2..D.;,/ ^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^ BV 4501 .B39 1859 Bayne, Peter, 1830-1896. The Christian life, social and individual, in the THE CHRISTIAK LIFE, SOCIAL AND IMIVIDUA^ ^^^ ^^ ^g. IN THE PRESENT TIMET"^''*'-^^ " BY PETEE BAYNE, A.M., AUTHOR OF " ESSAYS, BIOGRAPHICAL, CRITICAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS," ETC. Now we look upon Christianity not as a power which has sprung up out of the hidden depths of man's nature, but as one which descended from above, when heaven opened itself anew to man's long alienated race ; a power which, as both in its origin and its essence it is exalted above all that human nature can create out of its own resources, was designed to impart to that nature a new life and to change it in its inmost prin- ciples.—Ne an der. Hold thou the good : define it well : For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the Lords of hell.— Tennyson. NEW EDITION. EDINBURGH: THOMAS CONSTABLE AND CO. HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO., LONDON. MDCCCLIX. CONT^ENTS. PEEFATORY NOTE : GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. Page INTRODUCTORY. 1 PART I— THEORETIC STATEMENT. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE --..-. 7 THE SOCIAL LIFE .---..- 73 CHAP, I.— THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE - - 77 CHAP. II.— ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND CHRISTIAN PHILAN- THROPY - * - - - - - 107 PART II. -ILLUSTRATIVE BIOGRAPHIES. JOHN HOWARD THOMAS ARNOLD 139 WILLIAM WILBERPORCE ...... 197 SAMUEL BUDGETT -..---- 235 A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT - - - - 273 JOHN FOSTER ...... 284 344 THOMAS CHALMERS ..... 377 CONCLUSION. PEEFATORY NOTE GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. The main object aimed at in the present volume is sufficient- ly indicated in the introdvictory remarks. It is therefore unnecessary to reprint the preface in which its scope and oc- casion were formerly explained. The issue of a new edition of the Christian Life presents a suitable opportunity for ofiering my thanks to those review- ers who have deemed the book worthy of public notice. My acknowledgments are due, first of all, to those who intro- duced it to the American public, and next to those gentle- men of the Nonconformist press of England who genially and generously recognised the efforts of one totally unknown. I cannot omit an express reference to those critics in the Pa- triot and Freeman newspapers who so sympathetically ap- preciated the aims and feelings with which I had written, and who had the boldness, very perilous with esoteric circles, to treat a subject arising out of the slighted present, — in which, nevertheless, the forces are acting, and the colours being mingled, of which our souls will retain the stamp and the hue throughout the endless future, — as equally worthy of re- gard with the conventional themes of erudition. The most genuine way to demonstrate my sense of obligation to my re- viewers was, I suppose, to avail myself, to the best of my abi- VI PREFATORY NOTE : lity, of their advice. In deference to an opinion generally, if not unanimously, favourable, I have left the biographies almost entirely untouched. The argumentative portion has been subjected to very careful revision ; the statements ad- vanced, and the quotations made, have been scrupulously ve- rified. The theoretical and practical parts of the work have been more distinctly separated, and the whole arranged in two broad divisions. The atheistic, pantheistic, and Christian theories of man's duty and destiny are thus discussed in a single consecutive view. The reasoning has been through- out simplified, and in some instances supplemented ; but no leading position has been abandoned, or essentially modified. I am indebted, however, to the Rev. J. B. Paton, my critic in the Eclectic Review, for a suggestion which has enabled me to set part of the argument against pantheism in a stronger and clearer form. But my princijml object in this Note is to discharge a duty which the remarks of many of my reviewers, the hints of certain Christian friends, and still more my own reflec- tions, have pressed upon me. A sense of perplexity, a du- bious, uneasy feeling, has l^een experienced in many quarters touching my mode of allusion to Mr Carlyle. No disguise had been thrown over my admiration for his genius ; yet it was no more disguised that Mr Carlyle is not a believer in the Christian Revelation ; and in the religion of Christ I pro- fessed to find the only adequate and rational source of heal- ing or hope for mankind. How could sympathy be express- ed when divergence was so wide and irreconcileable '? Was it safe to render applause when so fearful a qualification had to be made 1 To such questions I have felt bound to re- turn an answer. Besides, if there is even a possibility that the apprehensions they indicate have ground in reality, — if any words of mine can have a tendency to set young minds on the path of temptation, and to dispose them favourably GEXIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CAIILYLE. Vll towards " instruction which causeth to err from the ways oi" understanding," — the matter must be to me of terrible per- sonal concern. In the present edition I have been able, I think, to set in clearer contrast than formerly what I re- gard as good and serviceable, and what I deem evil and per- nicious, in the works of Mr Carlyle ; but I am not certain that nothing more is necessary. In this Note, therefore, without any thought of an exhaustive critique on Mr Carlyle and his writings, I shall attempt briefly to point out, first, certain qualities of his genius which render his rejection of Christianity to some extent accountable, but void of even a show of authority ; next, w^hat contributions may be safely accepted from him to intellectual, and even moral progress ; and, thirdly, how potent the error of preferring, at the crisis of his moral and intellectual histor}^, the vague sublimity of the pantheist to the divine simplicity of Christ, has been to injure and derange the action of his intellect. The key to an exact intelligence of Mr Carlyle' s intellec- tual faculty, and to a correct valuation of his writings, is a clear apprehension of the fact that his genius is of the ima- ginative, as distinguished from the scientific, order. He is a great artist, the instruments of his art being words. Had his works been in metrical form, he would have been secure of recognition as one of the chief poets of the century. This initial and fundamental position must be put beyond all doubt. It is characteristic of the scientific mind that it contem- plates proposition after proposition, regards each with placid equanimity, and passes in clear indifierence from one to ano- ther. With the imaginative mind it is far otherwise. An idea, once embraced, is dwelt upon with intensifying, exag- gerating, inflaming power. The prismatic brilliancies of fancy cluster round it ; the fusing fires of imagination melt and mould it : its exact outline is lost. There may have been Vlli PEEFATORY NOTE : poets whose capacity was to see a tiling, vividly indeed, yet with photographic precision. In certain of his imaginative moods, though not in his highest, Shakspeare exhibits this species of imaginative vision. But Shakspeare's own refer- ence to the fine frenzy of the poet shows how he understood tlie poetic character. And Mr Carlyle is a poet in the most express and emphatic sense. Whatever he beholds takes cha- racter and colour from an imaginative medium. He sees a " flame-image" of the thing, not the thing itself. His eye is an instrument between a burning-glass and a telescope. The intelligent student of Mr Carlyle's works will be able to recall any number of passages in which the faculty exerted is purely imaginative. The two illustrations which follow may appear sufficiently characteristic to supply, or suggest, a com- plete proof that his province is that of the artist, not that of the. man of science. An exalted niche in the Carlylian temple of hero-worship is occupied by the bust of Mirabeau, " Consider," says Mr Carlyle, in his History of the French Revolution^ — " consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he (Mirabeau) has " made away with i^tume, swallowed) all Formulas f a fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of. system, then ; he is only a man of instincts and insights. A man, nevertheless, who will glare fiercely on any object ; and see through it, and conquer it : for he has in- tellect, he has will, force, beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles, but with an eye /" These words are an exact photograph from Mr Carlyle's life-size bust of Count Mirabeau. Would it not furnish an apt illustration of what has been said, if the application of the words of the paternal Marquis proved to be entirely Mr Carlyle's, and if the father, instead of saying that his son pierced beneath formulas to reach the essential truths which formulas disguise, meant something as nearly as possible the reverse % Such is the fact. In Mr GENIUS AXD INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. IX Caiiyle's separate essay on Miraheau the words of the Mar- quis are quoted in their original connection thus : — " And then, his talent for dazzling by superficial, for he has swal- lowed all formulas, and cannot substantiate anything^ Mar- quis Mirabeau, a lauded political economist, was familiar with the scientific use of the term " formula," as indicating the re- sult of a train of reasoning, severed from its demonstration, expressed in algebraic characters, and set apart for practical purposes. Such formulas are applied by the practical land- surveyor and the practical navigator, though each may be un- able to trace the steps of geometrical reasoning by which his in^ile has been arrived at. The Carlylian application of the word " formula" to the conventional usages of society was, doubtless, never thought of by Marquis Mirabeau. The con- cluding words of the sentence last quoted render it obvious to the slightest reflection that he meant to assert that his son, not having honestly worked his way into any science, had yet contrived to pluck the realized fruits of many; and that, pa- rading these, he passed for a man of extensive and profound, while really a man of meagre and showy, knowledge. He wore spectacles, indeed, but not of his own grinding. In- stead of saying that the brilliant Count had made away with formulas, the shrewd and exacting Marquis said that he had carefully gathered them up, scrupulously preserved them, and carried them about with him, in order that, on his playing them off to simple eyes, his glitter might be mistaken for gold, and that amazing French vanity, which flickered luridly about the very death-bed of Mirabeau, might be fed with perpe- tual incense. But need we seek a more pointed illustration of that imaginative fervour which transforms the materials with which it deals than is presented by Mr Carlyle's discovery, in a criticism so severely adverse, of a declaration that the lightnings in Count Mirabeau's eye had burnt up all the forms and falsities of French existence ? Mr Carlyle's conception X PREFATORY NOTE : of Mirabeaii's character may be in essentials correct ; but the helmet on the statue's head, derived from the rejoositories of the old Marquis, is as plainly a shaving-pan as that which once graced the head of a weaker but worthier hero. The second illustration is more interesting, if not more pertinent or convincing, than the first. Will the reader please to step into the studio of Mr Carlyle, in order to in- spect the materials of one of his poetic creations, and then to behold them, after the plastic hand has moulded them into a work of Carlylian art ? Camille Desmoulins thus recounts his j)roceedings at an important crisis of his history, the date July 12, 1789, the place the Paris Palais-Royal : — " It was half-past two ; I came to sound the people. My rage against the despots had passed into despair. I did not perceive that the groupes, though in a stateof lively excitement or consternation, were yet at the insurrection point. Three young men seemed to me animated by a more vehement cou- rage. They held each other by the hand. I saw that they had come into the Palais-Royal with the same design as myself; certain citizens passively followed them. ' Messieurs,' I said, ' we have here a commencement of the civic rising; one of us must devote himself for the cause, and mount a table to address the people.' ' Mount, then.' ' I consent.' On the instant, I was rather borne to the table than mounted it myself. Hardly was I there, when I saw myself encircled by a vast crowd. Here is my short address, which I shall never forget : — ' Citizens ! there is not a moment to lose. I come from Yer- sailles. M. Necker is dismissed. That dismissal is the signal- bell of a St Bartholomew of patriots. This evening the Swiss and German battalions will issue in a body from the Champs de Mars to exterminate us. There is left but one resource ; to rush to arms, and to take cockades that we may know each other.' The tears were in my eyes ; I spoke with gestures GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. XI which I could neither recall nor depict. My proposal was received with shouts of infinite applause. I continued : ' What colours will you have V Some one cried out, ' Choose you.' ' Vv^ill you have green, the colour of hope ; or blue, the colour of Cincinnatus, — the colour of American liberty and of democracy f Several voices exclaimed, ' Green, the colour of hope !' I cried once more : ' Friends ! the signal is given : lo there, the spies and satellites of the police are staring me in the face. I shall not fall into their hands, at least not alive.' Then drawing a couple of pistols from my pocket, I said, ' Let all citizens do the same !' I descended, stifled with embraces. Some pressed me to their hearts, others bathed me in tears. A citizen of Toulouse, apprehensive for my safety, would on no account abandon me. ]\Ieanwhile, they had brought me a green ribbon ; I fixeel the first piece of it in my hat, and distributed the rest to those who Avere around me." This description does not lack vividness or spirit ; see, now, how Mr Carlyle's imagination turns its clear gleam to flame. The following passage is from his Histori/ of the French Re- volution : — "But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Cafe de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face ; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol ! He springs to a table ; the police satellites are eying him ; alive they shall not take him ; not they, alive, him alive ! This time he speaks without stammering : — Friends ! shall we die like hunted hares 1 Like sheep hound- ed into their pinfold ; bleating for mercy, where there is no mercy, but only a whetted knife 1 The hour is come ; the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man ; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed ; and the word is, swift Death, or deliverance for ever. Let such hour be ivell-come ! Us, meseems, one cry only befits. To arms ! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, Xn PREFATORY NOTE : sound only : To arms ! — ' To arms !' yell responsive the in- numerable voices ; like one great voice, as of a demon yelling from the air ; for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or fitter words, does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers in this great moment. Friends, con- tinues Camille, some rallying sign ! Cockades ; green ones ; — the colour of Hope ! As with the flight of locusts, these green tree-leaves ; green ribands from the neighbouring shops ; all green things, are snatched, and made cockades of. Ca- mille descends from his table ; ' stifled with embraces, wetted with tears / has a bit of green riband handed him ; sticks it in his hat And now to Curtius' image shop there ; to the Boulevards ; to the four winds, and rest not till France be on fire !" There is no question here raised of intentional falsification. Mr Carlyle refers his readers to the work from which I have translated, Vieux Cordelier, par Camille Desmoulins, No. V. The veracity of Shakspeare is not to be impugned by colla- tion of the annals of Venice with the tragedy of Othello, nor that of Milton called in question because the dialogue be- tween Adam and Raphael does not occur in Genesis. But is not the mental operation by which Mr Carlyle produced his picture the same as that by which Shakspeare and Milton realized their scenes and characters 1 The imaginative trans- position of circumstance, addition of particulars, grouping and colouring of the whole, are Carlyle' s. The rushing out from the Cafe de Foy, the streaming hair, the pistol in each hand at the commencement of the address, — these we owe to the vision and faculty of the artist. Even the words of Camille must give place to others of an intensity suiting the key at which Mr Carlyle has pitched his conception of the character. The three friends with whom Camille frankly shared his glory are allowed no part of it by the imaginative artist ; the breadth and unity of pictorial effect must not be GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. Xlll broken ; the central figure brooks no rival on tlie canvass. It will be matter of opinion whether Mr Carlyle has im- proved the work of Camille, or only daubed and spoiled it. The reference to St Bartholomew was much in point in the city whose walls rang with shrieks and musket-volleys on the night of 24th August 1572 ; the audience in the Palais- Royal had heard the trampling of horses, and caught the flash of naked sabres, as those Swiss and German squadrons had gone, in the gi'ey of the morning, to camp in the Champs de Mars. The hares, and sheep, and whetted knives might have seemed too abstractly rhetorical, and Camille, a clear- spirited, witty fellow, though touched, I think, with more of that repulsive appetite for blood which the French Celt ex- hibits, than Mr Carlyle permits to appear, might have thought that about "supreme hour of Frenchman and Man" some- what extravagant, if not unintelligible. "Carlyle," remark- ed a practical man, to whom I once presented the original and the amended descriptions of Camille' s performance, — " Carlyle has spoiled it ; he has made a madman of him." There is a slight colour for the suggestion that the account by the actor himself represents a man under high excitement, but still sane, wdiile the figure in the work of high art is ac- tually raving. But what we have to remark is, the strictly poetic manner in whicli Mr Carlyle has treated the whole incident. Following the suggestion which these illustrations suffice to convey, any student acquainted with Mr Carlyle's writings may satisfy himself that his mind is of the imaginative, and not of the scientific, order. He judges and teaches by the eye. Is he concerned with history 1 He presents his reader with a series of dissolving views of the grand occur- rences, leaving causes to be inferred, principles to be deduced, from the mere spectacle. Does he treat social problems, and instruct his countrymen in their political duties ? He con- XIV PEEFATOPvY NOTE : ^ jures up a hero from the twelfth century, teaches us to know and admire him, depicts with consummate skill his manner of life and habits of action ; then, with a wave of his hand, he recalls the present, points the finger of fierce scorn to Mammon-serving dwarfs and game-preserving ogres, and bids us behold our beggarly selves in contrast with the great hero-worshipping generation of Abbot Samson. The politi- cal economist, the historian, the social philanthropist, step forvv'ard, with qualifying circumstances, with statistical do- cuments, with reasonings irrefragable as the multiplication table. " Professors of the dismal science," exclaims Mr Car- lyle, " you may go down !" Is it, finally, of the Christian Keligion that he speaks 1 Anything like formal demonstra- tion is still more wholly absent than on other occasions. He throws out assertions of " incredibility ;" he presents us once or twice with a poetic figure, which would be expressive if his argumentative position had bee?i established ; but from the high region of dogmatic assertion and imaginative efiect he never descends to the old familiar paths of logic and in- duction. It is now, so far as I can learn, the unanimous opinion of competent judges, — of those who, while ardently and sympa- thetically admiring Mr Carlyle's genius, have retained calm- ness and possessed ability to contemplate its various phases, — that his power is of the imagination. In an article in the Saturday/ Itevieio, June 19th, 1858, this view is presented with admirable clearness, and supported by convincing evi- dence. Mr Carlyle is a prose poet. This determination of the essential character of Mr Car- lyle's mind will conduct us to highly important results bear- ing on his relation to Christianity. Men have, in all ages, with instinctive decision and una- nimity, recognised the imaginative mind as broadly discri- minated, in its characteristic qualities and its appropriate GENIUS AXB INFLUENCE OP CARLYLE. Xv tasks, from the mind naturally fitted to estimate evidence and to work in science. When Plato relinquished the ambition of being a poet in favour of that of discovering and teaching truth, he evinced his own belief that the two ambitions were not to be reconciled, and his consciousness that his countrymen did not consult the poeta when in quest of exact knowledge. It strikes every one that the man who objected to Paradise Lost on the ground of its proving nothing, applied an absurd test to a poetical production. It is probable, however, that Plato was too sweeping in his conclusion that poetry and philosophy have no common ground on which to stand. It is still a question whether he does not afford, in liis o^vti person, a practical refutation of his theory, — whether he was not, at least, as much a poet as a philo- sopher. There is a kind of truth which poetry may prove, and become all the nobler poetry for proving. Not to refer to the poet's own department of the Beautiful, which in all its forms admits or requires no further proof than an appeal to human sensibility, it is open to no dispute that, wherever first principles are involved, a direct appeal to the human conscience and reason is the most express and pertinent form which demonstration can assume. We require no logical proof of those maxims of action or duty which spring full- armed from the brain of a Shakspeare, a Bacon, a Goethe. Every fundamental truth in ethics has its patent of nobility written by the hand of God, in characters legible on sight by the soul of man. The strongest reasonings against material- ism and atheism are of this underived, intuitively appre- ciated kind. Such reasonings are admirably in place in poetry, the thrill in the bosom which greets their impassioned utterance being nature's attestation of the true thought or noble sentiment. The dullard who objected to Paradise Lost would have found it rich enough in this kind of demonstra- tion. But the truth which can be reached only by a train xvi PREFATORY NOTE : of geometrical deduction, or which can have no possible ^rounds except those first collected in the premises of science, requires a totally different kind of evidence. The most elo- quent assertion could not establish the simplest proposition in Euclid, or the simplest principle in botany, or the simplest fact touching an occurrence of the past. So far, therefore, the common sense of mankind has been correct in setting the poets and men of first principles apart from the scientific reasoners. It is obvious that, so long as men instinctively regarded the poet as possessed of a different kind of capacity and au- thority from those of the scientific instructor, the mere me- trical form in which any doctrine was delivered set them on their t^uard against its erroneous character or pernicious ten- dency. The good was easily discriminated from the ques- tionable or the bad. To take an example lying immediately at hand, a]l persons of taste and discernment can enjoy the o-race of sentiment, the delicacy or grandeur of eloquent pas- sion, in the poetry of Byi'on and Shelley, while no grown man with any pretensions to sense finds difiiculty in putting aside what is melodiously absurd in their reasonings and opinions. But it is characteristic of much of our very recent litera- ture that the metrical form has been abandoned, while almost all else by which poetry is distinguished from prose has been retained. The large assertion, the figurative expression, the emotional arguments, of poetry, have preferred a tacit claim to that force in evidence which is unconsciously accorded to prose. Nor would this be seriously objectionable, if the distinction between first principles and facts ascertainable only by scientific investigation had been uniformly observed. How far this has been the case in general need not be in- quired; but there is one writer by whom the kinds of evidence applying to each have been subtly and perilously transposed. That m-iter is he with whom we are particularly concenied. GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. XYll It was open to Mr Caiiyle to make use of the first-hand appeals of the poet and preacher. The gleams of vivid lan- guage in which he has blazoned the goodly qualities of valour, sincerity, faithfulness, veracity, are the fitting demonstration of sentiments which to look at is to love. It is with perfect truth that Mr Carlyle declares such things to lie beyond the province of logic. But he has applied his first-hand reason- ing in cases where it cannot possibly avail. He has applied it, first, in social science. What is the result 1 There is but one opinion among practical men touching his works in that de- partment ; that their value is almost inappreciably small. The moment the laugh against the professors of the dismal science subsides, the moment their words are listened to, they are felt to put quietly and conclusively aside all upon which Mr Carlyle has so vehemently insisted. The truths of human history turn out to be, in sooth, a more dismal thing than the glowing picturf^s of the artist. Weighed in the balances of scientific evidence, the fact that a certain monk in the twelfth century conducted a certain Abbey successfully for some dozen of years, and that his brother monks had contrived to elect him to govern them, yields no single inference applicable to the social or political present. In any century that could be named, men who ordered their households, great or small, with the firmness, integrity, and skill of Abbot Samson, did beyond question exist ; hundreds, if not thousands, of Boul- tons and Budgetts could be named in proof that this century is peculiarly rich in such ; while the election of Samson by his brother monks has not a whit closer analogy to the elec- tion of senators for the British Parliament than the election of a Fellow in Oxford. The work of Mr Carlyle is disco- vered to be a political romance, and, " even as a political ro- mance, to be argumentatively weak. Mr Carlyle, in the second place, has applied the argumentative method of positive asser- tion and direct appeal to the facts of the Christian religion. h XVlll PREFATORY NOTE : And precisely the same cause which has deprived his writings on social questions of value, deprives of all authority his rejec- tion of the historical evidence of Christianity. An assertion that the facts of Christianity are " incredible," cannot possibly carry with it any force. Only by the formal demonstration of a scientific treatise could such a proposition be established. Mr Carlyle has not attemjDted so to establish it. There has never existed a human intellect for which it would not have been towering assumption to expect a statement of the kind to be received without proof. Newton might far better have asked mankind to receive his theory of the solar system on the strength of an i/9se dixi, than Mr Carlyle can ask us to obliterate all the stars in the Christian heaven at a mere word from his lip. To be influenced, therefore, by his inci- dental denials of the truth of Christianity, would seem to be the part only of a dull, slovenly, and servile intellect. There are one or two considerations, however, which claim our attention, before we can fully understand the import of these declarations of Mr Carlyle. They are connected with his general system of thought. How does the circumstance affect their argumentative value ? This question will be answered, and the melancholy mys- tery of Carlyle's rejection of Christianity will become more ex- plicable, as we proceed to notice a remarkable element in his mental constitution not yet touched upon. I allude to a cer- tain affinity for mysticism ; a tendency to vagueness, to ab- straction ; a haunting admiration for remote, dimly-looming, indefinite grandeurs. This habit of mind appears to have been of late, in large measure, thrown off by Mr Carlyle ; but at a critical stage in his mental history it had a potent and perni- cious influence. His mind affords, in this particular, a marked contrast to that of Sir William Hamilton. From his youth up, Mr Carlyle has required better bread than is baked with v/heat. He has not had the rare gift of perceiving how far GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. XIX the simply tiiie is greater than the singularly and magnificent- ly false. He could not stay at home. This was revealed in his critical preferences, as well as in more important instances. Scornfully rejecting the claims of the greatest literary inventor since Shakspeare, Sir Walter Scott, he exhausted panegyric on the works of Goethe ; and even among these, his warmest ad- miration was reserved for the products of that later period when self-consciousness unparalleled, and the bewildering ac- cumulations of laborious culture, had done much to relax the superb artistic energy of Goethe's prime, and to transmute it into the didacticism of an enigmatic sage. Turning with a careless sneer from the Sophoclean splendour of that poetic genius which produced Hyperion^ MrCarlyle gave the name of poetry to those dramas of Lessing wliose cold metallic glance was never mistaken by so true a critic as their author for the light that never was on sea or shore. Hastily misconceiv- ing the philosophy of Scotland, and not reflecting how large a mass of cloud may be reduced, say by one piercing beam of electric fire, to a very small quantity of water, he sought refiige in those transcendental speculations of Germany which he has himself lived to call a "hazy infinitude." Was it, considering these circumstances, so surprising that, at the time for calmly and judicially weighing the facts of Christian evidence, he should have been thinking of something "infi- nitely deeper" than miracles ] Was it so improbable that, instead of estimating those considerations, personal and his- torical, which prove a well-defined and authoritative "type" of life and morals, — a Divine Revelation, — to be a necessity of moral civilization, he should have preferred the unsteady and agitating guidance of the " light within f Was it not na- tural that he should have failed to embrace resolutely a definite standard of belief, and should have joined that eclectic school of religion and philosophy which can never, in the one or the other, occupy higher than a second place % Was it, lastly, XX PREFATORY NOTE : wonderful that lie sllonld have fovind, or fancied, truth in some everlasting flux of "spirit" passing through endless cycles of "form f The constitution of mind with which that of Mr Carlyle has, to say the least, a more marked affinity than is common in Great Britain, is pre-eminently characteristic of Germany* The capacity of believing in ontological schemes is possessed by the Germans in a measure which distinguishes them from every nation of ancient or modern times. Reversing the con- duct of the Jews to Moses, they reverence their sages only or chiefly when they are under the cloud. And since Mr Mansel has let fall the pertinent and suggestive hint, that ontological castle-building has detrimentally affected the cri- tical and exegetical labours of the Germans, I venture to add my hum.ble but emphatic opinion, that it has sicklied o'er with the pale cast of speculation their very capacity to esti- mate evidence. Hegel evolves from logical premises a shadowy- scheme of world-development ; into a wing of this air-built edifice Baur fits a still more portentously incredible scheme of the rise and development of Christianity. The master having drawn the universe out of logical premises, the disci- ple draws Christianity out of Paul's exhortation to the squab- bling Corinthians, to take to no hero-worship of apostles, but to remember the divine supremacy of Christ. Thus does monster hypothesis beget monster hypothesis, and dream circle within dream. Shrewd Paley had more notion of a fact than a whole coUeo-e of these wool-ojatherinsf doctors. One would not like to be tried for his life by a judge bent upon fitting the facts of the case into the Hegelian hypothesis. Now, it is quite certain that the deepest principle pervad- ing the works of Mr Carlyle, — that principle which waits, like a reserve force in the background, to lend aid when any of his particular positions is threatened, — is of that hyi^othe- tic and ontological kind in which the Germans can believe, GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. XXI and the British cannot. Perhaps it is a shade too strong to say that the British positively could not, after any amount of demonstration, believe in Mr Carlyle's fundamental doc- trine ; but it cannot be too strong to say, that it is of a kind ' which no inhabitant of this island permits to jirejudice his mind for or against particular matters of fact. The principle in question is twofold : that man is the highest manifestation and actual presence of God ; and that, by some necessity, for which Mr Carlyle has nowhere accounted, a law of perpetual mutation is impressed upon all those religious beliefs, politi- cal organizations, philosophical systems, whereby the man- god maketh himself known. This is the most exact philo- sophical definition of his belief, and it is at the same time that which most readily assists to a deep practical intelligence of his writings. It is exhibited as held by Mr Carlyle, and the attempt is made to controvert it by arguments cutting to its philosophical roots, in another part of this volume. It would be well if the reader could take that refutation along with him. We are at present, however, concerned only with the practical results of Mr Carlyle's doctrine in their bear- ing upon his authority against the evidence of Christianity. And the point to be noted is this : that, even should it be pleaded that Mr Carlyle's isolated assertions of the incredi- bility of the Christian Hevelation are supported by his whole scheme of first principles, and are therefore to be viewed rather as enunciations of principle than as statements of par- ticular fact, the sole additional support derived to them is in the twofold doctrine mentioned. For instance, in one of the most important passages in his writings, Mr Carlyle declares that Christianity has now lost hold of human belief, and asks, with the impetuous urgency of one who appeals to a first principle, whether it must not therefore be put out of the way. Y.ou may naturally enough allege that the assertion of its having ceased to be believed by men is not only unproved. XXll PREFATORY MOTE : but palpably erroneous, nay, absurd. This, however, is a ground which you will find it necessary to occupy, only if yon concede Mr Carlyle his first principle. Should you refuse to do so, — should you maintain that man neither gave truth to Christianity, nor can take it away, — should you inform him that if you were in a minority of one against the species in believing Christianity, your assurance of its verity would be iio whit affected, — then neither his facts nor his principles can find any point at which to effect lodgment in your mind. The self-evident principle on the strength of which he would have you sweep aside, a priori, the whole historical evidence of Christianity, you discover to be a pantheistic theory which hardly any conceivable reasoning could induce you to believe. We conclude, therefore, that the esoteric mysteries by wliicli Mr Carlyle's affirmations that Christianity is incredible are backed up fail to impart to them any scientific evidence, and will prejudice no sensible or independent mind against the facts of the case. The transition to the most obviously practical characteris- tic of Mr Carlyle's writings will now be easy. It cannot fail to be seen how he should have come to attribute an ethical xSignificance to reverence for great men. Hero-worship is the religion of pantheism. No man has carried it out with more consistency than Mr Carlyle ; no man has more diligently or devoutly reared altars to the great men in whom the univer- sal divinity, diffused in wan effulgence throughout the uni- verse, has been made for him visible and present. Only by perceiving how deeply this hero-worship is embedded in the system of Mr Carlyle's opinions, only by ascertaining its vital connection with his most intimate convictions, can the lan- guage he has used in reference to it appear rational or intel- ligible. The terms of solemnity and emphasis which he has employed to enforce hero-worship befit only the proclamation of a religion. Bvit it is, of course, not to be alleged that Mr GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CAELYLE. XXlll Carlyle lias proposed the literal adoration of great men. Such an idea is out of the question. The influence of his hero- worship has been less express, though exceedingly powerful. In certain particulars, it has not been unniixedly evil. It has led him to study men more earnestly, and to know them more correctly, than any former biographer ; it has led him to rescue from undue depreciation the element of individual human force in history ; it has led him to extol and incul- cate human qualities which, however named, ought to be es- teemed and emulated. On the other hand, it has produced certain effects of a very diiiierent character. It has prevented his pausing at the proper point in the exaltation of the indi- vidual, and made him overlook the capabilities of mankind as a race ; it has blinded him to the worth of homely and household virtues, and to the majesty of the common man ; worst of all, it has caused him to compromise or imperil the objective reality and unity of truth by confounding it with the phases of human opinion. The evil in the works of Mr Carlyle being thus separable, is it not to be desired that the good they contain should be acknowledged and accepted by the Christian world ? It is not well when religion has relaxed its grasp of the leading intellectual phenomena of the day. It least of all becomes the professors of that religion which is not more purely divine than profoundly and comprehensively human, — which defames no natural good, but exalts and transhgiires each in the light which makes all things new, — which clothes with the robe of celestial righteousness no passionless anchoret, no insipid earth-angel, no mouther of thin esoteric sentimentalisms, but the entire man, robust in feeling and faculty, in heart and in- tellect,— to stand aside in blank intolei-ance or ignorant alarm when some original and potent influence in philosophy or morals is being exerted. The most effectual, and surely the most rational and dignified, manner in wliich to counteract XXIV PEEFATORY NOTE : error, is to assimilate that truth with which, as with an ele- ment of binding iron, it has contrived to stubborn its ropes of sand. The graidtation in the world of mind towards dar- ing and powerful intellects would appear to resemble that lav\^ in matter by which the lesser body is attracted tovrards the gTeater. It was not to the depth or accuracy of their rea- sonings that Yoltaire and Rousseau owed the triumph of their infidelity in the last century, but to the general fasci- nation of their brilliancy and originality. Still, it would b€* to despair of humanity to believe that truth, if displayed in its ever-fresh vitality and symmetrical greatness, will not exert a more powerfid infl.uence than falsehood. Yoltaire and Rousseau, in addition to their other advantages, had cer- tain weapons of a really nobler and more Christian charaeteF than any which could be handled by the votaries of decrepit and jDaralyzed Romanism. But there are no weapons from the armoury of truth which cannot be matched and over- matched from the armoury of Christianity ; and by showing that it is in this last armouiy that they are of soundest temper, and that from this alone can be drawn a complete equipment for the soul of man, the trust of mankind in our religion may, under God, be confirmed. Mr Carlyle has offered certain contributions to intellectual civilization of which wise men ought to avail themselves. Well ^^nderstood, this doctrine of respect for great men, upon Avhich he has been for twenty years expatiating, is of high importance. Ui^on a just and loyal appreciation of emi- nently gifted men does the prosperity of mankind, — the be- neficent and harmonious working of all social and political institutions, — in an age of potent and advancing democracy, depend. If Mr Carlyle's teaching on this head has not been articulate or exact, let him yet have the credit of bringing into prominence a life-or-death necessity of the time. In the proclamation, besides, of his central doctrine, — in the bio- GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. XXV graphic delineations to which it has led him, — he has accom- plished much, and opened the way for the accomplishment of more. Winged with glowing human sympathy, aided by keen insight, his imagination has gone like a torch into th© deepening twilight of the past, and thrown a strangely genial and re-animating light upon the faces of the dead. Humo and Gibbon were men of distinguished faculty, superior, pro- bably, in certain qualities of the historian, to Mr Carlyle. But we cannot realize the characters with whom they bring us into a verbal acquaintance as living men. Our sense of kinship with them is dim and faint. Hume had strong sa- gacity, clear conception of much in national existence, and a broad and firm descriptive method. There is a great deal to be learned from his History. But he had a fatal faith in scoundrelism. With remorseless hand he shreds off the highest and brightest flowers in the gardens of time. Hex turns all the rainbows of history into dingy grey. Those high figures, again, which strut along the page of Gibbon, quenching their familiar smile in an austere regard of histo- ric dignity, are they in any vital sense known to us 1 The actions with which their names are associated seem to have no more than a mechanical connection with their individual characters. Mr Carlyle, in the mere worship of that pan- theistic divinity which he has seen shimmering and gleam- ing through all the generations of men, has found celestial fire where Hume saw only the phosphorescence of quackery and falsehood. The same influence vvdiich prevented his ac- cepting any belief as simply and eternally true^ has prevent- ed his denouncing any belief as wholly and at all times false. The avatars of the pantheistic god have been in heroes, not in quacks. Mr Carlyle has gone in quest of his heroes to the forests of the Norsemen, to the deserts of Arabia, strong in the consoling faith that no really great and lasting thing has been done by the mere impostor and villain. With the XXVI PREFATORY NOTE : sympathy of a gi-eat heart, he has found for himself brothers among the mighty of all ages. And in a manner totally dif- ferent from that of Hume or Gibbon, he writes history for, as he declares it to have been made by, his heroes. Every action is rendered exponent of the personal character and life. The inner world of thought, of feeling, of conscience, is opened to us, and the streams of speech and conduct issue from living fountains. Mr Carlyle's Abbot Samson and Cromwell are known to his readers at least as well as their contemporaries; and the monk of the twelfth century, and the Puritan of the seventeenth, become alike realizable, and ad- mit alike of toleration, respect, love. Abbot Samson is as distinct a delineation as Scott's Marmion, and far closer to liistoric fact, though Sir Waiter's portrait, allowing for a few anachronisms, may be truer than is generally allowed. The smile of humour, — genial, sympathetic, appreciative, but still a smile, — with which Mr Carlyle contemplates the Abbot and his ways, hits with marvellous exactness the style for such a subject. The French master of phrases, bent on doing jus- tice to his ancestors, gilds into an absurd mimicry of the j)re- sent their whole mode of life ; the philosophizing historian indulges in a thin contempt, or a still more inane compas- sion ; Mr Carlyle permits the smile at childlike simplicity, but makes us know well that it was the simplicity of strong and venerable men. By calling attention to the moving human forces of history, by insisting that the entire social organization be shown as the expression and vesture of human character and life, Mr Carlyle has pointed to elements of un- surmised freshness, grandeur, and instructiveness, which will probably impart a new character to the whole future litera- ture of the science. Considered strictly as a poet, Mr Car- lyle has, in the last place, claims upon our attention. It has long been my opinion — to be taken here for what it may be worth, since I cannot exhibit all its grounds — that Mr Car- GENIUS AInD influence OF CAELYLE. XXVll lyle was naturally fitted to achieve supreme success in metri- cal composition, and that he has therefore, to an important extent, mistaken his vocation. If you can write in prose, says Mr Caiiyle, do not write in vei-se. The maxim is a half- truth, or perhaps only a very small fraction or splinter of a truth. Poetry ought to be genuine ; bad poetry, being cor- ruption of the best, is intensely detestable ; and rhyming fa- cility now so abounds, that these facts ought to be well re- membered : all this is matter of course. At the same time, when poetry is geimine, it is above price ; and it is a uni- versal law that the natui-al gift must be nursed and cultivated in order to supreme excellence. The pearl is sought in the depths of the sea ; the gold is crushed out of the quai-tz rock : the fine poetic vein may lie deep, and yet yield to proper care the purest metal. The gift of melodious expression Mr Car- lyle rightly considers the distinguishing characteristic of the poet If it is present in any case, it