ONE EMPIEE. 317 



mental plan of vertebrate organization, and with the more fun- 

 damental plan of animal organization, is an instructive fact to 

 which our attention has more than once been drawn. But it 

 does not surpass in interest the unity of mankind in the basal 

 attributes of a moral and religious nature. It is vain to dis- 

 pute the possession of a nature essentially religious, by even 

 the lowest tribes of humanity. One common aspiration stirs 

 every human soul to accommodate itself to the Supreme 

 Being whose existence it feels, or more explicitly understands, 

 and whose authority it unhesitatingly recognizes. While this 

 common religious nature expresses the unity of mankind, it 

 has also a higher significance. The correlative of the religious 

 consciousness is God. Man and his Creator, therefore, con- 

 stitute one system a complete system, the unity of which is 

 expressed in a body of reciprocal relations between God and 

 man. The unity of the realm of nature is proven, as we see, 

 to the understanding by the phenomena and the history of 

 nature ; but without proof, every man holds intuitively to the 

 unity of nature ; every man firmly believes it. As the demon- 

 strated unity of nature implies one original Planner and one 

 Supreme Ruler; so this truth, here made known as an infer- 

 ence from facts of observation, is identical with the intuition 

 of the Unity of God revealed in the universal consciousness 

 of man. 



Now John and Jennie George and Julia John's mother 

 and aunt and every body that has been with us through these 

 Talks it is time for us to take a vacation. I fear several of 

 the last Talks have been rather hard for some of you, as the 

 thoughts are too grand to level down ; but I could never for- 

 give myself, had I omitted them, for they seem to me to be 

 the ripe fruit, while all the rest is the mere stem and branches 

 on which the crop of fruit is developed. I think some of my 

 readers will be glad to get this fruit, and I am sure that John 

 and Jennie will keenly relish it as soon as their appetites are 

 a little more matured. 



