402 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



sion of their worshippers? And such deities could be loved 

 and feared just in the way one human creature can love 

 or fear another ; the belief in them powerfully influenced 

 the conduct, but their worship, as it originated in the 

 darkened human heart, was a worship of impurity. 

 Observe with what a truly God-like wisdom Christianity 

 is formed to avoid the opposite extremes of these two 

 classes, and how it yet embraces more than the philoso- 

 phy of the one and more than the warmth of the other : 

 the object of our worship is at once God the First Great 

 Cause, and the man Jesus Christ our brother. 



' But not merely must we believe in Christ as God, 

 but also as our Saviour ; as the restorer of our moral 

 nature, and our sacrifice or atonement. There are 

 wonderful Janus-like mysteries here,- inexplicable in 

 their one aspect as they regard God, though simple and 

 easy in the other as they regard man. Perhaps an 

 illustration from the human frame may serve to explain 

 my meaning. Need I remind you, who are an anatomist, 

 and acquainted with Paley to boot, of the admirable 

 adaptation of the human frame to the various ends for 

 which it was created, or how easy it is for a person 

 of even ordinary capacity to be made to perceive this 

 adaptation? Almost any one can see how fairly and 

 beautifully the machine works, but who, on the other 

 hand, can conceive of the higher principles on which it is 

 constructed ? Who can know anything of the workings 

 of the brain as the organ of thought, or of the operations 

 of the nerves as the seats of feeling, of how the chyle is 

 chosen by its thousand blind mouths, and every other 

 fluid rejected, of how one gland should secrete a liquor 

 so unlike that secreted by another, of, in short, any of 

 the thousand phenomena of our animal nature when we 

 trace them towards their first cause ? The working of 



