call Ilim "God," which is literally "The Good." The same word thus signifying the Deity, and IIis most endearing qualities.-S. Turner.

Thy great name,

In all its awful brevity, hath nought
Unholy breeding in it, but doth bless
Rather the tongue that utters it; for me,
I ask no higher office than to fling

My spirit at Thy feet, and cry Thy name
God! through eternity. The man who sees
Irreverence in that name, must have been used
To take that name in vain; and the same man

Would see obscenity in pure white statues!-P. J. Bailey.

GOD.-Actions Consecrated to

After you have dedicated to God your thought and your words, you cannot deny Him the vigour of your actions, which ought all to be animated with the love of Him. This should make you consider how you might please Him most in everything you did, and have a greater regard to Him than to anything else. This should make you, in the beginning of every action, to dedicate it to God by the purity of your intention in such words as these "O my God! I design to please Thee; my aim is Thy honour and glory."-R. Nelson.

GOD.-An Address to

O Thou Eternal One! whose presence bright
All space doth occupy, all motion guide;
Unchanged through time's all devastating flight;
Thou only God! there is no God beside!
Being above all Beings! Mighty One!

Whom none can comprehend and none explore;
Who fill'st existence with Thyself alone:
Embracing all,-supporting,-ruling o'er,—
Being whom we call GOD-and know no more!

In its sublime research, philosophy

May measure out the ocean deep-may count
The sands or the sun's rays-but God! for Thee

There is no weight nor measure:-none can mount

Up to Thy mysteries; reason's brightest spark,
Though kindled by Thy light, in vain would try

To trace Thy counsels, infinite and dark;

And thought is lost ere thought can soar so high,
Even like past moments in eternity!-Derzhavin.

GOD. The Agency of

If not the slightest movement of matter can take place without the immediate agency of God, shall we wonder that His agency is needed in the higher and more subtle processes of mind? If every echoing wind bespeak a present Deity, shall it seem strange to appeal to His power in the regeneration of a soul? Each time the furrow opens to the ploughshare, or the sail of the vessel expands to the breeze, we call in the aid of a mysterious agency, without which human efforts

were vain. Can it be matter of surprise that the same mysterious agency must be invoked in every effort to break up the hardened soil of the human heart, or to communicate to the dull and moveless spirit of man, an impulse towards a nobler than earthly destiny?-Professor Caird.

GOD for All.

The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy. The lonely pine on the mountain top waves its sombre boughs and cries-Thou art my sun." And the little meadow-violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath—“Thou art my sun." And the grain in a thousand fields rustles in the wind, and makes answer-" Thou art my sun." So God sits, effulgent in heaven, not for a favoured few, but for the universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or so low that he may not look up with child like confidence and say-"My Father! Thou art mine."-II. W. Beecher.

GOD. The Altars of

Let our breasts be altars, and light the flames with sacred love; let our affections be the victims, let those children of our bosom be offered up to God.--Sannazaro.

GOD.-The Attributes of

These are natural and moral. Natural attributes:-God is an infinite spirit, self-existent, eternal, immense, simple, free of will, intelligent, powerful. Moral attributes:-God is a spirit infinitely righteous, good, true, and faithful. And the consummate glory of all the divine perfections in union is-the beauty of holiness.-Professor Hodge.

GOD. Beauties in

All the beauties of all the heavens, and all the angels, have been played forth from their eternal hiding-place in the Divine Nature. To say that God is in Himself a compacted universe of sweetnesses, beauties, and splendours, is to speak very unworthily, for endless universes lie hidden in the bosom of the Infinite Nature. Heavens, and heavens of heavens of beauties, are observing a most sacred reserve in Him!-Dr. Pulsford.

GOD.-Communion with

Communion with God is not to be attained by abstraction and asceticism, but by the development of divine sympathies.-F. W. Robertson.

Communion with God is heaven, and happiness, and eternal life. He that hath communion with Him, is in heaven while he is on earth; and if a man could be there without this, he would want heaven even in heaven. There is n essential difference between happiness on earth and happiness in heaven; tev differ but gradually. If a man could enjoy perfect communion with God, he would be perfectly happy.-Clarkson.

