and all things are but their morris-men, do not abide with us all forever. Some of us grow old, and lose the light which plays around our heads in our younger days. One day, one hour perhaps, never to be forgotten, a sudden darkness spreads over the universe, and we no longer see where we are, or what we are. The bright sun is extinguished; the stars no longer glimmer in the firmament, and the beacon-fires, which the philanthropic few had kindled here and there to cheer, to warn, or to guide the solitary traveller, are gone out. Friends drop away; we stand among the dead, by the graves of those we loved, surrounded by the ghosts of affections unrequited, hopes blasted, joys cut short, plans defeated; and there are mysteries. The universe becomes to us a scroll, a book, like that which John saw in the right hand of Him who sat on the throne, sealed with seven seals. Every object we make out in the darkness is a hieroglyph, big with a meaning of fearful import, which we can divine not; we are to ourselves a riddle we can rede not; and in tumult of soul, perplexity of mind, and sorrow of heart, we find ourselves standing face to face with the dread Unknown.

A change has come over us. Childhood and youth are gone forever. We have broken with the whole past. We stand alone; yet not alone, for the awful Mystery of the Universe is round, about, and within us. For a time our courage forsakes us; we can stand up no longer; we sink down, weak, helpless, forlorn. But this weakness passes away. After a while, in a sort of desperation, we draw ourselves up into ourselves, and bid the monster in whose presence we are, a "grim, fire-eyed defiance." Little by little, we become inured to the obscurity, and able to discern. the outline of things in the dark. By straining, by recollecting, by comparing, by reflecting, we become able to spell out, here and there, one of these fearful hieroglyphs, till we obtain the word of the universeGod. Then the darkness rolls back; things become plain again; conviction supplies the place of lost

faith; and foresight makes amends for the inspiration of hope which returns no more forever. A change has indeed come over us. We are no longer in the trustingness of common sense. We have become philosophers. We have looked beneath the surface, beyond the shadows of sense; in the visible we have found the invisible; in the mutable, that which changes not; in the dying, the immortal; in the evanescent, the abiding and the eternal. We have seen the world of childhood and youth vanish in the darkness of doubt; but we have found a new world, the world of truth, a new universe which is really a universe. We see and comprehend the hidden sense of that of which we saw at first only the form, the shadow. We now know what we believe, and wherefore we believe it, and are able to legitimate our belief. He who has been through this scene of darkness, doubt, perplexity, grief, and has attained to a well grounded conviction of the great truths comprised in the universal beliefs of mankind, is a philosopher.

Now, between this man whom we have pointed out as the philosopher, and the one we called the mere common sense man, is there no difference? and can they converse together with perfect ease? Can they utter themselves by means of the same symbols? Or, which is more to our purpose, will the same symbols have the same significance to them both?

Suppose a man, over whose mind and heart has passed the change of which we have spoken, a man truly born again, who has been able to see that there are mysteries, and who sees a little way into them, and who looks on man, nature, God, with other eyes and other feelings too, than those of childhood and youth; has he nothing within him, no thoughts, no spiritual facts, of which the mere common sense man knows nothing, has dreamt nothing; and which, therefore, he has not named; and which, therefore, are untranslated into his vocabulary? Can this man utter himself in the language of the market, in terms, the full import of which can be easily seized by them

