horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of thought. If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the thoughts and expressed by the language of man. And what dogmas are in unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these sermons. Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which human language can represent Divine realities. No one that we know of shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens between all possible human words and that which they attempt to express:--