more perhaps than any other indication, expresses the pagan character of our author's mind; his alienation from the distinctively Christian type of reverence, rather for the inner sanctities of self-renunciation than for the outward energies of self-assertion. His "hero-worships" certainly present us with a list far from concurrent with the "beatitudes :" nor can we fancy that he would listen with much more patience than a Lucian or a Pliny to blessings on the meek and merciful, the pure in heart, the ever-thirsty after righteousness. For him too, as for so many gifted and ungifted men, the force which will not be stopped by any restraint on its way to great achievement,-the genius which claims to be its own law, and will confess nothing diviner than itself, have an irresistible fascination. His eye, overlooking the landscape of humanity, always runs up to the brilliant peaks of power: not, indeed, without a glance of love and pity into many a retreat of quiet goodness that lies safe beneath their shelter; but should the sudden lightning, or the seasonal melting of the world's ice-barriers, bring down a ruin on that green and feeble life, his voice, after one faint cry of pathos, joins in with the thunder and shouts with the triumph of the avalanche. Ever watching the strife of the great forces of the universe, he, no doubt, sides on the whole against the Titans with the gods: but if the Titans make a happy fling, and send home a mountain or two to the very beard of Zeus, he gets delighted with the game on any terms and cries, "Bravo!"

The Sartor Resartus finds the manifestation of God in the entire life of the universe; in visible nature; in individual man, and especially his higher mind; in the march and process of history; and in the organic development of humanity as a whole. The author's tendency, however, has increasingly been to retreat from all other media of Divine expression upon his favourite centre, the genius and energy of heroic men. So much has he gathered-in his lights of interpretation upon this focus, as to incur the charge of setting up the personality of individuals as the single determining agency in the affairs of the world, and forgetting the larger half of the truth, that all persons, taken one by one, are but elements of a great social organism, to whose laws of providential growth they must be held subordinate. History cannot be resolved into a mere series of biographies: nor can the individual be justly estimated in his insulation, and tried by the mere inner law of his own particular nature. would be a melancholy outlook for the world, if its courses were simply contingent on the genius and life of a few great men, without any security from a general law behind that they should appear at the right time and place, and with the aptitudes for the needful work. And, on the other hand, were the life of

It

nations to be expended in nothing else than the production of its half-dozen heroes; were this splendid but scanty blossoming the great and only real thing it does, there would seem to be a wasteful disproportion between the mighty forest that falls for lumber and the sparse fruit that would lie upon your open hand. There is need, therefore, of some more manifest relation between individual greatness and the collective life of humanity; and to save us from egoism, from fatalism, from arbitrary and capricious morals, we must learn to recognise a divine method of development in both,-primarily, in race and nation, and with authority over the secondary functions of personal genius.

That Mr. Carlyle's "hero-worship" requires to be balanced by a supplementary doctrine of society and collective humanity, he would himself perhaps be disposed to allow. But what is this supplement to be? Is it merely to teach that the individual is to hold himself at the disposal of the whole? to correct his conscience by the general tradition or the permanent voice of humanity; to sink his egoism, to temper it by immersion in the universal element, and become the organ of the progress of the species? Far be it from us to deny that there may be men susceptible of inspiration from such a faith,-capable of dying for such abstractions as a "law of development," of being torn limb from limb out of regard for "the whole." Still less would we disparage by one word a heroism all the nobler for the faint whispers that suffice to waken it into life. Yet we cannot help feeling that in these impersonal ideas,—of " collective society,' "law of the whole," "destination of mankind," &c.-there is a want of natural authority over the conscience, and, missing the conscience, over the personal impulses of individual men. In the mere notions of "whole and part," of "organism and member," of "average rule and particular case," there resides no moral element, no rights over the will: and if ever they seem to carry such functions, it is only because a deeper feeling lurks behind and lends them the insignia of a prerogative not their own. In a world of mere general laws," it would ever remain a melancholy thing to see living heroes and saints struck down at the altar of "historical tendency" by some shadowy dagger of necessity. Love, enthusiasm, devotion, need some concrete and living object; if not to command their allegiance, at least to turn it from sorrow into joy. And you have but to translate your "progress of the species" into "Kingdom of Heaven," and the problem is solved. The ever-living God stands in Person between the "individual" and the "whole," by His communion mediating between them,-stirring in the conscience of the one, and constituting the tides of advancing good in the other,and so engaging both in one spiritual life. Surrendering imme

diately to Him, instead of to the ultimate ratios of the world, faithful men fling themselves into Omnipotent sympathy, and find deliverance and repose. They have a trust that relieves them of every care; and can leave themselves to be applied to the great account and problem of the world by One who is in the midst, and from the first, and at the end, at once. Through Him, therefore, as the common term of all righteousness, must the collective humanity win its due rights and reverence from Each. The private conscience ceases to be private, the public claim to be merely public, when both are to us the instant pleadings of His living authority. In obeying them, we yield neither to a mixed multitude of our own kind, whose average voice is no better than our own, nor even to our mere higher self; but to the august Revealer of whatever is pure and just and true. In enforcing its traditions and inheritance of right, the Nation or Society of men is not proudly riding on its own arbitrary will, but recognising the trust committed to it and serving as the organism of eternal rectitude.

