MISCELLANEOUS.

Southland Times, Issue 1178, 8 December 1869, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

The preacher at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, London, on Sunday, alluded to the dissensions of the present day, and told a story on the au hority of John Henry Newman. A naval chaplaiD, he said, who had long been out of the reach of English theological discussion, was eagerly asked on his return home by a partizan whether his floating chapel was High Church or Low Church. "That," said the chaplain, entirely depends on the tide."

The following letter, says a correspondent of a Grlasgow paper, was received many years ago from Thomas Oarlyle, in reply to an enquiry put before him by a young lady who had given her mind much to the moral problems involved in the question of a future state. The letter has never been published : — " The Grange, Alresford, September 27, 1 SiS. — My dear Madam, — The question that perplexes you is one that no man can answer. You may console yourself by reflecting that it is by its nature insoluble to human creatures — that what human creatures mainly have to do with such a question is to get it well put to rest, suppressed if not answered, that so their life and its duties may be attended to without impediment from it. Such questions in this, our earthly existence, are many. ' There are two things,' says the German philosopher, ' that strike me dumb — the starry firmament (probably infiuite), and the sense of right and wrong in man.' Who ever follows out that ' dumb ' thought will come upon the origin of our conceptions of heaven and hell — of an infinitude of merited happiness, and an infinitude of merited woe — and have much to reflect upon under an aspect considerably changed. Consequences good and evil, blessed and accursed, it is very clear, do follow from all our actions here below, and prolong, and propagate, and spread themselves into the infinite, or beyond our calculation and conception ; but whether the notion of reward and penalty be not, on the whole, rather a human one, transferred to that divine fact, has been doubtful to many. Add this consideration, which the best philosophy teaches us, that the very consequences (not to speak of the penalties at all) of evil actions die away, and become abolished long before eternity ends ; and it is only the consequences of good actions that are eternal — for these are in harmony with the laws of this universe, and add themselves to it, and co-operate with it for ever ; while all that is in disharmony with it must necessarily be without continuance and soon- fall dead —as perhaps you have heard in the sound of a Scottish psalm amid the mountains, the true notes alone support one another, and the psalm, which was discordant enough near at hand, is a perfect melody when heard from afar. On the whole, I must account it but a morbid weak imagination that shudders over this wondrous divine .universe as a place of despair to any creature ; and contraiiwise, a most degraded human sense, sunk down to the region of the brutal (however common it be) ttat in any case remains blind to the infinite difference there ever is between right and wrong for a human creature — or God's law and the devil's law. — Yours very truly, T. Cablyle."