GOD. The Contemplation of

If we study and admire God's works, and consider the investigation of natural phenomena the noblest of intellectual employments, how much more wondrous and elevating must be the contemplation of Himself, the great Being, in whom all the wisdom an 1 the beauty and sublimity of creation originate!—Archdeacon Sinclair.

GOD-in Creation.

God, by His power, through all creation reigns,

On earth beneath, through heaven's remotest plains:
Before His throne archangels meekly bow;
Suns are but shadows of His glory now;
Thunder His voice, the lightning of the sky
But a slight spark of His infinity.

He sways all worlds; at His supreme command
Deserts rejoice, and beauty clothes the land.
Millions of planets are but specks to Him,
Systems are atoms; light itself is dim:
Kingdoms and monarchs vanish at His breath,
His smile gives life, His frown consigns to death:
Man shrinks and shivers at His sovereign nod,
Hell sinks abashed before the gaze of God.

The mild, soft soothing zephyr of His love

Is the calm air that angels breathe above.-Dean Bagot.

GOD. The Decrees of

For men to judge of their condition by the decrees of God which are hid from us, and not by His Word which is near us and in our hearts, is as if a man wandering in the wide sea, in a dark night, when the heaven is all clouded about, should yet resolve to steer his course by the stars which he cannot see, but only guess at, and neglect the compass, which is at hand, and would afford him a much better and more certain direction.-Archbishop Tillotson.

GOD-Directs.

God gives to human passions, even when they seem to decide everything, only what is necessary for becoming the instruments of His designs: thus man works, but it is God who directs.—Archbishop Fénélon.

GOD.-The Effect of the Word

So long as the word God endures in a language will it direct the eyes of men upward. It is with the Eternal as with the sun, which, if but its smallest part can shine uneclipsed, prolongs the day, and gives its rounded image in the dark chamber.-Richter.

GOD. The Empire of

We have passed from planet to planet, from sun to sun, from system to system. We have reached beyond the limits of this mighty solar cluster with which we are allied. We have found other island universes sweeping through space. The great unfinished problem still remains: Whence came this universe? Have all these stars which glitter in the heavens been shining from all eternity? Has our globe been rolling round the sun for ceaseless ages? Whence came this magnificent architecture, whose architraves rise in splendour before us in every direction? Is it all the work of chance? I answer, No! It is not the work of chance! Who shall reveal to us the true cosmography of the universe by which we are surrounded? It is the work of an Omnipotent Architect.

Around us and above us rise sun and system, cluster and universe. And 1 doubt not that in every region of this vast empire of God, hymns of praise and

anthems of glory are rising and reverberating from sun to sun, and from system to system,-heard by Omnipotence alone across immensity and through eternity! -Dr. Mitchell.

GOD. The Existence of

An atheist there may be, but an anti-theist there cannot possibly be. That is to say-a man may declare that he does not find any evidence that satisfies him of the existence of a God; but no man may dare to say absolutely—there is not a God. The former is merely the expression of that individual's necessarily most limited, imperfect, and restricted experience; but the latter proposition would imply that the individual had soared among the stars, and ransacked the contents of the worlds that are there-that he had descended to the caves of the ocean, and explored the unknown treasures that are there-that he had travelled through the mines and strata of the earth, and discovered the hidden recesses, and depths and mysteries there-that, in short, he had been in time past possessed of omnipresence and omniscience, and in the exercise of two attributes of Deity had not discovered a God. The fact is-such an individual must be himself God, in order to be in a position to announce the proposition-There is not a God.-Dr. Cumming.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me His existence.-Bruyère.

I shall not undertake to expose, or even to enumerate, all the psychological proofs of the existence of God. I simply affirm, on the one hand, that it is in our soul alone that the idea of God is truly impressed; on the other hand, that it is impossible to study the soul without finding God therein. Look for God outside the soul, and you will find nought but fanciful images, idols, of God. Examine your soul, and its emotions and thoughts will be to you so many glorious revelations of the Godhead. How, indeed, can we enjoy, suffer, desire, hope, love, without feeling ourselves drawn upwards by a higher, a mysterious, an infinitè power? "The slightest aspiration of the soul," wrote Hemsterhuis, "towards the Better, the Future, and the Perfect, is a more than geometrical demonstration of the existence of God."-Nourrisson.