must define the form of mental exertion then and there appropriate, and its neglect will lead to inappropriate and unsafe activity. The iliythmic cadence in many passages of Mr Carlyle's works, and still more the original melody and pure gleams of colour in his few early poems, sufi&ce to prove that he possessed this na- tural gift Had he duly cultivated it, he would have been the greatest poet since Milton. With a faculty of expression on a level with that of Shelley or Tennyson, a more vigorous intellectual structure than the former, and a broader and more active sympathy witli life than the latter, he would have done things in the poetry of real life, in the epic or dramatic province, of a kind which has not been exampled since the his- torical dramas of Shakspeare. The false philosophy, and the false theology, which have spread contagion throughout his prose, would thus have been deprived of half their perilous influence. As it is, it will not be thought extravagant to define his History of the French Revolution as the greatest XXVIU TKEFATORY NOTE : imaginative work of a narrative kind produced in the present century. So Homer woukl have written, had Homer written in prose. Carlyle s language is uniformly tliat of the poetic in- ventor ; not gleaned from classic authors or standard diction- aries, but elaborated as the great painter mixes colours to bring out his peculiar tints ; and no writers, except Homer and Shakspeare, have been able to put so much into a single stroke as Carlyle. And if, in tlie recollection that Mr Car- lyle is simply a poetic artist who has written in j^rose, we decline to attach a scientific value to his hinted estimate of the historical evidence of Chi'istianity, we can safely respond to every pure and exalted sentiment struck out in the sweep of his poetic inspiration. Never sceptic saw so far into the meaning of Christianity as Mr Carlyle ; never sceptic set so generously the Christian hero at the top of greatness ; never, in whispered insinuation or sidelong sneer, has he done the faintest irreverence to that .Divine One whom Christians wor^ ship. From such a man we need not turn away when he ear- nestly enforces truths of natural religion, of which Christians re- quire at times to be reminded, as well as those that are without. But Mr Carlyle has furnished no exception to the law that truth loses in alliance with error. If for no other reason, it is "well to form a distinct conce2:)tion of the gooel that is in his writings, in order that it may be clearly felt how great has been the injury inflicted upon this mighty genius by rejection of Christianity. When I reflect what Mr Carlyle might have been if he had been a Christian ; l)ow the harmonious completeness of Scriptural morals woukl have replaced the narrow intensity of his enforcement of one or two moral doc- trines ; how trust in One, sitting over the floods, King for ever, would have calmed and heartened him ; how all the brilliancies of his eloquence, all the fervours of liis imagina- tion, would have been bound by Christian love, as with an azure girdle, into deeper and stiller beauty ; how the hectic . GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. XXIX fiiisli, the distempered burning, would have been taken from uU he has done ; how he would have learned to understand quiet times, to remember that mere strength, though of the Muses born, is but a fallen angel, and to recognise religion in the peaceful household as well as when " painted upon ban- ners j" it seems to me as if I could find no such striking proof that the Bible is the one adequate temple for the soul of man, and that only at the feet of Christ can the gi'eatest find rest. It remains that I indicate one or two of the more import- ant particulars in which " hero-worship" has been more than a name, in which it has been a deteriomting and perverting influence, in the intellectual activity of Mr Carlyle. Unduly exalting the force and value of individual men, he has overlooked, to an extent sufficient of itself to invalidate his claims as a philosophic thinker, the associative capacities of the race. Hume speaks of " that state which distinguishes a civilized monarchy, and which enables the Government, by the force of its laws and institutions alone, without any ex- traordinary capacity in the sovereign, to maintain itself in order and tranquillity." Had Hume lived to w^itness the French Revolution, it might have suggested to his mind one or two rather grave reflections upon this remark ; and we shall agree that, be the sovereignty placed in king or Parlia- ment, the State cannot possibly be safe and prosperous unless the ruling power be gifted with high capacity. But so far as Hume expressed the ancient and imconquerable aspiration after sovereignty of law, as contrasted with slavish subjection to a man or men, he was surely aiming at a great truth ; and most inhabitants of this island will be inclined to hold that the state he describes has been illustriously realized in the monarchy of Great Britain. Mr Garlyle's most charac- teristic writings constitute a sustained and emphatic denial of any such possibility as that which Hume supposes, and of which Tennyson has sung. Parliaments, polities, constitu- XXX PREFATORY NOTE : tions, all yield to liis hero-despot. In order to make good his position, he would require to prove that the most philoso- phic half of language must be discarded ; and he does not shrink from the other necessity which it imposes upon him, of regarding as mere mistake and bewilderment the grand tendencies and aims of modern civilization. Through the same intense and exclusive appreciation of men of pre-eminent or peculiar capacity, Mr Carlyle has in another way wronged the mass of men, and, in wronging them, has entailed severe retributive injury on himself. He has failed to estimate rightly the value of common human testi- mony. The evidence of gravitation is not so strong as the word of one honest man. He is poor indeed who cannot num- ber among his friends several whom he would believe if they told him that they had seen the blind receive their sight, the deaf hear, the dumb speak. The disciples of Christ were men whose testimony was adequate to settle that point for ever. And what of their Master ? Strange that Mr Carlyle should not perceive it to be the most incredible of all incredibilities, that even such a man^ as he discerns Jesus of Nazareth to have been, could have said falsely that he raised the dead ! And if, apart from all question of inspiration, it is not a historical fact that Jesus Christ laid claim to miraculous power, we need not attempt to ascertain any fact of anti- quity whatever. It is, in truth, deeply remarkable how Mr Carlyle's exag- gerated estimate of the heroic in man has prevented him from doing substantial justice even to those whom he has most elo- quently eulogized. "While according them a worship as heroes with which they would have dispensed, he has denied them that respect as men which they would modestly have claimed. His Luther, his Cromwell, his Knox, believed what to him are incredible delusions. The words of truth, which they trusted to have been written in the characters of eternity, GENIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. XXXI have been bleached out for him by the rains and suns of two or three hundred summers. It is not that they were unac- quainted with certain facts which have been laid open by modern research, that they failed to anticipate the march of science, or to forecast the discoveries of a criticism which w^e may suppose, for argument's sake, to be sound. The doctrine of the atonement, as understood by Luther and Cromwell, is accepted at this day by millions in England, Scotland, and America. Sin is a reality or a delusion to Mr Carlyle, exact- ly in the sense in which it was a reality or delusion to Knox and Bunyan. A pardon given by God to an agitated con- science, which nothing finite could appease, — a holiness of which the distemjiered soul could not, except in Christ, have firm assurance, — and the unspeakable peace which visited even the tried hearts of Luther and Cromwell with dawn- streaks of the light of heaven, — these are exactly the same now as then. Looked fairly in the face, and in its best form, admiration for men is a thing to be cautiously commended and guard- edly applied. The instruction and guidance which it is just and noble to accept, lie near to the instruction and guidance which are made the disguise of slavish imbecility or ignoble indolence. The Bozzy is essentially a small and mean crea- ture, excuse him as you may. Men have in all ages been ready enough to cower under Boman Catholicisms, Benaissances, Napoleonisms, and other forms of hero-worship or scoundrel- worship. To separate principles from men, to prize the for- mer without permitting their exaggeration or perversion through association with human passion and fallibility, is among the most momentous problems for men and nations, and one which, in religion, in politics, in art, they have been by no means successful in solving. Only by recognising the unchanging grandeirr of moral law, and by acknowledging a common and sole subjection to one Infinite God, can men XXXI 1 GEXIUS AND INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE. safely and honourably enjoy the aid of their fellows. " Turn thou from man, whose breath is in his nostrils, for wherein is he to be accounted of ?" The present seems, after all, to be a strange time for bid- ding men trust to the light within, or to seek for its clear shining in men of genius. Napoleon v/as a man of genius ; yet much a villain. Goethe was a man of genius ; and he wrote the Roman Elegies^ the most deliberately and malig- nantly immoral compositions known to me. Edgar Poe was a man of genius,— the greatest poetical genius, probably, that America has produced ; and what a melancholy despicability of sin and misery was his history ! Heinrich Heine was a man of genius ; perhaps the very greatest lyrist of a language whose genius is intensely lyrical ; a soul instinct with me- lody, whose every smile and tear was music ; and Heine has left behind him samples of blasphemous profanity which are a disgrace to the species. These are not exceptional names in the annals of recent genius. The association of brilliant genius with some intellectual extravagance or some desolat- ing vice has rather been the rule of these days. It is well to know how men justify their actions to themselves ; it is well to widen our horizon of sympathy and tolerance. But has Mr Garlyle exercised sufficient caution in bringing sym- pathy and pity into proximity with crime 1 Is it not well to see virtue in its objective reality, and vice in its unveiled deformity % Is it safe to be weighing inducements to cruelty and calculating palliations of debauchery, to yield to admir- ing impulses in presence of a blood-stained Dan ton (rather a darker portrait of whom might be truer than Mr Garlyle's), or to find a heroic anniliilator of shams in a thorough-going blackguard like Mirabcau % " If the light in you is dark- ness, how OTeat is that darkness !" INTEODUCTORY. In perusing The Tale of Goethe, which Mr Carlyle not un- warrantably supposes to be an allegorical presentation of cer- tain conceptions of its author touching the characteristics and tendencies of our time, attention can scarce fail to be arrested by the destiny there appointed for the Christian Religion. In the Temple of the Future, the hut of the fisher- man, to which former and darker generations had looked for aid in every grand emergency of existence, still found a place. The light of reason, entering in, breathed through it a new life and an immortal beauty. " By virtue of the Lamp locked up in it, the hut had been converted, from the inside to the outside, into solid silver. Ere long, too, its form changed ; for the noble metal shook aside the accidental shape of planks, posts, and beams, and stretched itself out into a noble case of beaten ornamented workmanship. Thus a fair little temple stood erected in the middle of the large one, or, if you will, an Altar worthy of the Temple. " The whole passage of which this forms a part is perhaps the finest illustration to be found of a certain wide-spread and multiform intellectual pheno- menon of the day. An attitude is assumed towards Chris- tianity which may for a moment be regarded as one of de- ference and admiration, but which a more careful considera- tion shows to be determined radically by contempt. The se- A 2 INTRODUCTORY. rene worshipper of reason or of man will concede the Chris- tian Keligion that polite and patronizing tolerance with which a generous victor treats the distinguished prisoner whose sword he has hung on the wall of his tent. The significance of Christianity as a fact in history, the superiority of its moral code, the depth of its ethical philosophy, will be eloquently exhibited, if only it is tacitly allowed that strict belief in its doctrines is no longer consistent with high intellectual cul- ture, and actual submission to its authority no longer com- patible with healthful and vigorous intellectual life. Cliris- tianity, we are told, is the highest thing man has done ; it is the most excellent in the general family of religions ; it has voiced the deepest emotions of the human breast. Language displaying all the sweetness, force, and gorgeousness of poetr}^ has been woven into wreaths to crown it ; intellect, wide in its comprehensiveness, and imposing in its power, has offered it a vassal throne. And how are Christians bound to receive the haughty condescension of this praise ? A legend from the times of the spread of Christianity furnishes an example for their guidance. Offers, it is declared, were made to the professors of the Religion of Jesus of a kind which seemed flattering and favourable. They might have obtained for their Master a niche in the Pantheon of the ancient world ; they might have sheltered their faith under the wide wings, drop- ping gold and manna, of the Roman eagles. A refusal on their part to accept the proffered distinction might well ap- pear to those by whom the proposal was made an instance of intolerable and infatuated pride. That The Crucified of Judea should be deemed mightier than the Jupiter of the Capitol, — that the words of a few poor fishermen should be esteemed more worthy than the ancient voice of the Sybil, and the mystic whisperings of a thousand sacred groves, — this was an idea to astonish and incense the Pagan world. But the de- claration of the smitten Galileans was explicit and unchanging : INTRODUCTORY. 3 The Gospel of Jesus is everything or it is nothing ; if true at all, every god and oracle must vanish before it. To the in- sidious homage paid in many a cultivated cii'cle to Christi- anity at present, our answer can be none other than that which was given of old. Christianity lives a Divine life, or dies. Until the concession is made that it is Divine, in no qualified sense, but to the express intent that it came down from heaven, no a2?2woximation is made to what it demands. It cannot, however, be unattended with important results to prove that, viewed whether from the side of theory or of life, this contemptuous assumption of the obsoleteness of Christianity is gratuitous and indefensible. On the side of theory, there has no moral or spiritual truth emerged in the world of culture, which it does not either embrace in its own scheme, or transcend by a truth that is nobler and dee^^er. In actual existence, it is still the basis of moral and practical life to men of unquestioned integrity, and of robust, advanced, and liberal intellect ; and it is the animating principle in so- cial combinations of a vigorous and natural kind. In the nineteenth century, we have nothing in the way of spiritual and religious truth to add to what was given us by the pea- sants who followed Christ among the hills of Judea ; and it must be in distinct contemplation of the fact, that eighteen centuries of civilization have failed to eclipse tlie light which they professed to have received from heaven, that we pro- nounce this declaration of theirs a lie. Proof of these pro- positions it is my object in the following pages to present. It is proposed, first, briefly to review, in connection both with the individual and the social life, as embraced in the Christian scheme, two of the most conspicuous phases of re- cent intellectual activity, antagonistic to Christianity; and, next, to exhibit the living power of Christianity, in the indi- vidual and the society, by means of a series of illustrative biographies. PART I. THEORETIC STATEMENT. THE IXDIYIDUAL LIFE. It is partly because of the elaboration and extent of its de- fences, but much more because it is conspicuously a mani- festation of present intellectual activity, that the philosophical system of M. Comte has been selected to represent here the atheistic theory of man, his duties and his destinies. The rapid advance of physical science within the last hundred years has rendered it possible to rear a structure of ascertain- ed fact and law in science more comprehensive and imposing than any which could have been previously formed. By many minds the largeness of system will ever be mistaken for the stability of tmth. With a logic perhaps somewhat more thoroughgoing and consistent, and a scientific domain for its application considerably extended, the philosophy of M. Comte shares the essential characteristics and the incur- able feebleness of all materialist systems. But it is open to no dispute that the positive philosophy is a prominent growth of recent speculation, or that its disciples assume airs of enlightened contempt in reference to Christianity. The axiom v/hich must lie at the basis of all systems of materialism is found at the basis of that of M. Comte. This axiom is, that sense is the sole source of evidence and the sole ground of belief. It immediately follows that the 8 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. only sphere of real existence is that of physical phenomena, Man can do no more than classify the facts and sequences which sense obser\^es ; the immaterial world becomes a mere fiction of thought ; and an immortal life, and a living God, are alike shown to have been products of the "young imagi- nation" of the race. It is in its profound and comprehensive atheism that the Positive Philosophy has any distinctive character. It sets out with an express negation of all that is unseen. The very question of theism is excluded as one of the " problems of our infancy." The positive method pushes it quietly, and as a matter of course, from its path. The ancient Jewish high priest wore on his forehead, as a sign before which armies and emperors shoidd bow down, the mystic name of Jehovah ; this philosophy bears as its badge the express and conclusive legend, There is no God. 'No important qualification of this statement is rendered necessary by the fact, that the dotage of Comte bore fruit in what he called a religion and an Mre Supreme. It is some- thing that even the hai^l and arid nature of Comte became conscious of an inhuman and intolerable vacuity in the re- gion of mere phenomenal logic. It is something to see even Comte driven to piteous extremities in filling up his concep- tion of humanity, by the theory which makes man merely a creature of sense. It is pleasing to know that Comte had a heart, and could feel the tender majesty of home. But that he ever passed beyond the limits of atheism, cannot be for a moment maintained. When he felt the fountains of his na- ture drying up, — when the dim sense awoke within him of the necessity of a celestial economy as counterpart to the sys- tem of earthly relations, — he did not reverently own the sa- credness and authority of the instinct, and bend the knee to that God of whom it whispered. ^ He never wavered in his pride. He turned once more to his logic. He marked off THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. U a certain number of his conceptions, and named them a sub- jective Etre Supreme. He acknowledged the want of a God ; but, instead of turning to the Living One, lie set up a graven image, which he avovjed not to be objective, that is, not to be alive. His construction of a "religion" was the consum- mation of his atheism. Mr Lewes, in putting in a plea in arrest of the verdict of atheism against Comte, appears to be unaware of the extent of the legitimate defences of that theory. The effect of atheis- tic belief will, beyond question, be to shrivel up all the finer affections of the heart, and to relax every bond of morality. But it is not necessary for the logic of atheism to do this. Not only could there be an atheistic religion of the affections, on the model of Comte' s, but an atheistic religion of conscience, in which our ethical judgments were treated as jDurely and ultimately autonomic. But were these two combined and elaborated, so as to result in a scheme of atheism incompa- rably grander than that of Comte, there would still be an in- finite chasm between it and any scheme of theism. " Be- sides the religion of humanity," says Mr Lewes, "there must be a Keligion of the Universe ; besides the conception of hu- manity, we need the conception of a God as the Infinite Life, from whom the Universe proceeds, not in alien indifference — not in estranged subjection — but in the fulness of abound- ing Power, as the incarnation of resistless Activity." This is, indeed, irreconcileable with atheism ; but it is strange that Mr Lewes, thus proved to be a theist, should have been be- trayed even by a commendable kindness of heart into a mis- take as to the real character of the views of Comte. The strength of positivism, so far as even apparent strength can be asserted of it, does not lie in the fantastic vagaries of that "religion" of which Comte, in his latter days, de- clared himself the high priest, but in the emphasis of his early assertion that there is no province either for faith or 10 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. for speculation except the physical. There is a clearness and simplicity in the methods and results of physical science which cannot fail to convey a certain satisfaction to the mind. The achievements of inductive research since the days of Bacon have surpassed the forecastings of intellect and the dreams of imagination. The prospect to which the positiv- ist can point of advancement in the same direction, when every human energy is devoted to earth, and concentrated in time, may be rendered august and magnificent. Let us suppose that man, distracted by no whisper of immortal des- tinies, has for centuries been occupied in tilling and survey- ing the world in which he dwells. A lordly spectacle pre- sents itself to the eye of imagination. AgTicultural science lias done its work. The most rugged soil has yielded to the skill of man. Where once spread the barren and unwhole- some marsh, the golden corn is waving, or the rich meadow, the bee humming among its flowers, the sheep and cattle straying upon its knolls, smiles in the noonday sun. To the top of the mountain the plough has been carried, and the eternal snows and storms have seen their domain curtailed by the power of chemistry and mechanjcs. Commerce, aid- ed by the powders of observation and the genius of invention, lias been urged to supreme development. The tempest of the deep has been bridled and subdued by man ; science has w^atched the monster in the homeless tracts where he sought his prey, and learned to trace his footstep, to know his ap- proach, to baulk his might. A universal free trade and per- fected locomotion distribute the productions of all climates. The Positive Philosophy has not remitted its more strictly intellectual labours. Every phenomenon has been referred to its class ; every sequence has been noted ; and the regu- larities of matter have been arranged under tlie name of laws. Statistical science has educated society to the utmost limit of self-consciousness, perfecting the theory, and regulating THE I^JDIVIDUAL LIFE. • 11 the action, of civilization. The museum of the world has been furnished, the storehouse of the world has been filled ; the movements of the stars have been set forth in geometric diagrams ; the Positive Philosophy is complete. Extend and embellish this perspective of the future as far as you may, in consistence with M. Comte's principle, and it must still be alleged that the theory of positive atheism dis- crowns man and takes the light off the universe. What is all this wealth, what all this power, which it offers 1 They are at best but the bribe which earth tenders to the human being, to induce him to deny his celestial origin and to barter his spiritual inheritance. What is all that fabric of Positive Science, rising in its still, cold magnificence, cover- ing earth and shutting out heaven 1 It is a magnificent tomb for the spirit of man. Adorn it as you will, let the flags of all the sciences float over it, it is but an ornamented grave. And if you tell me that living and reasoning crea- tures move about within it, I will refiLse to give the name of men to those who declare themselves " cunning casts in clay." It would be a false delicacy which scrupled to aflax to that order of human intellect which can accept the creed of atheistic materialism the brand of irredeemable and ever- lasting inferiority. It does not penetrate beyond the most superficial film of things ; it does not perceive that the tremu- lous radiance which shimmers through the veil of finitude has its source in the light-fountains, dark through excess of bright- ness, of the outer infinite, of the eternal God. Religion, were it but a delusion, would outweigh in value the utmost possible realization of the philosophy of Comte. Where it comes, all waxes dim : its foot blackens the stars. For why should we care to look to those stars, if they are but the mockery of our little day of life ? Why should we delight to search into the beauty of the earth around us, if it yields but a table and a grave, and has instilled into our veins the 12 • THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. strange maddening poison of a capacity to dream of a better fate 1 Physical science itself, which, when it is the humble interpretation of a material nature that manifests the great Immaterial Cause, is to be prized and cultivated, is covered with contumely by alliance with atheism ; in the words of Chalybseus, it becomes either the handmaid of a poor curio- sity, or a "partner of trade." According to the Positive Philosophy, religion was the first great human delusion, me- taphysics the second. The course of humanity has, it pro- claims, been that of the North American Indian, who, as he imbibes the ideas and acquires the habits of civilization, lays aside, one by one, the bits of painted glass, the strings of beads, and the gaudy feathers, which were erewhile his glory. Shall we not rather say that, on its hypothesis, the* course of humanity is to be that of the monarch who ruled well, and looked proudly, in his youth and manhood, but on whom the dotage of age came, and who laid aside his dia- dem, unclasped his royal robe, and shut himself up in a grave which he had hewn for himself in a rock? How deeply melancholy is the life of man if he has no in- heritance in the past or the future ; if he has no assurance of immortal existence ; if there are no mighty nations of the dead ; if the friends he has loved are nothing more than clay or dust, and betvv'een him and annihilation there is but a breath ! How all the dewy umbrage of his sympathies would wither, the fountains of his heart dry up ! A man comes upon the world with mighty powers, capable of exerting an in- fluence which will outlive himself by thousands of years. He stands amid his own generation, but his mind's dwelling is all time ; on his own little world, but his mind's dwelling is immensity. He acts, or thinks, or sings. If he has planned an Alexandria or a Babylon, he must pass away ere its streets and quays are ranged in the order in which his mind's eye saw them ; if he has desolated realms, he may have to depart THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 13 before nature, weeping over tliem in rain, and smiling on them in sunshine, has wrapped them again in soothing green. If he has pondered half his lifetime on the condition and destinies of man, and constructed some proud scheme for the advance- ment of his race, he must be gone ere any save its initial ef- fects are witnessed. If he have sung some lofty song, a Di- vine Comedy or Paradise Lost, which will take the ear of the ages, and be listened to by many generations, he must him- self lie down and die when perhaps only a few bosoms have thrilled to its music. Man here has time only to do his work and dig his grave. If he can believe that the buried gene- rations have gone onward to another state of existence, and if he can himself look foi-ward to a protracted life, in which he will retain his personality, his connection with humanity, his capacity to know and to be known, to love and to be loved, and that interest in all things human which he had while on earth, he may work in the sense of inducements truly sub- lime. But how he shrivels in the glance of the Positive Phi- losophy ! Man the animal, even the comparing and gene- ralising animal, were a pitiful and anomalous thing ; man the spirit wanders through eternity, and is formed verily in the image of God. As the distinct belief in a future existence, — an existence conscious, personal, objective, — is the necessary complement of man's nature, so far as it awakens hopes and discovers possi- blities, so the belief in a living God is necessary as the comple- ment of his nature, so far as it aspires after holiness, and forms the conception of duty. There must not be taken from man the belief in an Infinite Being ; in that belief alone can his whole nature be developed and displayed ; thus alone does he find the humility that does not degrade him, and the honour that makes him not proud; the faith that clothes him in strength, and the reverence that breathes over his face a soften- ed majesty ; the love that makes him a fellow of angels, and 14 - THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. the fear that reminds him he is still on the earth ; the blessing that breathes tenderly on his pathway here, and the hope that beckons from the golden walls. There is a beauty in the face of man when his God smiles on it, as on the face of the babe in his cradle on which a father looks in joy, which must not be taken away. There is an earnestness in the heart and life of a man when he knowsthat the eye of the Eternal is on him, which must not be foregone. There is an eternity of consequence in every act of an immortal, which he cannot deny and conti- nue to work. The finite being staggers in bewilderinent when separated from the Infinite ; he cannot stand alone in the universe ; he cannot defame his spirit without darken- ing it, he cannot scorn faith without weakening reason, he cannot deny God and reach the full strength and expansion of his faculties as a man. Coleridge says truly, that religion makes all glorious on which it looks. How poor the edu- cation for my highest faculties, obtained by going round the world to learn in what order its phenomena are ranged, and to discover as my highest reward new food to eat and new raiment wherewithal I may be clothed ! How effectual and sublime is the education I receive in the surve}^, if every ob- ject I meet is gifted with a power of exhaustless suggestion, and every leaf of the forest and star of the sky is a commis- sioned witness for my God, and no careless trill of woodland melody, no chance gleam of sunlight over the fountain that leaps from the crag, and, reckless as it is, must stay to re- flect in its rainbowed loveliness the beauty of heaven, no wild wave tossing joyous on the pathless deep, but has pov/er to call into action my highest and holiest powers, of wonder, of reverence, of adoration ! These considerations are in strict accordance with the superb argument with which Kant concludes his Critique of the Prac- tical Reason. The vista of a future life, touched with the ever- brightening radiance of immortal holiness and joy ; and the THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 15 existence of a Divine Being, combining infinite power with moral perfection ; these were discerned by the sage of Koenigs- berg to be the grand indispensable postulates of the practical reason, without which the realization of man's highest good is impossible. In connection, indeed, with this whole question, the dic- tates of instinct, of reason, and of feeling, lie close together. The testimony of the race against atheism has been so una- nim-ous that, to conclude it erroneous, would be to bring in a verdict of hopeless imbecility, of unaccountable, incurable, aimless madness, against mankind. If there is no world of unseen realities, the last lingering grandeurs of savage life, and the loftiest aspirations of the poet and the sage, become alike unmeaning and ridiculous. Where untutored man acts in the mere strength of uatvn^e, we are met by spectacles which, however sad, possess one element of sublimity in that they bear witness to man's belief in immaterial relations, in spiritual existence ; at the other end of the scale of humanity, where the loftiest intellects of the race rest in the solitude of greatness, our experience is the same. Had I visited the banks of some lone Indian river, while the Hindoo supersti- tion still reigned supreme, I should have found that I had not yet reached a gi-ade of society in which an invisible world was denied or forgotten, in which man could name no motive strong enough to silence the remonstrances or to outbid the offers of sense. I might have seen the widow brought out to die upon the funeral pile of her husband. I might have wept over that fair form, in its simple beauty, where the blush and the dimple of girlish hope were just yielding to the matron smile, and deemed it all too lovely for the em- brace of fire. But even there I should have had a haughty consolation, and I might have gazed with pride in my melan- choly, because that there, too, the human spirit asserted its supremacy over pain and death, and because even there, for 1 6 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. duty and devotion, a weak woman could die. On the other hand, there can be no doubt as to the spontaneous and indig- nant recoil of those minds which the acclamations of the race pronounce the greatest and best, from that universal blasting negative which distinguishes the Positive Philosophy. While men gaze in revering pride towards Plato, and honour the lofty contempt with which Pichte looked down upon the joys of sense, while there is rapture in the eye of Poetry, and ma- jesty on the brow of Philosophy, sight will not prevail against faith, sense will not, with its exhalations, choke the spirit. Your light Anacreons, and careless Horaces, and frivolous Moores, may continue to sing ; your Gibbons and Humes may still work ; your system-builders, with ears deafened by their own hammering, and backs bent with stooping to their own toil, will not cease to build ; but no Homer or Dante, no Shakespere or Milton, no Coleridge, and, I shall even add, no Shelley, will sing under the auspices of the Positive Philo- sophy ; your Fichte, your Carlyle, your De Quincey, your Tennyson, your Ruskin, will refuse to serve nature on such conditions ; they will throw up their commissions at once. What men have deemed best deserving of the name of thought would expire. " Why thought ? To toil, and eat, Then make our bed iu darkness, needa no thought." We have been told that immortality inspires the lyric Muse ; that it is the light in the distance which kindles her eye ; but the Positive Philosophy would turn her song into a funeral dirge. Quotation after quotation might be made from poetry, in indefinitely extended succession, of appeal from this theory, and assertion of a higlier lot for man. Young exclaims, as if in anger, " Were then capacities divine conferr'd, As a mock diadem, in savage sport. Rank insult of our pompous povert7, Which reaps but pain, from seeming claims so fair f THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 17 Shelley, with all his profession of atheism, shrinks startled from the brink of annihilation : — " Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword burnt up before the sheath By sightless lightning ?" Tennyson expressly alleges he would not stay in a world where the demonstration of the Positive Philosophy was com- plete : he would not confess himself and his fellows to be " cunning casts in clay :" — " Let science prove we are, and then "What matters science unto men, At least to me ? I would not stay." In the following stanza he again defines man on the hypo- thesis that he is no more than an animal, and has no more to enjoy or look to than the pleasures of sense : — " No more? a monster, then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, "Were mellow music match' d with him." In a poem by Coleridge, which does not appear to be very well known, a general estimate is made of the absurdity and contradiction which are all remaining to man when he has denied his immaterial and immortal existence : — * ' If dead, we cease to be ; if total gloom Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom. Whose sound and motion not alone declare. But are their whole of being ! If the breath Be life itself, and not its task and tent. If even a soul like Milton's can know death ; O Man ! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant. Yet drone-hive strange of phantom pui-poses ! Surplus of nature's dread activity, Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finish'd vase, Retreating slow, with meditative pause. She form'd with restless hands unconsciously ! Blank accident ! nothing's anomaly ! If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state. Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy feai-s. The counter- weights !— Thy laughter and thy tears Mean but themselves, each fittest to create B 18 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. Afld to repay the other ! "Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ? Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, "Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of image, ghost of ghostly elf. That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold ? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad ! he glad ! be neither ! seek or shun ! Thou hast no reason why ! Thou can'st have none ; Thy being's being is a contradiction." This reference to the effects of the Positive Philosophy, and this appeal to the testimony of mankind concerning it, are intended to bear a strict argumentative value. They prove it not to correspond to the legitimate and authorita- tive conception formed by man of his nature and destinies. But it may be useful to subject its fundamental position to at least a partial examination under the strict forms of philosophic method. The Positive Philosophy includes in one sentence of aboli- tion all metaphysic and all religion. The ontological reali- ties which metaphysic requires as the groundwork of pheno- mena, and the living God in whom religion finds the ulti- mate source of all moral law, it alike denies. In the last resort this negative becomes one, and amounts to an absolute and all-comprehending elimination of immaterial agency or influence from the frame of things. A man can therefore bring it immediately beneath the eye of his reason, by a calm and strict interrogation of consciousness, whether he is able, first, to believe that all the eflfects, to vnt, all the phenomena, he sees, are the result of no eflicient, ^o^(;er-implying cause, and, second, to believe this cause to be material The unchangeable canon of reason, by which man seeks a cause for every efiect, is that in obedience to which all philoso- phy, physical as well as metaphysical, has come into existence. "I am convinced," says Mr J. S. Mill, "that any one accustomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly exert his facul- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. ] 9 ties for the purpose, will, when his imagination has once learnt to entertain the notion, find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one, for instance, of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, events may suc- ceed one another at random, without any fixed law," Even supposing that we could conceive phenomena thus to succeed without fixed law, — even though no order appeared in their succession, — we could not possibly divest ourselves of the conviction that each succeeding event had a cause. To the flickering play of effect, instinct would instantly adjust a cor- responding capriciousness, but a constant efficiency, of power. How would the mind of man act in such a Avorld as Mr Mill supposes % It would at once attempt to pierce beyond what was seen. It would exhaust itself in endeavours to assign unity of cause to the changing show. The means it would adopt to reach unity could be none other than classification ; and if, as is the supposition, there w^ere no similarities or dissi- milarities to render classification possible, it would not, in- deed, believe the effects causeless, but would recoil in paralysis from a w^orld in which the initial operations of the understand- ing were impossible. Abstract, on the other hand, the im- pelling causal conviction of reason, and a similar result is in- stantaneously, and in any conceivable world, arrived at. Did it not strike Mr Mill that the world he imagines answers closely to our earth as it lay before the first man who ever philosophized; still more closely to our earth as it is known to the totally iminquiring savage ; and with absolute exact- ness to our earth as it presents itself to Mr Mill's dog % A seeming chaos of phenomena is the material which our world at first ofiered to the eye of philosophy. A sentient being placed in it, possessing no instinctive conviction that phenomenal ef- fect implied cause, could never have made a step in its arrange- ment under the unities of law. Identities of effect might for ever have flitted before his eye ; but the idea of effect 20 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. was foreign to him ; the sign stood for notliing ; and ten thou- sand repetitions of the meaningless symbol could not suggest a step towards unity. When every eifect brought with it an assertion of cause, when it was instinctively felt that ten thou- sand identities of effect must count one in power, the path to- wards the unity of pliilosophy was entered upon. That physical philosophy did not originate in, and is not sustained by, sense alone, requires, in fact, no further proof than the case of the lower animals. They possess the sensuous instruments of in- duction ; but the ordinance of cause they know not ; and it is, in consequence, for ever impossible for them to forge a link in that chain of science which is formed by the human un- derstanding, impelled by the faiths of reason, and employing the instruments of sense. And if the instinct of cause can- not be relinquished, even in conception, without a complete paralysis of human thought, causal power must surely be ac- cepted as one of those facts of real existence which are attested by the ultimate and irrefragable laws of our constitution. The fact of cause being established, the next inquiry is, whether reason can the more readily accept a material or an immaterial cause. If consciousness is carefully interrogated, it will pronounce nothing more directly and abruptly offensive to reason than the idea of matter originating anything. We can- not dissociate the idea of origination from will, thought, mind. If there is one notion by v/hich we define matter more than another, it is that it i'A powerless. So importunate, so inextin- guishable, is this instinct, that even a Comte will forget himself into saying that causes are " inaccessible;" a concession that they are at least not to be identified with any processes of mat- ter. Why is it that the rudest sailor never imagines for a mo- ment that the magnet, the cause of whose motion no philosopher can explain, moves itself ? And do we not find this irresistible propulsion towards an immaterial cause acting with the law of causality in the production of philosophy 1 Was it not because THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 21 the human mind conld not possibly rest in matter as the cause of the changes, the varieties, the very existence, of matter, that it subjected nature to the inquisition of observation and of in- duction 1 Ancient philosophy passed from broader to broader generalization of material agency, until it found itself in the presence of one immaterial Being. However it procures the idea of one mental cause, — whether from a Plato or a Mo- hammed,— the human mind accepts it with natural spontane- ity, and rests in it with infinite consolation. In our own time, the subordinate unities of physical agency have been made the subject of far more complete classification than in former ages. But instead of discovering anything in matter to respond to our instinct of cause, physical science has merely extended the proof that no such material entity exists. The/act of efllcient cause is still indispensable to the logic of induction ; the association of power with mhid is as urgent a demand of our reason as of old. Shall we then accept the classified regularities of the Positive Philosophy for our perfect theorem of the uni- verse 1 If the sage of the early time looked upon the ma- terial world, with its mysterious renovations, with its involved and awful forces, with the flushings of its ethereal, ever- changing beauty, and yet refused to find it more than the re- vealing of an infinite spirit behind, — if the " deep-hearted son of the wilderness" saw in the glancing of the stars above the Arabian deserts only the manifestation of immaterial power, only the writing of the name of Allah, — shall we rest satis- fied with the few lines of system that physical inquirers have drawn across the face of the world, and seek no more to ap- proach an Infinite Spirit ? Because we can trace somewhat farther than our fathers the ramifications of the great system of phenomena towards the unity of law, — because we can fol- low one or two of the branches of the world-tree towards the mighty stem of cause, — are we therefore to deny that any cause exists 1 We now know nature better than before : but •2'i THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. this is surely no reason why we should extinguish that faith which makes the knowledge of nature precious, the laith that it showeth forth the gloiy of God. It is not necessary, it would not perhaps be possible, to treat with closeness any problems of the individual life in con- nection with the Positive Philosophy. We have to pass into a higher region before such, except in their primary and rudest forms, present themselves. But the natural, and, in the long iTin, the inevitable effect of the positive negation of belief upon individual character has been rendered matter of simple and easy inference ; and if we discover that the problem of the individual character is solved by Christianity, in a way in- finitely superior even to that of a far purer and loftier philo- sophy, the conclusion against the positive school will be a for- tiori clear and decisive. The pantheistic view of man and his destinies, which is now to occupy our attention, contrasts with that of the school we have been contemplating in comparative indistinctness of theory and comparative potency in life. The strength of positivism lies in the icy clearness of its science ; the strength of modern pantheism lies in its vivid and exultant apprecia- tion of living energy, and commanding will, and those mighty emotional forces which heave and asritate the being from a region far deeper than that of the logical understanding. In the works of Fichte, in certain of those of Goethe, and, above all, in some of those of Carlyle, the great spiritual beliefs of humanity are presented with an urgency of assertion, with a proud impatience of controversy, with an assumption of inhe- rent and imperial authority, the mere splendour of whose burn- ing is sufficient to melt the thin frostwork which the positivist argumentation draws along the mind. The essential position of this school is, that man is a manifestation of God. Originally determined by the philosophy of Kant to an intense realiza- tion of the elements of man's moral nature, it has substan- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFK 23 tially obliterated tlie distinction between the liuman and the Divine, without consciously or avowedly abandoning the facts of conscience and of freedom. In Fichte's Way to the Blessed Life, the identification of the Divine and the human is scientifically expounded, the Divine essence being repre- sented as taking upon itself by necessity the form of exist- ence, and being individualized in men. It would be incon- sistent with the scope of this work, and would entail too large demands upon readers, to quote largely from this book of Fichte's, or to exhibit in detail its train of reasoning. Suffice it to say, that Fichte, with emphatic reiteration, de- nies substantial existence to any but the absolute being, the absolute ego. It is a mistake to consider the Fichtean egoism atheistic. As a philosophic system, it may be argued that it does not solve the problem of human or phenomenal exist- ence ; it may be argued also, that it ofiers no real proof either of God or of man, — that, to use the words of Sir "William Hamilton, " at the first exorcism of a rigorous interrogation," it " relapses into nothing ;" but of the two, God and man, it certainly assigns the primary and essential being to the former. The absolute Being is the " one free ego ;" it is divided into an infinite number of " egos or individuals." All that is high, beautiful, enduring, sublime, in humanity, is the more perfect passing into manifestation, in the neces- sary individual form, of unchanging and eternal being. It becomes thus evident how, in the hands of one whose moral nature was originally, like that of Fichte, of an exalted and generous order, and who had been prepared for his work of deduction by a training in Kant's school of transcendentally refined morals, an elevated and inspiring theory of human duty and destiny could be elaborated. Beneath the new nomenclature, the highest dictates of natural religion, trans- figured, it might be, in a light derived from Christianity, would be returned upon us. Fichte assuredly so returned them ; 24 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. but philosophy, even when it assumes a garment belonging of right to Christianity, is infinitely inferior to, and must not be confounded with, the religion of the Cross. It is, however, of secondary importance for us to trace the stream of modern pantheism to its source in the egoism of Fichte and the transcendalism of Kant. That the practical pantheism which pervades the works of Mr Carlyle could be traced by the biographer or the philosophic historian to the express influence of Fichte, and certain of his great German contemporaries, is to me a matter of clear conviction. But Mr Carlyle has consistently and studiously avoided philoso- phical nomenclature and scientific form,. and in his works the view under examination comes out, rather as what Arch- deacon Hare calls a " pantheistic spirit," animating and colour- ing every sentiment, than as a distinct theory. It is an as- sertion of the majesty of man even against the Infinite ; the hero is the manifestation of God. But for Mr Carlyle, as for Fichte, a way was thus opened up to the recognition of all which his instinct of rectitude and of truth responded to in history and 'in life. A certain intense, mighty, and, I shall add, august enthusiasm for what is believed to be goodness and truth is the animating principle in the works both of Fichte and of Carlyle. Fichte perceived truth and goodness in their loveliness and serenity ; Carlyle has bowed down to them when he thought he saw them incarnated as power. It is not to be wondered at that for young, hoping, aspir- ing minds, the visionary grandeurs of such a pantheism as that of which we have now some glimpse, should possess a powerful though bewildering fascination. Its theory of God, man, and the universe, can be represented in a sublime man- ner. Positivism can say nothing of the world but that it is, for the living a workshop, and for the-dead a grave; nothing of the soul of man, but that it is a mode in which a material organism works. But pantheism fills the world wdth spirit. