securely or to wake or die.

These are my drowsie days: in vain

I do now wake to sleep again :

O come that hour, when I shall never

Sleep again, but wake for ever.

"This is the dormitive I take to bedward; I need no

other laudanum than this to make me sleep; after which