of the general performance which constitutes the life of the natural body; and have all their several denominations and peculiar descriptions of properties; as the performance of the hand in giving and receiving, e. g. with the properties of bounty, liberality, munificence-the performance of the eye in seeing, descrying, surveying, with the properties of sharpness, clearness, comprehension; of the feet in walking or going, with the properties of sureness, swiftness, &c.; of the whole body, in habitation or being, with many properties incidental to either, of which some have been mentioned. And as the life, or performance of every member has its peculiar denomination when complete, so has that of the whole united, according to its effect or product; which, if material, will be a work, and give to doing the denomination of working, or making; if immaterial, will be an action, deed, effect, operation, performance; and give to doing, besides its proper denomination, that of acting, effecting, operating, executing, performing. Which several modes of doing will all be preceded, and generally followed by the other part of thinking, as their principle; giving and taking, as it appears a character accordingly. For there is an undeviating reciprocity between practice and principles; so that good or evil, at either end, will unavoidably produce the same, or confirm it in the other. As a good principle is conducive to good works, so are good works to a good principle: and as an evil principle is conducive to evil works, so are evil works to an evil principle; as in its place will be more fully shewn.

In the next place, as there are two sorts of action and life described by the criterion or circumstance of connexion, one desultory and quotidian, the other progressive and variously combined according to circumstances, so are there likewise two parts or portions in a life of either sort, which are Thinking and Doing, distinguished by their respective spheres, as we conceive them: and these spheres

are internal and external with respect to the owner or occupier, visible and invisible with respect to other men ; being denominated in proper terms, The Body and Soul; by an elegant periphrasis, The Natural and Spiritual Body (Cor. I. xv. 44): which is also the most satisfactory and intelligible form that has been adopted hitherto for expressing this subtle distinction. For a Body may signify a combination, either of parts or individuals: which shall all have something distinct, both in their subject and relations, and yet be so connected with each other at the same time, as to form an harmonious whole in some particular respect, like the body politic, for example, before alluded to. So the sea is a body of waters, and the land a body of earth, &c.; so one learned compilation is a body of laws, and another of divinity; and so in the author of either compilation, both being artificial productions, in man likewise, we find these two several bodies, v. g. the natural and spiritual, or material and immaterial; appearing very distinct in their numbers or detail, yet so related in the gross by sympathy and co-operation, by reciprocal influence and intersubordination, as to make a decided whole, or one connected being: which, from its beautiful order and prodigious variety, has been styled, The Microcosm, or Little World; and literally distinguished, into its celestial and terrestrial parts, like the great world in which it is included, a province being also assigned to either part corresponding with the sphere, whether higher or lower, to which it is related.

Sometimes this admirable union has been considered as a federal republic, and its principal sections as the two main branches of the human constitution. Which allusion is equally correct with the other, or perhaps more natural and significant, if it be not so sublime: the internal sphere representing the legislative, and the external the executive body; this composed of eyes, hands, and feet, tongue, and other material organs; that, of conscience,

thought, volition, and other similar gifts or faculties; the organs in one sphere performing what the faculties shall determine in the other, except, first in a case which is not uncommon, of murmuring and rebellion; next in another, which they cannot avoid, of natural incapacity, or gradual decline, and final dissolution.

The distinction of parts in any subject will be more easy and decided than that of elements, inasmuch as the distinction of elements being made first, is one step towards that; and also, as every new obstruction, in contracting the view of a subject, increases its certainty by suiting the contraction of intellect, as before observed. And what makes the distinction difficult is nothing natural, so much as the improvements that have been unnaturally made, or intended to be made upon it: of which one is, to consider the material or inferior part of the subject as mortal by nature, and mere earth in composition; also vicious in the extreme, and not only vicious, but seductive and degrading; while the superior and invisible part, which is the proper seat of vice as well as of virtue, shall (with the usual good fortune of superiors) be extolled to the skies, as heavenly, immortal and immutable; the only part that has itself the chance of surviving to a future state in the same form which it now exhibits, and of exalting the other part to such a state likewise through its felicitous union. This seems to be setting up an invidious distinction between the two parts; to be carrying the distinction between the two parts farther than is meet, farther than is creditable for both, and consistent with their happy connection; whereby two parts, the body and soul, which God hath joined together, vain man would put asunder. They who have made up their minds to such an hypothesis must be blind to all the natural reciprocities between these two parts and how one is always either better or worse for the other, like man and wife, or like the different members of our visible body, as observed by St. Paul (Cor. I. xii. 12). They must be ignorant, for example, how on

the one hand study, grief, and every other affection of the mind, if violent and long continued, will affect the body in the same manner as a strain or overtaxing of some of its own constituents; and how, on the other hand, a violent and long continued exertion of the bodily members or constituents will depress and weaken, if not completely destroy, or incapacitate at least many of the higher and more exquisite order of intellectual constituents, with which they are associated.

For so strict a reciprocity cannot be the condition of two distinct things. Of distinct things brought together, one may exist without the other, as well as with it: but such cannot be the case with parts, and especially with two like the body and soul, which have so many spiritual properties in common to unite the extreme elements of matter and intellect. The form indeed of either may be. defaced, and even cancelled, as it were, from the draft of creation, while that of the other shall remain; but the materials of neither can be separated entirely from the other, seeing there are so many of which they partake alike. "And though after my SKIN (or present exterior) worms destroy this body; yet in my FLESH (or substance, with a more glorious form) shall I see God" (Job xix. 26),. says Job. Among all the changes in life, from infancy to puberty, manhood, age and death, there is still an identical existence protracted: and it is still to be hoped, and indeed hardly to be doubted, that death is a grand restorative for human nature, and will replace every constituent both of body and soul in its primitive position, where, both may then come off well together, "as being heirs together of the grace of life" (Pet. I. iii. 7),

To so easy a distinction as this, no one can object, if it be only considered as arbitrary, and not real, as a distinction of man's making, and not of his Maker's. For had the Author of human nature made two things of the body and soul, or of the mind and the spirit, their opposition would have been still greater perhaps than we unfortunately

find it. But distinctions in nature are not so common as we make them: and what one of her chief secretaries* says repeatedly †, of classing their sums or integrals, may be said likewise of classing constituents in reference to this point, namely, "NATURA NON FACIT SALTUS." If therefore we distinguish the parts or constituents of the kingdom into some that are more material, some that are more spiritual, and some that are more intellectual, according to the usual method, it must be with an understanding, that such method is not observed from any belief in the trinity, nor duality either of the human subject, but for the convenience of a natural, well known, and consequently useful distinction.

2. Subject to the same reserve, another distinction of Heaven and Hell may also be seen in the two characteristic hemispheres of good and evil, which are soon to be exhibited in their principles, as the two essential hemispheres have now nearly been. For it may be said, in one word, that the two chief ESSENTIAL parts of the kingdom are soul and body; heaven and hell the two chief CHARACTERISTIC. But the division that would identify characteristic parts with essential, making the immaterial heaven, and the material hell, though abetted by many, and particularly of the ancient heathen philosophers, is a whimsical notion taken up at a venture, not warranted by Scripture, and not worth refuting. For if it be said in Scripture, "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other" (Gal. v. 17), we need not understand by such expressions, that the human flesh and spirit, or the more material and more intellectual constituents of the subject, though poised against each other, are characteristically distinct, any more than they may be essentially, or that one is uniformly good, and the other, as uniformly evil: for by the Spirit may be, and most likely is, here intended an higher spirit than belongs to this composition.

* Linnæus.

VOL. I.

+ In Philosophia Botanica.

L