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 25 — turns all that is seen into the visualized existence of in- finite being. When expressed in the chastened and stately- beauty of the language of Fichte, or clothed in the poetic gorgeousness of that of Carlyle, it can scarce fail to excite enthusiasm. It may be well to present in a single view, founded strictly upon the work of Fichte, already named, and upon one or two chapters in Mr Carlyle' s Sartor Resar- tus, the conception of God and the universe formed by the pantheist, and to set it in contrast with that of the Chris- tian. The gi'eat All is no machine, say these writers, no piece of dead though elaborate mechanism. The tree Igdrasil of the old Norsemen was better than that ; to look on the uni- verse as godlike and god, how infinitely better is that ! One mighty tide of divine force, filling immensity with the eter- nal ebb and flow of Being and Appearance, its waves ga- laxies and systems, its foam sparkling with worlds, — acknow- ledge that, they say, as at once universe and God. The pantheist is himself one little conscious drop in the bound- less tide, in the all-embracing infinite. In the branching of the stars this infinite life rushes forth ; in the flower at your feet it lives. Higher stiU is the manifestation which it finds in the embodying of human thought — in the rearing of na- tions and polities, in the building of towered cities, in all noble work and effort. It has struggled dimly into exhibi- tion in the beauties, grandeurs, and terrors of all mytholo- gies,— the grave look of the Olympian king, the still and stainless beauty of the woodland Naiad, the bright glance of the son of Latona, the thunder-brows of Thor, the dawn smile of Balder. The beauty which is the soul of Art, — the majesty that lives from age to age in the statue of Phidias, the smile that gladdens the eyes of many generations on the perfect lip and in the pure eye of a Madonna by Raphael, the serene and perfect ideal which the artist has in his soul, 26 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. and wliicli he never yet could realize witli cliisel or with pencil, — is its very self. Highest and purest of all it ap- pears in the life of virtue. " In what the holy man does, lives, and loves, appears God no more in shadows, and wrapped in a garment, but in his own immediate and efficient life." What, now, do we behold, when we turn, with unsandalled foot, to look upon the universe and the God of Christianity 1 An immensity, to the bounds of which, urge them never so wildly, the steeds of thought will never pierce, thronged with ordered myriads of worlds, all willed into existence, and ever upheld, by a Being of whom tongue cannot speak or mind conceive, but who lit the torch of reason, who hears the voice of man, and whose attributes are dimly mirrored in the hu- man soul. Endeavour to embrace the universe in thy con- ception ; let thought take to it the wings of imagination, and imagination open the eye of contemplation ; view this stupendous illimitable whole. Then conceive God infinitely above it ; filling it with his light as the sun fills with its light the dewdrop ; as distinct from it as the sun is from the dewdrop ; to whom the countless worlds of immensity are as the primary particles of water composing the dewdrop are to the sun. Then add this thought : that He, around whose throne the morning stars for ever sing, to whom anthems of praise from all the star-choirs of inmiensity go toning on eternally from galaxy to galaxy, hears the evening hymn of praise in the Christian home, the lowly melody in the Chris- tian heart, the sigh of the kneeling child ; and, when the little task of his morning sojourn on earth is over, will draw up the Christian, as the sun draws up the dewdrop, to rest on the bosom of Infinite Love. Such is the universe, and such the God of the Christian, so far as these faint and feeble words can image them forth. Is the universe, is the God, of the pantheist, more sublime ? The essential point to be established against pantheism, so THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. J, i far as it is a theory of the nature of God and of duty, is the existence of a Divine Being, by whom existence is im- parted to the finite, not in the way of emanation, but of crea- tion, and of whose authority over reasoning beings the laws of morals are the expression. It would lead too far to attempt to present the general argument in support of this position ; but the evidence derived from the philosophy of morals, — the argument from conscience, — immediately concerns us, and may be alleged to be in itself conclusive. Of it, therefore, a a few words. The starting point in all discussions touching the nature and functions of conscience is for us moderns the doctrine of Butler. It is necessary clearly to define wdiat that great moral philosopher effected. Mr Maurice, in one of his theo- logical essays, has treated the matter in a way fitted to in- troduce perplexity and confusion where all was distinct, and to compromise or imperil one of the best ascertained and most precious achievements of the human intellect. Butler ap- pealed to consciousness as to a fact in that inner world which consciousness surveys. Its evidence he treated as accurately parallel to that of the external senses " for the proof of things cognizable by them." This is recognised by Mackintosh. "He occupies," says the latter in reference to Butler, "the unassailable ground of an appeal to consciousness." The fact which Butler pointed out as attested by consciousness is, that man possesses a conscience which decides upon action, and presides among the faculties. What inference may be drawn from this is another question. By precisely similar evidence to that which convinces man that he has a reasoning or an imaginative faculty, he is proved to have a faculty which judges of dispositions and actions ; whether he will accord conscience the place assigned it in the constitu.tion of his nature, as he appoints to reason and imagination the work natural to them, is "a subsequent consideration. Mr Maurice has lost the 28 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. point of view from which Butler's doctrine of conscience can be apprehended. He does not perceive that Butler simply looks, with the eye of consciousness, into the inner world of mind, and registers his observation. The question between Butler and Combe, strangely, and to the disadvantage of both,* misconceived by Mr Maurice, is simply this : Is Psychology a real and possible science, or is it not 1 As to the other matter on which Mr Maurice enlarges, — the liability of conscience to error, — that is also beside the point. Reason, blown upon by passion or blinded by prejudice, may arrive at false conclusions, but that its office is to weigh evidence is not doubted; con- science may be liable to delusion, but it never ceases to speak with authority. Butler shows the highest point on which man can stand, in order, with his unaided powers, to see God ; but none knew better than he that this is but climbing to the top of a ruined tower, and that, though we can see farther than from the plain below, the only hope for man is that, gazing thence, he may perceive the dawning of the Sun of Righteous- ness. The merit, strictly estimated, of Butler as a moral philo- sopher, consists in his having, by an interrogation of con- sciousness, vindicated the primary and independent character of the dictates of conscience. He thus rendered it impos- sible, by any conceivable elaboration, to establish a selfish theory of morals. He severed, once for all, the idea of virtue from the idea of happiness, whether of the individual, of the race, or of universal being. Conscience gives law to the wish- ing faculty, whether intensified in the throb of passion, or guided by cool and exhaustive calculation. Were an infinitude * Combe would not object to Butler that he geueralized hastily, but that he attempted generalization where it was impossible. In the world of matter, he would say, you observe a fact, and there an end ; in the so- called world of mind, you fa7i observe none. The degree of caution and candour exercised in either case, on which Mr Maurice goes off, does not afiect the dispute. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 29 of advantage brought into competition with its demands, the consciousness would still be clear as to its unfaltering claim to obedience ; and we have merely to listen honestly to that consciousness in order to learn that the more advantage is opposed to conscience, the higher does our conception of the nobleness of moral triumph rise. "That your conscience approves of and attests to such a course of action, is itself alone an obligation." These words represent accurately what Butler has established. It is strange that Mackintosh, who evinces so genuine an appreciation of Butler, should have failed to perceive what precisely he had in view in such ex- pressions as that now quoted. " The most palpable defect of Butler's scheme," says Mackintosh, "is, that it affords no answer to the question, ' What is the distinguishing quality common to all right actions f If it were answered, ' Their criterion is, that they are approved and commanded by con- science,' the answerer would find that he was involved in a vicious circle ; for conscience itself could be no otherwise de- fined than as the faculty which approves and commands right actions." It was doubtless against a mistake of this kind that Butler was anxious to guard in denying to every other faculty the power to determine the decisions of conscience. What is the distinguishing quality common to all right ac- tions 1 It is that they are approved and commanded by con- science. What is conscience *? It is the faculty which dis- criminates among actions, carrying, as Butler says, "its ov/n authority with it," and setting apart certain actions which are thus constituted* right. The designation "right" is not * This word has given rise to astonishment and misconception even on the part of friendly critics. It has been supposed to yield the whole pan- theistic position. This idea could have been entertained only from a failure to perceive the stage at Avhich ths argument has arrived, and to embrace it in its wholeness. I take up, first, the function of conscience among the faculties ; and then the source from which this function is derived. My sole object in discussing the former is to put in a clear light the import of 30 THE IXDIVIDUAL LIFE. earned until the stamp of conscience has been ajffixed, and there is no quality of rightness by reference to which con- science can be defined prior to its own decisions. The noble- man is one on whom a title of honour has been conferred by the sovereign ; the sovereign is one empowered to confer titles of honour upon — noblemen ? no, but certain persons selected to become noblemen. The error into which Mackin- tosh fell, and against which Butler studiously guards, is that of assigning the name before possession of the character. No action can become " right" to a man until it is approved by his conscience. Are there now any grounds for believing that conscience acts in virtue of a divine commission, — that its authority, yupreme among the human faculties, is delegated, — that it ex- presses the will of a personal God 1 There are. In the first place, it seems probable that consciousness it- self bears more or less implicit testimony to this eflfect. But- ler himself held this opinion. The decision of conscience, he declared, " naturally, and always of course, goes on to antici- pate a higher and more efiectual sentence, which shall here- after second and affirm its own." This is an exceedingly im- portant declaration on the part of one of the most calm and accurate thinkers that ever lived. It is followed, however, by the statement that " this part of the office of conscience" was beyond his design, and it cannot be alleged that Butler has done for the doctrine of a ])ersonal God what he did for the doctrine of a supreme conscience. Dr Chalmers oflfei-s a valuable contribution to the argument by which Butler's pre- ceding demonstration might be followed up, in the remark that conscience possesses " tlie power of summary execution, Butler's statement, tliat conscience " is itself alone an oLligation."' This opens the way to the further question, Is conscience a self-acting instru- ment, or is it the golden sceptre in the hand of God, -^'hose touch marli» off the right from the wrong ? THE IXJ)IVIDUAL LIFE. 31 both for the dispensation of rewards and the infliction of pe- nalties,— an instant complacency in the act of well-doing, the bitterness of remorse in the retrospect of evil." The phe- nomenon of remorse does not appear to be accountable for, except on the hypothesis of a God of whose displeasure con- science makes us aware. Are remorse and regret convert- ible terms 1 Every misuse of a faculty is attended Avith a certain measure of regret. The higher the advantage that might have been won, or the loftier the ascent in nobleness of character that might have been made, the more poignant will be this distress. But does not remorse imply something else incurred besides loss of gain, or of capacity, or of moral power ? Does it not involve a decision dependent upon some foreign will, — a decision which seems fixed in the unalterable past, to which conscience compels assent, but which con- science claims no power to alter 1 Does it not whisper of gicilt ? Again, what is our idea of law"? Much is suggest- ed by this sentence of Locke : " Without a notion of a law- giver, it is impossible to have a notion of a law, and an ob- ligation to observe it." In days when extensive induction of physical uniformities has accustomed us to use the word " law" for mere regularity of sequence, there is risk of the introduction of confusing and bewildering influences into our minds when we inquire into our primar}" and originating no- tions of the tliiPig. The human mind does not naturally own allegiance to abstractions. Man does not first think of him- self as under a law to the Beautiful, the True, the Good, but ?.s bound to obey a Lawgiver. The words of Locke express an instinct by which man finds in the law of conscience the authority of a Divine Power, the writing of the finger of God. When we turn to history, we appear on all hands to discover evidence that it is not natural for man to consider conscience immediately Divine, but to connect it witli an ir- resistible, conscious, willing Power independent of himself. 32 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. Man has not been self-sufficing. Did the individual or the nation acknowledge sin and hear the rebuke of conscience 1 The hecatomb was straightway piled, the altar smoked : some external Power, believed capable, in what way soever, of sending forth a gentle message of pardon to calm and cool the troubled spirit, was appealed to. Did the simple tribe think it had done well? Did conscience give a favourable re- sponse ] A claim was supposed to have been established on the god or gods. Before the eye, resting afar as on the still evening horizon of a troubled day, there beamed out Elysiau fields, where rested virtuous heroes. There have been widely- extended systems of Pantheism, thought out by individuals, and nominally accepted by millions ; but the popular mind, acting on pure instinct, rushed to the assertion of its own in- dividuality, and that of its gods. The conception of man as self-complete, as a law to himself, as his own God, has been foreign to the mind of the race. In the next place, or perhaps more strictly carrying out the same general train of thought in a particular direction, does not the voice of conscience connect itself, in a very close and intimate manner, with the great mental law of causation 1 As if impressed by God with a necessity of bearing testimony to His existence, everything within the realm of iinitude, from Arcturus and the Pleiades to the moss that clings to the wall, presents itself with an irresistible power to compel re- ference to a cause. It is true that the action of conscience and will in determining conduct gives us more nearly an ac- tual intuition of causal power than any force which we can trace in matter. But there are effects in the spiritual as well as in the material world. It is legitimate to find illus- trations of the Divine power and wisdom in mind as well as in matter. God does not think, feel, imagine, in man ; but every exercise of thought, every loveliness of feeling, every beauty of imagination, is an illustration of God's creative THE IXDIVIDUAL LIFE. 33 power. In no case can we rest in tlie finite. And when the entire mental organization is crowned by conscience, — when the most marvellous of finite existences, the human spirit, finds its law imposed, its development directed, the prophecy of its spiritual destiny folded up, in the decrees of the internal monitor, — do we not naturally expect that herein will be to us the closest of all intimations, the very herald and representative, of the great causal Spirit himself 1 All nature bears the stamp of its Maker ; conscience names his very name. Putting together what has been said, a comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, conception of the polemic of monotheism, as against atheism on the one hand, and pan- theism on the other, may now be formed. By an appeal to those faiths of reason which assert a cause for the pheno- menal universe, and attest that cause to be not matter but mind, the theory that the All is a blind play of causeless and inconceivable forces is refuted, and the universe filled with spirit. By an assertion of the moral nature of man, — by an exhibition of the fact of moral obligation, — by an inspection of the idea of law, — the personality both of man and of God is elicited, the spirit of God is shown to be no vag-ue perva- sion of the universe with soul, but a living, willing, loving Person, who extends his authority over, and enters into con- verse with, the individual man. The essential defect of pantheism as a moral system is its want of reality and of definiteness, — its inability positively to fix, positively to certify, anything. Its god is excogitated by what is found to be a strictly impossible exercise of thought. A single philosopher may persuade himself that the absolute being of which he talks is not absolute nothing ; but even to him this being is an entity of thought, not of life ; and to the first disciple who fairly asks himself what it is he believes, there remains a blank. The pantheist, owning no power or c 34- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE.' goodness in the universe witli which he is not essentially one, is not entitled, when the facts of consciousness and the shapings of imagination fail him, to turn for an Infinite Holiness and an Infinite Power to faith. Strictly speaking, he can believe in no unseen, — in nothing beyond the external and the internal vision. His ideal will be rather a succession of brilliant but fleeting gleams, — a flickering dance of northern lights, — than a certain and unchangeable association of abso- lute perfection with omnipotent will. It is because there is much that is noble in the pantheistic sentiment and tendencies of Fichte, Carlyle, and their school, that a confident appeal may be made to them in reference to this charge of indefiniteness. A vagueness fatal to practical use must for ever attach to moral speculation which does not preserve in clear inviolate integrity the personality of God, the personality of man, and the reality of virtue. A writer who exalts life over opinion, action over speculation, so earnestly as Mr Carlyle, is bound to consider this. Unless he does so, he cannot expect that earnest men will cordially and entirely accept even what is good in his writings. I bear my humble testimony to the effect that there is much good in them. It is a poor and perilous mistake to confound every form and degree of error under one sweeping condemnation. The morality of Fichte and Carlyle is incomparably superior to the morality of Epicurus, D'Holbach, or Comte. It is more. It is in- comparably nobler than the morality of Paley and his disci- ples. Paley investigated certain of the external evidences of Christianity with a conclusiveness of success which it would be difficult to state too strongly. But the very apprehension of virtue, as an ascertained and independent fact, appears never to have dawned upon him. While doubtless a con- scientious man, he found, in strict metaphysical language, no place for conscience in his moral pliilosophy. His defi- nition of virtue points out accurately what virtue is tiot. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 35 What is done "for tlie sake" of happiness, temporary or everlasting, cannot by possibility be virtue. It is a notable fact in the history of speculation, that, after Butler's demon- stration of the place and functions of conscience, Paley should have written his Moral Philosophy. It is exceedingly sur- prising that this "virtue," motived by happiness, should have been mistaken by an acute and honest man for that Chris- tian virtue which is love and life, after Butler had said this : — "It is a great mistake to think you can love . . . anything from consideration that such love . . . may be a means of obtaining good or avoiding evil." It was well, if the pervasive Epicureanism of last century had inva- lidated the most sublime of human attributes, and obscured the very nature and meaning of holiness, that thinkers should arise to assert the free, unbought majesty of man, and to de- clare that there is something higher, infinitely higher, than happiness. Against materialism, against utilitarianism, Fichte and Carlyle enter their eloquent and mighty protest. But can they supply the wants they create, can they meet the as- pirations they awaken ? Have they any stable and consistent system of belief to oppose to the advancing tide of those errors ? It is an opinion of Isaac Taylor, expressed in the Restoration of Belief, that atheism and Christianity are pre- paring to divide the world. In the era of physical science, indefiniteness may fascinate youth, but will not detain and satisfy men. In so much of Mr Carlyle's mental history as is before the world in his books, it is made plain that he has himself passed through stage after stage of moral develop- ment, until at last his readers may ask in dismay what it is he will have them believe. There was a day when he wrote eloquently in exposition and application of that doctrine of reason and understanding which Coleridge derived from Kant. The ideal of humanity, the reality of freedom, the great faiths v/hich impart grandeur to man, had all their seat in the rea- 36 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. son. In one of Mr Carlyle's last works, the Coleridgean dis- tinction is made the subject of the most bitterly clever deri- sion. But it is discovered that Mr Carlyle has still some mysterious grove, into which, when hit by the sun-shafts of argument, he can retire. Plain logic and everyday reason- ing will not suffice to combat any doctrine of his. Coleridge called that region in the world of mind where those truths are rooted which the logical understanding can do no more than manipulate, the region of reason. It is now, I believe, recognised by most metaphysicians, that such a region exists. Mr Carlyle laughs at Coleridge, and must be supposed to have discarded Coleridge's Kantian views ; but the more provoking is it to be invited into his own Dodona grove, and to have the puzzle proposed to us of fixing its name and nature. At the time when Mr Carlyle drew his belief from Fichte's TFay to the Blessed Life, his opinions on most of the grand ques- tions of moral philosophy and natural theology must have been comparatively definite. But every landmark of his be- lief has been gradually involved in a bewildering and cheer- less haze. We put the question. What is the outlook for eternity % We learn that we cannot be assuredly answered, — that a look into the future is a look into a " great dark- ness." AVe ask. What is virtue, and how are we to perform the duties of our station 1 Hints, laden with a fearful mean- ing, are thrown out to the effect that evil is but the neces- sary " shadow" of humanity ; hero-worship is insisted on with never-flagging urgency ; and a more and more express contradiction to every common idea of mercy, justice, and even truth,* urges the idea that the essential character of moral judgments is obliterated, and virtue confounded with mere force of intellect or will. When at last we earnestly demand. Who is the Lord, that we may serve him ? we learn * See, in the Life of Frederick the Oreat, the *' white or even gray" lies of Friedrich "Wilhelm, the said lies beiDg manifestly and meanly black. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 0< that even once-honoured pantheism is matter for a jest, we are refused any statement as to whether God is a person or not, and all we are informed concerning Him is that He is "inscrutable." A new proclamation of the worship of the Unknown God will hardly serve for the practical teaching of the world. From following the fair and fleeting mirages of Pantheism, men will turn to the sterile but definite nega- tions of the positive philosophy. "With reference to Mr Carlyle's declaration that all inquiry touching the personality of God is to be dismissed, — that the subject is inscrutable, — it may be important to offer a remark in passing. The attitude assumed commends itself by a cer- tain appearance of humility and reverence. But the question involved is of too urgent importance to admit of its being thus despatched. A personal God, a living God, — this, in point of fact, and nothing else than this, can be called a God at all. It is not enough that our instimctor wear an expres- sion of devoutness, if, prepai'atory to vanishing behind a lu- minous mist, he pronounces no distinct negative or affirmative on this point. The reverence must be spurious, the humility must be effeminate, which shrinks from a clear acknowledg- ment of God, and defrauds man of his highest glory. It does not honour God to make Him one with the Fate of Pagan- ism or the infinite substance of Pantheism, and virtually to allege that His reasoning creatures cannot, or dare not, draw near to Him. It strips man of his highest glory, — it dis- crowns him as the privileged and excelling king of this lower world, — it forbids the most sublime exercise of reason, the most august act of freedom, — to declare that, as person with person, he cannot know and commune with his God. Con- templating the universe in its vastness, alit as it is with ra- diance, remembering that proximity is but relative, and that the particles of a sand-gi-ain may to God appear no more in contact than the clustering galaxies whose distance from our 38 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. world and from each other we cannot sum, it is in the power of the human mind, by an effort of abstraction, to figure it all as a bush, burning in the desert of immensity, to which the reasoning spirit, in hallowed awe, yet with a sublime con- fidence, may draw near to see its God. Let the shoes be from the feet ; let no rash or irreverent approach l)e made ; but let no human being shut his ear to the voice calling to him now, as to the Hebrew prophet of old. T will not reject the highest attribute of my humanity, — power to hear that voice. I will not go away saying the sight is too great for me, and indeed inscrutable. I will look because I am king of the earth, be- cause my attributes of reason and freedom empower me to do so, and because the express commands of conscience are not to be put aside by any assumption of inability or unworthiness : I will look with silent reverence, because the God before whom I stand is infinite in holiness and in power. But to return to a more direct prosecution of that line of thought on which we were proceeding. The vagueness of the modern Pantheistic teaching deprives it, I repeat, of all practical value. The almost spasmodic earnestness of its spirit, — its testimony to the all-importance of religion, — its defensive attitude against the great materialist and utilitarian heresies, — pledge those who abide by it to give due consideration to this charge. While appealing to us on behalf of religion on the one hand, and rejecting Christianity on the other, Mr Car- lyle is bound to satisfy us that, on his hypothesis, religion is possible. The spirit of religion, he declares, is immortal, but its form is perpetually changing : all forms in which it can be embodied must change. Mr Carlyle would admit the ne- cessity of associating religion with form ; only he regards this association as essentially temporary. A very slight effort of calm reflection will convince us that the perpetuation of re- ligion on these terms is impossible, — that it would of neces- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 39 sity either congeal into the hard negation of atheism, or eva- porate in a vague spiritualistic illumination. The question is simply this : Can a religion subsist of which the forms are hnoiun to be allegorical ? Not only can no instance be found in history of the worship of an incarnated moral or spiritual idea, when the form of incarnation was avowed to be delu- sive, but we are conscious to ourselves that no man could wor- ship what he knew to be a temporary expedient. If the funda- mental forms of the Christian religion, the Unity and the Trinity of the Godhead, the atonement by the Son, the ap- plication by the Spirit, are held to body forth certain ideas, men may eliminate, elaborate, appreciate, and admire them, but they will never worship them. In fact, every real be- liever in a religion, and pre-eminently every believer in Chris- tianity, would demur to any such distinction between form and truth as is here drawn. The forms of Christianity just named are its essential facts. There can be no accommodation be- tween life and idea ; there can be no transposition of facts of existence and facts of knowledge or of moral law. Philosophy and religion cannot become one : the object of philosophy is ab- stract truths existent only in relation to the thinking mind ; the object of religion is essential life^ the fountain of power, the source of finitude. Inform men of the esoteric secret that the imputation of life to the Divinity is the subtle, self-deceiv- ing form in which they express their respect for certain princi- ples, and they will never again bend the knee. These are not days, and our island is emphatically not the place, when and where systems of philosophical belief are worked out with consistent logic and accepted with entire belief. The crumbling of the great ontological structures of German speculation in the last century, and the mere huny, versatility, and practical activity of the present time, lead men rather to snatch whatever fragment of truth may be flung in their way, to adopt whatever maxim is ready and 40 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFK serviceable, to trust to impulse and intuition. Mr Carlyle would care comparatively little though any philosophical doc- trine with which his sentiments were said to be in vital con- nection were refuted. He would bid us leave speculating and philosophizing, and turn to life. But is it not precisely in this sphere that the most forcible appeal may be made against teaching, of which the practical outcome must be the cessa- tion of all that mankind have known as religion ? " It is easily proved," says Jonathan Edwards, "that the highest end and happiness of man is to vieio God's excellences, to love Him, and receive expressions of His love. This love, including all those other affections which depend upon and are neces- sarily connected with it, we express in worship. The highest end of society among men, therefore, must be to assist and join with each other in this employment. But how comes it to pass that this end of society was never yet obtained among deists 1 Where was ever any social worship statedly performed by them 1 And, were they disposed socially to ex- press their love and honour, wliich way would they go about it ? They have nothing from God to direct them. Doubt- less there would be perpetual dissensions about it, unless they were disposed to fall in with the Christian model. We may be convinced, therefore, that revelation is necessary to right social worship.^' It will not be denied that it has amounted almost, or altogether, to an impossibility to sustain the prac- tice of religion where any form of rationalism has prevailed. Is not this the natural result of a transference of religion from the domain of conscience to that of reason, from that of reve- lation to that of oj)inion, from that of faith to that of science? Neither a man himself, nor a man's fellow, can create or ex- cogitate for him a God. In the mere process of excogitation, that element of infinite reverence and awe which is of tlie nature of religion will escape. The man becomes a reasoner, a theoriser, an arguer, but not a worshipper. His God is THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 41 stripped of authority. The fear of God is not in his breast ; the love of God can have no dwelling there. A subtle atheism, more or less noble, is his real religion. When temp- tation does not press, it may lend the character certain fair hues of purity, disinterestedness, or spiritual enthusiasm. When strong temptation assails the soul,^ — when any of those terrible powers which ever slumber in the human breast awake, — it v/ill pass away like a film. It is no such easy matter to frame a religion which will make men tremble, or weep, or work. It is no such easy thing to fetter cupidity, ambition, or lust. Mr Leigh Hunt suggests a Religion of the Heart. I know the work only from reliable indirect sources, but its name reveals its nature. The religion of the heart ! The cure of human ills, the satisfaction of human doubt, the vanquishing of human siisr, by an appeal to the finer feelings, by the gentle influence of a meek sentimen- tality ! Has Mr Hunt set forth his theory to Mr Carlyle, and endeavoured to make him a proselyte ? The interview would have been worth the theatrical exhibitions of a season. How did the sardonic painter of the French Revolution look upon the proposed Palingenesia 1 Was it with inextinguish- able laughter, or with a glance of burning fire, or with me- lancholy, unutterable scorn ? He knows the world is not a cloud-film. He knows that men are not wax figures, whose cheeks can be painted by a delicate, lady-like hand. He might tell us that the lion of the desert, with the madness of hunger in his eye, may be tamed by sweetened milk and water ; that the raging volcano, which has torn up the welded earth, and is hurling its flaming fragments at the sky, may be lulled by the song of the soft west wind or the waving of a lady's fan ; that the chafed surges of ocean may pause, and bow placidly their heads, when the maiden prays them, in mild accents, to spare her lover ; but that man is to be charmed by no gentle music, that man is a creature of battle and of blood, that the 42 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. Furies and the tempests but faintly image the savageness of his mood, and that all absurdities pall before that which re- gards him as reclaimable by honeyed words. There is but one thing in this universe that will overmaster the spirit of man : the sight of God laying hold of His thunderbolts ! The Positive Philosophy, the serried ranks, that, consciously or unconsciously, follow the dark guidance of Mammon and Atheism, are advancing. Say not Atheism cannot for a time prevail Even now the Fiend may be filling his chalice in the fire of hell, to pour it on our heads in some agony of na- tional horror, like that of the French Revolution. Atheism has ere now led nations captive; and a theory of atheism so plausible, so temperate, so seemingly innocent and benign, was never advocated in the world before. Are we to oppose it by the like of Mr Hunt's Religion of the Heart ? Or even by sublime but indefinite apostrophes to duty, and reverence, and hero-worship, and the divine silences ? If one might respect- fully draw an inference from the tone of Mr Carlyle's late works, one might think that he is aware of some deficiency of force, and has a sad foreboding as to how the battle is to go. A glance at past history, and at the present state of the world, reveals to us here two perils which we dare not over- look. The one is superstition, the other licentiousness. It will not be in the power of atheism to extinguish the religious instinct : but it may confine its manifestation to bar- barous and debasing forms. If we drive away from us reli- gion, when arrayed in the spotless robe of Christianity ; if we will insist that we can devise for ourselves, with the aid of reason and science, better rules of action and modes of life than are afforded by that gospel which even its enemies al- low to stand pre-eminent among the institutions of men; we will find religion, by unalterable necessity, re-appeai'ing amongst us, but now in a polluted garment, and bearing a curse rather than a blessing. Is there no lesson for the age THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 43 iu our Agapemones and Morinonisms ? Do they not prove the desperate and reckless yearning of the human heart after faith in God 1 — a yearning not to be appeased by the removal of all religious education, not to be satisfied by sensual joys, and which, if there is no true religion in which it can rest, will always call forth for itself some humiliating and baneful form of superstition. The second peril, that of licentiousness, is no distant pos- sibility, no slight and permissible evil. Against this the cal- culating prudence of materialist or utilitarian morality would be utterly inefficient. To restrain, indeed, any of the living and powerful forces in tlie human breast, these would not avail : Superstition would break asunder their green withes, on the one hand ; and Passion, on the other, would snap their flaxen cords as with the might of fire. And it is not a little mysterious how a spiritualism so high-toned and lofty as to be removed above tlie common apprehension of men, and al- leging all thought of reward or punishment immeasurably be- neath the serene dignity of its virtue, can yet look with in- dulgence, or at least with tolerance, upon foul incontinence ! If there is one form of iniquity beyond another which all pure-minded and patriotic men ought now to unite in oppos- ing, it is this. It might be a question whether there is a sin possible to a writer, which no conceivable amount of genius is sufficient to induce us to pardon. If such there be, it is that committed in the works of Byron. "We can bear with him in all his petulance and scorn, in his unhealthy ego- tism and half-conscious affectation ; one star-glance of his Muse will cast a redeeming light over all that : but, if we see him draggling in the very mire the pinions of that Mase, and heaping foul ashes on her head, how can we pardon him ? We may have a certain sympathy with him, as we mark his regal port, though his aspect and fierce demeanour seem to speak defiance to God and man ; but we cannot pardon him 44 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. when we see him, a vile toad, squat at the ear of youth and purity, instilling foul poison. We may own a grandeur in Cain, and have a word to say even for the Vision of Judg- 'ment ; but Don Juan must be flung upon the dunghill. I never can think of the state of the Roman Empire in its de- cline, without seeming to trace certain analogies between its state and that of Europe in the present day : one at least of the great causes which then enervated the race, and fitted it to be trodden in the dust by the strong men of the North, is now in operation over Europe. And if Atheism and Mam- mon once do their work, the judgments of God may again awaken to burn up a polluted and enfeebled people ! When the carcass of a nation lies dead, tainting the solar system, there will not want lightnings to kindle its funeral pyre ! Christianity fulfils accurately all those requirements which we vainly make upon the pantheistic spiritualism of the day. By the mere fact that miracle enters as an essential element into its evidence, it asserts the authority of the Lord of na- ture. It claims assent to its truth, but it claims worship for its God. It is frankly to be conceded that the miraculous element in its evidence could not stand alone. If it did so, the authority of revelation would be arbitrary, the freedom of the human being would be infringed, the personality of man would be overpowered by absolute will. But unless it was present, the truths of speculative intellect, and the gene- ralizations of