the human race to those of the brutes, because he is invested with a higher principle, which supersedes them. In him alone, of all the visible creation, is the faculty of reason fully developed. The lower animals, it is true, possess qualities which approach this high property, and which cannot easily be distinguished from it by a definition; but if it may be called reason, it is not human reason. It wants, even in its nearest approaches, the freedom, the comprehensiveness, the grasp of human intellect, although this faculty be, in the brute, cultivated to its utmost extent, and in the man, be suffered to exist without improvement. A dog or an elephant may display a surprising sagacity in one or two directions; but man is endowed with a sagacity of a superior order in all directions. And then, if we speak of his capacity for improvement, how infinitely superior is he to every other order of the animal creation. Compare a Newton, a Locke, or a Bacon, with a savage of Australia, and the amazing capability of expansion in the human mind will be at once perceived.

This leads me to notice a peculiar intention of the Creator with regard to the human race ;—I allude to that of intellectual discipline. Every thing seems to be contrived and adapted to this great object. His situation in reference to the external world, whether we consider animate or inanimate nature, the alternations of the seasons, the germination, the growth, and the decay of plants, the various faculties and dispositions, of living beings, and especially the power bestowed on him of appropriating organized as well as unorganized existences to his use, to alter the form or qualities of one class, and to modify the functions and instincts of another, so as to make them subservient to his will and productive of his advantage, all these indicate very distinctly the intention of the Creator, and point to the developement and the training of the human faculties, as one great end for which man was stationed in this lower world.

Nor is the relation in which man stands to his own species a less striking indication of the same truth. I have already noticed in this light the remarkable arrange

*

ment by which man is placed in families, and the child, by slow degrees, advances through the various stages of infancy, boyhood, and youth, to the full vigor and maturity of his faculties; but all the relations of society speak a similar language. It is by the mutual intercourse, transactions, and arrangements of social life, its sympathies and emulations, its wants and desires, its very hatreds and contentions, that the human mind is strengthened, enlarged, and exalted, till its intellectual powers rise to so stupendous a height, and become able to survey so wide a

field.

Now, the adaptations of man's physical and mental faculties to this peculiar state are very remarkable. Of his bodily powers I have already spoken, and in the quotation from Cicero, the hand was particularly mentioned. This wonderful instrument, in conjunction with the arm, may be regarded as the perfection of mechanical power, consisting in a combination of strength, with variety and extent of motion, and with a nicety of touch, which conveys to the mind definite ideas of the figure, of the hardness, and of the consistency of bodies. Although the superiority of man is assuredly not owing, as Anaxagoras maintained, to the possession of a hand, yet without it he would be comparatively powerless. He would want the means of effecting what his ingenuity might suggest ; and his ingenuity itself would be kept in abeyance by that very want. "This," says Mr. Turner, "is the sceptre of his power, his instrument of domination, his all-conquering and all-transcending mechanism. It has all the potentiality of an enchanter's rod, and has achieved those wonders of human art, strength, and ingenuity, which the magicians of our imagination might toil in vain to surpass. We have not the eagle's talons or the lion's claws at the end of our fingers; but we can arm them with swords, guns, and bayonets, far more terrible. All that we admire and dread and use in mechanism and manufacture, in art, war, luxury, labor, and comfort, is the produce of the human hand."*

* Sce‹ Spring,' Papers on the effects of protracted childhood. Sacred History of the World, vol. i. p. 509.

This admirable instrument, however, would be of little benefit without the informing and directing mind. It is still but an instrument; and one of the irrefragable evidences of Creative contrivance and adaptation is the gift of such an instrument to the only being possessed of a reasoning and intelligent soul. There is no other terrestrial animal on whom it would not have been bestowed in a great measure in vain.

