a God. There was in this instance apparently a momentary rise above the level of their own wretched mythology, and the recognition of the existence of that very God whom Aaron preached, and of whose power Moses was the delegate and exponent. They recognised, in other words, the existence of the true and the living God. One indeed wonders how any can live without God. Atheism is the last retreat of the human heart-the aphelion of humanity. It is the most unnatural, freezing, and horrible chasm in all God's created, moral, or intellectual universe. The man who has made up his mind to the awful conclusion, "There is no God," must be of all creatures in the universe the most miserable and the most deeply to be pitied. He can surely never be happy. When and where amid tumbling accidents can he have repose? If I had reached the belief that there is no God, this creed-if creed it may be called-would be to me absolutely intolerable. I could not anywhere rest from inquiry if peradventure I might find Him. I should ask of every stone, I would inquire of every flower, I would study every fact, and analyse every phenomenon; I would listen to every oracle, I would trace every acre of the globe, and descend to all depth, and climb to all height, watching if I might hear a single tone of the grand voice of my Father, or detect a solitary yet unobliterated foot-print of the presence of my God. I would ask sun and moon and stars, "Have you, in your journeys through illimitable space, never seen a shadow of God? Are your ceaseless hymns unheard? Were your fires kindled from no source? Or are you worse than empty? Are you, like this orb of ours, peopled by a race who have the awful prerogative of feeling, and

wishing and desiring life, and the painful certainty staring them in the face that annihilation is eventually and eternally before them?" Atheism seems, in proportion as it is realized, a burden intolerable to man. One, however, rejoices that the utmost that the Atheist can reach is Atheism; he can never reach the point of Anti-theism that is to say, all that he can assert is, "I have never discovered the presence of God." He proclaims his weakness, not disproves God's being. But what are you? Because you, the worm of a day, háve been so blind as not to see the presence of a God, surely you dare not say there is none; for how do you know that the place you have not pierced, that the height you have not soared to, that the depth you have not descended to, may not be the scene of the lesson-book that has inscribed upon it, luminous and indelible, "There is a God?" Therefore, for you to say, "There is no God, because I cannot discover him," is equivalent to stating that you are God, and have been everywhere in the universe, are, in fact, omnipresent and omniscient; and thus in your denial of God, you have proved that you are God yourself, which is absurd.

But there was, also, the admission, on the part of the Egyptian magicians, that God is and acts. Many people admit that God was, but how few of us feel, as we ought, that God is! Many have the notion of God, that he launched the earth in its orbit, and left it to make the best of its way home. Their idea is that God created us at the first, gave us a certain supply of vital power, just as a locomotive has a certain available amount of steam, and then left us. is not true. God is, as well as was. God is in every one of us, acting, controlling, governing, helping,

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comforting, strengthening, according to the hour and power of our need. It was no slight admission for the magicians to make, that God's finger was in one miracle. At the same time, there was no less power in their daily experience, though they could not see it. In the sweetness of the waters of the Nile, in the flow of its beautiful current, in the lotus that floated on its surface, in the beasts of the hills that came to drink of it, in the sunbeams that entered the casement of Pharaoh's palace, in the rains, if rains there were, that refreshed the parched earth, in rising and setting suns, in all that was grand as the Pyramids of Egypt, in all that was elegantly minute as its most exquisite textile manufacture, God equally was; only they were so blind that they could not see Him. The miracle startled by its violence, but it no more effectually proved the presence of God than it did the rising and the setting sun, the opening flowers and ripening fruits, or the flowing and falling of the river Nile. God's power is as much exerted in scattering the dewdrops every morning on the flowers of the field, as in upheaving the everlasting hills. God's finger is as truly in the buds of spring bursting from the withered stem, as it was in the blossoming of Aaron's rod, or in the miracles and wonders that were performed before Pharaoh. It is familiarity that makes us forget Him; the very commonness of his presence, the very prodigality of its proofs, makes us fail to see Him; and hence the incidental miracle that startles by its sudden grandeur, like a thunder peal, tells man that there is a God, when the still small voice, from its ceaseless utterance, has failed to be heard by him. So far we see in the creed of the sorcerers the admission of the existence of a God, and, secondly, the

admission of the acting, or presence, or imminent power of that God in the world.

Here was also the belief that there is a province in which man's finger can do much, but that there is a higher province in which man can do nothing. As to some of the miracles they said, "This is the finger of man. We have done these ourselves;" but, in one miracle they were constrained to exclaim, recognising the sphere in which God is all, "This is emphatically the finger of God."

Let us look into three great provinces - Creation, Providence, and Revelation and we shall see in all their grandest and noblest developments, the finger of God, and in each of them a province also where man's strength is absolute weakness, and where, if God's finger do not act, there will be no result at all.

Man's finger can arrange and shape the productions of creation in the most wonderful and exquisite manner. Some of his creations approach apparently, though not at all really, the works of God. That beautiful flower, with its exquisite scent, the tints so profusely lavished upon every petal, that it looks as if God had never anything else to do in the past, than to beautify and scent that flower-this is the finger of God. The seedless, scentless thing that you see in the shop-windowvain mimicry of the original—that is the finger of man. The primrose of spring, the snowdrop starting from the snow-wreath, the camelia- these are the finger of God. There is a province where man's finger can do much, but there is a province beyond it where man's finger can do nothing. Take the humblest field-flower that is covered by the rank grass, and of it a higher Judge than we has said, "Solomon in all his glory was not

arrayed like one of these." Study that marvel-life; a bird. its exquisite structure; a bee, its peculiar and beautiful habits- any living creature that you like— see how man could construct an automaton almost to rival any of these in the exquisite beauty of its mechanism, but still it wants, and must ever want, that great . and glorious inspiration-life. Man never has been able by any combination of mechanical forces, or by any arrangement of chemical powers, to originate life. A philosopher thought he had done it by galvanism, but a little more philosophy told him that he had only discovered what God had done there before. The automaton exquisitely made, capable of playing a tune upon the flute, and giving striking proof of man's genius is the finger of man, and is no doubt very wonderful; but the bee, the bird, the eagle on his outspread wing, or the sparrow on the house-top-oh, what a gap between them!-this last is the finger of God. Study man's inner being-conscience, that wonderful power, that seat of justice, that court of righteous and holy decisions, the chancel of the soul, the sanctuary of human nature. No artist can make that, he can barely paint it. Intellect, moral feeling, all those glorious powers that are folded up in the bosom of the humblest we can wield, we can study, we can imitate, but we cannot create them; these are each the finger of God. I am not depreciating man; I admit that he can do a great deal. To revert to a vision that has passed away, and left on its site not a wreck behindthe beautiful Crystal Palace of 1851, with all its grandeur, and it was great; with all the beauty of its contents, and it was unrivalled; yet what was it but a dim shadow, a tiny microcosm, of that grander palace,