moral law, could not be indissolubly associated with creative power and Divine life. TiTith is the evidence of philosophy : truth and miracle combine to attest religion. Christianity, incarnated in Christ, was a revelation of the Truth : God spake by miracle from heaven, saying. This is my beloved Son, hear Him. Association of a code of moral excellence with efficient Power and active Will to guaran- tee its realization, accompanies Christianity throughout ; as its appeal was made at first, not only to its immaculate mo~ THE I.NDIVIDUAI- LIFE. 45 rals, but to the authority of a miracle-workiiig God, so its entire and ultimate appeal must in all ages be, not only to a system of religious truth, but to that perpetual miracle of the Spirit's work by which, in ever-renewed spring and har- vest,— in perennial freshness of amaranthine flower and ce- lestial fruit, — the moral law of Christianity is incarnated in Christian life. The miraculous evidence of Christianity does not come within that train of argument which it was determined here to follow. From the attack upon what is in a sense justly called the external evidence of Christianity, an attack which was very vigorously maintained diuing last century, the re- jectors of Christianity have turned to assail its ethical doc- trines. As to the matter of fact, to be determined by sim- ple processes of historical investigation and inductive reason- ing, whether the promulgation of Christianity was attended by miracle, Paley argued, I believe, conclusively. The ques- tion was one for a competent historical jury ; and Paley was exactly the man to sum up before such a jury. The sub- stantial facts upon which he proceeded have remained be- yond reach of doubt ; and for honest, clear-minded men, Arm in the conviction that philosophical theory cannot obliterate actual fact, and biassed and bewildered by no hypothesis of world-development, his interpretation of them will be satis- factory. But it is enough here that the place of miracle in the scheme of Christian evidence be pointed out, — that the function of miracle, as investigated by reason, be shown to be a natural, legitimate, and, in fact, indispensable one, in the establishment of a religion. The object mainly in view at present is to exhibit the superiority of Christian revela- tion to any ethical teaching of the pantheistic school ; and for this purpose we have to enquire what it is that Christianity informs us as to God and duty. The Bible, by many and explicit declarations, affinns that 46 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. God cannot, in essence, be known to man. By no searching can Jehovali be found out unto perfection. He is tlie I AM, whom no eye hath seen or can see. His power is infinite ; his perfection is absohite ; but it is not upon any ability of the human mind to conceive Him, that His existence or His attributes depend. He is not a God constructed or devised by aggregation of moral or intellectual ideas ; when reason has done its best to comprehend Him, faith still believes in a light that is inaccessible and full of glory. But when Paul professed to reveal to the Athenian sages the Unknown God, whom they "ignorantly" worshipped, he made no vain boast. He could inform them with absolute accuracy how they, as finite beings, stood related to Him, what He approved and disapproved, what, so far as they could know Him, He was. The truth, so far as revealed, was absolute ; the limit to its revelation was in the capacity of man, not in the nature of God. The Bible brings God, so to speak, near man, — enables man to feel that he can have converse with Him as person with person, — in two ways : first, by the divine intimation that man is formed in the image of God ; and, second, by the incarnation of the Godhead in the man Christ Jesus. The passage in which it is announced that God created man in His own image occurs at the outset of revelation, and is fundamental to its whole scheme. In recognising himself as a person, in being conscious of himself as a spiritual being, endowed with conscience and will, man makes a nearer ap- proach than through the most extended inquisition of nature, to the conception of a living God. If man could perfectly realize to himself his original nature, he would have before him the perfect reflection of infinitude in the mirror of finite being. It is this fundamental truth that imparts any worth to the efforts of the human mind, unassisted by revelation, to body forth a conception of God. It empowers us to avail THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 47 ourselves of every natural manifestation in which Pantheism arrays its imagined God, — every tint of natural beauty, every trait of human nobleness, — and, though with cautious hand, to set it in its true position in the system of things, as a means of revealing the Christian God, of strengthening our faith, of deepening our adoration. But the Bible does not leave us under the necessity which presses inexorably upon Panthe- ism, of confining our knowledge of God solely to an elabora- tion from human qualities and physical manifestations. It avoids the peril of anthropomorphic error, by denying that man now corresponds to his original type. It represents the Di- vine image in man, though not altogether erased, as yet, to use the words of Calvin, " confused, broken, and defiled." But it presents an unsullied representation of God in humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. The school of infidelity with which we are at present concerned has expressed profound veneration for the character of Christ. " It is in point of fact true," says Fichte, " what the first part of the Christian dogma asserts, that Jesus of Nazareth is, in a quite peculiar manner, and one wholly inapplicable to any other individual, the only-begotten and first-born Son of God." Had Jesus not lived upon eai-th, the conceptions formed by Fichte of the mo- ral nature of God and of man would assuredly have never been arrived at. But we must take the account of the nature of the God-man as Christ gave it, and as his disciples under- stood it, not as Fichte, with a mockery of Biblical interpre- tation, exhibited it. The man Christ Jesus was distinguished from other men, not, as Fichte imagines, by a peculiarly vivid consciousness of a common Divinity, but by being alone the un- sullied image, in a human form, of an invisible, personal God. In Him we know as much of God as finite minds can. His mo- ral attributes we have revealed in absolute, eternal perfection. In the depths of Divine infinitude there is nothing more Divine than the holinesss of Christ. The essential mysteries of in- 48 THE IXDIVIDUAL LIFE. finite power and life Christ did not, indeed, enable us to com- prehend. But He exhibited the moral ideal in Divine and infinite purity, manifesting itself under the conditions of humanity ; and He assured us of the fad of a power that could control nature, by putting such forth in works of mi- racle. The might of the ocean and the tempest, the strength of the everlasting hills, the silent beaming forth, as in ever renewed miraculous "vision," of the splendour and opulence of summer, the illumination of immensity by worlds, may offer some faint idea of the going forth of the power of Omni- potence ; but there is a still more impressive, and, as it were, present manifestation of supernatural power made to man, when the storm sinks quelled before the eye of Jesus, or the dead comes from the grave at his word. And as such power is beyond human conception, so the moral perfection of Christ is apart from, and unparalleled by, all actual human attain- ment. When the heart expands with a love that embraces the whole circle of sentient existence, or even, by the boun- teous imagining of poetic sympathy, first breathes an ideal life into flower and^ tree, and then over them, too, sheds with Wordsworth, the smile of glowing tenderness, we may remem- ber that there still linger traces of the Divine image in man, and faintly imagine the streaming forth of that Love which brightens the eyes of the armies of heaven, and gives light and life to the universe ; but can any manifestation of human tenderness bring to us such a feeling of God's love as one tear of Jesus shed over Jerusalem, or one revering look into His eye when, in the hours of mortal agony, it overflowed in love and prayer for His murderers ? We can attach a true and noble meaning to the words of Fichte when he bids us watch the holy man, because in what he " does, lives, and loves," God is revealed to us ; but any instance of human heroism is faint and powerless in enabling us to form a conception of the holiness of God, when compared with the devotion to His THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE, 49 Father's service of Him Whose meat and drink it was to do the will of God, and Who died on the cross to make atone- ment for sin. And if, in addition to all this, Christianity tells us of a Divine Spirit, whose mysterious but certain in- fluence on the mind enables it to discern a glory and a beauty in the Saviour incomparably more exalted than can otherwise be distinguished, how truly may we assert that it brings us into a closer nearness to the Divine, than the most ethereal dreaming of mystic trance, or the most gorgeous imagining of pantheistic poetry ! Respecting human duty as laid down in the Christian scheme, it is not necessary to say anything more than that the Christian must become as Christ. Two laws are pointed out as schoolmasters to bring men to Him. The one was delivered by Moses, and constituted a moral ideal which the Jews never did, and mankind never could, realize ; the other is the law of natural conscience, on the authority of which Paul appealed to the Romans, and by the witness of which also the whole human race would stand condemned before God. Neither of these brought or can bring salvation. That is obtained only when the believer is united to Christ, and the transformation of his nature, in accordance with the life of Christ, through the Spirit, has commenced. And this brings us to the last arena on which the issue between the school of Fichte and Carlyle and the disciples of Christ can be tried. The most momentous problem of the individual life is before us. Mr Carlyle has not hesitated to use the word " conversion ;" and in the works of Fichte we can very distitinctly recognise a theory of the thing. According to the writers named, it is seemly and right, if not in all cases necessarsT-, that, at a certain stage of the personal history, the mind awaken and bestir itself, and strug- gle as in throes of birth or tumult of departure ; that for a time it wrestle with doubt, or cower trembling under the D 50 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. wings of mystery, searcliing earth, and heaven for answers to its questions, and satisfaction for its wants ; that there be a turning, in baffled and indignant loathing, from the pleasures of sense, as all inadequate either to still or satisfy new and irrepressible longings after the Good, the True, the Beauti- ful, after God, freedom, immortality. Our language probably contains no example of the delineation of mental confusion and dismay to be compared with Mr Carlyle's description of such a period in Sartor Resartus. In this time of distraction and unrest, calm thought and manly action are alike sus- pended ; the quiet of the soul is broken ; around it seem to hang curtains of thick cloud, streaked with fire, shutting it, in gloomy solitude, from heaven's light above, and the voices of human sympathy around. Mr Carlyle shows us how a soul may emerge from this confusion and distress to noble and perfect manhood ; how it may once more feel around it the fresh breath of the open sky, and over it the clear smile of heaven ; how the streams of thought may again flow on in melodious harmony, and the wheels of action obey their impulse ; how perfect content is to be regained with one's position in the system of things ; how all fear and torment are to give place to blessedness ; how love is again to suffuse the world, and over every cloud of mystery to be cast a bow of peace. Christianity likewise recognises in the individual life a pe- riod of unrest and disquietude ; it may be, of tribulation and dismay. It is the period preceding conversion. It is, in- deed, by no means necessary that in every case there occur this tumultuous crisis of internal life. Mr Carlyle declares that the ultimate lesson of manhood may be taught by the mild ministries of domestic wisdom and love, even better than "in collision with the shai-p adamant of Fate ;" and so the change which is wrought in the soul by vital Christianity may be silent and gradual as a cloudless dawn, unobserved by a^y THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 51 human eye until the new light wraps the whole character, touching all its natural gifts with immortal beauty, and turn- ing the cold dews of night into liquid radiance. In order, however, to define clearly and discriminate firmly the stages in the change, it may be well to contemplate it in a case si- milar to that presented by Mr Carlyle in Sartor Resartus. Let us conceive one who has hitherto been a Christian but in name, suddenly pausing and beginning to give earnest heed to the spiritual concerns which he has deemed of tri- vial importance. Suppose him to be affected in a twofold manner : by a sense of personal uneasiness, — of what Fichte names "torment," — of present self-accusation and prospec- tive alarm ; and by doubt and dismay in consideration of hu- man sorrow, and the mysterious and appalling destiny which, as he learns from Christianity, awaits a portion of the hu- man race. The first of these may be indicated by the gene- ral name, fear ; the second is an inability to assent to the fact of Divine justice. The first will agitate most strongly minds not of a noble natural temper ; the second is often found to rack with keen agony men of generous and benig- nant dispositions. The second may indeed be absent alto- gether ; but it may be doubted whether the final attainment and rest in this case will be so lofty, pure, and beautiful, as in the other. Let it be supposed, however, that the mind is in extreme tumult and anguisli ; how is it that Christianity professes to restore tranquil happiness, and recall healthful activity 1 The question will be answered presently ; but first we must have some idea how the same effect is aimed at by Fichte and Carlyle. Perhaps in no case do the tremulous delicacy and subtle pride of the day come out more strongly than in our modes of regarding all that relates to fear in religious matters ; and perhaps in no other case does the power of Christianity to lay its hand on the heart of the race, and its way of coming 52 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. in contact with life and reality, contrast so boldly witli the fine-spun, flattering, but evanescent theories of a haughty philosophy. The history of the world abundantly testifies that a religion altogether dissociated from fear is emasculated and unavailing ; the state of Greece in its decline, of Rome under the Csesars, of the Italian republics of the fifteenth century, shows what is that guardianship exercised over the national virtues, by a religion which has become a sentiment or a debate, which has laid aside its terrors, and passed into the school of the philosopher or the studio of the artist. In the teaching of Christianity there is, and has always been, an element, and a prevailing element, of fear. Fichte, in characterising that state of the mind which pre- cedes conversion, does not expressly mention fear; he uses the general term, torment, and regards this as nature's monition to leave self and sensuality, and turn to the Divine. Torment, with him, is the stirring of the divine principle within, and the expression of its unrest and embarrassment in the bonds of sense ; but whence it has arisen that this discipline is ne- cessary for the human soul, — why the throes of divine birth must agonize us, — why the beginning is anguish, when joy, which is the companion of perfection, the guerdon of genius, is the progress and the end, — we learn not from his philoso- phy. Fichte, when his terms are rightly interpreted, de- fines, with a certain correctness, the of&ce of fear ; of its ori- gin, save perhaps some assertion Of necessity, he gives no theory. Mr Carlyle, on the other hand, refers expressly to fear. His hero, in the time of his unrest, "lived in a conti- nual, indefinite, pining fear." The way in which Mr Car- lyle, in the ultimate attainment of rest by his wanderer, dis- poses of this fear, is one of the most sadly interesting points in his writings. Drawn by the force of intense human sym- pathy and fiery insight, into a more intimate knowledge of the actual feelings of the soul than the lofty philosophic THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 53 entliusiasDi of Ficlite's speculation enabled that writer to at- tain, he seems to indicate the element of a regard to futurity as entering into the anguish which oppresses the awakening and aspiring soul. The wanderer attains true manhood by finally triumphing over fear, not only fear of anything on earth, but fear " of Tophet too ;" by casting a defiant glance around this universe, and daring any existent power to make him afraid. We are aware of no voice reaching him from heaven, to whisper of pardon and invite to peace ; we see no hand stretched out to remove sin or impart purity ; by one tremendous effort of will he rids himself of terror, and declares that if hell must be dared, it must. Some time after this achievement he discovers that nature is God, that he himself is part of the Divinity ; we might say that, hav- ing shown himself brave, he had vindicated his right to his natural birth-right, and might boldly lay claim to his inhe- rent divinity. There is sublimity in this spectacle of a finite being defying the terrors of Tophet ; there is a grandeur in the aspect of him who, a few short years ago a weeping in- fant in his cradle, and in a few more fleeting years to be so still under his green hillock, thus, in the brief path between, hurls indignant scorn at the terrors of infinitude. But was it not such a sublimity which rested on the brow of Moloch, in the glare of hell's battlements 1 Such a sublimity, me- thinks, was in the eyes of Eblis, where pride waged eternal conflict with despair, as he sat on his globe of fire. " Let the world insult our feebleness ; there is no cowardice in capitulating with God." I shall not affirm that Mr Carlyle puts into the mouth of his hero a deliberate defiance of the Almighty ; but he assuredly represents the soul, in the great crisis of individual life, as trusting solely to its own energies for deliverance, — the terrors which encompass it as drawing off at the determined hest of human will, not by Divine permis- sion or commandment, — the saviour of man, as himself. As 54 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. to the ultimate origin of the discipline of sorrow, Mr Carlyle gives us no more satisfaction than Fichte. In fiict, in all essential points, these writers are on this whole subject at one. When we turn to Christianity, it seems impossible to fail to note an access of clearness, and what might be styled an agi'eement with the general symmetiy of nature. Whence this torment of self-accusation and alarm 1 It arises, says Chris- tianity, in its strictly personal reference, from a twofold source; from a sense of imperfection, and a consciousness of guilt. This last word is not named by Mr Carlyle or Fichte; yet surely history, reason, and conscience authorize us to impute to it a weighty significance. Why is it that in every age man has striven to propitiate his God 1 What mean those altars whose smoke lies so darkly along human history, — the shrieks of those children whom they pass through the fire to Moloch ] What spectre is that which the human eye has always seen setting a crown on the head of Death, a crown of terrors 1 Most explicitly and conclusively of all, what is the word which reason utters, when compelled, by its very nature, to seek a cause for this tor- ment, whose existence is granted 1 Are we not, by complicated and overpowering evidence, led to acknowledge the fact, how- ever mysterious, of gniilt 1 It may be that this result is one of exhaustless melancholy ; but, alas ! our tears will not wipe out the statutes of the universe ; and the man of real fortitude will, of all things, scorn intellectual legerdemain, and refuse to accept no fact. Of a sadness not so profound, but still sad, is the other source of personal anguish, — the sense of im- perfection,— recognised at this stage by Christianity. It is this on which Mr Carlyle and Fichte lay stress, but without giving it any explanation, and virtually or expressly regard- ing it as natural and right. It is the awakening sense in the bosom of man that he is a stranger here, an exile from a home where a spirit could expatiate ; it is the dim agony that comes with returning consciousness, when he begins to perceive the THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 55 iron grating, and the chain, and the couch of straw, and when the eye which he turns towards the azure is pained and dazzled by the once natural light. Better is this agony, be- cause it is the pain of one returning to consciousness, reason, and health, than any wild dreams of maniac joy; yet it too is unnatural ; and no theory of man's life is anywise satisfac- tory which tells us not how it became necessary, how the im- jDerfection which causes it originated, how man came into that dungeon. Christianity affords a simple, natural, and adequate explanation, both of the guilt and the imperfection, by its doctrine of the fall. So profoundly does the theory that man is now in a state of lapse and distemper agree with all that can be gathered from consciousness and history ; so perfectly does it explain the glory of his sadness, and the sadness of his glory ; so definitely does it intimate why the prostrate column and the shattered wall show a mind in ruin, while yet the gold, and gems, and ivory that shine amid the frag- ments hint that it was once an imperial mansion ; so well does it explain the sublime home-sickness which has led earth's loftiest sons, despising all that grew on a soil accursed, — that pleasure by which sense strove to wile away the faint remi- niscences of other scenes, that wealth which but represented the perpetual struggle against death, — to go aside from the throng, and seek the joys of spirit and the embrace of truth in lonely thought and contemplation ; so satisfactorily does it harmonize the loveliness of the dawn and the horror of the battle-field as existing in one world ; that it seems worthy to be ranked among profound mysteries that it can at all be called in question. As to the origin of evil, it may be frankly con- ceded that the problem contains elements beyond reach of human solution. But by preserving inviolate the ideas of per- sonality, freedom, moral obligation, Christianity presents the only conditions under which it can be conceivably solved. It respects, too, the terrible and momentous/ac^s of the problem. 56 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. It shows evil to be a dread reality, but God to be infinitely above it. Pantheism either explains evil away, puts out the eye of conscience, {. e., smashes its telescope to save its faith, or opens the way to Manicheism. Christianity recognises as seasonable, and accounts for, the action of fear on the human mind, which is unable to feel it- self at peace with God. How does it remove it 1 Does it enjoin a calculation of advantage 1 Does it declare that a certain amount of duty performed on the compulsion of ter- ror will avert danger, or say that it is possible to perform one virtuous action on this compulsion 1 The Christian scheme of morals does not recognise as deserving the name of virtue what is produced by any external motive, what has not its root in the heart. This it intimates in a twofold manner : by express declarations, and by the whole nature of that sal- vation which it offers to man. It explicitly declares that the glory of God is to be in all cases the unconditional motive of action, the deep and all-pervading spring of life. And the whole tenor of its descriptions of that salvation which it pro- claims renders the idea of its morality being produced by ex- ternal inducement absurd ; it demands a new birth, a new creation, a new life ; upon no action will it set its seal of ap- probation, unless it is the fruit of the Spirit, and springs from holiness and truth in the inward parts. Scripture being thus clear and decided, it might be well to know to what extent theologians have given colour to the charge that Christianity is thus selfish. The mode in which certain Christian writers of last century wrote did, to some extent, lend it countenance ; the enforcement of virtue by rewards and punishment was, it is probable, too exclusively insisted on ; the school of Paley did tend to give Christianity rather the aspect of a mechanism than of a life, did rather seek for it a place beside a refined Epicureanism, than claim for it its right and natural position in a more lofty and ethereal region than was ever reached by THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 57 the sublimest speculation of Platonism. But we need have no hesitation in claiming for the Puritan theology a freedom from any such error; and in the conclusion of the second chap- ter of the first book of Calvin's Institutes, we have his express declaration that, were there no hell, yet, since the Christian loves and reveres God as a Father, the dread of offending Him would alone suffice to render him abhorrent of vice. Fear does not produce virtue ; the fact that a man refrains from sin to avoid the punishment of hell, is no proof that he is converted. Yet fear is not without a function in the system of things. It bears not the wedding garment ; and no hand but that of the Divine Spirit, working faith in the Christian, and so enabling him to appropriate that garment, and clothe himself in it, can effect in him that renovation which leads to godly action and spiritual joy ; but it goes out into the highways of a blighted and delirious w^orld, and there, like a terrible prophet of the wilderness, who foretells the coming of the mild Redeemer, startles and arouses men. Its office is preliminary, external, awakening ; it is the beginning of wisdom. Since, indeed, on this earth, the deep-lying dis- ease which renders it necessary is never altogether removed, its warning voice is never altogether silent ; but the humi- liating remedy will vanish utterly with the disease of which it is a sign, and by which it became necessary ; when the Chris- tian goes to take his place among the angelic choirs, he will be able to join them in a melody that is only love ; and it does not admit of doubt, that every feeling of slavish fear with which any being regards God, is strictly of the nature of sin. By fear, or by whatever means the Spirit of God may em- ploy, the soul is brought to lie down in perfect abasement before God, to acknowledge its want, its woe, its Aveakness, and its unreserving consent to receive all from His hand. This is what, in the Christian scheme, corresponds to the " renunciation" of Goethe and Carlyle ; now is the soul 58 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. broudit to tliat staoje of utter desolation and bareness whicli agrees witli the critical stage of the wanderer's trouble. We are here at the point whore one essential element in the Chris- tian scheme is revealed ; we come within sight of its great dis- tinctive virtue, humility. Now is it that the sinful finite being, to use the words of Pascal, " makes repeatedly fresh efforts to lower himself to the last abysses of nothingness, whilst he surveys God still in interminably multiplying immensities ;" this is what Vinet pronounces the end of all Christian preach- ing, " to cast the sinner trembling at the foot of Mercy." In the melodious yet heart- wrung wailings which float down the stream of ages from the harp of the poet- king of Israel, the feelings of such moments found expression ; such feelings were in the heart of the Pilgrim, when, fleeing from the City of Destruction, and fainting under his burden, he knelt with clasped hands before the Cross ; and it was in this same atti- tude that the New England Puritan, in utter self-abandon- ment and feeling of the majesty and boliness of God, judged himself worthy of damnation, and had scarce power to pray. It is but the unqualified acknowledgment that man, as he exists in this world, requires the aid of Divine power to raise him to that higher state of being to which he aspires. It is the disrobing of itself by the soul of all the raiment of human virtue ; which, however pure and beautiftd it may seem to earthly eyes, is not that spiritual glory whicli will beam more fair in its immortality, when the earth will have faded away, and all that framework of society whicli gives occasion and play to so much of the virtue that is between man and man, shall have been gathered in by death, alike its origin and its end. It is the confession that, however the soul of man may wing the atmosphere of earth, it has now no pinions on which to ascend into the sunless serenity of celestial light. And now speech must give place to silence, nor any at- tempt be made to define the new birth of the Spirit. " In TKE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 59 what way," says Coleridge, " or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock with priceless gems and gold, is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery in all cases alike." Only this may be said, that by faith the soul lays hold of, and unites itself to, Jesus, finding in Him all that for which it has sought ; His mysterious sacrifice sufficient to make atonement for guilt, His righteousness a fei)otless robe in which it may sit for ever at the banquet of the Almighty King, His name the har- monizing of all contradiction, the solving of all doubt, the open secret of the universe. In a passage which he who has once read can hardly have forgotten, so softly pathetic is it, so richly and melodiously beautiful, Mr Carlyle sets, as it were, to lyric music the joy of the wanderer's heart when he attains final peace. The inheritance of the Christian is Kkewise peace, though of ano- ther nature from that which visited the scathed heart of Teu- felsdrockh. This is no proud ecstacy of self-assertion, no rap- ture of philosophic dream ; on the Christian, from the eter- nal heavens, there now streams down the smile of a living Eye. The emotions which befit his state have, from the olden time, been voiced in a mild anthem, whose divine sim- plicity and angelic music are beautiful as the morning star, and to which we may imagine the saints of God, in the fu- ture eternity, attuning their harps, when memory wanders back to the little earth, and they think of that humility which is the highest glory of the finite. " The Lord is my shep- herd, I shall not want." The peace of the Christian is to feel the circling of Jehovah's arms, as he lies in the light of His countenance. I add but a few fragmentary remarks, which readers must regard as partial indications of what might be said, rather than as any unfolding of the momentous and inspiring themes to which they relate. It might be profitable fully to discuss, firsts 60 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFS the ethical value of this theory of conversion in that precise point where it contrasts with pantheism ; next, the mode in which it tranquillizes the mind which is agitated by a sense of the sorrowful mysteries of human destiny, and the dark paths of Divine justice ; thirdly, the Christian theory of work ; and, lastly, the Christian theory of heaven. Only a few words can be offered on each. I accept from the hands of Mr Carlyle and Goethe the far- trumpeted doctrine of self-renunciation ; I listen to Fichte, and to the whole of that lofty spiritualistic school of which he may be considered the head, and bear witness to their emphatic and eloquent proclamation of the sin and blasphemy of selfishness ; and I calmly assert, that it is in Christian cour version alone that real self-renunciation is attained, that self is actually conquered. Of all that holds of pantheism, — of the genius- worship of the day, — of the idealistic or emotional reli- giosity now so common, — of all which professes to work in the human bosom a benign and self-conquering revolution by the evolving of any hidden nobleness lying there, or reference to any perfect internal light previously obscured, — it is to be al- leged that it fails to approach the root of the evil. Wheu laid down in the most perfect and plausible philosophic form, these views are thus powerless ; and, in application to prac- tical life, the perils which encompass them are obvious and unavoidable. To denounce the sensual life is no great achieve- ment or novelty in ethics ; a moderately enlightened Epicu- reanism has always done that. But how can I apply the term " self-renunciation" to an act which is really and merely the assertion of self, of spiritual self, that is ] What is this more than the piii-chase of a lofty and delicious pride, by the sacrifice of the garbage of sense 1 Self, on every such theory, leaves the coarse dwelling of sensual pleasure, but it is only to rear for its own royal abode a palace of gold and cedar. And if the commands of a serene spiritualism may, in the THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 61 case of tlie philosopher, repel the advances of sense, who that has ever cast his eye over life can refuse to concede that they would be all unheeded on that wild arena ? while the absence of any jirecise definition or applicable test of the spiritual and divine in the individual breast, would leave a broad avenue, the more inviting that it was lined by academic plane-trees, to all manner of delusion, extravagance, and absurdity. This is a delicate, soft-stepping, silken-slippered age, pa- tronizing the finer feelings and a high-flown emotional vir- tue ; vice has cast away its coarse and tattered garment, and, though finding no great difficulty in obtaining admit- tance into good society, must come with sleek visage, in a spruce, modern suit, glittering with what seems real gold ; the religion that languishes in luxurious aspirings or dreams is very widely approved of. But does not an elevated and insidious but fotal pride tend to pervade the moral atmo- sphere of the time 1 "We will glow in lofty ardour over the page of Fichte, Carlyle, Schiller, or Goethe, but it is a balmy and consoling air which breathes its mild adulation through our souls ; for is it not our own nobleness which is so grate- fully evoked 1 We will worship in the Temple of the Uni- verse, with a certain proud homage, like that of the stars, and winds, and oceans ; but our lordly knees must not be soiled by getting down into the dust. We will perform with Goethe the great moral act of self-renunciation, and wrap ourselves, with much ado, in those three reverences which he defines : but it were strangely bigoted to weep like an old Puritan because we cannot leap from sin our " shadow." Christianity, we are fain to proclaim, is pervading the age more deeply than ever before ; not now as a constraining and antiquated form, but as an essence and life ; not, indeed, with remarkable definiteness, not troubling itself to answer such minor questions as whether Christ's history is an actual fact, or whether Paul was an inspired preacher or a moral 62 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. genius troubled with whims, but with a grand expansiveness and philosoplnc tolerance, sweet to remark ; casting a re- spectful and even deferring glance towards its plebeian an- cestry in Judea, in whose steps, however, an enlightened de- scendant cannot exactly walk. This will never do. As of old, it remains true that Christianity alone preaches humi- lity, and that this preaching is ever the special offence of the Cross : rather tread the burning marl in pride than re- ceive mercy only from God. But, for the fallen finite being, this is the true position towards the Infinite ; from this Christianity cannot swerve. To proceed to our second point. There is a pain which arises from inability to recognise the facts of divine justice, and from human sympathy with that part of mankind which rejects the Christian salvation and meets the doom foretold. It is a sorrow which never on earth departs entirely from noble minds, and is, perhaps, not intended to depart : that sympathetic agony whicli, in virtue of our human unity, we feel with every brother sufferer, whatever his sin, is doubtless designed to be one of our most mighty incentives to spread the gospel and to urge its ac- ceptance. But, if Christianity does not altogether remove this pain, it does more to that end than any other system ; if there are clouds in the heavens which not even the tele- scope of faith can yet resolve into worlds of light, it can open a prospect infinitely more glorious and consoling than pre- sents itself to the unaided eye. If one might conceive any sentence as written over the throne of God, Idndling the eyes of the cherubim, it would be this : " God is Love." Chris- tianity came, as it were, with the intimation that such words are there inscribed by the hand of Eternal Truth ; faith, gazing from the far station of earth, might be unable to de- cipher the separate letters, and might see them only as blend- ed into one star-beam, falling through time's night, but even in that beam there was infinite consolation and infinite hope. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 63 What does philosophy say of the future of the race ? Either it dismisses, as the vagary of superstition, all idea of the possibility of the future visiting of sin by retribution, and thus leaves unstilled man's instinctive and indestiiictible ap- prehensions, and unaccounted for a dumb yet adamantine array of facts, or it refers vaguely to benevolence, or it leaves good and evil in eternal strife. Christianity obviates the awful peril of sin being explained away or tampered with by attaching to it an infinite punishment. But it gives us the infallible assurance that our sense of justice will be satisfied ; and in its unqualified declaration that God is Love, in its distinct intimation that judgment will be pronounced and stripes meted out with reference to the amount of light en- joyed, and in the variety of the figurative language in which it indicates the mode of punishment, it so far at least post- pones the difiiculty, referring it to eternity and to God. It bestows the sublime privilege of waiting upon the Most High ; it permits the weak and wildered creature of finitude to watch the unfolding of the schemes of almighty Wisdom under the eye of almighty Love ; and it is not presumptuous to think tliat one great fountain of that felicity, on which, as on an ocean stream, the souls of the blessed will eternally float, will burst forth in the sudden discovery of the might of that love, and the depth of that wisdom, in the disposal of every fate. When God wipes away all tears from the eyes of His own, He will wipe away also those noblest, and perhaps hottest tears that are shed on earth, — tears over the lost. The Christian theory of work can be expressed in a few words, yet its full exposition and illustration were one of the most sublime pages in sacred poetry. " Faith that worketh by love ;" it is all here. The basis is faith ; it must lie at the root of all action : whatever truth this age may have for- gotten, there is one tiTith which has been uttered for it in strains 64 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. of eloquence so earnest and overpowering, tliat it bids fair to be for some time remembered ; that a man or nation is mighty in work precisely as he or it believes. Give a people faith, and, though its tribes lie scattered and powerless over its desert domain, like the dismembered limbs of a giant, it will gather itself together, and arise and stride forth along the shaking earth till every nation trembles at the name of Islam; give a man faith, and, though his heart be narrow and his brain confined, and what he believes an absurdity and dream, he will pass by hundreds of abler men who occasion- ally doubt, and, trampling them in their gore, will control a fiery nation, and reign in terror, till the name of Robespierre is a trembling and abhorrence over the whole earth. But if all belief is powerful in action, if even belief in an idea makes a man resistless, of what nature will that work be whose hid- den root only is faith, but all whose bloom and outgoing is love 1 And thus it is in Christianity. It is not necessary to enter at all upon discussion of the nature of saving faith ; but this is, at least and beyond doubt, implied in it, that the believer is certain that God loves him, that in Christ He is his reconciled Father. For one moment ponder this thought. The man has faith tliat God loves him ; with all the emphasis of that strongest of human words, he lays it to his heart that love is in the bosom of the Eternal for him. What will be the instant result, by all we know even of fallen man ? It is perhaps not possible for a human heart altogether to resist the attraction even of human love; the blind and selfish afiection of passion which impiously arrogates the name may be scorned and hated ; but deep, unselfish, spiritual love cannot surely be known to exist towards us in any bosom without awakening some responsive thrill. And if it is possible between man and man, it is assuredly impossible between man and God. It is not given to the human being to resist the attraction of infinite tenderness, when once faith has seen the eye of God THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. B5 looking down upon His accepted child ; after long waiting, when at last the balmy drops descend, the fountains must spring. And what is the relief, the joy, the blessedness, of him that loves ? Is it not the pouring forth of this love, the urging of it into every channel where it is possible for it to flow ? Yes : and this is the Christian scheme of work ; that he, whose breast swells with the irrepressible love of God, finds duty transmuted actually into its own reward, and every labour but fuel to enable the flame of liis joy to go up towards heaven. The psychological verity of this whole scheme is perfect. Why is it that, when the heart of the youth or maiden has once been filled with love, when its whole com- pass has been occupied, as with molten gold, by afiection for some beloved fellow-creature, if this beloved proves false or dies, it is no uncommon circumstance that madness or deatli ensue 1 Is it not because the outgoing of love is prevented, and that, instead of issuing forth to wrap its object, instead of well- ing out in streams of joy, in ofiices of affection to that object, it must struggle in its fountain, and bum the heart that har- bours it ? And may we not, in the face of Stephen, radiant in death, in the triumph-song of Paul when about to be of- fered, in the ecstatic hymns on the lips of the early martyrs as they went to the stake, find reliable evidence that there may be a love in the human breast for a Father God, which will seek, as in an agony, for some channel in which to flow forth ] Nor can it ever have to seek in vain : in the inner kingdom of the soul, in the outer kingdom of the world, there is ever work to be done for God, by which the Christian may prove that he loves his Saviour. Of this last duty and joy, as permitted to the Christian, a. single word may be said in passing. Even at this day you may find it declared that Calvinism circumscribes the freedom and fulness of the offer of redemption. Singulai" ! If you gather all the human race into one congregation, be I the E 66 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. most rigid of intelligent Calvinists, I will put to my lips the trumpet of the gospel, and proclaim that whosoever will may come and drink of the water of life freely. If you bring me to a hoary sinner, who has defied God for a lifetime, and who now shakes with the palsy of death, I will tell him that God yet waits to be gracious, and willeth not his death. And will my pleading with this dying transgressor be the less earnest and hopeful because I have not to trust to the feeble efl^icacy of my words, or the grasp of his expiring faculties, but may look and pray for the extension of a Divine arm to seize and rescue his soul 1 Because God has not taken me into His confidence, has not unfolded to me the Book of Life, and showed me the names of those chosen before the foundation of the world, will I not deign to be His instrument to save whom He pleases ? You fix the lightning-rod on the mast ; you cannot explain and represent the power in it to call down the fire of heaven. Calvinism makes it a duty to proclaim the gospel freely : at any one moment, there is no person in the world to whom it is not empowered to say. Come : but, in accordance with the whole analogy of nature, it covers up in mystery God's creative work. With reference to the felicity of heaven, which .was the next point to be remarked upon, the essential matters to be considered are the purity of its nature, independently of place and time, and the graduation of its degree before and after death. Butler defines happiness to consist in " a faculty's hav- ing its proper object." " Pleasure," says Sir William Hamil- ton, "is the reflex of unimpeded energy." The two expressions do not contradict each other, though that of Butler is the more exact and lucid By application, however, of both, we might classify every degree and order of haj)piness from the highest to the lowest ; it always remaining tiTie that, however base or diluted might be the joy of activity, and though, relatively, even painful, it might yet be named pleasure in contrast with the THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE, 67 state of compiilsoiy inactivity. The pleasure of revenge is poor and contemptible, yet it is a joy compared with its un- satisfied gnawing. And whatever might be the lowest and feeblest form of joy, it cannot admit of question what would be the highest. It would assuredly be the activity of love. We have no sooner uttered the word, than we are at the gate of the Christian heaven. When the heart begins to go out in love to God, heaven has commenced within it, and the certitude of an eternal heaven is found in this, that it is towards an Infinite and Eternal God that it goes out. Pro- vision is thus made at once for endless activity and endless love, to combine in a harmony of everlasting joy. There