condition of the highest state of man. But it is not the only condition thereof, nor is it always found in connection with the greatest spiritual capacities. Nay, the more rich and complex is the nature of the mind, the longer must its period of preparatory growth and discipline necessarily be. In the early Catholic centuries, the Church was really at the head of civilisation, and nearly all the purest streams of intellectual and national life were fed by her. But when other sources of life began to arise, when it became evident that men had the power of getting at reality first-hand, whether in the facts of physical nature, or of intellectual research, or of religious experience, then that chasm began to open between the ecclesiastical and the natural-religious forms of civilisation which has never been understood at all by the ecclesiasticists, and which is even yet but imperfectly comprehended by their opponents. The prophecy of the former is, that if we give up the inviolability of the form, we lose all certainty of retaining our hold on the realities of religion, and must, sooner or later, drift into Atheism in belief, and mere anarchical individualism in society, each man doing what is right in his own eyes. And in confirmation of this, they point to the merely negative influence of free criticism upon character and civilisation, and ask what we can show to counterbalance it, and even whether we have any means of verifying our religious intuitions at all. How can the finite comprehend the Infinite, or the creature judge that which should be his Ruler and Lord? Here lies the real gist of the difficulty; and perhaps the wide-spread Atheism of the present day may contribute towards the reduction of the problem to its lowest terms more speedily than was possible while men lingered in dead forms of materialistic Christianity on the one hand, or of sentimental philosophy on the other, which obscured the distinctness of the real issue.

The true answer we take to be this: that if we were unable to recognise the existence of any object until we could systematically reconstruct its internal metaphysical constitution, then we should assuredly be unable to recognise the being of God; but that no such inability does really attach to the action of our perceptive faculties. We recognise the existence of our fellow-creatures, although we may be wholly ignorant of their mental or physical constitution, and greatly in the dark respecting their characters. The faculties by which we become aware of the existence of God are, of course, less rapid in growth than those by which we become aware of the existence of our fellow-men; but the universal experience of the race shows that they are no less ineradicable and active, and far more directly related to character. Every race and every age,

whether savage or civilised, Pagan or Christian, has in its own way, darkly or clearly, found and felt the real Spiritual Personality above us, though discerning his true character but imperfectly, and only coming to perceive by slow degrees his infinite mercy and perfect righteousness. But however decidedly we may realise the sensation that God is, we are plainly not meant to imbibe passively our ideas of what He is from some mechanical source that will save us the trouble of feeling after and finding Him for ourselves. On this subject, as on all others, our faculties must be personally exercised before they can yield any valuable results. Even the elementary senses require education: the infant tries to grasp objects many yards distant, supposing them to be close at hand; the unpractised ear cannot discriminate the identity of sounds which are instantly painted on the mental perceptiveness of a musician; and the tyro in mathematics puzzles himself over theorems which to an older student have long been self-evident. In all these cases, the faculty has to be educated before it can do its appropriate work; but the fact that by exercise and experience it does acquire the power to accomplish that work, shows that there is a real and natural relation between the human faculty and the external object.

Now, believing most profoundly that such a relation exists between ourselves and our Creator, we believe that every genuine inquiry into the subject must tend to develop it, and that it were easier for the earth to thrive without the light of the sun, than for man to live without the perpetual self-revelations of God. They cannot be destroyed, but they may be obscured and distorted; and the fearful mind which dares not trace them to their source, and would base them on mechanical props and confine them to arbitrary and narrow channels, shows far less real faith than one who gives fair play to every power that God has given him, trusting Him for the result. The unnatural repression of the intellectual faculties which orthodoxy so long enforced, has so far succeeded as to drive half the truth-seekers of our time into the error of attempting to reconstruct life upon a purely intellectual basis. But the reaction of Faith is sure, and is already beginning to be seen. We have no fears for the ultimate result. Believing the affirmative and spiritual side of our nature to be incomparably the highest, and ordained to wield lawful authority over the character, we yet hold that the action of the negative and critical faculties is vitally essential to the healthy condition of the mind; and we have so full a faith in the preëstablished harmony of man's powers, that we are indifferent on which side a new truth may enter, feeling sure that its relations with all

other truth will disclose themselves in God's own time. Welcoming all vigorous and genuine utterances on either side, we value such works as the best of Miss Yonge's, for their truthful and inspiriting delineations of life from an affirmative and spiritual point of view. But we must always regret that they are marred by a feeble reverence for damnatory theories and sacerdotal fictions, which obscures their spiritual beauty, and must tend to narrow the hearts of those who accept it for truth. We should regret this the more, did we not believe that a large proportion of her readers are more discriminating on these points than herself, and are able, with whatever consciousness of moral and intellectual shortcomings, to repose peacefully on that truth which she has yet to learn,-that, under all creeds and at all times,

ART. X.-THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DR. ALEXANDER CARLYLE.

Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk; containing Memorials of the Men and Events of his Time. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1860.

