derived from the world of mind or the spiritual world. The connection between them is just the relation that exists between effects and their causes. Is it not so? Observe the work of an artist—a sculptor, for instance. He is moulding beautiful forms:—like Canova, he is modeling a "Venus;"—or like Powers, a "Greek Slave," or an "Eve;"—or like Michael Angelo he is planning the dome of a great St. Peter's. Now, must not the form exist in the artist's mind, before it can exist in the clay or marble? And when the material statue stands complete, is it any thing more than an outbirth from the idea in the artist's mind,—anything more than a copy, as it were in stone of the figure previously existing in the moulder's thought? Did it not exist, then, in spirit, before it existed in matter? Did not that statue stand, a delicate form, among the thousand beautiful things in the inner world of the sculptor's mind, before it came forth to view? And did not God's all-piercing Eye see it there existent, long before it was beheld by man? Nay, angels, perhaps, who see with the fine eyes of the spirit, may have been allowed to behold that figure in the gallery of the artist's imagination, long before it stood in the gallery at Florence or at Rome—the gaze of an admiring throng.
We thus may see that the works of an artist, or of an artizan of any kind, are, truly and correctly speaking, productions—forms brought forth from ideal objects previously existing in the mind of the workman. In such cases, then, plainly the material thing exists but as an effect from the spiritual thing. Now, we have only to extend the analogy, and to apply this great law to the workings of the Divine Artist, to form