has been much written in our day about the worship of sor- row, and a great truth lies under the words ; this tiiith, freed of its encumbering falsehood, Christianity embraces ; it speaks of tribulation as that through which we enter into the king- dom of heaven, and gives sorrow the high office of breaking the soul to humility and contriteness, that it may kneel at the feet of Jesus. But, if there is any one instinctive utter- ance of the human soul, such is the declaration that sorrow, whatever it may subserve, is a blot upon God's universe, is the fang of the snake sin, is the shadow cast by the wings of the great dragon that has come up from the bottomless pit to prey on man ; and that, if well interpreted, the worship of joy is higher than the worship of sorrow. And how com- pletely is all that insinuation about Christianity being allied to a selfish theory of morals now seen to vanish ! Happiness in the Christian scheme is not a motive, but an effect. The Christian does not serve God for happiness, but God by a sub- lime necessity has attached happiness to His service. Along the ranks of His army goes the command to rejoice ; above it floats the banner of love. Felicity is the light which rests over it all. From the helmets of the seraphim that light is flashed back in full unclouded blaze ; on us of the human GS THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. race, who, as Isaac Taylor says beautifully, " seem to stand almost on the extreme confines of happiness," its first rays are even now descending. Happiness is the spheral music in which a God, whose name is Love, has ordained that holiness must voice itself; His light, as it sweeps over the -(Eolean harp of immensity, kindling every dead world into beauty, awakens the Memnonian anthem of joy. So much for the nature of the felicity which Christianity styles celestial. Have we then no distinctive character to assign to that state and that locality which the believer en- ters upon after death, and which, in common discourse, re- ceive the special name of heaven 1 We have. In the es- sential character of the happiness of the future heaven, we can point to no change, but in circumstances there is a mighty alteration. Fichte, importunately insisting that a party, which may be taken as that of evangelical Christianity, expects a sensuous heaven, points in triumph to the fact that the eye is by it turned to futurity, when there can be but an objective change ; v/hile all that is subjective in heaven's bliss must be enjoyed now or never. Without any strain- ing, it can be shown that precisely the reverse of Fichte's proposition is true, and that, unless the Christian believes in, and hopes for, heaven, he cannot be sure that he has a real capacity for spiritual enjoyment. For what is this objective change on which Fichte bases his argument ? It is the re- moval of every source of enjoyment peculiar to sense and time, the casting free of the immortal soul from every kind of happiness which is not in goodness and in God The Christian professes to find joy in God as his portion. The Christian ethics of Butler are based on the idea of simple goodness as the object of an afiection. In heaven alone can we be sure that God only will be our portion, — that goodness pure and simple must fill the heart with joy, or leave it void. No man can enjoy the Christian heaven whose conception of THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 69 its joy is sensual or selfish. The Paleyan moralist, kept in the path of outward rectitude by Hope going before him with a picture of Milton's heaven, and Fear coming after him with a picture of Dante's hell, has no idea of it. Nor can Fichte offer any sure test by which it may be known that the bliss which he expressly and emphatically associates w^ith goodness arises from delight in goodness alone. The joy of the Christian heaven depends upon its holiness. Those who desire to form some conception of the peculiar glory of the celestial ages ought to read Butler's sublime sermon on the Love of God, and to follow out its suggestive meaning. Butler there aims at indicating the exhaustless sources of joy which would be found in the contemplation of the divine na- ture. We can here offer only one or two themes of medi- tation, supplementary to this central consideration. Let it then be thought what a power there is towards the impeding and shadowing of happiness in the very fact that this is a world of prevailing sin. We fight here under the cloud : we can have little hope that we will hear the final shout of vic- tory. And as we go to each charge, do we not see around us the fallen and the dying ] Are we not aware that over tlie whole earth there is always sorrow, and have we not to dim the eye of imagination, and close the gates of sympathy, that we cry not out at the spectacles of grief which are ever, in wof ul pageantry, passing onwards to the grave % How true is this of Mrs Browning's ! ** The fool hath said there is no God, But none, there is no sorrow." Every human heart must thrill to that touch of beautiful pathos, in which the author of Festus bodies forth the depth and earnestness of human wo. Among the celestial bands an angel is seen in tears ; a word of amazement passes along at the sight of an angel weeping ; but the wonder is soon explained : 70 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFK ** It is the angel of the earth ; She is |iways weeping." While our step is on such a world as earth, we must know the thrills of sympathetic anguish. Surely it will be an un- measured access of joy when the cloud of sin, smitten by the light of eternity, finally rolls away, and bares the sunless heavens. Consider, again, the joy that may arise in the hea- venly ages from the contemplation of the works of God. Even here it cannot be questioned that serene and exquisite enjoy- ment is obtained by pure and elevated minds in gazing on the greatness and beauty of nature. But the mind now may be compared to a mountain lake, in which, indeed, at times, the silent and beautifid hills, and the calm flowers, and forest foliage, and the clouds touched by the finger of morn or eve, may glass themsel,ves, but which is ever and anon ruffled and obscured by the rude tempest. And who can tell how far this enjoyment may be enhanced, when the sympathies are all true and harmonious, and vibrating to the music of love ? What mortal man can guess the rapture which fills the eyes of the seraphim as they sweep onward among the stars of God ! Lastly, not to multiply instances, can we not even now perceive, that from Christian friendship, as it would exist in heaven, there would result an exhaustless and unutterable joy ? One grand complaint that noble minds have against society is, that its vast texture of forms and gradations pre- vents kindred hearts from uniting,-^ — ^thwarts the action of sympathy. Assuredly the highest terrestrial joy is that of perfect friendship ; and how rare, how nearly impossible, is perfect friendship here ! ** Are we not form'd, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar ?" Yet the harmony that can result from this union in diversity is scarce to be seen on earth. It is no vague imagination, but what can be clearly deduced from Scripture and reason, THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 71 and easily embraced in thought, that from the friendship of the redeemed, knit in perfect sympathy of Divine love, will spring a joy which the harps of heaven will scarce have chords to voice. Such considerations as these might be multiplied indefi- nitely, and that with strict adherence to truth. The prospect they open up to us is sublime indeed. And if its glory admit- ted of enhancement, would it not arise from casting a look back upon the stricken and lowly penitent, as he lay in Christian humility, expecting all from the hand of God 1 Here it is as in the case of physical science ; which, beginning with bare algebraic formula, climbs upwards from system to system, till it is encompassed with the blaze of an inconceivable glory, and the wing of human imagination is seen feebly fluttering far below. Fichte, in his Way to the Blessed Life, after confessing that neither himself nor any other philosopher had till that time succeeded in elevating, by popular instruction, those who " either will not or cannot study philosophy systematically, to the comprehension of its fundamentar truths," allows that " Christ's Apostles," and a succession of " very unlearned per- sons," have possessed this essential knowledge. He discrimi- nates well the scientificand developed knowledge of philosophy from the life-knowledge of its fundamental truths. But might it not have occurred to him, that perhaps this strange exception might have another meaning and cause than any of which he dreamed? Might he not have conceived it possible that the gospel of Jesus had actually some wondrous power of getting at the life 1 If he missed the truth, let us hold by it. There is a profound meaning in the following sentences of Neander, used in reference to primitive Christianity : — " It belonged, indeed, to the essence of Christianity, that while it could become all things to all men, and adapt itself to the most different and opposite circumstances of human nature, it 72 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. could condescend even to wholly sensuous modes of compre- hending divine things, in order, by the power of a divine life^ working from within, gradually to spiritualize them. In this respect, the great saying of the Apos- tle may often have found its application, that the divine trea- sure was received, and for a season preserved, in earthen vessels, that the abundant power might be of God, and not of man." Let this be well pondered, and that superiority in Christianity which Fichte acknowledges may be explain- ed. Coleridge spake truly when he said that philosophy was iu the pagan night as the fire-fly of the tropics, making it- self visible, but not irradiatiag the darkness. THE SOCIAL LIFE. 73 THE SOCIAL LIFE. Religion is the only stable basis on which a commonwealth can be reared. This proposition, fundamental to all that is here to be said of the social life, might be demonstrated by clear inductive reasoning : I shall attempt merely to trace in outline one or two of the main divisions of the proof The first, and perhaps, all things considered, the most im- portant argument in its support, is to be derived from the analogy of the individual. The community has, so to speak, a distinct personality ; it is not a mere collection of indi- viduals. The more careful and protracted our observation of the man and the nation is, and the more profound our re- flection upon the phenomena presented by each, the more firm will our assurance become that a strict analogy holds between them. Butler's demonstration of the supremacy of con- science in the individual bosom is an adequate proof that the healthful and natural state of the nation is exhibited, only when the national conscience is dominant, when religion pre- vails. The political Butler has not yet appeared ; but a noble task awaits him. He will show how, as the man who listens to the voice of conscience, who can stand apart from his fel- lows, and, over all the brawling of the popular wind, hear the still small voice of conscience as supreme on earth, and 74 THE SOCIAL LIFE. turn his eye at its monition towards heaven for an approval which will make him independent of human opinion, is he who is most true to his nature ; so the nation which would rightly occupy its position in the world must have aims above all that is sublunary, and hold itself as a nation responsible to God. The second source of argument on this point is the evi- dence of history. More express and conclusive evidence than is derivable from this source can scarcely be conceived. Of many things the historical student may be doubtful, but of tliis at least he must be sure : That no amount of wealth, no extent of culture, has ever given a nation strength and sta- bility when the religious element has been in decay. Let it be noted that I now speak of the development and power of the religious faculty ; not of the subordinate, though im- portant question, whether the religion is true or false. And let any man consider the history of Judea, of Greece, of Rome, of Italy, and of France, and declare whether the nation is capable of avoiding some one fatal peril or another which is not religious. Either foreign subjugation, or domestic des- potism, or maniac anarchy, has ever overtaken the godless na- tion j and, in all times, the nation that had a faith, that re- verenced an oath, has put a bridle in the teeth of the unbe- lieving peoples. The only other department of proof to which it is neces- sary to refer is that of the testimony of great individual thinkers. It is interesting to note how, one might say with* out exception, the great thinkers and workers of all time have here agreed. Consider the amount and the nature of the evidence to be derived from that one source, the construc- tion of ancient and modern polities. Every legislator re- quires religion as his bower anchor ; every man who attempts to establish a commonwealth, or to rule an empire, commences with religion. That he was himself an irreligious man or THE SOCIAL LIFE. T5 ( sceptic mattered little. Whether he were a Zoroaster or Mahomet, a Ptolemy Lagus or Napoleon, it was the same ; the point of the national pyramid, each felt, must point to heaven. And the testimony of thinkers is equally explicit. Plato virtually makes religion the base of his republic ; and Mr Carlyle is, in our own day, again proclaiming, in what man- ner, or with what likelihood of success, it is unnecessary to inquire, the same truth. In one of Bacon's Essays, you find his authority and that of Cicero, like one sword with two edges, knit together. The fact is explicitly stated by Mon- tesquieu. One of the most healthy thinkers of recent times, Thomas Chalmers, gave the strength of his life to enimciate and enforce the momentous doctrine. It is not impossible, with the light of revelation and the voice of history, to discern the grand outline of that method by which God has ordained and commanded man, in slow progress through the centuries, to work out his perfection as a race. On the one hand, he has a personal freedom from God, which it is his duty to preserve, which he dare not alienate ; on the other, in order to his progress, God has revealed to him, first, by the fact of an experienced necessity, and, second, by the direct sanction of His word, that civil government, the more or less complete merging of individual freedom in public law, is also a divine ordinance. In the former of these it is involved, that every faculty which God has bestowed upon or committed to the individual perform its full and appropriate work, or reach its perfect and congenial development ; that the intellectual powers have a fair sphere for their operation, that the conscience be untrammelled, that the will exercise its legitimate authority over thought and action, and that each capacity of enjoyment be duly gratified. All this is implied in the perfection of individual fi'eedom ; and all this Chris- tianity guarantees in its declaration of the essential equality, the blood-unity, of all men, and its command that all work 7G THE SOCIAL LIFK be done, that every faculty operate, with might. In the latter, — in the ordinance of civil government, — it is implied that every man perform not only his own primary and direct duty, but that he subserve the performance of all other duty ; that he play, so to speak, into the hand of every other man ; that he make way where he is himself superfluous ; that he obey where his service is necessary to the performance of a duty which he is himself incompetent to effect ; in one word, that he recognise as right all that graduation of rank according to work done, which nature tends to effect. This is the true theory of divine right, — that the real, the natural power, be obeyed Let it not be imagined that this is a divine sanc- tion of any particular form, or any particular depositary, of governing power : Christianity does not change a living body into a mummy or petrifaction, and command men to obey it : it sanctions the power; and if the time has come for this power to be born, the giant child may hear its sanctioning voice in the womb of futurity, and tear its way, amid what throes soever, to life and inheritance. In the darkest and most barbarous times this social theory of Christianity will be a guiding light ; when civilization shall be completed, when freedom and law shall have become one, and not till then, it shall have been wrought out. It will be i^roper to consider certain social aspects of the present day with some degree of minuteness, and this may be done with perspicuity and convenience in a couple of se- parate chapters. THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 77 CHAPTER L THE SOCIAL PEOBLEM OF THE AGE. That there is in our time some great difference from other ages, that some Ionian change is in progress, seems hidden from no thinker of the day. De Tocqneyille on the one hand, and Carlyle on the other, proclaim the fact This process of change was inaugurated by the greatest event of modern times, in itself, indeed, but a result, the first French Kevolution. The doctrines of the Encyclopaedia, the infidel or atheistic theories of Yoltaire, Diderot, Naigeon, and their followers, had gradually pervaded French and European so- ciety, eating out religion from the heart of nations. Kings and nobles trembled not. This new philosophy of material- ism and sensuality seemed to them but a summer cloud, touched with the roseate hues of genius, and distilling a gen- tle rain, to nourish the flowers of sentiment and foster the growths of science ; if there did issue from it a few gleams of distant lightning, these would but clear the air of ennui, and promote a freer respiration. The ancient sentence, " Fear God and honour the king," had, it was agreed, held sway long enough over the human mind ; the principalities and powers of earth were satisfied, and sat smiling in the t^ THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGK secure content of dotard imbecility, while the Encyclopaedic lightning burned out from its place among the beliefs and maxims of men, the former half of the regulating sentence : Let there be no God, they said, but oh, continue to honour us. At last the storm came, in a burst that shook the globe. The world stood still to listen ; even the lone and discrowned Jerusalem, sitting amid her graves, became more desolate, for pilgrims forgot to turn their steps to the East. We know the result We have marked the path of that lightning which burned the old French monarchy from the face of the earth, and in whose blasting gleam the brilliance of every crown in the world waxed pale. That wild glare awoke a power that had long slumbered : — The people. Leaving Encyclopsedism behind, and lifting its voice in other nations besides France, this great new element in social affairs — in its awakening, its attempt to make itself heard, its slow grar vitation towards its own place in the system of things — has given its distinctive features to our epoch. To deny the fact that the relations of classes and the modes of social action wear at present among free nations an aspect unknown in the feudal ages, is now impossible. It is simply out of the power of any man to turn the eye of his imagination upon the mediaeval time — to note the tranquil- lity of its general atmosphere, breathing in dim religious light through the still cathedral aisle, and resting round the hoary turret of the feudal castle — to mark how reverently the serf looks up to his master, and with what undoubting devotion the worshipper kneels before the uplifted crucifix — to observe the Book unchained from its place at the altar, and the venerating wonder with which men gaze upon him who can read — ^to see one large class sitting aloft, glittering in its badges, in its one hand feudal charters, in its other a feudal sword, on its lip a really noble and beautiful smile of chival- rous valour and youthful strength, on its brow all the intelli- THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 79 gence of the age, and another large class below, born to bow down before this, to receive food from its hands and instruc- tion from its lips, and yield it, in return, the instinctive affec- tion of children and the childlike obedience of men not born to the heritage of a will — and then to maintain that the order of society has not undergone a universal and upturning alteration. So thorough, so transforming, is the change from this era, that a single glance at the picture is sufficient to convince any intelligent, informed, and healthy-minded man that it is gone for ever. It is only in what may be called late years that the ultimate influences of the mighty agency introduced by John Faust into civilization — the agency of the printing press — have begun to be traceable. It is only in these times that its unpredicted power to loosen the tongue of the world, to draw forth the electricity of thought, to turn the pen into a sceptre, and the hereditary diadem into a toy, has been fairly evinced. It is the grand characteristic of our age that thought is more fluent, that men more easily commu- nicate together, than heretofore ; the University of the modem era can be closed to none ; for who is it that cannot learn to read and write, and who that can read, and has the power of using his fingers, may not act upon his fellows 1 We see around us the rending of ancient associations, the awakening of novel powers ; we witness discordance, severance, doubt ; the ancient reverences and the ancient unities have mostly passed away ; men believe not, without uttering a determined Why ; men respect not, without a mandate in nature's own handwriting. "Thought," says Goethe, in his sententious manner, " widens, but lames ; action narrows, but animates." The words fiimish a key to the intelligence of all the phenomena we have been contemplating, and a warrant for believing that they may exhibit, not the spasms of approaching disso- lution, but the untamed energy of new developments of life. 80 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. It is well known ho-w the man of one idea can work ; it is well known also, that in order to do any single work well, you must on it concentrate your efforts. The same law ap- plies to the nation. The army of Islam was victorious be- cause it poured the lightning of its defiance on the foe as from one blazing eye. Nations rolled away resistless to the crusade, because their hearts throbbed with the one idea of saving the sepulchre of the Saviour from the desecration of unbelievers. If you look well into the ancient time, you will find the unity of action on the part of vassals accounted for by the consideration that they had not a sufficient power of thought to doubt ; the iron energy of governments, by the fact that there had not yet dawned on the world the idea of toleration, and that they were lamed by no freedom or va- riety of opinion. There are, however, in the individual life, stages which are peculiarly those of doubt. The youth acts cheerfully and with energy on the belief he has received from his fathers : then he begins to question, to hesitate, to doubt ;, his arm is at once paralyzed, and with many words his ac- tions become few and indecisive. But he may advance to yet a higher state : this doubt and temporaiy indecision may be a stage in his progress to calm intelligent manhood ; he may regain his early cheerful and united energy, with his beliefs liis own, and the still sky of manhood over him. There are similar periods in the life of nations, and that " transition era" in which we live is one of them. The old relations which bound class to class have passed away, and with them we have lost much of the old power of action ; pretension and quackery flourish amain. Mr Carlyle tells us that all things have unfixed themselves, and float distract- edly on an ocean of talk. It Is useless and it is contrary to tnith to say that his denunciations are altogether uncalled for, that the peril he descries is not real. Let any one look into the state of our law, and the slow success of effoi*ts mak- THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 81 ing for its amendment ; let liim examine the condition of our trusts, enough, as on good authority appears, of itself to give work, long and difficult, to Reform, had it the hands of Briareus ; let him consider the ease with which public nui- sance can shelter itself under so-called private right, and the clumsy and inefficient machinery by which any change, de- manded it may be by the very health of our towns, can be effected ; let him reflect on the power of corporations to clog the wheels of general progress, and the seeming powerless- iiess of Britain to teach her children ; then, or rather when he has added from all hands to this partial list of our short- comings, let him decide whether an infusion of energy into the legislative and administrative agencies of our country is not urgently demanded. Nay, if this does not satisfy him, let him traverse the Continent of Europe, and see despotism teaching her children, cleaning, and beautifying, and ordering her streets, offering countless suggestions of order, cheapness, decorum, common sense, to a British observer, and then let him answer. " When," exclaims Mr Carlyle, " shall we have done with all this of British liberty, voluntary principle, dangers of centralization, and the like 1 It is reaUy getting too bad. For British liberty, it seems, the people cannot be taught to read. British liberty, shuddering to interfere with the rights of capital, takes six or eight millions of money annually to feed the idle labourer whom it dare not employ. For British liberty we Uve over poisonous cess-pools, gully-drains, and detestable abominations ; and omnipotent Londoa cannot sweep the dirt out of itself. British liberty produces, — what ? Floods of Hansard debates every year, and apparently little else at present. If these are the results of British liberty, I, for one, move we should lay it on the shelf a little, and look out for something other and farther. We have achieved British liberty hundreds of years ago ; and are fast I" 82 THE SOCIAL PKOBLEM OF THE AGE. gi'owing, on tlie strengtli of it, one of the most absurd popu- lations the sun, among his great Museum of Absurdities, looks down upon at present." Certain of these expressions may be exaggerated, and the conclusion arrived at will assuredly not be accepted here. But the strictures of Mr Carlyle suggest a question which the considerations already adduced, the spectacle, so often repeated within the last fifteen years on the Continent, of powerless constitutionalism falling back into despotism, and many cha- racteristics besides those already referred to of the domestic administration in Britain and America, make exceedingly ur- gent. It is this : — Can we combine modern freedom, thought, and enlightenment, with the strength and activity of despotism ? Can that awakened power, the People, be kept awake, nay roused, by an ever-broadening enlightenment, to a plenitude and potency of political function even yet unexampled, while every benefit and every energy of government are preserved 1 Omitting the consideration of certain views of less im- portance, it is necessary to notice two solutions of our pro- blem, proposed, either explicitly or implicitly, by classes of thinkers who recognise the necessity of reaching a solution. With each party we shall have one important point of agree- ment : from each it may be necessary to difier in matters of vital moment. The first solution is that which, however modified, had its source in the materialist philosophy of the first French Re- volution, and has ever continued in. essential particulars to agree with it ; that of liberal, or, more strictly, infidel radi- calism. The one thing worthy to be accepted from the French Revolution, and from the party whose view we now consider, is tlieir testimony to human freedom. It was an apple of celestial hue and fragi-ance which France stretched out her hand to pluck ; and if she found it but bitter and bloody dust, it proved such only because the hand with which she grasped THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 83 it was tliat of a blaspheming demon. The sun looked down on strange sight's in that Revolution tumult ; on sights whose significance can never be exhausted, and in which the eyes of nations will in all time have deep lessons to read. It looked down on a people that turned its gaze on the past, and saw generation after generation trooping dimly down the vista of years from the cavern of vacant Chance ; which had the heart to cast its eye on the future, and see all men sink- ing from the verge of the world into the blank abyss of anni- hilation ; and which, even in the ghastly loneliness of such a universe as this, standing for one cheerless moment between two vast and eternal graves, could contrive to be riotous and gay. It looked down on a cathedral where men were gri- macing in idiot laughter round what they called the goddess of reason. It looked down on a Convention where they were " decreeing" the existence of the Supreme Being ; the exist- ence of Him to whom the whole universe is as a film of breath on the morning air. Perhaps more wonderful still, it looked down upon a nation having, with all this, the name of free- dom on its lips, uttering words which sounded like those of heroic patriots and poets, asserting the equality of man, and declaring that it would rule itself. But it had been most wonderful of all if it had seen these words made good, if a people denying its immortality, and believing the universe to have no moral Sun, knit by no sacred memories to the past, and owning no treasure of hope in the future, its spirit stubborned by none of the iron of duty, and its appetites call- ing aloud for pleasure, had been able to become free. This it did not behold. That nation first mocked freedom by the mummeries of children, and then made its name a loathing over the world by the horror of bloody cnielty. Federation fetes, statues of liberty, endless outflowing of meaningless mellifluous oratory, and then foaming hatred, and the long line of death-tumbnls ; the dream that freedom was no go- 84 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. vernment, and the awakening to find that it was the govern- ment of madness ; — such was the history of the French Re- volution. If we accept even from it the imperishable truth that freedom is the inalienable inheritance and ultimate goal of man, let us also read in it this other lesson, that without religion a nation can never be free, but will either go mum- ming and fooling to plant liberty trees and inaugurate plas- ter-of-Paris images, or will awaken the Furies of anarchy, and join with them in a dance of death. Never did revolution more completely fail than that of France ; and never in this world was there a revolution so profoundly infidel. Its source was the infidelity of Voltaire; the philosophers who supported it were as a body infidel. Other and inferior gifts God may grant to nations that have utterly forgotten Him, but it would seem that the crowning gift of freedom can be conferred only upon one in whose heart there is the belief in a God, and which can reverence an oath. For this reason, we shall turn away from infidel radicalism ; it aims at an impossibility, it contradicts human history. From atheistic liberalism, which must end either in folly or in anarchy, let us turn to Mr Carlyle. The fundamental axiom of that diluted pantheism of which we recognised Mr Carlyle as the great living advocate, we found to be, that man is divine. The whole tendency of such a belief would necessarily be towards the exaltation of the great man : if such a thing as worship could exist, it would be worship of him : if a theory of government were to be propounded, it would be that in which his wisdom ruled with- out let, and his will was absolute. If my fellow is more di- vine than I, it is right that I bow down to him, it is right that I serve him ; and it is no diflS.cult task to show that the good things of this life will plenteously reward my doing so. In one word, if well traced out, the legitimate social theory of pantheism is despotism. THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE, l55 Althoiigli we find in Mr Carlyle's latest writings wliat seems to expose him to the objection of looking somewhat too fixedly on the past ; and although our own time and land might have furnished him with scenes and with men as well fitted to enforce dramatically certain of those lessons which he has read us in his Past and Present, as St Edmundsbury and Abbot Samson ; yet it is but a superficial view of his whole works which does not perceive a deeper truth behind all his applause of the past. His mighty intellect and iron will are drawn, as by the sympathy of brotherhood, towards the giant forces of the olden time ; he speaks of the present age as feeble and distracted, when contrasted with ages long gone by; and, in the work just named, he has, by the wizard power of his genius, summoned up, in living distinctness, certain gi'eat spectacles and men of the past, that those of the pre- sent may hide their heads before them. Yet who has pro- claimed with such emphasis as he, that the law of all human things is progress, that it is vain t<^ attempt to chain the fu- ture under the past ? We cannot fairly doubt that his desire or hope is, not that the nineteenth or twentieth century should become the thirteenth, but only that certain funda- mental characteristics should be found in both. Mr Carlyle, looking forward into the distance, appears to contemplate a time characterized somewhat as follows : the rubbish of extinct customs has been swept aside ; the dust of shattered systems has fallen from the air, and sunk harmless into the soil ; the discords of quackery and disputation have gone silent ; and, alas ! the world-tree of the nations, planted of old in Judea, the Igdrasil of modern civilization, that bloomed into its chivalries, and yielded fair flowerage of literatures and philosophies, and bore its final fruit in the Lutheran Reformation, has fallen utterly, and mouldered as into moorland moss ; the deep eternal skies of nature, the gi*eat laws of duty, of industry, and of hero-worship, have 86 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE, again emerged, and roofed the world. More and more the development of Mr Carlyle's system has tended to the pour- ing of contempt upon all the modes and agencies of our pre- sent social life ; he has scowled upon popular assemblies, upon free election, upon what is partly the voice and partly the guide of public opinion, the free press : more and more clearly his all-embracing word, — of command, of denunciation, of prophecy, — has been hero-worship ; and, with more and more distinctness and decision, he has pointed at the severance of all men into two great classes, the foolish and the wise, the silently and blindly governed, and the silently and irrespon- sibly governing. He has declared his utter abandonment of faith in any political exercise of the popular understanding, by proposing a step of manifest return, in the appointment of certain senators or j^rivy-councillors by nomination.* One of his late works contains an assertion which, with absolute explicitness, declares him the eternal foe of freedom, which prescribes to it, in confej^ring or debating with him, but one tone, and that the tone which can so well be borrowed from his own works, of implacable defiance and irreconcilability ; an assertion whicli is probably the keenest and most bitter insult ever sent to the rude heart of the human race, ever levelled against that great class which has made up, and which for an indefinite number of centuries must continue to make up, the bulk of mankind, and, if not a preponderating, at least a large proportion of the public voice of every free country ; the sad and amazing declaration, that " by any bal- lot-box Judas will go as far as Jesus."t He has sneered at * In the Latter Day Pam'phhts. t A similar statement, based, not as Mr Carlyle bases it, on general considerations, but on the facts of the gospel history, is constantly to be found in commonplace books. To-day, it is said, the Jewish multitude cried Hosannah before the steps of Christ ; to-morrow, their shout was, Crucify Him, Crucify Him. A vague glance at the Scripture narrative appears to sanction this represent9,tion ; but such a glance is precisely THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 87 the advantages of liberty, and palliated the evils of despotism, pointing to Epictetus and to Paul as showing the indepen- dence of the individual character of any such influence. In a word, no one can question the fact, that Mr Carlyle has drawn off altogether from the side of what is meant by radi- calism ; that his political philosophy has disjoined itself from the popular enlightenment, the popular science, the popular election, which cluster round that standard. What, then, does he propose, or prophetically proclaim ? What is signi- fied by his unceasing laudation of " might," what by the analogies upon which he ventures, surely with a strange bold- ness, between men and the lower animals ? What is indi- cated by his admiration of Frederick the Great, the virtual what can yield nothing in the way of strict historical fact ; and careful inspection for a single moment, of the dates and circumstances of the events recorded, proves it to be the reveme of correct. The occasion of the passover had filled the Jewish capital to overflowing. The crowd which occupied its streets and poured into its surrounding valleys, when the approach of the Galilean Prophet was announced, represented with peculiar fulness and accuracy the universal commonalty, urban and rural, of Judea. To whatever expression of sentiment it gave utterance, that was the unmistakeable, spontaneous, and general sentiment of the Jewish people. The vast multitude received Christ as one coming in the name of the Lord. Such then was, and had been from first to last, the opinion, more or less intelligent, of the Hebrew commonalty touching Jesus of Nazareth, The great instincts of humanity in their bosoms said, This man speaks truth. How was it, then, that a crowd, and a Jewish crowd, called aloud. Crucify Him ? The reason is simple. At the hour when sacerdotal conspirators were plotting the arrest of Christ, the family of every Jewish peasant and artizan in that vast multitude which spread palm-trees before the Saviour was gathered in solemnity round the table on which lay the paschal supper. An outcast scum of vagabonds and assassins, such as can be had for hire in any large capital, and could be found in Jerusalem, was still abroad. A venal rabble, of the kind which has in every age belied the people, undertook the job of arresting Jesus. And why did they come by night? Because by daylight the people of Judea would have trampled into the dust that brutish crew, as they at- tempted to seize Him whom the common people heard gladly. It is a melancholy proof of human carelessness and vague stupidity that to this day the common people should bear the blame of a proceeding which was managed as it was for fear of the body of the Jewish nation. 88 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. declaration of whose reign to his subjects was, All you can demand of me is, that I govern well ; if you are happy, it is of no importance whether your happiness is that of freemen or slaves ? The sum total and ultimate goal of Mr Carlyle's political thinking has turned out to be what was naturally and philosophically to be expected — Despotism. He will not attempt to marry freedom to strength, nor cherish the hope that the race may pass from the unintelligent energy of youth, when force followed authority, and thought had not lamed action, to the free energy of manhood ; the multitude are hopelessly foolish, and their highest bliss must be found in bowing, with instinctive reverence, before an absolute sove- reign, their eyes blinded by the glare of his sole and God- like will. All the inventions, all the sciences, all the enlight- enment of modern times, may then be brought to clothe and feed them, as his ability renders possible, and as his bounty chooses to dispense ; only they must obey with no question as to the reason. Surely there is something sad and disappointing in this prospect opened up by Mr Carlyle for the future. Has all that ancient and heroic struggle for freedom, then, been but the fruit of delusion and frenzy ? Or was our race destined to expend all its heroism in a long, weary battle ; and when at last it saw its enemy dead, when at last it did behold Des- potism in the swoon of death, with its cruel and bloodshot eyeball glazing and becoming light] ess and ghastly, to find it had toiled and bled for a mere bauble, and that its only hope was to re-animate the conquered monster ? Has the path of humanity, over sandy deserts and up flinty moun- tains, through burning heats and bitter storms, been to such a promised land as this 1 A promised land ! No ti-ue man would accept it, though its vines were richer than those of Es- chol, and it flowed with milk and honey. Decided was the error of the Radicals of the French Revolution ; still more THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 89 deadly is that of Mr Carlyle. There is a strength of noble- ness in the human heart to scorn such prosperity as even per- fect despotism could bestow ; for no humiliating happiness will it sell its birthright of freedom ; men will rather be freemen, ay, and die for freedom, in a rocky gorge of Hellas, or on bare moors in Scotland, than slaves amid the vines of Campania. *• Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame, Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts. Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame ; Verse echoes not one heating of their hearts, — History is hut the shadow of their shame, — Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts, As to oblivion their blind millions fleet. Staining that heaven with obscene imagery Of their own likeness." One grand temptation of the age is to distrust and abandon Freedom. Her robe has been soiled with blood, her eye has been lit with frenzy, " blasphemy's loud scream" has mingled with her " music of deliverance ;" but she is, for all this, an angel of light, and we must not forego the faith and hope that her features will yet beam forth in theii; own immortal loveliness. We shall not lift the light from human annals, and silence the songs which have risen from earth's fairest homes and noblest battle-fields ; that thrill which the word " freedom" has ever sent through the heart of nations has not been altogether meaningless. Upon any correct theory of man, the essential excellence of freedom is demonstrable ; not, certainly, as a present possession, but as a future attain- ment : it must be the aim of civilization to educe every fa- culty of the whole man, spiritual as well as physical; and this can never be done until man, as a civis, as one united indis- solubly with his fellows, thinks and wills, as well as works and feeds. At what period a nation may come to be capable of freedom, it were long to tell ; but the nation which has had freedom won for it by the wisdom and dauntlessness of its sons, covers itself with everlasting infamy if it cannot enter 90 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. on the possession of its inheritance. To accept Mr Carlyle's Yie^Y of the future, were to confess ourselves nationally worthy of this contempt ; and if Ave put " British freedom on the shelf/' our heroic fathers that have bled for us from Bannock- burn to Sedgemoor, will, from their high thrones, look down mpon us with indignation and shame. There is another answer to our question besides those we have glanced at. But first it may be well to ask, whether the attainment of energetic and stable freedom is to be con- sidered easy. Does human freedom mean the dissolution of government? Are the shouts of nations at the name and prospect of liberty to be understood as indicating that free- dom is easy, that it consists in every man's doing as he likes ; that, when a nation has hurled tyranny aside, it has now only to gesticulate round plaster figures, or go in white-robed pro- cession to plant liberty-trees, or amuse itself with any other form of foolery ? No. The sternest task ever attempted by a nation is that of inaugurating and maintaining freedom. The man who governs his own spirit has been, on the highest authority, pronounced greater than he who takes a city : this man has attained personal freedom. National freedom is simply the government of its own spirit by a nation. It is the attempt on the pai*t of a people, as on the part of a man, to have a will chainless as that of the wildest libertine, and yet live and work with united energy under wisdom's law. And the toils of Thermopylae, Morgarten, and Naseby, were, it may be, slight to this. *' Latius regnes avidum domando Spiritum, quam si Libyam remotis Gadibus jungas, et uterque Poenus Serviat uni." There is no free people to which the lines may not be ad- dressed. It was a sublime duty, rather than an alluring plea- sure, whose distant .gleam lit the eyes of nations as they looked to liberty ! To attain tine freedom demands the very last THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 91 « agony of national effort, the severe and final endeavour by which a people at length reaches its throne. Christianity afibrds ns the axioms in accordance with which the question proposed can be satisfactorily answered. Taking from irreligious radicalism the truth groped after by it, and accepting at the hands of Mr Carlyle the vitally important lessons he has so powerfully re-proclaimed, — avoiding anar- chy on the one hand, and despotism on the other, — it sets the race on a path of unlimited advancement. Christianity pronounces men in essentials equal. All the protests which, in the course of human history, have been uttered against the oppression of the poor by the rich, and in behalf of the native majesty of man, sink into insignificance when compared with that ^^ttered by and embodied in Christianity ; there is one grain of truth in that claim which modern democracy, though in crazed, and maundering, and blasphemous tones, has so often put forth, to number the founders of Christianity in its ranks. In express terms, the Christian revelation declares all nations of the earth to be of one blood ; it pronounces all men equally the subjects of one King ; it makes the value of a soul infinite, and shows no difierence between the worth of that of a beggar and that of a prince. Look into the stable at Bethlehem, on that night when crowned sage and humble shepherd knelt by the cradle of that Babe who was their common King ; do you not see in that spectacle the bond of an essential equality, uniting all ranks, and making the regal purple and the peasant's russet faint and temporary distinctions 1 Coleridge said well, that the fairest flower he ever saw climbing round a poor man's window was not so beautiful in his eyes as the Bible which he saw lying within ! If all classes forsook the gospel, one might expect the poor, the hard-toiling, the despised, to cling to it. Whatever Chris- tianity may have become in our Churches and in our times, the great class of the workers can find in its aspects no ex- 92 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. cuse for abandoning itself, unless they can show that the Churches have re-written the Bible ; unless they can allege that it no longer exhibits the Divine Founder of Christianity preaching to the poor, companying with publicans and sin- ners, bringing into the bosoms of harlots the healing light of Divine love ; unless they can show that it was the sanctioned usage of apostolic times to honour the rich in the Christian assemblage ; unless, in one word, they can deny that the gos- pel holds forth to every man the prospect of being a king and priest to God. But Christianity does not make this truth of essential hu- man brotherhood powerless by leaving it alone. Mr Carlyle, with his glance of lightning, saw the anarchy or the weakness to which modern freedom was tending ; government he knew to be absolutely necessary. And this government, in some way or other, must be vested in able men. He called on the na- tions to obey their mightiest, to worship them as heroes ; and proceeded to scorn and scout the prevalent ideas and hopes of freedom. But Christianity meets this want too. It writes down civil government as an ordinance of God. Not that it sanctions what has been called divine right, or any such super- ficial and absurd notion : not that, in any part or passage of the sacred volume, it commands us to honour any one for the blood in his veins ; but that it recognises the institution of government as a necessity, and enjoins men loyally to submit to it, and honour the king. Any one form of government is not appointed ; but government is stamped with approval ; and, by the promulgation of the truth of radical equality, a way is opened up by which freedom may flourish under any political form. How, then, are we in every case to find our rulers? By finding those who are fitted to rule. Is the fact that they are thus fitted the reason of our honouring them, and our theory, after all, the same as that of hero- worship ? By no means. Their honour is reflected. Their THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 93 fitness is the indication of the reason why they should be ho- noured ; the reason itself is because God has commissioned them ; and we are precisely as free in performing the tasks naturally appointed us, as they in performing those for which He has fitted them. Thus, as it embraces the one truth of democracy, Christianity embraces every particle of truth which Mr Carlyle has contributed to human knowledge. All that he has said of the might and value of man, though per- haps demanding supplement and modification, can on these terms be accepted without endangering human freedom ; every power of the hero can be brought to serve the race, and yet honour be done both to God and to man. The greatest will rule because God has given them the kingdom ; and the people shall be willing in the day of His power. A nation would be perfectly free and perfectly governed if the allied truths of equality and subordination were both in full force ; if not only the ablest governed, but the channels to government were absolutely unobstructed, ahd every man had the assurance that, if he were the ablest, he would be go- vemor. Christianity does not furnish any nostrum by which all the ills of- society can be at once cured, its weakness turned to strength, and its powers brought into operation ; the bare fact that any one, whencesoever he derive his specific, mis- conceives so far the nature of man and the evolution of his- tory, as to imagine that the one is to be perfected, and the other brought to a close, by a magic word which he can utter, is conclusive evidence of his utter incapacity. Without Christianity no nation can be fundamentally and entirely re- generated ; unless we proceed upon its theory of man, we always fall into some fatal error ; spreading out into the stag- nant marsh of weakness and disunion, tumbling in cataract- foam, writhing madly and streaked with blood, into the abyss of anarchy, or gliding into the Dead Sea of Despotism : but 94 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGK earnest tliouglit and practical effort of our own are necessary in addition to all it gives us, — calm consideration of the difii- culties, conditions, and tools of our time, valour to dare and perseverance to do, Baconian induction and Platonic ardour. It is in this spirit, and with this consciousness, that I would offer a few hints towards the solution of this great problem — To show Freedom her hands, to point out how the energy of Despotism may be in her reasoning eye, the power of Des- potism in her willing arm. It seems the natural order to inquire first into the consti- tution and functions of the central government. How is the ruling body to be got together 1 and. To the discharge of what duties is it competent when assembled 1 With all its drawbacks and perils, representation must be accepted as one of the principal facts of modern civilization. For several centuries now the European nations have more and more clearly been laying hold of the idea, and more and* more earnestly groping after its realization. It is a principle inwoven with the fundamental characteristics of Christian ci- vilization, a principle sure to be evolved in that system of national life which was based on the Christian theory of man. It is the natural, and will ultimately be the triumphant, so- lution of the central problem of national life, — to preserve the individual freedom, to honour the individual reason and will, and yet to realize a national personality, a national unity, a national will. Every theory of government which is not founded on a recognition of the fact that government is a duty and function which a people calls certain of its citizens to perform has been gradually becoming obsolete. No colour- ing of eccentric genius, no obscurantism of political pedantry, will change into the robust verdure of spring the wan autum- nal tint which overspreads all speculation, not having health and heart enough to acknowledge the sovereignty of man, in- herent in the many, and deputed to the few. The only ques- THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 95 tions really remaining to be discussed are, how best tlie many may be taught to select the few, and how they may be brought loyally to obey them when selected. Were it a vain attempt to endeavour to educate the popu- lation of a free country to these special duties and functions of freemen 1 It has been little thought of. Much surely might be done, both to awaken a sense of duty^ and to guide to a selection of men. Unless integrity reigns in the heart of the free elector, no hope can be entertained for a happy issue to the exercise of his office. Not only must virtue and honesty, generally con- sidered, be advocated in a free country ; freemen must be aroused to a sense of the nobleness, the responsibility, the sacredness, of the distinctive duties of the free. In a brave army, cowardice is reckoned more to be shunned than death ; every brave soldier will rather die on his colours than aban- don them. Travellers tell us of the Osmanli, that, however reduced they find him, how faded soever the glory of olden days, he yet regards with a silent pride the sabre that hangs at his belt, letting no speck stain its brightness, but stinting himself rather than part with a jewel in its sheath. It seems to whisper of the old might of Islam, to tell him that in his veins runs the blood of conquerors, — that he has in Lis heart a treasure dearer than life. Now, methinks, a freeman with a heart in his breast should treat an attempt to buy from him his honour, — to purchase his free voice, — as a tiTie soldier would a charge of cowardice, or a valiant Osmanli a request to sell his sabre for a bit of bread. Every free-born elector of Britain or America possesses the bii-thright of a sacred duty; he has one act to perform which is worthy of the greatest, and for the right doing of which it were noble to die. " The honour of a freeman !" — this, in free nations, should be a for mula for the expression of something stronger than death. But, on the other hand, might not the attempt at bribery be 96 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. regarded as standing higli in the list of crimes ? Is such a thing impossible as high treason to the people ; and is it unjust that it should be visited as severely as high treason to the prince? And if the honour of freemen might be cherished, to guard the purity of election, its efficiency might unquestionably be promoted by the adoption of certain practicable methods, by which the body of electors in free nations should be guided, at least in an important degree, in the selection of representa- tives. It is surely somewhat strange that Mr Carlyle, instead of denouncing popular election in that unqualified and indig- nant manner, did not think it might be possible to give such directing hints to honest electors as would aid them in fixing upon the worthiest candidate for their suffi'ages. Men of all ranks having such an irresistible tendency to bow down to the hero, might it not be possible, to some extent, to point the said hero out ? Is it so hard to indicate certain of the particular difficulties and dangers to be encountered by the elector ? Would rough common sense, when set on its guard, be apt to be blinded by cajolery or fawning ? Were it im- possible to awaken electors to a feeling of the emptiness of mere talk, and train them to a habit of comparing words with actions ? Is there not spread widely such a measure of in- telligence among our working men, and the general body of our population, that they could, especially if urged and in- structed, inform theiuselves of the past life of their proposed representative, and judge whether, from his bearing in what spheres he has occupied, he has the heart, the head, the arm of a man 1 Is it altogether hopeless that they might learn a total indifference to the jingle of the guineas in his purse, and ask neither of what blood he comes, nor what are his posses- sions ; but whether he is a man of ability, uprightness, infor- mation, discreet valour, and religion, worthy to become a British lawgiver 1 So much directly bearing on electors ; one word as to those THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 97 whom they may elect. The question admits, to say the least, of discussion, whether it is not advisable, in our British Islands, to find a larger body of men from which representatives can be obtained. It seems a reasonable idea that a larger class of British subjects might, beneficially to the commonwealth, have opened up to them a path into the House of Commons. The aristocratic and monied classes alone can at present enter there. Is it certain that there is not thus excluded an im- portant and available portion of the intellect of the country? The shrewd, energetic, earnest citizen, of the lower order in the middle class, accustomed to think much and work hard, enters not. The bulk of the intellect of the fourth estate must rule without the doors of the Senate House. That a powerfully-minded member of the working class, who knows the feelings and wants of his brethren, should ever be ad- mitted, seems to be regarded as an extravagant idea ; yet, can it be doubted that such an one might prove an abler senator than the gambler for fame with an abundance of money, or the brisk scion of the nobilitv, who can drive tandem and is a capi- ta] shot ] We scout the idea of paying our legislators in gold ; may they not occasionally make us pay for the honour of em- ploying them in rarer coin ? A few evils might arise from making it possible for membership to become a trade ; would there arise a greater number than from continuing to make it a fashionable amusement? There is no reason to doubt that governing bodies, of which the members have been or are paid, have proved themselves not one whit less patriotic than those where the practice has never been introduced. But why, at least, should not an extremely limited number of our repre- sentatives be paid ? No man of vigorous intellect and sound heart would think it demeaning to accept a bounty from his country, if he could not otherwise tender her his services ; nor would a scofi" against such be tolerated in a British House of Commons. ^8 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. The question of the functions to which the governing body- in a free nation is competent is one of high importance. The notions which float in the public mind on this subject are vague, and not unfrequently erroneous. There is a ten- dency, fatal in its consequences, and decried by earnest men, to confound true freedom with laissez faire ; as if liberty meant no iiile at all, or as if it even implied any curtailing of the executive ; instead of government, effective and com- prehensive, by the best, with consent of all. National free- . dom is apt to be confounded with individual liberty, and thus to lose its significance and efficacy. A people may be na- tionally impotent from fear to meddle with personal rights. The idea is too common that in a free state the government ought to exercise little or no control over private affairs, and that the state is free in proportion as this is the case. It is forgotten that the essence of tyranny consists, not in the fact that men obey, but that they do so without know- ing and comprehending the reason of their action ; and that the life of freedom consists, not in any exemption from obey- ing, but in obedience, after due exercise of that will which God has implanted in men and nations, after assurance ob- tained that submission or active compliance are promotive of the general welfare, and assent asked and accorded. The en'or now opposed is based on a misconception of the very essence of liberty, one which dooms it to be utterly ineffec- tive for any great national end. The sole characteristic of real freedom is, that a nation acts with consent and intelli- gence ; you cannot decide whether a nation is free or en- slaved by knowing what its government does, you must know hoiu it does it. The man is as free who commands himself to be bound, with express directions that no attention be paid to any subsequent shrieks or implorings, in order that he may undergo an exciniciating operation, as he who sweeps across the moorland on his own steed, or gazes over the face THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 99 of a flashing sea from tlie deck of his own yacht. If a nation, acting through men by itself deputed, men who represent the national will, comes to the conclusion that the beauty of its cities would be enhanced by their streets being built ac- cording to plans approved by a body of qualified men, it con- tinues a perfectly free state, though no one of its citizens can, at his own whim or caprice, infl.ict an architectural nuisance upon his fellow-townsmen. If it is discovered by a nation that the malconstruction of private dwellings frequently occa- sions fire and gives rise to extensive damage, or that the stu- pidity or carelessness of individuals results in the confusion of titles and the multiplication of quarrels and lawsuits, it may most freely appoint bodies of judicious men, architects and lawyers, to inspect plans and titles. And so on. The nation is ever free when itself wills the restraints which on itself it imposes. Until freedom takes a positive, and, as it were, aggressive attitude ; until it learns to extend its exe- cutive in various directions, and to bring the sifted intellect and the concentrated will of the nation to look upon with scrutinizing glance, and to order with energy and exactness, the various modes and departments of national life, it will never fully unfold its powers. As yet, it has not been fairly pitted against despotism. It may one day prove possible, with the perfect preservation of individual freedom, to pit national eflfort in free nations against national effort in des- potisms, and to demonstrate that the analogy between the nation and the individual here too holds good ; that, as the free poet sings more- sweetly and more thrillingly than he whose song is heard through a grating, and as three free warriors will hurl back a host of enslaved invaders, so a na- tion, which freely collects its reason, and gathers its will, and girds up its loins, and exerts itself in all manner of regulating and compelling action, will in peace tower in calm wisdom, a Pallas among the nations, and in war ride over their 100 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. necks, as the proud vessel, with all sails set and eveiy spar in order, but with a living will on board, rides over the poor slaves of moon and tempest, the wandering billows. It is the general obliviousness to this aspect of freedom, and the kindred phenomenon of testiness to all touching of so- called private rights, which have given edge and occasion to such denunciations on the part of Mr Carlyle as have been quoted. On the subject of the relation between rank and rank in a free state, much might be said. It is unnecessary, how- ever, to enter on its discussion, so ably and lucidly has it been treated by Mr Mill, Mr Grreg, and others. " We have en- tered," says Mr Mill, "into a state of civilization in which the bond that attaches human beings to one another must be disinterested admiration and sympathy for personal quali- ties, or gratitude for unselfish services, and not the emotions of protectors towards dependants, or of dependants towards protectors." This relation, though difficult fully to realize, is at once possible and noble. There is a twofold error by which its attainment is impeded. One-half of society lauds freedom in name, and even verbally evinces a desire that it should be extended to all : while there is either an ignorance of its real character, demands, and difficulties, or an unwil- lingness to meet them ; a backwardness, above all, to em- brace, in all its significance, the essential truth of freedom, that the soul of every man is of equal worth, and, of natural consequence, the hardship or inconvenience of one class no more to be deprecated than those of "another. When the rich think of the poor, the ruling classes of the obeying, their ideas seem to run mainly on the retaining of these in quiet and content, in comfort, indeed, and it is to be hoped in hap- piness (for we are very tender-hearted), but in a condition of servile dependence ; and if this is the case, it is not to be wondered at that the patronized classes may entertain a half- THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 101 suspicion of kindness, as if allied to alms-giving. On the other hand, there is exhibited by the working-classes, in their yearning towards freedom, an error, if possible, still more pernicious : the idea that this liberty for which they long is a certain w^orldly good ; the dim, half-conscious notion, that the free are those who sit at a well-furnished table, while the only partially free or enslaved pick up the crumbs ; and that the grand object to be held in view by these last is just to change places. Of the unnumbered errors that went to com- pound the idea to which the patriot Frenchman of 1793 gave the title of freedom, perhaps none was more insulting to the name of liberty and the soul of man than the conception, ever emerging in the tumult of the time, that freedom meant the procuring of some great accession of eatables and drink- ables by the populace ; that it would prove the opening of exhaustless breasts of abundance ; that it was to be, in great measure, the satisfaction of the strong but not very sublime human faculty of greed. Now, there was just a particle of truth here, the particle, namely, that in a state of perfect and normal freedom, the physical condition of all classes would be the best possible in the circumstances ; but this is pre- cisely the lowest truth for the sake of which a man can de- sire freedom ; and a pre-eminent cause why the stern repub- lican goddess poured such indignant contempt upon the wor- ship offered lier by the patriots of France was, that they for- got the high blessings she sheds upon the spirit, and bent before her with the prayer that she would degrade herself to minister first and chiefly to the body. Freedom does not ab- solutely guarantee physical opulence to any class ; her aim is to fix every man in his station, and give him there his de- sert : to enable, on the one hand, the workman to toil with no feeling of inferiority or self-contempt, in the sense that it is not man and injustice, but God and nature, which ordain his labour and appoint his sphere, and in the deliberate and 102 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. intelligent belief tliat it is in all respects, physical and spi- ritual, best for him that the man whom he obeys do actually command him, receiving, in respect of severer and more costly work than his own, a higher reward than he enjoys ; and, on the other hand, to take every ray of insulting pride or condescending insolence out of the eye of the master, as hav- ing no essential superiority over his employed, as deserving a kindly respect but no reverence, as simply doing in his sphere that duty which his equal but not equally endowed brother does in his. Whether the precise /orwi of the relation between the in- dustrious classes and those who employ them may, to any considerable extent, and at an approaching time, undergo al- teration, is a question of no small interest. It is a matter not open to dispute that the gradual superseding of the ancient method, of wages given by a master and work done by a ser- vant, is, in extensive departments of our affairs, possible and desirable. It may be doubted whether there can be found any effective mode of counteracting that often deprecated tendency of civilization to concentrate wealth in certain quarters, save by carrying ovit the principle of co-operation in the manufac- turing, and perhaps also the mercantile provinces. This, cer- tainly, would be a thoroughly efficient means of that coun- teraction ; and it were hard to say how there could be pointed out, on the whole, a more perfectly wholesome and promising phenomenon in a state, than that of workmen, by force of thrift, sobriety, education, and sense, becoming their own employers. The achievement here being precious, the task is again difficult ; but the hope may be cherished that there is stamina in the British working class ultimately to effect it. Mr Greg has discussed this subject in a masterly manner. To tell the working-classes that tliey are perfectly enlight- ened, and endowed with every manly virtue, that they are therefore unjustly treated by the higher ranks, while their THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 103 country suffers from tlieir not sharing more largely in politi- cal rights, is an extremely easy, but signally useless proceed- ing. It is gross flattery to our lower classes in general to say that they stand remarkably high in culture and moral worth ; the fact does not admit of disguise, that the work of their education, using the word in its widest sense, has yet, in very great measure, to be done. Britain, besides, pos- sesses such an amount of freedom, that no class within her borders, morally and intellectually strong, can be long de- frauded of its substantial rights, or excluded from its natural station. We have not to win our freedom ; we have but to learn to use it ; and the higher classes may learn bold- ness in proceeding with reform, and the lower encourage- ment in waiting, from the fact that revolution, for the attain- ment of any political privileges in our island, would now con- stitute an absolute novelty in the history of nations. Can any man conceive so large a number of British citizens as would constitute a force sufficient to make itself felt by the Government of the empire, deliberately putting life and living to the hazard for all that an almost ideal reform could offer 1 In moral and intellectual education ; in loyal and temperate, but steady and determined, aiming after complete political enfranchisement ; in the acquisition of an intellectual power to discern their true position, with all its possibilities and perils, as affected by modern invention, and the attainment of a moral ability to accommodate themselves thereto ; in gradually becoming fit to be their own masters ; in bridling passion, and subduing intoxication ; lies the true game of the working-classes. What intellectual and moral education can be made consist- ent with the practical operations of each of the employments of the body of the people ought to be earnestly aimed at ; and it may, with some measure of distinctness, be perceived inM^hat direction efforts of this kind should proceed. Machinery may 104 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. become tlie slave of intellectual progress, by doing for us our rude and physical work. As by a spell of supreme potency, modern science and invention have summoned to our aid, to be our unresisting and irresistible ministers, the mechanical powers which thunder in a thousand factories, and hang their black smoke-banners over our towns. Is it impossible that such advantage be taken of their capabilities that a larger amount of leisure than heretofore may be found for purely intellectual pursuits by our mechanical workmen 1 And may not the inventive exercise, which was formerly found in in- dividual operations, be advantageously foregone, for the sake of the enhanced freshness of intellect and keenness of relish with which he who has been engaged during working hours in a mechanical employment will turn at its close to the pur- suit of science, or the study of literature ? The manufac- turing workmen, we are informed by Mr M'Culloch, are a particularly intelligent class ; and the free libraries of Man- chester and Liverpool, with their ranges of quiet, studious, dignified, and happy readers, give surely a conclusive testi- mony to the truth of his words. And if workmen gradually became their own masters, and could thus to some extent con- trol the feverish intensity of manufacturing competition, how nobly consistent with freedom, and how plainly practicable, were this whole scheme of advancement ! Hope, then, for the education of the working class must rest on two things : first, that working hours be shortened ; and, second, that operatives prove themselves possessed of the moral power, and the capability of intellectual pleasure, which alone would make such curtailment a blessing, and not a curse. I am not insensible to the difficulties which are to be met with in any attempt at improvement here ; they are stern, complicated, all but overpowering ; but however steep and rugged the way, there is no other. It were a depressing consideration, if, to the calmest and THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 105 most careful thought, it seemed an impossibility that freedom might yet achieve triumphs unexampled, perhaps undreamed of, in the history of the world. It were Utopian, indeed, if this attainment were represented as easy ; and all that has been here said would deserve to be put aside with a j^itying smile, if it had been implied that by one effort, or through the wisdom, theoretic and practical, of any one scheme, a nation was to be regenerated. But if the realization of perfect free- dom is confessed to be in every aspect a work of difficulty, and if hopes of this realization are based upon the gradual, almost or altogether imperceptible, pervasion of the nation by a deeper nobleness and a more substantial intelligence, it is not easy to see on what a charge of Utoj)ianism can be found- ed. And as we set out from Christianity, as we found in it the basis upon which a system of free social relations could be reared, it is only by returning to Christianity, and finding in it a golden band to unite the whole in safety, harmony, and beauty, that we can irrefragably demonstrate the possi- bility of such advance as has been indicated. The real happi- ness of freedom was never in the course of human histoiy at- tained by a nation morally weak ; licentious, irreverent, feel- ing itself bound by no relations to an unseen world. The alliance of freedom and irreligion, which we have seen at- tempted in these latter ages, is anomalous and impossible. Show me a sniffing, unbelieving, debauched, playacting thing, gesticulating on its platform or stump, swelling with conceit and self-importance, listening open-eared for any faint breath of applause, basely flattering the crowd before it, mere animal greed in its eye, mere tirade about the felicity of the rich and the removal of taxes on its lips, and I will show you that which no earthly power will ever make free. That heart has not width enough to hold the love of freedom, that poor head cannot form its very concej)tion ; it is but an ima- ginary and absurd delusion of which that tongue is prating: 106 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. freedom disowns tlie whole exhibition. But show me a working man, who, from his own fireside, with his loving wife beside him, and his children smiling in his face, can look beyond earth and time, and see a King, from whom he holds a charter of freedom, seated on an eternal throne, the rays from His eye falling equally on the king and the peasant, the oak and the lichen ; who has not contracted his wishes and thoughts upon the spreading of his table and the covering of his back, or on anything which he will have to surrender to the grasp of death ; who has not denied his immaterial ex- istence, but knows that it is as a thinking, reasoning, loving spirit, that man has a real existence and a perennial noble- ness ; and I will sliow you one on whom freedom will look with hope. OCIATIVE ACTION, ETC. 107 CHAPTER II. ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND CKKISTIAN PHILANTHEOPY. In the preceding chapter we had before us the social life main- ly in that broader aspect in which it pertains to the nation as such. But voluntary association among the citizens of a free State, independently of the central power, is a natural and ine'S'itable growth of freedom. It is a phenomenon, also, of so great prominence in the most recent civilization of free coun- tries, and has been an agency so powerful in political reform, in social amelioration, and in the missionary movement, that it demands careful consideration. The spirit of Christianity has entered into it in many forms ; and unless we have some clear- ness of idea concerning it, we cannot accurately appreciate that great agency of Christian Philanthropy which is asso- ciated with the names and the achievements of Howard and of Wilberforce. In his essay on The Signs of the Times ^ an essay marked by his usual penetrating intellectual energy, and perhaps re- markable, even among his essays, for the brilliant and musi- cal terseness of its style, Mr Carlyle divides the forces which act in human affairs into the dynamic or individual forces, 108 ASSOCIATIVE ACTIOX AND love, religion, enthusiasm, and so on ; and the mechanical, •which arise from organization and union. His distinction and classification may be accepted as correct ; but he has omitted to define the connection between the two provinces of human affairs on which he comments. In the close of his essay he distinctly recognises the soundness and necessity of each set of forces. One man conceives an idea or perceives a truth : many men must unite to carry out or to diffuse it. But has he fully considered how the machinery of association and the dynamics of individual power are related ? The connec- tion is that of simple, proportional, indissoluble sequence. The machinery arises from the dynamics, the organized and united force results from the individual, by a necessity which cannot be exhibited, because its negation cannot be even conceived. An army of which the soldiers are drilled, marshalled, and then enlisted; a tree that unfolds its leaves, and strikes down its stem, and j^;2(^% deposits its seed; — these are conceptions precisely analogous to that of a corn-law league or a mis- sionary society which has not originated in individual force. Goethe said his opinion was infinitely strengthened by the assent of even one. The strength to be found in the assent and co-operation of numbers is the aim of that machinery for the carrying on of various objects which seems to Mr Carlyle to be iu* such excess in our time. An individual or dynamic force acts in an individual bosom ; it is communicated to ano- ther bosom, to a third, to a fourth : these all now have a com- mon bond, and constitute a common force ; a society, an organi- zation, if you will, a machine, is formed. The machinery must always be in a precise ratio to the dynamics. Whence is it, then, that we see so little machinery in the olden time, say in the time of Luther, and so much in our day ? For a simple and conclusive reason. Before Luther could at all disseminate his views, he also had, by immoveable necessity, to find and form ]us machinery : men lieard his voice, and gathered round him ; CIIPvISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 109 and he was speedily in the centre of a square Avith fixed bay- onets, powerful for aggression or defence. The effectiveness of this square, besides, depended accurately on the amount of the dynamic force in each breast ; the more perfect the in- dividual, the more perfect the machine. But Luther, or any man of Luther's time, had a much harder task to perform in securing his machinery, than any man can have now-a-days. It is, we have seen, the great leading characteristic of our age, that thought is more fluent, that men more easily com- municate and draw together, than was ever the case in this world. It is because every dynamic force can now, with ex- treme facility, gather round it a machinery, that tlie land is covered with organizations and societies. Had Luther lived now, he had found it a more easy task to spread his doctrines than he did in the sixteenth century ; but he cou.ld not, by any possibility, have spread them without gathering round him a living machine of men. If, therefore, desirous of urging a point, we said that Mr Carlyle, in opposing these two pro- vinces of our affairs, in saying we have too much machinery, and too little dynamics, gave expression to a sheer natural impossibility, we should speak the actual truth ; every human organization must originate in dynamic, in individual force. The truth, of course, is, that it is in the latter we must always look for the e\i\ ; change the quality of your dynamic force, and all, save some matter of practical detail, is done ; and it may be legitimate to put this interpretation upon Mr Car- lyle's essay, and benefit by his superb enforcement of the great duty of purifying the nation's heart that the issues of its life may be pure. In those stern old ages it was a serious mat- ter for a man to gain his machinery ; it was only when he saw, as by the light of a chemib's sword, and felt himself com- manded to speak, as by a voice from, a bush burning yet not consumed, that he would risk his life for his doctrine. In our day, every man who has a crotchet and a well or not very 110 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND well hung tongue, can gather his company, can form his asso- ciation, can construct his machine. Would you wonder that the flower which grows in the hothouse has a sicklier look than that whose roots had to cling to the solid rock in the scowl of the norland blast 1 Mr Carlyle looked over the luxu- riant field of modern society, and saw the growth of organi- zations most abundant, in great measure a growth of weeds ; let us, accepting the hard-won conditions of our time, recog- nise it as well that plants spring quickly, but direct all energy to pluck up weeds, and to examine the seed sown. There is not anything positively new in the idea of Chris- tian Philanthropy. It is as old as love. Its history began to be written in the first tear which fell from a human eye, over one whose only claim was pity, and whose only plea was sorrow. But no proof is necessary that there is such a thing in our day as " the philanthropic movement :" simple pity, — love for the wretched as such, — has become a more formal and recognisable power in our time than formerly. The following are here accepted as the fundamental posi- tions of Christian Philanthropy. I. In the system of human affairs there is a distinct, trace- able, and indispensable function to be performed by compas- sion. IT. All men are, in a definable sense, equal. All human law is grounded on expediency ; on what is temporal, and not eternal. Peveno;e is foreia^n to the idea of law. III. It is not a possible case that hatred be the highest and most reasonable feeling with which one human being can regard another. There cannot upon earth exist, in the human form, any one whom it is not noble and holy to love. TV. It is impossible, in this world, that the traces of the Divine image be absolutely obliterated from the human souL God has not revealed to man any period at which it is either incumbent on or lawful for him to abandon hope and effort CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. Ill that his brother may attain to that higher nature which ii? at once the restoration and the elevation of humanity. These positions are closely connected with each other, and a more searching analysis might doubtless afford clearer lines of demarcation ; but, for practical purposes, they may serve. The first is the general declaration with which philanthropy, as such, sets out. The second leads us to define its true re- lation to justice. The third is intimately associated with the second, and is the Christian rule of feeling, as expressed by our Saviour. The fourth indicates the rationale of every effort towards reclamation of the criminal or condemned. At its first arising. Philanthropy was hailed with accla- mation. Without hesitation, apparently without question, and almost with universal voice, men aflirmed its light to be holy, and its influence, of necessity, benign. Be the cause, however, what it may, we now find matters altered. Phi- lanthropy, it is true, has pervaded the nation, and more is done at the simple cry of compassion than was ever done be- fore ; but it has been assailed with vituperation and con- tempt, scarcely condescending to argue ; while it furnishes every petty novelist and scribbler with subjects of caricature, and targets for small arrows that stick because they are vis- cous with venom, not because they are pointed with wit. The chief argumentative assailant of Philanthropy is a man whose words must always deserve calm and thorough consi- deration— Mr Carlyle. Caricaturists and small wits might be left to shift for themselves, were it not an en^or to sup- pose that nothing can injure which has little force, or that men are not in the habit, every day, and scores of times every day, of holding apples so near to their eyes that they shut out the light of the sun. A few words (and they shall be as few as possible) may not be wholly wasted on the sub- ject of the ridicule to which Philanthropy is in our day ex- posed ; they may prove applicable to the sense of the ridi- 112 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND culous as exercised on every kind of religions or moral action or emotion. The sense of the ridiculons is extremely valuable in man or nation. In every department of art, of literature, and of life, it prunes a fantastic or grotesque exuberance, keep- ing down, to give it in one word, excessive idiosyncracy. It is, by its nature, in close league with common sense ; it is the mortal foe of bombast, sentimentality, softness, and every sort of pretence. The strong sense of the ridiculous inhe- rited by the English people is one of the healthiest charac- teristics. It may at present threaten to degenerate into a universal titter ; but, in its native strength and soundness, it preserves us in a line mean between the French and the Germans ; between the " gesticulating nation that has a heart, and wears it on its sleeve," and the nation that thinks walls, and holds the empire of the air.* There is much in our literature at present which might be bettered by a little smart satire ; it is a tonic we cannot well do without. No exemption is to be claimed for Philanthropy from the restraining or tempering power of a sound sense of the ridi- culous, resulting in manly and discriminating satire. Like ever}'- other human thing, it may run into absurdity or ex- cess, and, in particular instances, may furnish legitimate ob- jects of caricature. But satire has its laws : as sure and imperative laws as any other species of composition. And in these it certainly is included, both that it must never be absolutely in error, and that it must never be absolutely frivolous. There is a rational mirth which comports with earnestness and reve- * " Geutleinen, think the wall :" — these were the words in which Fichte commenced his philosophic lectures in Jena. However idealistic, we can scarcely conceive a British audience not heing touched with a feel- ing of drollery hy the words : the Germans sat like stucco. Let it not he thought from this remark that I intend the faintest disrespect for the ma- jestic genius and noble character of Fichte. CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 113 rence, and is beautiful as the smile of natural and fearless strength ; but there is such a thing as the laughter of intel- lectual paralysis ; and what more ghastly than that 1 Laughter is noble and profitable ; but not that of the madman when he sets the house on fire, or that of the fool who goes to wed- ding and funeral with the same mindless grin. Its office is to prune the excrescences that will adhere to the best of human things, to prevent stupidity, pretension, or weak en- thusiasm, from attaching their distorting or encumbering in- signia to any form of truth. But it becomes at once of ma- lign influence, if its attacks menace the truth itself, if, in cut- ting away excess of foliage, it draws the vital sap from the tree, if, in curing the squint, it cuts out the eye. Sound sa- tire should clear from all stains the statue of truth ; but it should make men love to gaze on that statue the more. And, since satire is of prevailing influence, since it acts upon the mind with a more subtle insinuation, and often exerts a greater power of unconscious mental modification than argument, it is of serious importance that this fact be constantly borne in mind. In the caricatures we have had of Philanthropy, this fun- damental law has been infringed. There has been a fatal want of discrimination of the true from the false : qualities radically and perennially holy, human in the noblest sense, and dignifying humanity, have been confounded with their morbid excess, or left to appear altogether absurd and ignoble. One or two words will make this plain. There are three circles in which, in his life on earth, and the discharge of his earthly duties, a man may act. The first is that of self; one must always, by duty and necessity, do more for himself, or in connection with himself, than for any one else. The second is that of family and friends, of all those who have a claim on one by blood or friendship : within this circle a man must perform certain duties, or he meets H 114 • ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND universal reprobation and contempt. The third is that of humanity in general. It were an insult to our readers to prove to them that this is truly and properly a sphere of human duty ; although there are not wanting writings in our day whose tendency seems to indicate it as an insult to sup- pose one to doubt the reverse : it is unnecessary to eliminate the fact, which used to be considered as good as settled, that a man is by nature united in mysterious but ennobling bonds with every other man, and that it is not one of the charac- teristics of a high state of humanity, that it be separated into families and coteries, each attending to its own affairs, like so many families of wolves in the pine forest ; readers may be supposed to agi^ee that severance, disunion, isolation, selfish- ness, are symptoms of disease in the human race, and that the evolution of the ages, if it tends to any consummation what- ever, must tend to their termination. Not only, however, is this sphere noble ; it may be further asserted, still with- out necessity of formal proof, that it is this third sphere where, save in rare instances, nobleness as such has existence. A man who performs well his duties to himself, who has no higher object than that he may be undisturbed and happy, we shall not call noble. In the second circle are many of the loveliest spectacles which our earth can show ; the affection of brothers and of sisters, the self-sacrificing nobleness of friendship, the sacred beauty of a mother's love. But, leav- ing the question of friendship (which, indeed, holds, in its pure form, of the high and the immortal), domestic feelings and spectacles, as such, take rank among the natural productions of our planet ; the loveliest perhaps we have to show, but of a beauty precisely analogous to that of the rose and the foun- tain, and esssentially pertaining to time. By neglecting fa- mily duties, one becomes less than a man ; by performing them never so well, he comes not to merit applause. Dis- tinctive nobleness commences in the third circle. It is when CHRISTIAN PHILAJ^THROPY. 