When we examine a watch, or any other piece of machinery, we instantly perceive marks of design. The arrangement of its several parts, and the adaptation of its movements to one result, show it to be a contrivance; nor do we ever imagine the faculty of contriving to be in the watch itself, but in a separate agent. If we turn from art to nature, we behold a vast magazine of contrivances; we see innumerable objects replete with the most exquisite design. The human eye, for example, is formed with admirable skill for the purpose of sight; the ear for the function of hearing. As in the productions of art, we never think of ascribing the power of contrivance to the machine itself; so we are certain the skill displayed in the human structure is not a property of man, since he is very imperfectly acquainted with his own formation. If, then, the designing agent is not man himself, there must undeniably be some separate invisible Being who is his former. This great Being we indicate by the appellation of Deity.-R. Hall,

In the book of Nature is written in the plainest characters the existence of a God, which Revelation takes for granted; of a God how full of contrivance! how fertile in expedients! how benevolent in His ends! At work everywhere; everywhere, too with equal diligence, leaving nothing incomplete, finishing "the hinga in the wing of the insect" as perfectly as if it were all He had to do; unconfun lel

by the multiplicity of objects, undistracted by their dispersion, unwearied by their incessant demands on Him, fresh as on that day when the morning-stars first sung together, and all nature shouted for joy.—Jesse.

The palpable argument for the existence of a God, as grounded on the phenomena of visible nature, lies not in the existence of matter, but in the arrangement of its parts,—a firmer stepping-stone to the conclusion than the mere entity of that which is corporeal to the previous entity of that which is spiritual. To us it marks far more intelligently the voice of a God, to have called forth the beauteous and beneficient order of our world from the womb of chaos, than to have called forth the substance of our world from the womb of nonentity.Dr. Chalmers.

GOD. Familiarity with

There is in some professors of the Gospel an unhallowed familiarity with the sacred name of God. They forget both His character and their own; and seem as though they thought it a mark of a high degree of grace to bring down Jehovah from His lofty throne, and to degrade Him to a level with themselves.-Bradley. GOD. Feelings when Appearing before

When we would appear before God in our solemn devotions, we must see that we empty ourselves of all proud conceits, and find our hearts fully convinced of our own vileness, yea, nothingness in His sight. Down, down with all our high thoughts! fall we low before our great and holy God, not to the earth only, but to the very brim of hell, in the conscience of our own guiltiness; for, though the miserable wretchedness of our nature may be a sufficient cause of our humiliation, yet the consideration of our detestable sinfulness is that which will depress us lowest in the sight of God.-Bishop Hall.

GCD-in Glory.

Oh! what must it be to see and love God in glory, when but a ray of divine love darted into the soul at present brings with it such pure and spiritual delight as makes all the joys of the world fade into nothing?-Romaine.

GOD.-The Glory of

Suppose that we ascend the steps of creation, from matter in its crudest form to Nature's highest and most beautiful arrangements; from the lichen that clothes a rock, to the oak that stands rooted in its crevices; from the dull coal, to the same mineral crystallized in a flashing diamond; from a dew-drop, lying in the cup of a flower, to the great ocean that lies in the hollow of its Maker's hand; from a spark that expires in the moment of its birth, to the sun which has risen and set with unabated splendour on the graves of a hundred generations; from the instinct of the moth that flutters round a taper, to the intellect of an angel who hovers before the throne; from a grain of sand, to this vast globe; from this world, to a creation in extent perhaps as much greater than our planet as it is greater than the grain of sand: as we climb upwards, step by step, our views of God's glory enlarge: they rise with our elevation, and expand with the widening prospect. At length we reach a pinnacle where the whole heavens and earth lie spread out beneath our feet; and reach it to fall on our knees, and, catching the strain of adoring seraphim, to exclaim-" Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!"-Dr. Guthrie.

The glory of God is the one great object of a creature's being.-E. Irving.