in whom no such change has been wrought? Would you talk with a blind man of colors? Couch his eyes. Will the miser comprehend you, when you speak to him of the pleasures of benevolence? Can you, by any possible form of words, make the meaning of the word love obvious to him, whose heart has never thawed in presence of sweet and gentle affection? Whoever has had some little acquaintance with the world, knows to his sorrow, that he often fails to make himself understood, even when he adopts the commonest and simplest forms of speech. The words a man utters are not measured, in the minds of those to whom he speaks, by his experience, but by theirs. Words are meaningless, save to those who have, in their own experience, a significance to give them. Be they as full of meaning as they may, in the mouth of him who utters them, they fall as empty sounds on the ears of those who listen, unless they who listen have the same inward experience as he who speaks. How different is the import of the same words to different minds. How different is the import of that word death, when, with our childish simplicity and curiosity, we look from our mother's arms into the coffin to see the baby-corpse, from what it is in after life, when, one by one, all our early associates and friends and companions have dropped away, and we stand alone by the new-made grave of the last, the best loved one! And how different, too, is the meaning of that same word death, to him who looks upon the grave as the end of life, and sees buried, in its darkness and silence, all that which is to him but the dearer and lovelier and more beloved part of himself, from what it is to him who regards the grave merely as the door of entrance, through which we pass from this world of trial, sin, and suffering, to our everlasting Home, where is repose and joy and blessedness forever and ever! No matter what are the words one uses, nor what is the meaning he seems to himself to be conveying. If that particular fact, he would communicate, be not a fact of the experience of

him to whom he would communicate it, let him be assured that to him it is incommunicable. No matter with what wisdom we speak, we can impart no more than they, to whom we speak, are prepared to interpret by what they have thought, felt, joyed, or sorrowed in themselves.

The darkness, we sometimes complain of in men's speech and in books, is not unfrequently the darkness of our own minds. To say of a book, that it is unintelligible, is seldom any thing more than to say, that we are aware of nothing in our experience, by which it can be interpreted. A wise man, especially a modest man, is slow to infer, from the fact that he does not comprehend a book, that it contains nothing to be comprehended. We often fancy, too, that we understand an author, when we have not the remotest suspicion of his meaning. His words are so common, his manner is so familiar, he talks so much like one of our old friends, that we never think of asking ourselves, whether we understand him or not. One day we shall read him, and be startled at the new and unthought-of meaning we discover in his words, and we shall be filled with wonder that we did not see it before. We rarely understand one another. Only they who have a common experience are mutually intelligible. This is the reason why we are so estranged one from another. Two men meet for the first time, they converse together, understand each other, and they are friends forever. Let men but understand one another, and all strife, hatreds, contentions, wars, are at an end; and of this they seem to have a secret consciousness, for this is what they imply, whether they know it or not, when they say of two or more persons, "there is a good understanding between them."

They, who, like Nicodemus, sneer at the New Birth, have made as little proficiency in philosophy as in theology. No man, who has not been born again, been born spiritually as well as naturally, can see the kingdom of God, in a philosophical, any more than in

a religious sense. There are some things which the natural man may understand, and there are some things which he cannot, for they are spiritually discerned. Spiritual things, be they expressed in what language they may, can be discerned only by spiritual men. Spiritual things are foolishness to the natural man, and the common sense man laughs outright at the profound words of the philosopher. When the natural man becomes a spiritual man, he finds that what he had called foolishness, are the deep and unsearchable things of God, and the common sense man, when he becomes a philosopher, stands in awe of that at which he had laughed. Let no man laugh at what he understands not, for the day may come when he shall weep at his folly; when he shall bitterly condemn himself, for his previous want of spiritual dis

cernment.

We know no help for this difficulty, on the part of the unregenerate, to understand the regenerate. No matter what terms are used; the most common household words will be as dark, as unmeaning, as are said to be the most abstruse, the most far-fetched terms ever adopted by the most hopeless Germanizing Transcendentalist. Admitting then that Locke did write on metaphysical subjects in a sort of common sense phraseology, we cannot esteem it a very great merit. We have sometimes thought that, by studying to adapt his style and language to the apprehension of the unlearned and the superficial, he retarded instead of accelerating the progress of metaphysical science. It is true, that the manner in which he treated metaphysics made his "Essay" somewhat popular, and secured it a much larger number of readers, than it probably would have had, if he had written more in the manner of the scholar; but we very much doubt whether he by this means added at all to the number of metaphysicians. He became popular because nobody found anything in his "Essay," which made any body a whit the wiser. People read him and called themselves philosophers, without hav