115 one rises above self and family, and looks abroad on the fa- mily of mankind, that he takes the attitude which in a man is essentially great ; when one no longer feels around him the little necessities which compel, or the little pleasures which allure, and yet is able to contemplate men as a great brother- hood of immortals with a gaze analogous to that of Him in whose image man is made ; when one passes beyond what he shares with the lower orders of creation, and soars to those regions where, as an intelligent, God-knowing creature, he may sit among the angels ; when one can look on the world through the light of eternity ; then it is that he does what it is the distinctive privilege and nobleness of man on this earth to do, what marks him as animated by those emotions to which, under God, humanity owes all it has achieved in time. All this is so plain, and so absolutely certain, that statement embraces proof What excuse, then, could be pled for a satire which en- dangered this peculiar nobleness of humanity, and perpetually read to man the lesson that he should mind himself, or, at most, his family, or, at very most, some interesting family which he fancied, much as he might rabbits or pigeons ? A very superfluous lesson, to be sure ! For one man or woman who neglects self or family from actual desire to promote the welfare of the human race, ten thousand, at the veiy least, neglect the latter for the former. Human indolence and selfishness require no aid from satire to make men ever sink back into their own little circles, into their own little hearts ! Go out to your lawn in the evening after a shower, when the earthworms are looking out, and commence to lecture them on the paramount importance of home duties ; how it is pro- per to keep their holes tidy, and attend to the respectable up- bringing of their children ; how they have duties enough at their own doors, and it cannot be too earnestly enforced on them that they ought not to look much towards the stars, 116 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND just beginning to come out, and so very far away ; but spare your sweet breath, and abandon tbe quite superfluous task of bidding men cultivate selfishness, and withdraw their eyes from looking in love towards the ends of the earth. Holy and beautiful are home duties and home delights ; these may nowise be neglected or scorned : but God did not kindle the smile of the winter hearth, or the warmer smile of the true wife, God did not fill home with the musical voices of chil- dren, and the thousand " hopes, and fears that kindle hope, an un distinguishable throng," that these should be his all to a man, that no voice should reach him from the outer world. These are a solace after his work, these are rewards of his toil ; but these can never furnish him the tasks that mark him distinctively as a man. It is v/hen we widen our sphere of vision and of love, — a sphere which will go on widening to eternity, — and not when we contract it, that we become noble and man-like. Looking upon contemporary satire, do we not meet, on all hands, with forms of ridicule, — with quiet sneers, with rude horse-laughter, with elaborate figures, of high broad brows, and breasts calm and cold as marble, and with sign-painter daubs, that are human only in bearing human names, but otherwise as dead as spoiled canvass, — all meant to raise the laugh against a Philanthropy that would look abroad ? Let care be taken lest, while we laugh, our unconscious hearts are robbed of the purest spark of celestial fire lingering within. When we look at the delicate and living lines in the stately statue of a St John Rivers, or at the mechanic movements, utterly removed from all possibility of sympathy, and to be condemned as abortive and inconceivable by every canon of mere criticism, in a Mrs Jellyby, let us beware lest we re- coil too strongly from the finely and almost soundly satirized excess of the one, and from the hideous and unmitigated atrocity of the other, into what is, in the former, however CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 117 painted, after all but liuman passion, or into what is offered as the right morality in contrast with the absurdities of the other, a silly and simpering good-nature, that never looks beyond its own little ring, and such objects as can look well and draw mawkish tears in the pages of a novel. Let it be remembered also, that, whatever may be the case with mor- bid idiosyncracy, it is in general the heat which warms most that casts its warming influence farthest. The cottages of Cardington, as we shall see, did not suffer because Howard was visiting the sick-beds on the shores of the Bosphorus ! These words cannot be considered uncalled for. Many, it is to be feared, when their hearts, in the first ardour of youth, were beginning to expand with holy desires, that told of their brotherhood or sisterhood with earth's nobles and standard-bearers, have felt them contract again to the mere every-day feelings of home and neighbourhood, under the in- fluence of such satire as we have been considering ; satire which would laugh at Plato as he trod, afar from men, the lone mountains of thought, which would keep David ever at the sheepfold, and John ever at the net. Enough now of this phase of the subject. Philanthropy, as was said, has been attacked by Mr Car- lyle. It has been attacked with weapons of argument, and with those of fiercest scorn, declared " a phosphorescence and unclean," and rejected from among the agencies to be regard- ed with hope by those who desire the common weal. By considering the case in the precise light in which he views it, we come directly and conveniently to the heart of the whole question, to the determination of the relation borne by Philanthrophy to justice. Mr Carlyle's conception of the origin of human law is at the root of his opinions on the whole subject of Philanthropy. In reference to the object of law, he has these words : — "Example, effects upon the public mind, effects upon this 118 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND and upon tliat — all this is mere appendage and accident." " Revenge," lie says again, " my friends ! — revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to revancher one's-self upon them, and pay them what they have merited : this is for evermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine, feeling in the mind of every man." And, once more, after putting the case of a man having, in the fary of passion, slain another, — " My humane friends, I per- ceive this same sacred glow of Divine wrath, or authentic monition at first-hand from God himself, to be the foundation for all criminal law," &c. Mr Carlyle's theory of law, then, is, that it proceeds from and gratifies revenge. The explicative word of Mr Carlyle's whole system of be- lief is " hero-worship." With his pantheistic views his theory of human law is in perfect philosophic consistency. If the great and good man is to be worshipped as a god, the bad man is to be hated as a de\'il. But if the good man is not a god, and the bad man not a devil, but both subjects of an infinite King, whose law fixes the relation between them, it may be quite otherwise. Enough has already been advanced to invalidate the theory of hero-worship ; but it may be useful to have another look at it from a plain, historical point of view. Two great classes may be distinguished among the leaders of mankind : those who have exercised their influence by power not moral, and those who made an appeal to the mojal nature of man. By the first class are meant such men as Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander ; by the second, such men as Mahomet, Zoroaster, and Moses. The former were mere embodiments of force ; their soldiers trusted and followed them, because armies were in their hands as thunderbolts. The captain of banditti, whose eye sees farther and whose arm smites more powerfully than those of his followers, exercises an influence in kind precisely similar. Anything CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 119 analogous to worship is foreign to every sucli case ; a fact rendered palpable and undeniable by the simple reflection that there is no feeling of an infinite respect, as due to what is infinite, manifested in these or the like instances. A supple -kneed Greek might have knelt to Alexander, "if Alexander wished ;" but no proclamations could make a Greek believe that Alexander could lay his hand on the lightning, or impart life to an insect. There is, however, another class of great men, with w%ose influence on their fellows worship has been ever and intimately connected ; this may be repre- sented by Mahomet, Zoroaster, and Moses. Here, then, the point at issue comes directly before us. Worship did origi- nate in each of these cases. Whence did it arise % Mark the men in their work, and listen to their words. Mahomet arose and said, " Ye have been worsliipping dumb idols, that are no gods : look up to Allah ; there is no god but Allah !" His words were not in vain. Zoroaster arose and said, " Ye have wandered from the truth which your fathers knew and followed ; I bring you it back fresh from the fountains of heaven." Men gave ear to him also. Moses came to the children of Israel, and said, " I am hath sent me unto you." They heard the word, and followed him ; through the cloven surges, into the howling wilderness, whithersover he listed. Whom did men obey and worship in each of these cases 1 Did they worship Mahomet when he pointed his finger up- wards to Allah ? Did they obey the commandments of Moses when he gave them the tables where God's hand had traced words under the canopy of cloud and fire 1 Surely we may say with plainness and certainty, No. It was ever the Sender that was worshipped, not the sent ; it was the belief in his alliance with an exterior, an infinite power, which won him his influence. He has brought us fire from heaven ! Such in all ages has been the cry of men, as they looked^ their eyes radiant with joy and thankfulness, on the 120 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND priest or propliet, and ranged themselves under liis guidance. The crown and sceptre which men have most highly ho- noured, and most loyally obeyed, have always been believed to have come down from heaven ; men have not worshipped the spirit of a man, or the breath in his nostrils, but the Spirit to whom he turned them. The rudest Polynesian islanderprobably regards with profounder veneration the black, unchiselled, eyeless idol to which he bows down, than the wisest and mightiest chieftain he knoirs : the one holds of the unseen and the infinite, the other he can look upon, and examine, and compass in his thought ; to the one ho may look in the day of battle, of the other he will think in the shadow of the thunder-cloud ; the one he will respect and obey, the other alone will he worship. Go into the portrait gallery of the Venetians, and mark there the "victorious Doges, painted neither in the toil of battle nor the triumph of return, nor set forth with crowns and curtains of State, but kneeling always crownless, and returning thanks to God for his help, or as priests interceding for the nation in its affliction." That spectacle illustrates well the relative re- gards of men towards their greatest, and towards their God. But some one indignantly exclaims. Why, in the first place, all this is the extreme of triteness ; and, in the second, Mr Carlyle, by his doctrine of hero-worship, means really nothing more. No great originality is claimed in connection with the matter, and certainly the truth maintained, whatever it wants, is clothed in the majesty of age ; so strictly in accord- ance with human instinct is it, that it probably sounded by no means strangely in the ears of men, when Moses, bidding them turn from those whose "breath was in their nostrils," was commissioned to write it down, an eternal truth for eternal remembrance, in the Book of Deuteronomy. But, however this may be, and even though what has been said might be sanctioned by Mr Carlyle, it is enough to reverse CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 121 his \\hole theory of human affairs. It is sufficient to show that the term " hero-worship" is an absurdity, or worse; to in- dicate the true significance of those phenomena of universal history which Mr Carlyle has categorized under that term ; and, at least, to lead to the overthrow of his theory that law originates in revenge. It were difficult to compute the prac - tical importance of the truths to which, under the name of hero-worship, he has directed our attention ; but it was a true and pregnant remark of Mackintosh, that, in the con- struction of theory, partial truth is equivalent to error. Granted that men have honoured men ; granted that, in every department of human endeavour, the point to be aimed at, for health, prosperity, and advancement, is to obtain qua- lified men. But, when Mr Carlyle associates this fact with worship, he misses an all-important distinction which reveals the highest lessons of what he names hero-worship. This distinction is, sooth to say, very simple. If a city is sur- rounded by armed squadrons and a line of circumvallation : if the townsmen are in terror that no quarter will be given them, but yet, because of a scorching thirst which threatens to kill them by slow torment, are proceeding to open their gates ; if, then, suddenly one of their number discovers, in a spot hitherto un thought of, a well of cool and abundant water ; if his fellow-citizens crowd around him, and grasp his hand, and look on him with tears of joy — what shall we see in the spectacle 1 Respect for him, or delight at the dis- covery of the fountain ? Entirely the latter. When a man, looking heavenward, cries out, I see heaven opened, and the light streams forth — lift up your eyes, and see it for your- selves ; when men hear, and believe, and bestir themselves, and exclaim, It is even so : we see the light, we feel ourselves being drawn nearer to it, and mayest thou be blessed for showing it to us — what shall we see in the spectacle 1 Shall we regard it as a testimony of man to man, or of man to 122 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AXD God ? As the latten We look with Mr Carlyle along liuman history ; we see men paying the highest honour to their Mahomets and Zoroasters ; we see the character of whole epochs moulded by this honour ; we see nations ga- thering round these, and willing, one would say, to cement for them thrones in their hearts' blood ; and from the whole we learn, not the divinity of man, but the fact that the deep human instinct has in all ages looked for a God. The louder the shouts arise of what Mr Carlyle calls hero-worship, the more definitely and decisively will they proclaim with us, that hero-worship, in any permissible or definable sense, is con- tradicted by the united voice of humanity. "We find ourselves led, then, by the path trodden by Mr Carlyle, to the throne where God sits. King of the universe. Is it possible to eliminate a theory of law in consistence with this truth 1 There is one argument of a somev/hat metaphysical natm^e bearing strongly against the theory of revenge, which it may be worth while to adduce in the outset. It proceeds on the hypothesis that there is an intelligent and almighty Governor of the universe. It may be introduced by a well-known quotation : — " Alas ! alas ! Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once ; And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the renaedy : How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are ? O, think on that ; And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made." It would be rash to consider this a mere echo of popular sentiment on the part of Shakspeare : these words came manifestly from depths in the greatest merely human heart that ever beat ; they embody one of those thoughts that wan- der farthest into eternity. When thinking or speaking of the Infinite Being, we cannot proceed by calculation of de- CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 123 grees : absolute purity is stained by a mote as certainly as by a whole atmosphere of hell's darkness. If it is the eter- nal law of justice that the reasonable being affected with sin be hated, we cannot go about to say, so much will be hated, so much will be tolerated, and so on. Now, Mr Carlyle will certainly not deny that sin adheres to the whole human race : set on a gi'ound of perfect light, he will allow our species, as a whole, to look black. He sees a brother man commit some atrocious crime ; with what he calls a glow of divine wrath, he slays him. It being a divine emotion to hate that being because affected with sin, it must be also divine, in one of absolute holiness, to hate and exterminate every creature so affected, even by the smallest speck that infinite light can reveal. It will follow that the Divine Being could no more suffer sin for a moment than during a whole dispensation. If this is so, how is it that the human race exists 1 How is it that God did not lift his foot in anger, and crush our planet into annihilation as a loathsome worm staining the azure of immensity 1 Really there is no answer : if hatred is the highest and holiest emotion with which a man can regard a fellow-creature affected with sin, if this fact is the real foun- dation of justice, and if an infraction of justice here is an in- fraction of essential right, there cannot be conceived a reason why a sinful species could subsist in God's world. There are limits to which this argument might be pressed for which it would not remain valid. But the present is the economy of mercy and hope ; and the long-suffering which is at present extended by God to man may surely be extended by man to his fellow. " Be ye therefore merciful as your Father also is merciful." Is there a living man, or has there ever been a man, who could deliberately consider that his distance from the purity of the Infinitely Holy was less than the distance of his most sinful brother from him 1 Is there any of the sons of men who could deliberately challenge his Maker to 124 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND cast a stone at him 1 If such there be, let him hold to the theoiy that hatred and revenge are the emotions with which God now regards the sinner ; if there is none such, that theory chains the noblest human soul that ever existed, on the eternal rock of despair. Tills prehminary argument suggests a distinction which lies at the basis of all that is to follow — that, namely, between moral evil and the soul it pollutes. This distinction Mr Car- Ijle overlooks or ignores, yet on it all depends. God eter- nally and infinitely hates sin, and no bounds are to be placed to the hatred with which it is right for men to regard it ; but precisely as " hero-worship" was found not to indicate infinite love and honour as due to men, but as directed to- wards the fountain of light, so the efforts men have made to exterminate the excessively wicked from among them, indi- cate hatred of their brethren only in a secondary and tem- porary sense, and point chiefly to the abyss of blackness which their iniquity reveals. It cannot be necessary to prove the possibility of drawing this great distinction, or its reality when drawn. Every man could understand and sympathise with Coleridge when he said he would tolerate men, but for principles he w^ould have no toleration. The peasant Christian sees no mystery in that passage where God is asserted to have no pleasure in the death of the sinner, although the whole Bible testifies His ex- terminating abhorrence of sin. Every parent distinguishes between the hated offence and the loved offender, when he punishes his child. And have not men ever borne witness to an instinctive feeling of this distinction 1 Bad as the world is, there perhaps was never a scaffold erected, and a man put to death upon it, for whom, whatever his crime, certain eyes in the crowd were not filled with the dew of pity. Have not some nations treated the condemned, previously to their execution, with condoling kindness 1 Or what find we in CHRISTIAX PHILANTHROPY. 125 that spectacle exhibited in Paris, on the autumn evening in 1792, which Mr Carlyle has painted for us as with the brush of Michael Angelo ? The Septembriseurs, maddened with rage, their arms to the elbow clotted with gore, their whole aspect that of unchained demons, clasped to theii' breasts, with the audible weeping of irrepressible joy, any one among the prisoners who was pronounced guiltless and snatched from the jaws of death. Even they witnessed to the fact, that it is a stern work for man to be the executioner of man. It is the mark of the evil one perceived on a fellow-creature that is hated, not that creature himself. Would to God, men say from their inmost hearts, we could part this evil from you ; but we cannot, and we must expel it from the midst of us ; you must go with it. The tainted spot must be cut out ; but while the knife is being whetted, the tear is being shed. E/evenge performs a function in human affairs. Even in the precise mode in which Mr Carlyle pictures its exercise, it may, in rare cases, come legitimately into action. ** The forked weapon of the skies can send Illumination into deep, dark holds, Which the mild sunbeam hath not power to pierce," Where the calm voice of law cannot be heard, or its hand cannot strike, then revenge may start forth to assert huma- nity and justice. Keeping steadily in view the distinction between the sin- ner and his sin, we can have little difficulty in discovering the origin and defining the function of human law. Man, in all ages and circumstances, presents two grand as- pects : that of the individual ; and that of the civis, or mem- ber of society. It is not a mere theological dogma, that man is king of this lower world — that his relation to his fellows is different from that he bears to the inferior animals. Is there not a certain mystical sacredness attaching to the life of a man 1 Is there any degree of idiocy or insanity which will turn aside 126 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND that naming sword with which conscience pursues the mur- derer ? In the remotest desert, in the depth of the seques- tered wood, why is it that he who dehberately slays his fel- low feels that he is not unseen 1 — that, though no human power will ever reach him, there is a tribunal before which he will appear — One to whom his brother's blood can cry even from the ground ? Is it not because there is a sense in which all men are equal — their differences relative, their equality essential 1 And what but this can we understand by the inherent majesty imputed by sages and poets to man ? What but this renders it a glorious thing, however slender my capacities, that I have the gift of a human soul ? Not only is it that the grandeurs and harmonies of nature are dis- posed for the delight and exaltation of all, not only that " The sun is fix'd, And the infinite magnificence of heaven Fix'd, within reach of every human eye ; The sleepless ocean murmurs for all ears ; The vernal field infuses fresh delight Into all hearts :" from which sublime truth a metaphysical as well as a poeti- cal argument for essential human brotherhood might perhaps be drawn : the very fact that the human eye has been opened, as no other being's on e^rth has been, to see the face of the one God, seems a sufficient proof that there remains for man, from every power on earth, an ultimate appeal. The desti- nies of men are bounded, not by time, but by eternity ; the human soul is a denizen, not only of earth, but of the universe : " God's image, sister of the seraphim," if indeed the seraphim can claim a glory equal to that of the soul of man, will always assert a claim to the citizenship of heaven, and a power of appeal to the judgment of God. The right by which any earthly power can judge and punish the individual man must be delegated. Neither is it merely a theological dogma that the human CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 127 race is in a state of imperfection, and of effort towards some higher condition. It is a historical fact. Call it what you will, — account for it as you may, — the human race, in its history in time, has been marked by one grand characteristic, unique in this world. That characteristic is a visible effort towards some development, — a progress, or aim at progress. Our species has not the aspect of one who has finished his journey, but of one still proceeding in it, — not of one who has cultivated his field, and can sit down to enjoy it, but of one who still sees it untilled and encumbered with rocks ; hu- manity has always shown a brow darkened with care and dis- satisfaction, an eye fixed on the distance, a staff in the hand. We need not ask whither it is bound ; but, beyond question, it has ever been going ; never could it lay itself down to sleep ; never could it build itself an eternal city; ever its most heroic aspect has been displayed when it aroused itself, and set out anew on its march. But the deepest thinkers have recog- nised that, along with this characteristic of progress, the human species is distinguished by that also of a remarkable and pre-eminent unity. You cannot individualize man so far as to separate him from his species ; in the wolf-child of India, in the maniac of solitary confinement, you see what man is when separated from man. In the unity of the species, or its irresistible tendency towards unity, originated society. Society assumed a power which no individual man can claim, — the power to touch the human life ; this power was con- ferred on it by God ; and the form in which He revealed to man that it belonged to him was, the necessity, stern and pain- ful indeed, by which he was driven to exercise it. The perfect development of human unity, — the attainment of all that man can do or become in a civic capacity, while individual right and individual freedom are preserved, — is the aim of civilization. The machinery of human civilization is vast and various ; one of its principal parts is — law. 128 ASSOCIATIVE ACTIOX AXD Where, tlien, precisely are we to look for the origin of law ? To the relation between the two entities, — the individual and the society. If we can find any reason why the society shoukl originate law, we shall have discovered that of which we are in quest. We have not fe.r to look : we find it by a glance at individual passion. At what time law commenced, it is beyond our scope to inquire ; whether its origin was in any respect supernatural or not, is of no moment at present ; but certainly it was when untamed passion was seen tearing the weak and defenceless ; when individual greed, individual lust, individual hate, and, most cruel and perilous of all, indivi- dual revenge, ranged, like beasts of the forest amid a ilock, that Law unbared her " beautiful bold brow," and bade them all cower beneath the eye of reason. Human law arose from no human passion ; but from the necessity discerned by men, if they were to abide longer in this world, to have some voice above human passion, with power to control it. That mighty instinct in the human heart which has ever spurned control by an individual brother, required absolutely to be commanded by a power not individual, which could dare to compel submission. With the very idea of law is bound up restraint of the individual ; the very object of law is the counteraction of passion ; if any two ideas are precisely antithetic, they are these two, law and passion. Let us, leaving the others, look for a moment at this par- ticular passion of revenge. When was it ever felt, save for personal wrongs, to such an extent that it could supply the place of an independent, disinterested voice 1 When was it felt for sin, either against God or man, with half the inten- sity with which it has burned for the most insignificant per- sonal injury ? When was its power ever permitted to remain comparatively unchecked, without producing eflfects of excess which were the mockery of justice ? Kevenge was in the eye of Cain when he struck down Abel ; revenge was the Themis CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 129 of the deadly feud demanding the unintermittent stream of blood from generation to generation for the accident or the mistake ; but when revenge ever spoke, save perhaps in the convulsions and spasms of national life, with the voice of rea- son, cannot be discovered. Of all the passions on which Law cast her quelling eye, blind, selfish, murderous revenge was perhaps the most turbulent and unreasonable. We are led to this conclusion : — That man, feeling in his bosom a freedom which, like the very breath of the Almighty, was part of his essential existence, yet saw himself so encum- bered by manifold imperfections, so preyed upon by individual passions, that, in his progress onwards, he was compelled, un- consciously, or by a voice from heaven, to originate the thing society, and to establish a power which, personating the com- munity, should visit with punishment crimes committed against it : this last power was Law. It has been said that it had its root in expediency ; but the sense in which this holds good is important. It was expedient with reference to eter- nity. As mankind navigated the stream of time, a fatal mu- tiny broke out, and the expedient of law became necessary to make existence possible ; in a perfect state of humanity it were impossible ; it will vanish when society vanishes, in the restored state of man. But it may, nevertheless, appeal to eternal laws ; nay, it may be specially said to rise over the clamour of individual and temporal interests, and endeavour to catch the eternal accents of justice ; its commission is tem- poral, its code is eternal. Law is the antithesis of individualism. But if we did seek its analogue in the individual mind, we should not look for it in revenge : we should find it in the serene pause of reason, when all noises from without are excluded, and the raving passions are stilled within, and the soul asks counsel of pure truth and perfect justice. Does not the universal opinion of mankind, in its uncon- I 130 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION A^B ftcious expression, during all ages, vindicate this view of law? If not, whence is it that Justice has ever been figured as of calm, passionless countenance ; no cloud of revenge, no gleam of pity on her brow, and holding in her hand the well-poised balance 1 Law does not regard men as such ; it regards them as retarding forces which hinder men in their march through time ; and, as such, visits them with punishment. Hatred, love, revenge, pity, every emotion which has reference to the living, sentient being, is foreign to that iron brow ; there must be no quivering in the hand which holds that even ba- lance. But look again at that calm image of Justice, lifting her serene brow into the still azure. A poetic eye, regarding that figure in time, may see that it has ever been accompanied by two other figures. On the one hand was Revenge, with in- struments of torture, and an eye where blended the fury of hell and the hunger of the grave. This Fury has ever called for more victims and more pain. That she has not cried in vain, let the groans that have come from earth's racks and wheels, earth's crosses and furnaces, bear sad witness. On the other hand was Love, pleading ever against Revenge, and endeavouring to draw an iron tear from the eye of Justice. Both these figures are foreign to the idea of Law. Revenge looks from the fault to the individual, and says, torture and kill him; Love looks from the fault to the individual, and says, pity and save Mm : Law regards the fault alone. Revenge is thus shown to have, as was previously said, a function in time. Love might conceivably become morbid, might degenerate into a weak sentimentalism, might cease to accept the stern necessity of not sparing the sin, whatever might be the feeling entertained for the sinner. And had it not been for the positive pleasure of revenge, perhaps the sorrow entailed upon men, in the punishment of those among them who clog the wheels of progress, had caused its having CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 131 never been proceeded with : so far, in strict psychological truth, does Mr Carlyle err when he speaks of the exercise of revenge being painful. Love may go farther than can be allowed it in the present condition of the human race ; and then revenge may feel itself crushed and unduly outraged, and call out for a new fixing of that medium between ex- tremes, which is all we can yet attempt. Nay, it is quite beyond my intention to deny that this may, in individual instances, have been the case in the Philanthropic move- ment. Love and revenge, considered thus in their relation to jus- tice, are alike temporal When men have re-attained their true, original, spiritual life, their work will have been com- pleted; Justice will then for ever rule, and alone; but no longer over cowering, struggling, trembling creatures ; for, when we look up, the iron brow shall have become gold, and we shall know, by the fadeless smile on the lip, that to eter- nity Justice and Love are one. Now are we fairly at the point where we can decide upon the claims of Philanthropy. Granting that love and revenge are each and equally foreign to the idea of law, let us put this question : — In a state of progress, in a state of advance- ment from worse to better, shall we proceed towards the en- largement of the province of love, or to that of the province of revenge 1 Surely we may answer, without hesitation, that the advancement must be in the direction of love, and that, more and more, revenge will be driven away, as men attain to higher and higher development. When all passions fade away, their function being performed, love will also pass away, but only to become one with justice. We shall not hang such a curtain of murky darkness over the future of humanity, as to say that it is not towards love, but towards hatred, not towards mercy, but revenge, that we are advancing. Surely, if there is one instinct in the human heart which is entwined 132 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND with its essential life, and -which wings its proudest aspira- tions ; if there is one universal faith written in the bright- ness which, even in its tears, the eye of humanity gathers as it looks towards the far distance ; if there is one belief which pre-eminently stamps earth as the place of hope, it is this, — that, despite volcanoes and thunderstorms, despite scaffolds and battle-fields, despite death and the grave, love is, by eter- nal nature and essence, holier than hate, and will ultimately prevail against it. Whatever their present mission, revenge and hatred are known by men to belong to a state of disease ; to be in their nature, when between reasonable beings, not divine, but diabolic. Go to the poor Bedouin of the desert, and ask what is his idea of justice and of law. There, amid his burning wastes, where he clings on to the skirts of civi- lization, scarce able to count on his life for an hour to come, ' you find in full development the bare idea of force as what is to be feared, and obeyed, and worshipped. The foot that can crush him like a worm into the sand, the eye that will not relent for tears or groaning, — these he honours. Is not this the first rude idea of humanity 1 Must we still learn from the desert wanderer ? Surely, at some point in the evo- lution of the ages, the soothing, softening, mighty influences of kindness were to begin to make themselves more distinctly felt than in the old iron times. It is a universal principle that, strength being secured, the milder any Government is, the nearer does it approach to perfection : this holds good of the heai't, the family, and the nation. And however Phi- lanthropy may as yet struggle amid obstmction and obscura- tion, shall we not hail it as a streak, coming beautifully, though as yet faintly and dubiously, over the mist-wreaths of morning, of that mild sunlight whose power will one day re- place that of the tempest ? The time had come for Philan- thropy ; and Howard was sent to call it into visible form and working. And, methinks, even although such a dreadful CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 133 tiling has happened as that one or two fewer strokes have been inflicted on the writhing criminal than fierce revenge, or even Bedouin justice, might demand, it is better to have it so, than that we should go back to the days of racks and wheels, of human beings distracted with sorrow, and guiltless creatures dying of jail fever. But this consideration is not required. The cause of Philanthropy rests immoveably on these simple truths : that there is a discernible and distinct office performed by pity in our present condition relating to justice ; and that its function must go on expanding if men advance. Philanthropy is a weapon from heaven's armoury ; the time ought to have come when we can use it ; if it has not, the greater our shame, not the worse the weapon. Extremes are always easy ; this is as true as that they are always wrong. A maudlin, morbid pity, refusing the impe- rative conditions of our existence in time, is the one extreme ; for it no defence is here ofiered, — it is distinct from true Christian Philanthropy : a savage, unsparing, execrating de- nunciation of Philanthropy is the other, equally false, and still more easy extreme ; against it I here specially strive. The difficulty assuredly is to discover what is really valuable in Philanthropy, to separate it from dross, and to shape it into a tool for our work, or a weapon for our warfare. We have hitherto contemplated love in its human aspect, and appealed merely to human reason and history. But it can in no quarter be deemed unimportant that an idea is ap- proved by a religion, which, name it as you will, is the high- est that ever appeared on earth, and has swayed more intel- lect than ever any other. Christianity sanctions and embo- dies Philanthropy. The angel that led the choir over the fields of Bethlehem was named Love. Take away love from Christianity, and you have taken away its life ; love, not alone to the just and the holy, but to the sinner ; to the pale Magdalene, to whom no one but the King of men and of 134 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION AND angels will deign to speak, to the poor publican, and the hated leper, and the raAdng maniac. It was at the voice of Chris- tianity that modern Philanthropy awoke, and it is in this al- liance that it is to be regarded with hope. Christianity gives us those fundamental truths of Philanthropy, that sin can be hated and the sinner loved, and that love will be the end of all. Say not that this first is a filmy distinction, or that it will blunt the weapons, and unnerve the arms, that must carry on truceless war with evil. If it is a cloud, it is as one of those interposed by kind supernal powers between the breast of Greek or Trojan hero and the mortal stab : it alone shuts our hearts against hatred of our brothers. And think not the second charge valid : all human history is against y6u. Men have always fought and toiled best when moved by im- pulses holding of the infinite. It is the banner painted on the clouds under which men will conquer ; it was when, amid the battle -dust around Antioch, or coming along the slopes of Olivet, the worn cinisader caught the gleam of celestial helms advancing to his rescue, that he became irresistible. The ill done us by a poor brother is a paltry motive ; who would not rather strain his sinews a little harder, have a few more hot drops on his own brow, than kill the poor creature whom we had got down ! We must have a motive in our war with evil that will be beyond the sounding and measur- ing of our own faculties. This Mr Carlyle knows well ; but he finds it in boundless wrath against the individual caitifi"; by looking beyond time altogether, we have found it in a ne- cessity of nature and the command of God. Sin is an infi- nite evil ; against it we are to strive with unbounded indig- nation. To put it away from us, we must slay him who is fatally infected, and whose infection will spread ; but not to- wards him are we necessitated to entertain any feeling but love ; the whole fervour of our hate is against that snake whose deadly venom has utterly tainted his blood. It is by CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 135 some mighty distraction in the order of things, by some stain- ing of the " white radiance of eternity," by some disturbance of the everlasting rest, that sin has extended its influence to reasoning human beings. One great eifect of this is, that, in time, and by man, the distinction between the sin and the reasoning human being it affects cannot be perfectly preserved. But the infinitude of God's peace will one day envelope the little stream of time, and hush all its frettings and foamings in the calm of its perfect light ; and the religion whose aim and end is the attainment of this liigher rest by man does most fitly, and with a sublime prominence, wear this distinc- tion on its front. " Love thy neighbour as thyself," says Christianity : there is no exception. But does Christianity not bid us war against sin ? Retaining, with Sandy Mackay, the ancient belief in a positive living spirit of evil, I venture to believe also in sin- less intelligences, superior, for the present at least, to men, and employed on bests of mercy by God. Wandering un- seen among us in the performance of their ministries of love, they are untainted by the sin and untouched by the sorrow of earth. Now, can we conceive any way in which they could have been secured from mere earthly sorrow, from the poig- nancy of sheer ignoble grief, — that grief which is dependent for its origin on the state, and not on the circumstances, of the soul, — save by their distinguishing between the sin and the sinner, and being thus wrapped up in an impenetrable gar- ment of celestial love 1 Safe in this, they can gaze upon the wandering mortal, however black his iniquity, with eyes wherein every gleam of indignation, every dark speck of hatred, eveiy scowl of revenge, is drowned in the softest dew. God has sent them as messengers to a world of sin ; but they bear with them the atmosphere of heaven, for within .them is the glow, around them is the music, of love. And man is by Christianity exalted to a privilege like theirs. Like 136 ASSOCIATIVE ACTION, ETC. them, lie shares in the universal battle ; like them, he wars to the death with sin : but, if he is a Christian, he is, like them, dowered with an exemption from every emotion that would taint the atmosphere of his own mind. All now said has been shown to be consistent with human instinct ; but if nature only points to the distinction between sin and the sinner, if, like a dumb animal, it merely by its pain indicates a want, Christianity brings out the tnith in its clearness, and vindicates a superiority to nature. It is on the mount with Jesus that we enter the company of heavenly creatures. And with full decision, while with earnest reverence, may we point to Christ Jesus himself as the perfact philanthro- pist. Let who will deny the compatibility of a Christian hatred of sin with a Christian love of the sinner ; let it ap- pear to philosophers and to natural religionists chimerical or weak ; the Christian can always respond by merely pointing to Him as He appeared on that day when He looked over Jerusalem. Was there infinite hatred for sin in those words of doom ] Was there infinite love in those tears 1 And, let who will jeer at the man or the woman who goes into the penitentiary, the prison, the condemned cell, with the Bible, to try to rescue for heaven those whom society must banish from earth : if nature calls that a vain or absurd task, Chris- tianity speaks differently. To every objection — of hopeless- ness, of sentimentalism, of enthusiasm — the Christian can simply answer. There was once a thief to whom the gospel was preached in the mortal agony, and that night he walked with the Preacher in Paradise. PART I ILLUSTRATIVE BIOGRAPHIES. JOHN HOWAED. There is no fair and adequate, in one word, satisfactory, bio- graphy of Howard in the hands of his countrymen, — no esti- mate of his character and work which can or ought to be final. Aiken's work is mainly a lengthened mental analysis, by no means void of value, and written with clearness and spirit ; but it admits of doubt whether Howard was of that order of men in whose case such analysis can be considered useful or admissible. Brown's life contains a true image of Howard; but it rests there in rude outline, too much as the statue lies in the half-cut block. The work wants unity, is fatally dull, and is not free from the generic taints of bio- graphy, exaggeration and daubing. Mr Dixon's book is in some respects the best, and in some the worst I have seen on Howard. The account it gives of his journeys is spirited and clear, and no charge of dullness can be brought against its general style. Yet it may be pronounced, as a whole, and in one word, wrong. It is set on a false key. It is brisk, sparkling, continually pointed ; if it does not directly share the characteristics of either, it seems to belong to a debateable region between flippancy and bombast ; in fatal measure, it wants chasteness and repose. No man can be named in whose delineation these characteristics are so totally out of 140 JOHN HOWARD. place, and these wants so plainly irreparable, as in tliat of Howard. The main attribute of his nature, the universal aspect of his life, was calmness : he ever reminds one of a solemn hymn, sung with no instrumental accompaniment, with little musical power, but with the earnest melody of the heart, in an old Hebrew household. Mr Dixon gives his readers a wrong idea of the man : more profoundly wrong than could have arisen from any single mistake, — and such, of a serious nature, there are in his work, — for it results from the whole tone and manner of the work. A Madonna, in the pure colour and somewhat rigid grace of Francia, stuck round with gumflowers by a Belgian populace ; a Greek statue de- scribed by a young American fine writer ; — such are the ano- malies suggested by this Life of Howard. There were one or two memoirs published in magazines at the time of his death, but these are now quite unknown. On the whole, the right estimate and proper representation of the founder of Modern Philanthropy have still to be looked for. And at the present moment such are specially required. Since the ptiblication of Mr Carlyle's pamphlets, opinion regarding him has been of one of two sorts : either it is thought that his true place has at length been fixed, that Mr Carlyle's sneers are reason- able ; or unmeasured and undistinguishing indignation has been felt against that writer, and the old rapturous applause of Howard has been prolonged. Neither view of the case is correct. To submit that applause to a calm examination, and discover wherein, and how far, it is and has been just ; to estimate the power of Mr Carlyle's attack, and determine in how far it settles the deserts of its object ; and to offer a brief, yet essentially adequate representation of the life of Howard in its wholeness : such is the attempt made in the following paragraphs. John Howard was born in London, or its vicinity, about the year 1727; the precise locality and the precise date JOHN HOWARD. 