to take or refuse what is thus given, as being near only a few of His creatures, and leaving the rest, feeling a soul-hunger after Him, to care for themselves and to never find Him.

Believe that He who is called our Father is better, more just, more loving, than the best fathers can be, and that He "is not far from any one of us."

In those dim ages through which I have led you, God, whose breath made and ever makes each of us a living soul," was as near the people who lived then as He is near us, leading them, although they, like ourselves, often knew it not. The rudest, and to us in some things most shocking, forms of religion, were not invented by any devil, permitted by God to delude men to destruction, but were, as we learn from savage races now, the early struggles of man from darkness to twilightfor no man really loves the darkness-and from twilight to full day.

Around him was the beauty and motion of life; before him very often the mystery of death, for there were weeping fathers and

mothers in those old times over dead little children, and friends stood silent and tearful beside their dead friends in those days as they do in these; and do you think that man would sit himself down to frame a wilful, cunning lie about the things which awed him?

Although the ideas which these early men had about what they saw and felt were wrong, they were right to them, and it was only after a long time when some shrewd man, making bad use of his shrewdness, pretended to know more than God will ever permit man to know here, that lies and juggling with the truth of things began.

I tell you this because I want you to feel a trust in God that nothing can take away; and how much you will need this trust, when your heart comes to feel the sin and sorrow of this world, the years that are before you will reveal.

XVII. Man's First Questions.

It was not long after man had risen from his first low state, and the chief wants of his

body were supplied, that he would begin to act the man still more by thinking (see page 8), and then would hear some voice within, telling him that eating and drinking were not the chief ends for which life had been given him.

He saw around him the world with its great silent hills and green valleys; its rugged ridges of purple-tinted mountains, and miles of barren flat; its trees and fragrant flowers; the graceful forms of man, the soaring bird, the swift deer and kingly lion; the big, ungainly-shaped mammoth, long since died out; the wide scene beaming with the colours which came forth at the bidding touch of the sunlight, or bathed. in the shadows cast by passing clouds; he saw the sun rise and travel to the west, carrying the light away; the moon at regular times growing from sickle-shape to full round orb;* then each night the stars, few or many, bursting out like sparks struck off the wheels of the

* Moon means the measurer, hence our word month, "for time was measured by nights and moons long before it was reckoned by days and suns and years."

Sun-God's chariot, or like the glittering sprays of water cast by a ship as she ploughs the sea.

His ears listened to the different sounds of Nature; the music of the flowing river; the roar of the never-silent sea; the rustle of the leaves as they were swept by the unseen fingers of the breeze; the patter of the rain as it dropped from the great black clouds; the rumble of the thunder as it followed the spearlike flashes of light sent from the rolling clouds: these and a hundred other sounds, now harsh, now sweet, made him ask-What does it all mean? Where and what am I? Whence came I; whence came all that I see and hear and touch?

Man's first feeling was one of simple wonder; his second feeling the wish to find out the cause of things, what it was that made them as they were.

All around him was Nature (by which is meant that which brings forth), great, mighty, beautiful; was it not all alive, for did it not all move?

In thinking how man would seek to get at the cause of what he saw, we must not suppose

that he could reason as we do.

But although

he could not shape his thoughts into polished speech, common sense stood by to help him.

He knew that he himself moved or stood still as he chose, that his choice was ruled by certain reasons, and that only when he willed to do anything was it done. Something within governed all that he did. Nature was not still; the river flowed, the clouds drifted, the leaves trembled, the earth shook; sun, moon, and stars stayed not these then must be moved by something within thein.

Thus began a belief in spirits dwelling in everything-in sun, tree, waterfall, flame, beast, bird, and serpent.

XVIII. Myths.

In seeking to account for the kind of life which seemed to be (and really was, although not as he thought of it) in all things around, man shaped the most curious notions into the form of myths, by which is meant a fanciful story founded on something real. If to us a boat or a ship becomes a sort of personal thing,