and example a sound and sufficient morality; to share in all the hopes and aspirations of humanity; to be foremost in practical reforms; to find what the instincts of mankind blindly search for by reference to the character of God finally revealed in Christ, and to the hope of immortality which His Resurrection brought to light; to endeavor to clear religion from the reproach of credulity, narrowness, timidity, and bitter sectarian zeal; these are, as our Master Himself assured us, the only means of engendering in the hearts of men that moral quality which we call Faith: for "he that is of the truth heareth my voice."
In a future paper I hope to show, by reference to the facts of man's nature, how this faith in immortality is being, and is to be, so far wrought into his mind as to form a predisposition toward a belief in the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of Christ as a proof of that which he cannot help but desire to believe.—Contemporary Review.
THE SOURCE OF LABOR. |
SCIENCE has taught us that the processes going on around us are but changes, not annihilations and creations. With the eye of knowledge, we see the candle slowly turning into invisible gases, nor doubt for an instant that the matter of which the candle was composed is still existing, ready to reappear in other forms. But this fact is true not only of matter itself, but also of all the influences that work on matter. We wind up the spring of a clock, and, for a whole week, the labor thus stored up is slowly expended in keeping the clock going. Or, again, we spend five minutes of hard labor in raising the hammer of a pile driver, which, in its fall, exerts all that accumulated labor in a single instant. In these instances, we easily see that we store up labor. Now, if we put a dozen sovereigns in a purse, and none of them be lost, we can take a dozen sovereigns out again. So in labor, if no labor be lost, as science asserts—for the inertia of matter, its very deadness, so to speak, which renders it incapable of spontaneously producing work, also prevents its destroying work when involved in it—we should be able to obtain back without deduction all our invested labor when we please.
Imagine a mountain stream turning an overshot wheel. It thus falls from a higher to a lower level. A certain amount of labor would be required to raise the water from the lower level to the higher; just this amount of labor the water gives out in its fall, and invests, as it were, in the wheel If, however, when arrived at the lower level, the water were to demand of the wheel to be pumped up again, the Highest trial would show that it would ask more than it could obtain,