A LIFE extending from the year 1722 to the year 1805, and an autobiographical record of its chief incidents down to the year 1770, would, in the case of almost any one, be tempting to the taste not only of the professed antiquary and historian, but of the mass of readers generally. The impressions of men and manners, formed by one who lived through a period commencing while Jacobite conspiracies were still rife in England and Scotland, and before the hopes of the exiled Stuarts had been raised to the highest pitch, and depressed to almost hopeless despondency by the vicissitudes of "the '45,"-and terminating when Great Britain was engaged in a struggle for existence against the imperial despot whose genius had grasped and directed the energies of French Jacobinism, could hardly in the case of any man, however insignificant his position, or however limited his capacity for observation and criticism, fail to convey much curious information beyond the regular his

torians of the period, and throw unintentional light on many obscure points of individual character and national habits. The present autobiography, however, has much more substantial claims on our attention, proceeding as it does from a man who was most favourably situated for gathering and placing on record the feelings and impressions, both of the "vulgar herd" and of the most cultivated and distinguished men of his times, and whose qualifications for availing himself of his opportunities were very much above the average. The Boswellian theory, that the best impression of a great and wise man is to be derived from the gossiping recollections of a very little and very foolish one, whether true or not as an explanation of a singular fact, represents one extreme in the classification of successful memoirwriting, of which such reminiscences as those of Dr. Alexander Carlyle supply us with the other, and between which there is perhaps to be found little except dull or decent mediocrity. The complete absence of judgment and of the power of critical observation is, perhaps, the next best feature in a biographer to the possession of both these qualities in high perfection; but we may surely claim for the latter the superiority in interest as well as in value. If the former amuses us by its purposeless garrulity, and leaves us in the unfettered exercise of our own faculty of estimating and conceiving character, so making us ourselves do the work of biographers; on the other hand, a masterly delineation of men and occurrences can never supersede the work of the thoughtful reader, though it may define and influence its direction and result, while the least reflecting mind will own the charm of its artistic power.

Dr. Carlyle was a minister of the Established Church of Scotland. The semi-judicial position and exceptional experience of the clergy ought, one might suppose, to render them peculiarly skilful discerners and interpreters of character. They are placed in a sacred chair of spiritual authority, from which they can peruse and study at their leisure the open volume of the motives and actions of their parishioners. But, allowing for exceptions which render the general rule more striking, we do not find among the clergy this clear insight into their fellowmen in a preeminent degree. It may be that their too great familiarity with the scenes of every-day life renders them less prone to analyse their distinctive features, just as it requires the keen eye of a stranger to detect the special beauties of a landscape on which an inhabitant has long gazed with unintelligent satisfaction. The salient points of character in the members of a parish flock connect themselves generally in the mind of their pastor with some question of local or social politics, or some ecclesiastical controversy. A man is a good Church

man or a Dissenter,-a Puseyite or an Evangelical,-a member of such a party in the vestry-meetings, an habitué of such or such a set in the intercourse of social life; and unless he be flagrantly profligate or aggressively eccentric, the analysis of his character is usually carried no further, or is lost among a host of disconnected or insignificant personal traits. But though Dr. Carlyle did not escape from some of the drawbacks incident to his clerical profession, and was a little too much inclined to classify men according to their approximation or divergence with respect to the "high-flying" and "wild," or the "moderate" and "Carlyle" party, he had so instinctive an appreciation of the peculiarities and minor varieties of character, and so remarkable a power of blending his observations into an harmonious and artistic portrait, that he emancipated himself in a great degree from the shackles of local associations, and drew materials from his pastoral experience which served him well in his wider observations of the outer world. The fact of his own as well as his father's living being in the neighbourhood of a centre of intellectual activity such as Edinburgh, and the friendships formed in his collegiate career, which brought him frequently into contact with the bustle of political life, and the wider experiences of aristocratic circles, must in any case have modified materially the role of a country clergyman, even had that role been more congenial to the bent of Dr. Carlyle's genius than it was. But congenial it can hardly be said to have been; and there was much truth in the complaint made in many quarters at the epoch of his entering on his clerical functions, that he was wanting in "grace." He was emphatically of the Sydney Smith type, and in the eyes of the more rigid professors of the Church of Scotland, into which the leaven of the old Covenanters still largely entered, his unemotional good sense, intolerant and unappreciative of all enthusiasm ; his satirical and somewhat bacchanalian humour; his boyish love of practical jokes; and his addiction to the society of young ladies at dancing assemblies, and of play-writers and players at theatres, must have seemed insuperable disqualifications for a minister of the Word. They were rendered all the more obnoxious because his life was in the most tangible points of morality above their censure, and because his ambitious and commanding mind was not satisfied with the erection of this independent standard of clerical morals, but sought to impress its own stamp on the Church of Scotland itself, by secularising the Presbyterian clergy, and converting the General Assembly into a branch of the civil polity. In the "politics" of the Church at that time Dr. Carlyle found that sphere for his intellectual activity which was not afforded by his pastoral