It is for want of this deliverance from Self at the upper end, that Mr. Carlyle, resolute to break the ignoble bondage on any terms, proposes escape at the lower end; and, preaching up the glories of "Unconsciousness," sighs for relapse into the life of blind impulsive tendency. With him, we confess the curse; we groan beneath its misery; but we see from it a double path,backward into Nature, forward into God,-and cannot for an instant doubt that the Self-consciousness which is the beginning of Reason is never to recede, but to rise and free itself in the transfiguration of Faith. Deny and bar out this hope, and who can wonder if the sharpest remedies for man's selfish security are welcomed with a wild joy; if any convulsion that shall strip off the green crust of artificial culture and lay bare the primitive rock beneath us, appears as a needful return of the fermenting chaos? How else are the elementary forces of instinctive nature to reassert their rights and begin again from their unthinking freshness? In some such feeling as this we find, perhaps, the source, in Mr. Carlyle, of that terrible glee that seems to flame up at the spectacle of revolutionary storms, and to dart with mocking gleams of devilry and tender streaks of humanity over a background of "divine despair." Indeed we could not wish for a better illustration of the two paths of escape from Self,-back into Nature, forward into God,-than the contrast of Carlyle and Maurice in the whole colouring and climate of their spirit: the sad, pathetic, scornful humour of the one, capricious with laughter, tears, and anger, and expressive of manful pity and endurance, alike removed from fear and hope; and the buoyant, serene, trustful temper of the other, genial even in its indignation, and penetrated with the joy of an Infinite Love.

The three schools of doctrine at which we have thus rapidly glanced occupy the most distant points in the English religion of the present age; or, at least, in the new fields of tendency which it has opened. It may seem a vain quest to look for any thing common to the whole. Yet when they are interpreted by their inner spirit, rather than by their outward relations, one thought will be found secreted at the heart of all-the perennial Indwelling of God in Man and in the Universe. This is the distinct gain that has been won by the spiritual consciousness of the time; and that already enriches fiction and poetry, art and social morals, not less than direct theology. In the preceding criticisms we have said enough to show that we are not indifferent to the mode and form of doctrine in which this thought is embodied. But however threatening the mists from which it has to clear itself, it is the dawn of a truth,—a blush upon the East,-wakening up trustful hearts to thanksgiving and hope. We know well the anger and antipathy of all the elder parties towards every phase of the new sentiment. We are accustomed to their absurd and heartless attempt to divide all men between the two poles of their logical dilemma,-either absolute Atheism, or else "our" orthodoxy. But these are only symptoms that the new wine cannot go into the old bottles. They do but betray the inevitable blindness of party-life,-the increasing self-seeking, the loss of genial humility, the conceit of finished wisdom, which mark the decadence of all sects. Precisely in the middle of this pretended alternative of necessity,-far from "Atheism" on the one hand, and from most "orthodoxies" on the other,―stand at this moment the vast majority of the most earnest, devout, philosophic Christians of our time; men with trust in a Living Righteousness, which no creed of one age can adequately define for the fresh experiences given to the spirit of another. To them, and not to the noisy devotees and pharisees of party, do we look for the faith of the future.

A LIST OF RECENT WORKS SUITABLE FOR BOOK-SOCIETIES.

An Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament. By Alfred Barry, M.A. John W. Parker and Son.

A Rationale of Justification by Faith.

Hamilton and Adams.

[A thoughtful and able theological essay. It is written mainly
from the point of view taken by the Coleridge theologians. So
far as it falls short of this, in the effort to be more orthodox,
it seems to us to lose its own footing.]

On Truth and Error. Thoughts, in prose and verse.
By John
Hamilton (of St. Ernan's), M.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge.
Macmillan and Co.

The State of France before the Revolution, 1789. By M. de Tocqueville. John Murray.

[The most mature work on political philosophy published in recent times.]

Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose. By Mark Napier. 2 vols. Hamilton and Adams.

[This enlargement of the same author's "Life and Times of Montrose" contains much new and valuable historical material. The author's politics are exceedingly prejudiced, and his style rather tumid.]

Memoirs of Frederick Perthes. From the German of Clement Theodore Perthes, Professor of Law in the University of Bonn. 2 vols. Hamilton and Adams.

[A piece of extremely minute German biography, referring to a
period of great social and political interest. The simplicity,
strength, and heartiness of Perthes' character make him an
admirable type of the non-speculative but cultivated portion of
the German middle classes.]

Beaumarchais and his Times. Vols. 3 and 4. Addey and Co.
The Espousals. By the Author of "The Angel in the House." J. W.
Parker.

[A second instalment of a genuine poem, worthy of, if not quite
equal to, the first portion.]

Bothwell. A Poem. By W. Edmondstoune Aytoun, D.C.L. Blackwood.

[A poem of rather level history, not without tasteful passages. It may be read once, but hardly a second time.]

KK