Culture of the Imagination.

Within this storehouse dwells a busy faculty, the Imagination or the Phantasy or Fancy, so called from its power of calling images before the mind. Its employment consists in wandering about among the facts, good or bad, true or false, laid up in the memory. It is perpetually comparing one with another, ranging them in the most capricious order, and continually producing the most surprising and widest combinations. It is to this faculty that what are called inventions are due. In some men it acquires from exercise the most prodigious energy. When kept under proper control and properly guided, its services are invaluable; but when allowed to ramble about unwatched, it is like a child wandering through a house with a lighted candle, and when under the guidance of a corrupt heart, it can conjure images from hell.

Judge of the use it is likely to make of the facts furnished to it by these very papers that declaim so loftily about our "ignorance and superstition, mental prostration and atheism."

And what are the Christian uses of the imagination? To Rise from the Creature to the Creator! Not to rest in "the knowledge of it for its own sake."

To penetrate into the mysterious laws of "this globe which God has given us to investigate," by "imagining" from those which fall directly under our senses,—those which we witness only in their effects. And when—to use the beautiful metaphor of one whose blindness in supernatural matters is rendered all the sadder by his perspicacity in natural science, ^* —"we have carried our feeble light a little way into the darkness that surrounds science," to raise our hearts thankfully to God by 'imagining' that beauty which is dimly shadowed in these noble laws, and to look forward to the day when there will be no more darkness, when we shall see not only the creature but the Creator face to face as He is!

And, nobler still, studying no longer the laws of inanimate nature, however beautiful, but gazing on the heart of man to imagine the beauty of that poor heart when all its human infirmities shall have been cleansed away, and it has become a dazzling mirror, without spot or blemish, to reflect the Sun of Justice! ^†

To take what is most pure, most holy in human happiness, and from it imagine the happiness of Heaven! The love of the friend for the friend, of the parent for the child, the joy of meeting after long separation. "God does not call us his servants, but his friends." ^‡ He is "Our Father, who is in Heaven;" and "after this our exile," we shall meet him. To try to imagine what that meeting shall be! and from the greatness of our failure, to gather the unimaginable greatness of the lot to which He has destined us!