whose counsels are in truth interwoven with them all,—and who works out His own great designs as surely by the operation of these jarring and unruly elements, as by the more tranquil and steady processes of the world of inanimate nature.
And this view of God in all things—this habitual contemplation of the Almighty, His word, and will, in connection, not only with our daily actions, but even with the daily scene before us, it is, of course, the object of the great enemy of the Church to obstruct and to prevent. His most ardent wish is, to thicken the screen before us—to persuade us to regard the tangible things which surround us as the exclusive objects of our moral vision,—to induce in us a belief that the adjuncts to the great scene really open to our ken, are to be identified with that scene itself. And even with regard to things which from their nature, are the most essentially (so to say) connected with Heaven, he would have us forget the connection, and imagine that the things of earth with which, in this world, they are necessarily involved, are the heavenly things themselves. He would have the objects of our contemplation, and by consequence our spirits themselves, of the earth, earthy; he would darken the prospect before us by excluding, if possible, every gleam of celestial light which might burst through the vail; every ray of spiritual brightness which might impart to us, amid the dimness and the haziness of our nearer prospect, a conception of the glories of a world unseen.
These great truths, for such they are, may be illustrated by examples varied as is the manner of Satan's warfare with the Church in each succeeding generation. But the most profitable illustration of them, as far as this generation is concerned, may be drawn from the mode in which he is especially labouring to deceive ourselves and our contemporaries by obscuring, as far as in him lies, from our view, the real nature of the Holy Church itself, to which we belong. That Church, we may presume, as contemplated by Christ's followers, by the light which His Holy Spirit sheds upon their minds, is seen to be His own Divine Institution; to be an institution gifted and blessed by Himself in the first instance, and still presided over by Ministers deriving their authority from those Apostles on whom he deigned to breathe, and with whom, in their Apostolic capacity, He pledged
