our shores pattly from a love of novelty, but more from sympathy with our democratic institutions. His attention was first arrested by a consideration of the laws of primogeniture which seemed to him so absolutely absurd and unjust, that in seeking to trace their origin for some show of reason upon which they could rest, he was led to a general review of all governments, both human and divine, which could end only with a reconstruction of his former views and opinions. Educated into the most rigid tenets of the church of England, which he repudiated as his mind expanded, he was now passing through that dark period when the soul, relinquishing the dead letter which it has been taught to regard as the life-giving source of religious inspiration, is loosed from its moorings, and drifts about on the fathomless ocean of its own conjectures and reasonings ere it reaches in safety the other shore.
The spiritual element must be felt, it cannot be demonstrated. Vain is the most glowing rhetoric to him whose intuitions have not unlocked those sublime realities of the unseen world which the human intellect alone can never grasp or unfold. An influence more subtle than mere words can diffuse conveys the higher knowledge of the soul, which she selects according to the laws of affinity, making the meat for one poison for another, from the inability of the one to comprehend the language of the other.
In rejecting a rigid code of belief there is often a tendency to materialism and skepticism. Reason is a safe guide when it has a stand-point; otherwise it is like a ship without a rudder. When a doctrine
