And Eugene closed the oaken door, and returned, and for the first time of his life knelt down to beseech light from the Author of light--light to guide him through these wearisome shoals of doubt and darkness--light to show him something more than how to render matter subservient to animal comfort--light to enlighten the {51} inward feeling. Good and evil, what are they? Mind and matter--which is the true reality? What are we to live for--the animal life, or the spiritual? And is the purely spiritual distinct from the purely intellectual as well as from the animal? Is there a soul, the functions of which are different, distinct, from those of the body, and to the knowledge of which mere intellect cannot arrive? What is nature? What is revelation? How do they act upon each other? What is the office, what the aim of each? Revolving these themes, it was deep in the night ere the young man sought his couch. TO BE CONTINUED. -------- ORIGINAL. INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH. Our age is more sentimental than intellectual, more philanthropic than Christian, more material than spiritual. It may and no doubt does cherish and seek to realize, with such wisdom as it has, many humane and just sentiments, but it retains less Christian thought than it pretends, and has hardly any conception of catholic principles. It studies chiefly phenomena, physical or psychical, and as these are all individual, particular, manifold, variable, and transitory, it fails to recognize any reality that is universal, invariable, and permanent, superior to the vicissitudes of time and place, always and everywhere one and the same. It is so intent on the sensible that it denies or forgets the spiritual, and so engrossed with the creature that it loses sight of the creator.