the sunshine on the golden harvest, and the gentle lapping of the summer waves on the gleaming shingled beach.* * "I know it is usual for the orthodox when vindicating the moral character of their God to say:--'All the Evil that exists is of man; All that God has done is only good.' But granting (which facts do not substantiate) that man is the only author of the sorrow and the wrong that abound in the world, it is difficult to see how the Creator can be free from imputation. Did not God, according to orthodoxy, plan all things with an infallible perception that the events foreseen must occur? Was not this accurate prescience based upon the inflexibility of God's Eternal purposes? As, then, the purposes, in the order of nature, at least preceded the prescience and formed the groundwork of it, man has become extensively the instrument of doing mischief in the world simply because the God of the Christian Church did not choose to prevent man from being bad. In other words, man is as he is by the ordained design of God, and, therefore, God is responsible for all the suffering, shame, and error, spread by human agency.--So that the Christian apology for God in connection with the spectacle of evil falls to pieces."--Note by the Editor. The Nature of God, what is it? Infinite and Absolute, he evades our touch; without human will, without human intelligence, without human love, where can his faculties--the very word is a misnomer--find a meeting-place with ours? Is he everything or nothing? one or many? _We know not. We know nothing._ Such is the conclusion into which we are driven by orthodoxy, with its pretended faith, which is credulity, with its pretended proofs, which are presumptions. It defines and maps out the perfections of Deity, and they dissolve when we try to grasp them; nowhere do these ideas hold water for a moment; nowhere is this position defensible. Orthodoxy drives thinkers into atheism; weary of its contradictions they cry, "there is _no_ God"; orthodoxy's leading thinker lands us himself in atheism. No logical, impartial mind can escape from unbelief through the trap-door opened by Dean Mansel: he has taught us reason, and we cannot suppress reason. The "serpent intellect"--as the Bishop of Peterborough calls it--has twined itself firmly round the tree of knowledge, and in that type we do not see, with the Hebrew, the face of death, but, with the older faiths, we reverence it as the symbol of life.