It is not my intention to enter into any formal analysis of the intellectual powers; but it is impossible not to perceive that the correspondence between these and the structure of the human frame is exceedingly remarkable. Man has appetites, passions, and affections which incite him to act; he has ingenuity and judgement to enable him to contrive and to resolve; and, by the instrumentality of his bodily powers, he finds ability to execute. To these faculties and inclinations the external world is adapted. He has stone, wood, and iron at his command. With these materials, he builds houses, constructs machinery, bridges, rivers, traverses the sea in ships, and overleaps the barriers which set bounds to his habitation, and circumscribe his intercourse with his fellows. He does more. By the aid of an element, whose properties were unknown to early ages, he finds himself possessed of an agent of tremendous force; and his genius is again roused. He invents new and more complicated forms of mechanism, by which manufactures are improved and extended, commerce is promoted, and vessels are impelled through the ocean against wind and tide, while carriages career on land at a speed which emulates the velocity of the eagle, and seems almost destined to annihilate the obstructions of time and space, and to unite, as in one great city, the whole scattered inhabitants of the earth.

Meanwhile, the lower animals yield to the sway of man, subdued, not by his physical force, for in this he is inferior to many, but by his mental skill. He destroys the noxious; he cherishes the useful and subservient; he extends his plastic hand over the earth, and, causing the desert to blossom as the rose, multiplies the num

bers both of his own species and of the animals he has subdued to his service. Hence, again, proceed new inventions and new triumphs. The very elements bend to his control. The rigors of winter are softened; the breath of spring becomes more balmy; summer is decked in fresh charms; and autumn teems with additional plenty. Doubtless there are bounds to all these acquisitions ; yet it is not man who shall prescribe them, but the fiat of the Deity, Himself.

TWELFTH WEEK-THURSDAY.

MAN. HIS MORAL POWERS.

"IN man," says Voltaire, "there is more wretchedness than in all the other animals put together. He loves life, yet he knows that he must die. If he enjoys a transient good, he suffers various evils, and is at last devoured by worms. This knowledge is his fatal prerogative; other animals have it not. He spends the transient moments of his existence in diffusing the miseries which he suffers, in cutting the throats of his fellow-creatures for pay; in cheating and being cheated; in robbing and being robbed; in serving that he may command; and in repenting of all that he does. The bulk of mankind are nothing more than a crowd of wretches equally criminal and unfortunate; and the globe contains rather carcasses than men. I tremble, at the review of this frightful picture, to find that it contains a complaint against Providence itself; and I wish I had never been born."

In this picture there is a certain horrid verisimilitude, though it is darkened and deformed by the bitterness of the misanthropist, and the impiety of the atheist. It is not with the moral powers of man as with his intellectual. He loses the image of God which was originally stamped on his soul. He does not, therefore, improve in purity and virtue by the discipline of life as he does in mental capacity. On the contrary, his progress in morals seems

at times to be retrograde, as his intellectual faculties expand by exercise; and, by the intercourse of society, he often becomes more regardless, more depraved, more impious. His love of evil increases along with his power of perpetrating it; and, if left to himself, he at last exhibits a spectacle little different from that which the infidel Voltaire has portrayed with so ruthless a hand. The Apostle Paul describes the inhabitants of the heathen world, in his day, in terms scarcely less painful :-"As they did not like to retain God in their knowledge," says he, "God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: who, knowing the judgement of God, (that they which commit such things are worthy of death,) not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them."*

This is, assuredly, no rhetorical and misanthropic picture like that with which I commenced this paper, but a simple statement of the condition of heathen society in the days of the apostle. The arts and sciences had increased beyond all precedent in the empires of Greece and Rome, and moral depravity had kept pace with intellectual acquirements. To this melancholy fact history bears witness; and the description of the state of manners in Rome, by historians almost contemporary with Paul, corresponds but too truly with that which I have quoted.

The truth and depth of observation with which some heathen philosophers speak of human depravity, is quite remarkable. Plato, in particular, speaks of sin with an accuracy little short of an enlightened Christian. "The Divine nature," says he, "originally invigorated the human soul; but, when this was alloyed, humanity came to

* Romans i. 28, 29.