141 « have been matter of dispute. His mother, of wliom we have no information, died in his infancy. His father was a dealer in upholstery wares in London, and realized a considerable fortune. He had a character for parsimony. We are not, indeed, furnished with any instances of remarkable closeness or illibei'ality, and his conduct to his son affords no marks of such. That the allegation, however, had certain grounds in truth cannot be doubted ; and the circumstance is not a little singular in the father of one who must be allowed, whether with censure or applause, to have found, from the days of his boyhood, a keen delight in giving. Bat what- ever the nature or force of this foible, the character of the elder Howard was, on the whole, worthy and substantial. He was a man of quiet, methodic habits, deeply imbued with religious sentiment ; his views were Calvinistic, and he was member of a denomination unconnected with the English establishment — probably the Independent. He was specially characterized by a rigid observance of the Sabbath. We find in him, indeed, unmistakeable traces of the devout earnestness of an earlier age ; and it admits of little doubt that his religion was a lingering ray of the light which burned so conspicuously in England in the preceding centuiy. Wliile the bacchanal rout of the Restoration made hideous the night of England's departed glory, there were a few, perhaps man}*, who retired into hidden places, to nurse on household altars the flame which seemed erewhile about to illumine the world ; and in the next centuiy such could not have altogether died away. That deep godliness whose sacred influence, like a resting gleam of dewy light, was shed over the whole career of John Howard, accompanied him from his father's house. Were it not somewhat strange, if it proved to have been a dying ray of the old Puritanism which brightened into Mo- dem Philanthroi:»y ! The boy Howard made no figure in his classes. He was, 142 JOHN HOWARD. beyond question, what is generaUy known as a dull boy. He never acquired a perfect grammatical knowledge, or a ready command, even of his native language. Yet he appears, in his early years, to have given indications of a character dif- ferent from that of ordinary dull boys. His schoolfellows seem to have discerned him, despite his slowness, to possess qualities deserving honourable regard ; they saw that he was unobtrusive, self-respecting, unostentatiously but warmly ge- nerous. Price, doubtless one of the quickest of boys, and Howard, slow as he was, were drawn towards each other at school, and formed a friendship broken only by death. He succeeded also, and with no conscious effort, in inspiring his older friends and relatives with a sense of the general worth, the substantial, reliable value, of his character. He was known to be sedate, serious, discreet ; his word could be de- pended upon ; his sagacity was true ; above all, he was sim- ple, quiet, modest. It being manifest that he had no vocation to letters, his father very sensibly . removed him from school, and bound him apprentice to Messrs Newnham & Shipley, grocers in the city of London. A premium of :£^700 was paid with him ; he was furnished with separate apartments, and a couple of saddle-horses. There is no mark of parsimony here. In 1742, his father died, leaving him heir to considerable property, and seven thousand pounds in money. By the pro- visions of the will, he was not to enter on his inheritance ere reaching his twenty-fourth year. But his guardians permit- ted him at once to undertake the principal management of his afiairs. As he was still a mere boy, seventeen or eighteen at most, this must be regarded as a decisive proof of the high estimation in which he was held by those who had been in a position to form an estimate of his character. He speedily quitted the establishment in the city ; his apprenticeship was never completed. / JOHN HOWAilD. 143 Not long after his father's death, he travelled for some time on the Continent, and, on his return, went into lodg- ings at Stoke-Newington. Here he continued for several years. His existence was quiet, even, in no way remarkable, broken only by visits to the west of England on account of his health. This last was quite unsettled. It is indeed to be borne in mind, in the contemplation of his whole career, that he had to sustain a life-long straggle with ill health, that all the influences, to sour the temper, to close the heart, to dim the intellect, to enfeeble the will, which are included in that one word, bore perpetually on Howard. His consti- tution was by no means sound, and had a strong determina- tion towards consumption. In his unnoticed retirement at Stoke-Newington it is easy to picture him ; his pale, tran- quil countenance, marked, perhaps, with somewhat of the weary and oppressed look that comes of constant acquaintance with weakness and pain, but unclouded by any repining, and mildly lighted by modest self-respect, by inborn kindness, by deep, habitual piety. He derived some pleasure from a slight intermeddling with certain of the simplest parts of natural philosophy and medical science : of the latter he seems to have obtained a somewhat considerable knowledge. This quiet existence was, after a time, rather interestingly and unexpectedly enlivened. Howard, in one set of apart- ments which he occupied, met with less attention than he deemed his due ; probably it was thought his mild nature could be imposed upon with impunity : he quitted the place. Entering lodgings kept by a widow named Loidore, he found himself waited upon to his absolute satisfaction. In his new abode illness overtook him, or rather his perpetual ill health reached a crisis. Mrs Loidore tended him with all possible kindness ; and the result on his part was not only gi-atitude, but, as we believe, sincere attachment. On his recovery, he offered her his hand. She was above fifty ; he was now 144 JOHN HOWARD. about twenty-five. Her health, too, was delicate ; but Howard was resolute, and, after of course objecting, she of course con- sented. The circumstance indicates Howard's extreme sim- plicity of nature, and power to do, in the face of talk and laughter, what he thought right and desirable : it may also be regarded as one proof among many of a naturally affection- ate nature : it reveals nothing further. For two or three years, the married pair resided at Stoke- Newington, much in the same manner, we presume, as for- merly. Howard had a real, though by no means ardent, af- fection for his wife ; it was a sincere affliction he experienced when, after the above period, she died. Such was the youthful period of Howard's life. The ex- tent of information which the few incidents it embraces af- fords us regarding him may be summed up by saying, that they show him to have been methodic, gentle, and, above all, considerately kind. He seems never to have allowed the pleasure of making a fellow-creature happier to have escaped him. He was now about twenty-eight years of age. Unbound by any tie to England, he determined again to travel. The excitement arising from the occurrence of the gi'eat earthquake at Lisbon was still fresh, and he was attracted to Portugal. He sailed for Lisbon, in a vessel called the Hanover. His voyage, however, was not destined to have a peaceful termi- nation ; and the circumstances into which he was about to l)e thrown exercised a perceptible influence on his future ca- reer. The ship was taken by a French privateer ; Howard was made prisoner. . The treatment he met with was inhu- man. For forty hours he was kept with the other prisoners on board the French vessel, witliout water, and with " hardly a morsel of food." They were then carried into Brest, and committed to the castle. They were flung into a dungeon; and, after a further period of starvation, " a joint of mutton JOHN HOWARD. 145 was at length thrown into the midst of them, which, for want of the accommodation of so much as a solitary knife, they were obliged to tear to pieces, and gnaw like dogs." There was nothing in the dungeon to sleep on, except some straw ; and in such a place, and with such treatment, Howard and his fellow-prisoners remained for nearly a week. He was then removed to Carpaix, and afterwards to Morlaix, where he impressed his jailer with such a favourable opinion of his character, that he was permitted to enjoy an amount of liberty not usually accorded to prisoners in his situation. At Morlaix Howard had inducement and apology enough for remaining idle, or, at least, for occupying himself solely in negotiations for his own release, and in gathering up his strength after his hardships. But he did not remain idle, nor did he abandon himself to the above occupations. The sufferings he had witnessed while inmate of a French prison would not let him rest. He had seen something amiss, something unjust, something which pained his heart as a feel- ing man ; his English instinct of order and of work was out- raged ; there was something to be done ; and he set him- self to do it. He collected information respecting the state of English prisoners of war in France. He found that his own treatment was part, and nowise a remarkable part, of a system ; that many hundreds of these prisoners had pe- rished through sheer ill usage ; and that thirty-six had been buried in a hole at Dinan in one day. In ftict, he discovered that he had come upon an abomination and iniquity on the face of the earth, which, strangely enough, had been permit- ted to go on unheeded until it had reached this frightful ex- cess. He learned its extent, and departed with his informa- tion for England. He was permitted to cross the Channel, on pledging his word to return, if a French officer was not exchanged for him. He secured his own liberation, and at once set to work on behalf of his oppressed countrymen. His K 146 JOHN HOWARD. representations were effectual. Those prisoners of war who were confined in the three prisons which had been the prin- cipal scene of the mischief, returned to England in the first cartel ships that arrived. Howard modestly remarks, that perhaps his sufferings on this occasion increased his sympathy with the inhabitants of prisons. There is not much to be said of these simple and unimposing circumstances. They merely show that he, on coming into a position to do a piece of work, did it at once and thoroughly ; that his feelings were not of the sentimental sort, which issue in tears or words, but of the substantial and silent sort, which issue in deeds; that what had doubtless been seen by many a dapper officer, and perhaps by prisoners not military, in full health and with ample leisure, had not been righted until seen by Howard, sickly and slow of speech. It was nothing great or wonder- ful that he did : in the circumstances, nine out of ten would have done nothing at all. He was thanked by the commis- sioners for the relief of sick and wounded seamen ; but his real reward was the intense pleasure with which he must have hailed the arrival of those cartel ships, and felt that at least so much of iniquity and cruelty was ended. For the first time in his life, dull Howard was at the top of his class. Abandoning, for the present, all thoughts of foreign travel, Howard now retired to Bedfordshire, where he possessed an estate. It was situated at the village of Cardington, and had been the scene of his childhood : it was his principal residence during life. We come to contemplate him in what he him- self declared to have been the only period of liis life in which he enjoyed real pleasure. Though quiet and unobserved, that pleasure was indeed real and deep. He had reached the prime of life ; his years were about thirty. His character, in its main features, was matured. He was quiet, circumspect, considerate ; he knew himself, and was guarded by a noble modesty from obtruding into any JOHN HOWARD. 147 spliere for wliich lie was not fitted by nature ; the ground- work of his character was laid in method, kindness, and deep, unquestioning godliness. The time had arrived when he was to experience a profoimd and well-placed afiection, and to have it amply returned. Henrietta Leeds was the daughter of Edward Leeds of Croxton, in Cambridgeshire : she was about the same age with Howard, and seemed formed by nature precisely for his wife. She resembled him in deep and simple piet}'". She had drawn up a covenant in which she consigned herself, for time and eternity, to her Father in heaven, and signed it with her own hand. She resembled him in general simplicity of nature : she had no taste or liking for aught be- yond what Avas plain and neat. Most of all, she resembled him in kindness of disposition : the bestowal of happiness was the source of her keenest joy. Her features were regu- lar ; their expression mild, somewhat pensive, and not with- out intelligence : a little gilding from love might make her face seem beautiful. Where she and Howard first met does not appear ; but meet they did, and thought it might be ad- visable to make arrangements to obviate the necessity of fu- ture parting. His love was in no sense raptui'ous. It was sincere and deep, but characteristic : it retained, at a period when such is usually dispensed with, the noble human faculty of looking before and after. Love has a thousand modes and forms, all of which may be consistent with reality and truth. It may come like the burst of morning light, kindling the whole soul into new life and radiance : it may grow, inaudi- bly and unknown, until its roots are found to be through and through the heart, entwined with its every fibre : it is unreal and false only when it is a name for some form of selfishness. Howard's was a quiet, earnest, undemonstrative affection. He was drawn by a thousand sympathies to Harriet ; never did nature say more clearly to man, that here was the one who had been created to be his helpmeet : he heard nature's voice. 148 JOHN HOWARD. and loved. But he was quite calm. He even looked over the wall of the future into the paradise which he was to enter, and remarked the possibility of difference arising between the happy pair whom he saw walking in the distance. Accord- in o-ly, he went to Harriet, and proposed a stipulation that, in case of diversity of opinion, his voice should be decisive. Harriet assented. They were married in 1758, and took up their residence at Cardington. Here, with the exception of a few years spent at a small property which Howard pur- chased in Hampshire, they continued until the death of Mrs Howard. One is tempted to linger for a brief space on the sole plea- sant spot in Howard's earthly journey. Ere he met Harriet, he had turned to the right hand and to the left, scarce know- ing or caring whither he went, and dogged always by pain. Not long after her death, he heard the call which made liim a name for ever, and which bade him leave the wells and the palm-trees of rest, to take his road along the burning sand of duty. Not only may the spectacle of a truly happy English home be pleasing, but we may gather from the prospect cer- tain hints touching the actual nature and precise value of Howard's character. The pleasures of the new pair were somewhat varied. The embellishment of the house and grounds went so far. This was a business of particular interest with Howard. He built additions to his house, and laid out three acres in pleasure- grounds, erecting an arbour, and cutting and planting accord- ing to his simple taste ; the approving smile of Han'iet al- ways sped the work. A visit to London was proposed and carried into effect ; but the enjoyment obtained was nowise great, for neither was adapted for town life, and Harriet in particular longed for the green fields. Natural philosophy, in a very small wa}^, was put under contribution. Then there was occasional visiting and entertaining of the countiy JOHN HOAVARD. 149 gentlemen of Bedfordshire. Howard always exercised a warm and dignified hospitality, and, though remarkably abstemious himself, kept ever a good table and excellent wines for his guests. But of all the joys of this Bedfordshire home, by far the principal arose out of the fact that Howard and his wife were both "by nature admirers of happy human faces." Around Cardington there was soon drawn a circle of such ; gradually widening, still brightening, and, by nature's happy law, ever shedding a stronger radiance of reflected joy on the centre whence their own gladness came. Shortly after the marriage, we find Harriet disposing of certain jewels, and putting the price into what they called the charity-purse ; its contents went to procure this crowning luxury, happy human faces. Since this pleasure may be supposed to inte- rest us more than any of the others, it is worth while to in- quire how the money was disposed of. The village of Cardington had been the abode of poverty and wi-etchedness. Its situation was low and marshy ; the inhabitants were unhealthy ; ague, that haunts the fen and cowers under the mantle of the mist, especially abounded. Altogether, this little English village had the discontented, uneasy look of a sick child. And the intellectual state of its people corresponded to their physical ; no effort had been made to impart to them aught of instruction. Part of this village was on the estate of John Howard. Unnoticed by any, and not deeming himself noteworthy, but having in his bosom a true, kind heart, and loyally anxious to approve him- self to his God, he came to reside upon it with his wife. No bright talents were his ; and his partner was a simple crea- ture, of mild womanly ways, made to love rather than to think. Yet the fact was, account for it as you will, that, year by year, the village of Cardington showed a brighter face to the morning sun ; year by year, the number of damp, un- wholesome cottages grew less ; year by year, you might see 150 JOHN HOWARD. new and different cottages spring up, little kitclien-gardens behind, little flower-gardens before, neat pailings fronting the road, roses and creepers looking in at the windows, well- washed, strong-lunged, sunny-faced children frolicking round the doors. These cottages were so placed that they could see the sunlight ; the mist and the ague were driven back. Their inhabitants paid an easy rent, sent their children to school, were a contented, orderly, sober people. Cardington became " one of the neatest villages in the kingdom," If you asked one of the villagers to what or whom it owed all this, the answer would have been — John Howard. Kind-hearted, conscientious, shrewd, and accurate, he had lost no time in acquainting himself with the evils with which he had to contend, and addressing himself to the contest The damp, unhealthy cottages on his own estate were by de- grees removed, and such as we have described built in their stead ; those not on his own estate, requiring a similar treat- ment, were purchased. He let the new cottages at an ad- vantageous rate, annexing certain conditions to their occu- pancy. He became the centre of quite a patriarchal system. His tenants were, to a certain extent, under his authority ; they were removable at will, they were bound over to sobriety and industry, they were required to abstain from such amuse- ments as he deemed of immoral tendency, and attendance at public worship was enjoined. Besides the customary ordi- nances, there was Divine service in a cottage set apart for the purpose, the villagers, we are told, gladly availing them- selves of the additional opportunity. Schools also were estab- lished, not in Cardington alone, but in the neighbouring ham- lets. He ruled a little realm of his own ; a realm which, in the eighteenth century, was very favourably distinguished from the surrounding regions ; an unmarked patriarchal domain, whose government was, on the whole, beneficent. When we contemplate the phenomenon of Howard's in- JOHN HOWAHD. 151 iiuence at Cardington, do we not experience a strong impulse to question the fact of his having been, even intellectually, the ordinary, unoriginal man he has been called 1 It is fair to recollect that he was of that class which, perhaps pre-emi- nently, does nothing ; of that class whose epitaph Mr Car- lyle has written in Sartor Resartus. His task was not per- haps very difficult ; but just think of the effect, if every Eng- lish landlord performed his duty so conscientiously and so well. A biographer of Howard, writing when the present century was well advanced, has recorded that Cardington still retained, among English villages, a look of " order, neat- ness, and regularity." If mere common sense did this, it was common sense under some new motive and guidance ; we can only regret that it so rarely follows the higher light of godliness. And if Howard's claim to positive applause is slight, what are we to say of his exculpation from the posi- tive sin which, during that century, accumulated so fearfidly on the head of certain classes and corporations in England 1 Different had been the prospect now, had England, in that century, been covered with such schools as Howard's. Surely one may ask, without arrogance, why did not the Church of England accomplish at least so much then 1 In his own household, there reigned calmness and cheer- ful content. The whole air and aspect of the place was such as might have suggested that perfect little picture by Ten- nyson,— '* An English home— grey twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace." He lived much in the consideration of Old Testament times and worthies, shaping his life after that of the Hebrew Patriarchs. His Bible was to him a treasury of truth, which he never even dreamed exhaustible. As he looked over the 152 JOHN HOWARD. brightening scene of his humble endeavours, and the pleasant bowers around his own dwelling, and felt all his tranquil joy- represented and consummated in his Harriet, we may imagine those words breathing through his .heart — " I will be as the dew unto Israel :" as the dew, stealing noiselessly down in an evening stillness, unseen by any eye, yet refreshing the very heart of natm^e. Harriet, with all her simplicity, was a perfect wife ; she could hear the beating of her husband's heart. Once there was somewhat over from the yearly ex- penditure. Howard, thinking his wife might derive enjoy- ment from a trip, proposed that they should spend it in a visit to London. Harriet looked quietly into his eyes, and answered, " What a pretty cottage it would build !" Con- ceive the smile of silent unspeakable satisfaction, of deep unbounded love, that would spread over the placid features of Howard as he heard these words. The part taken by the kind and gentle Harriet in the dis- semination of blessing over Howard's neighbourhood was no- wise unimportant. In the hour of sickness and distress, she was to be seen by the bed or the fireside, supplying little wants, whispering words of consolation. She made it also a peculiar part of her duty to see that the female portion of the community was employed, and to supply them with work when threatened with destitution. Thus was Howard, cheered and assisted by his wife, an unassuming, godly English landlord, doing his work, and never imagining that he was a profitable servant. His te- nantry, and specially his domestics, loved him ; although, as we are happy to find, since it is an almost conclusive, and certainly indispensable proof of decision and discrimination, there was not a complete absence of murmuring and insinua- tion against him in the village. He engaged in constant and intimate converse with his dependants, interesting himself in their affairs, and giving little pieces of advice. He might be JOHN HOWARD. 153 seen entering their cottages, and sitting down to chat and eat an apple. We can figure him, too, as he walked along the road, *• "With measured footfall, firm and mild," stopping the children he met, giving each of them a half- penny, and imparting the valuable and comprehensive ad- vice, to "be good children, and wash their hands and faces." Can we not discern, as he utters the words, a still smile of peace and satisfaction on his really noble English counte- nance ? There was no sign of creative power in his eye ; there were no lines of deep thought on his brow ; but deci- sion, and shrewdness, and intense though governed kindness, were written on that face. Above all, it was cloudless in its clearness. It was the calm, open countenance of a man who could look the whole world in the face, which was darkened by no stain of guile, or guilt, or self-contempt, and on w^hich, through habitual looking upwards, there was a glow of the mild light of heaven. Nor was it destitute of a certain re- posing strength, a look of complete self-knowledge and self- mastery, gently shaded, as it was, by a deep but manly huma- nity, which told again of the bended knee and the secret walk with God. When we look at Howard's portrait, we cease to wonder that his face was always received as an unques- tionable pledge of perfect honour and substantial character. There was one drop by which the cup of happiness in the home at Cardington might still have been augmented. How- ard and his wife had no child. Han-iet seems to have been peculiarly adapted to perform the duties of a mother : so gentle, so full of quiet sense, so well able to read a want ere it reached the tongue. At length, after seven years of mar- ried life, on Wednesday, the 27th of March 1765, she had a son. On the ensuing Sabbath, Howard went to church as usual ; all seemed to be going well After his return she was suddenly taken ill, and died in his arms. She had just 154 JOHN HOWARD. seen her boy, just felt the unuttered happiness of a new love, just discerned that a fresh brightness rested on the face of the world, and then she had to close her eyes, and lie down in the silent grave. Howard's feelings, it is scarce requisite to say, were not of the sort which commonly reach the surface. There was no- thing sudden or impulsive in his nature ; his very kindness and affection were ever so tempered, ever rendered so equable, by considei'ation, that they might at times wear the mask of austerity. But the sorrow he felt for his Harriet reached the innermost deeps of his souL A light had passed from the " revolving year ;" the flowers which Love may strew in the path of the " stern daughter of the voice of God" — for Duty herself strews no flowers — had withered away ; until he again clasped the hand of Harriet, his enjoyment had ceased. He laid her in her grave, and a simple tablet in Cardington Church told the simple truth, that she had " open- ed her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue was the law of kindness." A good many years afterwards, on the eve of a departure for the Continent, from which he might never re- turn, Howard was walking with his son in his grounds, and mentioning some improvements which he had contemplated : — " These, however. Jack," he said, " in case I should not come back, you will pursue or not as you may think proper ; but remember, this walk was planted by your mother ; and if ever you touch a twig of it, may blessing never rest upon you !" His infant son was now all that was left on earth to How- ard. He loved him with the whole force of his nature. Two strong feelings, having reference to this earth, and two alone, were, in the years of his long journeyings, to be found in his bosom : the one was the memory of Harriet, the other the love of his boy. But it is not unimportant to a perfect comprehension of JOHN HOWARD. 155 the character of Howard to know that there was, in his ge- neral deportment as husband and father, a gravity, decision, and authority, which wore the aspect of austereness. The founder of philanthropy was as free as ever man from any form of sentimentalism ; it was for real affliction, for sub- stantial pain, he felt and acted ; a tender, winning, soothing manner was never his. Whatever may be said of modern philanthropists, he certainly was not one whose feelings car- I'ied him away, who saw distress and injustice, and, bursting into tears, rushed, half-bHnded with his symjjathy, to make bad worse. He has been spoken of by some as if he re- sembled one who, perceiving a child drowning in a reservoir, and being moved to pity by its cries, casts down an embank- ment to save it, and floods a country. He was no such man. Since the world began, until he appeared, no one had done so much for the relief of distress, simply as such ; and yet it is probable that few men have lived who could look upon pain with calmer countenance than he. Nineteen men in twenty would have been weeping, and either blundering or leaving the distress alone; Howard remained quite cool, looked at it, measured it, mastered it. For about a year after the death of his wife, he continued to reside at Cardington. Towards the end of the year 1766 he visited Bath ; ill health had again, in new extremity, re- turned upon him. In the spring of the following year he travelled to Holland, and, quickly returning home, remained at Cardington until it was time to send his son to school In the interval, nothing worthy of notice occurred ; he pur- sued his old plans for the improvement of his neighbour- hood, deriving his principal comfort from his boy. At length it became proper to send his son to school ; and Howard prepared again to visit the Continent. Cardington had become sad to him. He in great measure broke up his establishment there, pro\dding, with considerate kindness, for 156 JOHN HOWARD. his domestics ; these, as has been elsewhere remarked, loved him with an affection worthy of the servants of an old pa- triarch. He departed in the autumn of 1769 ; his intention was to visit the south of Italy, and probably remain there for the winter : he went by Calais, the south of France, and Geneva. We arrive now at the most important epoch in Howard's life. The reader has been informed of the pervasion, from a period too early to be precisely fixed, of his whole chai'ac- ter by godliness ; and we saw how the fact influenced his benevolent exertions in Bedfordshire. We have not yet however looked, so to speak, into the heart of Howard's re- ligion ; we have only noted it incidentally, and from afar. It is necessary to view it more closely ; it will be of great im- portance to ascertain the weight and nature of its influ- ence. His spiritual life now reached a crisis, which deter- mined, in certain important respects, his future character and career. Howard had intentions of spending the winter of 1769-70 either in the south of Italy or in Geneva. On aniving at Turin he abandoned the project. He had been pondering seriously the object and nature of his journey. He accused himself of mis-spending the " talent" committed to him, of gratifying a mere curiosity with those pecuniary means which might be turned in some way to God's glory, and which were necessarily withdrawn from works of mercy ; he thought of the loss of so many English Sabbaths ; he thought of " a retrospective view on a death -bed ;" he thought also of " dis- tance from his dear boy." He determined to return. He concludes the memorandum from which these facts are ga- thered in the following words :* — " Look forward, oh my soul ! How low, how mean, how little, is everything but * Howard did not -write English grammatically ; the spelling and punc- tnation are therefore altered. JOHN HOWARD. 1-37 what has a view to that glorious world of light, life, and love. The preparation of the heart is of God. Prepare the heart, oh God ! of thy unworthy creature, and unto Thee be all the gloiy, through the boundless ages of eternity." " This night my trembling soul almost longs to take its flight to see and know the wonders of redeeming love, — join the triumphant choir ; sin and sorrow fled away, God, my Redeemer, all in all. Oh ! happy spirits that are safe in those mansions." He turned homewards, and in February 1770 was at the Hague. We have here a further record of his spiritual life. " Hague, Sunday Evening, February 11. " I would record the goodness of God to the un worthiest of his creatures : for some days past a habitual serious frame, relenting for my sin and folly, applying to the blood of Jesus Christ, solemnly siuTendering myself and babe to Him, begging the conduct of his Holy Spirit ; I hope, a more tender con- science," evinced " by a greater fear of ofiending God, a tem- per more abstracted from this world, more resigned to death or life, thirsting for union and communion with God, as my Lord and my God. Oh ! the wonders of redeeming love ! Some faint hope," that " even I ! through redeeming mercy in the perfect righteousness, the full atoning sacrifice, shall ere long be made the monument of the rich, free grace and mercy of God, through the Divine Redeemer. Oh, shout my soul ! Grace, grace, free, sovereign, rich and unbounded grace ! Not I, not I, an ill-deserving, hell-deserving creature ! But, where sin has abounded, I trust grace superabounds. Some hope ! — what joy in that hope ! — that nothing shall separate my soul from the love of God in Christ Jesus ; and, my soul, as such a frame is thy delight, pray frequently and fervently to the Father of spirits, to bless His word and your retired moments to your serious conduct in life. " Let not, my soul, the interests of a moment engross thy 158 JOHN HOWARD, thoughts, or be preferred to my eternal interests. Look for- ward to that glory which will be revealed to those who are faithful to death. My soul, walk thou with God ; be faith- ful ; hold on, hold out ; and then, — what words can utter ! "J. H." I anxiously desire to avoid presumption here, and would leave every reader to his own judgment and conclusion in the matter ; but I think the workings of Howard's mind through this portion of his history may be traced. It appears that, on leaving Cardington, his mind had en- gaged in deep reflection. His boy had gone away from him ; his Harriet was sleeping silently, her tender ways to cheer him no more ; he looked over his past life, from which the last rays of joy's sunlight were departing ; he looked forward to an old age, embittered by perpetual ill health. His mind awoke, in the discipline of sorrow, to a deeper earnestness. He felt, with sterner realization than heretofore, that the world was a desert, and time a dream ; with a new and tre- mendous energy his soul rose towards the eternal kingdoms. He looked with earnest scrutiny within, he closed his eye more to all around, and gazed upwards from his knees for the smiling of one countenance upon him. The intensity of his feelings would not comport with the prosecution of his jour- ney to Italy. He mused upon it in the strain that has been indicated. He concluded that it was his duty to return home ; in a state of mind not a little agitated, he proceeded in the direction of England. He did not, however, proceed further for the present than the Hague. His mind appears here to have become calmer ; the second of the extracts just given reveals an almost rapturous frame of spirit. It is a detail of God's goodness towards him ; and, let it be remarked, that this goodness consists in work wrought in him, in his closer approximation to the requirements of God's law. The man who can feel ecstatic joy for that, and give God all the glory. JOHN HOWARD, 159 has nothing higher to attain to in this world ; and on him no essential change will be wrought by passing through the gates of heaven. He again turned southwards. At Lyons he writes thus : " Lyons, April 4, 1770. " Repeated instances of the unwearied mercy and goodness of God : preserved hitherto in health and safety ! Blessed be the name of the Lord ! Endeavour, oh my soul ! to culti- vate and maintain a thankful, serious, humble, and resigned frame and temper of mind. May it be thy chief desire that the honour of God, the spread of the Redeemer's name and gospel, may be promoted. Oh, consider the everlasting worth of spiritual and Divine enjoyments ; then thou wilt see the vanity and nothingness of worldly pleasures. Remember, oh my soul ! St Paul, who was determined to know nothing in comparison of Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. A tender- ness of conscience I would ever cultivate ; no step would I take without acknowledging God. I hope my present jour- ney, though again into Italy, is no way wrong, rejoicing if in any respect I could bring the least improvement that might be of use to my own country. But, oh my soul ! stand in awe, and sin not ; daily, fervently pray for restraining grace ; remember, if thou desires t the death of the righteous, and thy latter end like his, thy life must be so also. In a little while thy course will be run, thy sands finished ; a parting fare- well with my ever dear boy, and then, oh my soul ! be weighed in the balance, — wanting, wanting ! but oh, the glorious hope of an interest in the blood and righteousness of my Redeemer and my God ! In the most solemn manner I commit my spirit into thy hand, oh Lord God of my salvation ! " My hope in time ! my trust through the boundless ages of eternity ! John Howard." The last quotation which it is necessary to make is one of very great importance. It commences with a slight retro- 1.60 JOHN HOWARD. spect and self-examination ; it passes into a deliberate dedi- cation of himself and his all to God : — " Naples, May 27, 1770. " When I left Italy last year, it then appeared most pru- dent and proper ; my return, I hope, is under the best di- rection, not presumptuous, being left to the folly of a foolish heart. Not having the strongest spirits or constitution, my continuing long in Holland or any place lowers my spirits; so I thought returning would be no uneasiness on the review, as sinful and vain diversions are not my object, but the ho- nour and glory of God my highest ambition. Did I now see it wrong by being the cause of pride, I would go back ; but being deeply sensible it is the presence of God that makes the happiness of every place, so, oh my soul ! keep close to Him in the amiable light of redeeming love ; and, amidst the snares thou art particularly exposed to in a country of such wickedness and folly, stand thou in awe, and sin not. Com- mune with thine own heart ; see what progress thou makest in thy religious journey ! Art thou nearer the heavenly Ca- naan,— the vital flame burning clearer and clearer ? or are the concerns of a moment engrossing thy foolish heart ? Stop ; remember thou art a candidate for eternity : daily, fervently pray for wisdom ; lift up your eyes to the Rock of Ages, and then look down on the glory of this world. A little while, and thy journey will be ended ; be thou faithful unto death. Duty is thine, though the power is God's ; pray to Him to give thee a heart to hate sin more, uniting thy heart in his fear. Oh, magnify the Lord, my soul ; and, my spirit, re- joice in God my Saviour ! His free grace, unbounded mercy, love unparalleled, goodness unlimited. And oh, this mercy, this love, this goodness, exerted for me ! Lord God, why me? When I consider, and look into my heart, I doubt, I tremble. Such a vile creature ; sin, folly, and imperfection in every action ! Oh, dreadful thought ! — a body of sin and death JOHN HOWARD. 161 I carry about me, ever ready to depart from God ; and with all the dreadful catalogue of sins committed, my heart faints within me, and almost despairs. But yet, oh my soul ! why art thou cast down ? — wliy art thou disquieted 1 Hope in God ! His free grace in Jesus Christ ! Lord, I believe ; help my unbelief Shall I limit the grace of God ? Can I fathom His goodness 1 Here, on His sacred day, I, once more in the dust before the Eternal God, acknowledge my sins heinous and aggravated in His sight. I would have the deep- est sorrow and contrition of heart, and cast my guilty and pol- luted soul on thy sovereign mercy in the Redeemer. Oli, compassionate and divine Redeemer, save me from the dread- ful guilt and power of sin, and accept of my solemn, free, and, I trust, unreserved, full surrender of my soul, my spirit, my dear child, all I am and have, int,o thy hands ! Unworthy of thy acceptance ! Yet, oh Lord God of mercy ! spurn me not from thy presence ; accept of me, vile as I am, — I hope a rej)enting, returning prodigal. I glory in my choice, ac- knowledge my obligations as a servant of the Most High God ; and now, may the Eternal God be my refuge, and thou, my soul, faithful to that God that will never leave nor forsake thee! " Thus, oh my Lord and my God ! is humbly bold, even a worm, to covenant with Thee. Do Thou ratify and confirm it, and make me the everlasting monument of Thy unbounded mercy. Amen, amen, amen. Glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, amen ! " Hoping my heart deceives me not, and tnisting in His mercy for restraining and preventing grace, though rejoicing in returning what I have received of Him into his hands, yet with fear and trembling, I sign my unworthy name, "John Howard." Howard was not a man who found any special delight in using his pen : the deep modesty of his nature, the deficiency 162 JOHN HOWARD. of his education, liis consequent want of affluence in expres- sion, and the whole structure of his character as univ^ersally recognised, put tliis beyond dispute. It was only when his heart was very full, and the emotions with which it burned were as mounting lava, that they overflowed through that channel. The expressions quoted may be confidently regarded as pulses of his spiritual life, proceeding as truly from the centre of his spiritual nature as the blood which at fever heat might gush from his heart, the centre of his physical frame. And consider the earnestness, the stammering, gasp- ing intensity, with which they start ruggedly forth ; mark the awe-struck humility with which he bows down before the Infinite God, and, as it were, the mute amazement of grati- tude which, when the smile of God falls out of heaven upon his head, forces him to exclaim, " Lord God, why me ?" Sure- ly this last is a remarkable passage of feeling. Will it not be with such an emotion that the redeemed of God, when the eternal inheritance, so far surpassing expectation and desert, at last and suddenly bursts upon their sight, will shrink from asserting their right, and exclaim, " Lord, when did we merit this f Observe, finally, here, respecting Howard, the com- pleteness of the result, — the unwavering, imexcepting abdi- cation of the throne of the soul to God. This formed the conclusion of that crisis in his spiritual history to which re- ference has been made. One other remark must be made respecting these docu- ments. In those awful moments, when Howard was alone with God, and his eyes, looking to the Rock of Ages, were so solemnly raised above every concern of time, there was one earthly visitant that entered the secret places of his heart ; that visitant was his boy. The time was now near when Howard was to find his pe- culiar work. It may be said, though with reverence and hesi- tation, that he was specially fitted for it by God. Implanted JOHX HOWARD. 163 by nature in his bosom, lie exhibited from his earliest years a deep and a notably cosmopolitan compassion for the afflicted as such. In early years his nature was stilled, hallowed, and strengthened by religious principle. As he advanced in yeart^, the great truths of Calvinism, or rather that one great truth of Calvinism, The Lord reigneth, — the Lord, just, sovereigu, incomprehensible, in whose presence no finite being can speak, — formed a basis, as it were of adamant, for his whole cha- racter. He was sorely tried by physical ailments ; and, at the risk of his life, was compelled to pursue rigidly abstemious habits, being thus also debarred from all the pleasures of the great world. He was brought soon into actual experience of the distresses sufiered by the inhabitants of prisons, and his first piece of positive work in the world was the relief of sucli. His character was next matured, confirmed, and mellowed, in the soft summer light of a quiet English home, where he loved and was loved by a true wife ; and where, in such tasks as we have seen, a mild apprenticeship was served to thorough- ness and accuracy. He was then suddenly and awfully struck with affliction ; she who was so very beautiful in his eyes, — " Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky," — was taken away from him. And then, after a little time, came that crisis in his spiritual history which his own words so vividly delineate. Whatever were his natural abilities, he awoke from that crisis with a moral strength which no force of temptation could overcome, and a calm dauntlessness which nothing earthly could turn aside. Then he found his w^ork. Howard's history thus seems to suggest the idea that God intended by him to bring prominently before the world some tmtli not hitherto duly regarded, to accomplish some work not hitherto adequately done : that tlie time had arrived when some gospel — shall we call it the gospel of love ? — was to be more specially and explicitly unfolded than it had been 164 JOHN HOWARD. heretofore. With deliberate and immoveable faith, he him- self entertained this belief, and has put it on record in humble yet sublime words, Avritten when it was well-nigh finished : — " I am not at all angry with the reflections that some persons make, as they think to my disparagement, because all they say of this kind gives God the greater honour ; in whose Almighty hand no instrument is weak, in whose presence no flesh must glory ; but the whole conduct of this matter must be ascribed to Providence alone, and God hy me intimates to the world, however weak and unworthy / am, that He espouses the cause,^ and to Him, to Him alone, he all the pi^aise^ Returning from the Continent, Howard remained for a certain period at Cardington : we hear of nothing remark- able in his life for some time. The state of his health in 1772 rendered it advisable to make a tour in the Channel Islands ; but he speedily returned to Bedfordshire. Here, in 1773, he was called to the ofiice of sherifi' of the county. He considered it his duty to comply with the invitation. Pru- dence might have whispered another decision. He was a Dissenter, and by becoming sheriff incurred the liability of ^ ery severe penalties. His danger might not be very great ; but it was real. He was not without enemies ; and his act put it in the power of any one of them, with profit to him- self, to inflict very serious injury on him. It is, besides, the ])art of prudence to guard against possibilities : there was at least the possibility that he might suffer. Howard, however, with all his calmness, was too brave to be distinctively pi-u- dent. It might astonish some to find this among his adoptr ed maxims, — "A fearless temper and an open heart are sel- dom strictly allied to pmdence." It is the maxim of a truly brave man. In this afliiir of the sheriffdom he kept prudence in its proper place : when the voice of duty was clear, its mouth was shut. * The italics arc Howard's. JOHN HOWARD. I