THE DIAL.
MAN IN THE AGES.
The ages have presented man in a two-ſold aspect, as man, as not man. Human things, constitutions, politics, laws, religions, all have gone, either on the fact, rather we might say, have grown out of the intrinsic reality of man's individual worth, or else, and contrary to this, on the tacit assumption of man's individual worthlessness. With the one, man, the living soul, the individual in his sole being, is more than king, noble, hierarch, church, or state; not he theirs or for them, but they nothing save for him; with the other, state, church, hierarch, noble, king, each is more than man; he theirs and for them, he little or nothing save as a fraction of the general order, a part and instrument of the whole. Lactantius has preserved to us a quaint illustration, which he refers to an earlier antiquity than his own, in which the course of each man is compared to the letter Y, and as he comes forward into action, through the point whence it divides itself into two branches, he passes either in the direction of the one, or in that of the other, through sin to death, or through holiness to life. The ages of our race have presented a like divergency. They have parted off in a direction congruous to man's true nature, or into a direction incongruous and contrary to it, verging and branching out, now toward hell, now toward heaven.
These divergencies, whence are they? Not out of time, which rolls over man as a flood; not out of place, which surrounds him everywhere; not out of any outward power
