sight, and sometimes utterly forgotten, But still we have seen and learnt enough to form some estimate of the relative place which the Hebrew and the Classical view of politics should assume in the matured Christian faith.

As we have said, in the Hebrew nation the bond of national unity had but little conscious reference to the national genius or national characteristics; it was almost entirely based on the unique historical discipline and government by which the nation had been educated. It was the divine task or purpose assigned to a nation which constituted in the eyes of the Jews the foundation of its national unity, and they were not accustomed to reckon characteristic genius or endowments amongst their quali fications for fulfilling that task or purpose. In the book of Revelation this teaching as to the foundation of national life and unity is extended to the other nations of the ancient world. Each is seen to have had a definite place and function in the divine plan of education for the human race. But the Hebrew prophet clearly regarded national life, at least up to the spiritual phase of it, as a poor tool or instrument in the hands of God, without independent and intrinsic value of its own. He hurried over all the long ages during which the unconscious development of national character and intellectual power, and of dim-sighted ignorant religion, was going on in the early world, as mere preliminary notes to the great revelation of God's kingdom. This was the end of the ages, the point on which all the lines of history converged. The Greeks and Romans, on the other hand, had of course no such conception of an eternal purpose connecting all the nations and all the ages in its many folds. But they had a clear belief in various forms of divine genius endowing them with, and developing, their most characteristic national gifts, directing their national destinies, and so limiting these gifts, as they conceived, by the law of race, that they would be endangered or perish with the loss of political independence.

Such were the supernatural and the natural view of national life and unity;-the one resting exclusively on a divine law imposed upon the nation, and a divine testimony committed to it; the other, mainly on similarity of organisation, common powers, common tastes and habits, and common tutelary deities. The one was a unity conferred by God's overshadowing purpose, the other by the community of human talents. It is not difficult to see how these conditions of true national unity are blended in the life of modern nations. The divine and the human bonds of unity are now interwoven at a thousand points; the spiritual light has permeated the human talents so as to fuse them into distinct national characters, only adapted, it may be, to some

few forms of human activity, but capable of embodying in all of them an eternal purpose. Thus a true bond of unity in a nation, as in a family, simply depends on this,—whether the common atmosphere of thought, feeling, and energy tends to foster, ripen, and deepen, or to hinder and shackle the growth of the highest nature in its members. If it aids this,-if the nation lives in a truer and clearer relation to God, and has a clearer grasp of his purposes than the individuals who compose it could have in any other human relations,-then the national bond is really divine, and its members may well feel with the classical nations, that the charm will be broken so soon as they lose their independence. But if this be not the case,-if the stimulus of similar characteristics and habits prevents or impedes the free growth of the diviner nature in the separate elements of a nation, then national decay and dissolution is already begun; and with the spiritual the secular progress of the nation is arrested. And in this case no identity of race can suffice to create or maintain any true national unity. The supernatural knot is loosened so soon as the social or political influences put forth begin to interpose a mist between God and the individual soul, instead of constituting or vivifying its highest level of life. And this loosening of the supernatural knot is not distinguishable from that of the natural, since the supernatural is but a new life poured through the natural, and not an external addition to it.

But if this be the true interpretation of the sacredness attached both in ancient and modern times to national unity and independence,—namely, that (as the Poles have recently asserted) it lends a new spring and elasticity to Church and State, to art, science, and literature,—we must see that it is not a nationality but a nation which is sacred. And a nation may both begin to be and cease to be. The time may be when separate tribes, previously too loosely organised, and too poor in moral qualities for any progress or spiritual unity of life, are welded together for the first time into a community capable of indefinite growth and spiritual organisation. The time may be, again, when, either from moral or other causes unknown to us, this power of mutual aid has passed away, when the nation has lost its mutual cohesion, its divine unity and life, and must be dissolved. The value of national unity and independence is only secondarily a question of race, primarily one between the national heart and God, which will be answered at once and by acclamation both by instinct and conscience, if there be any promise of life for it, or if it be not already in its decay.

Again, what is the light cast by the Christian faith on the relations of national government to the life of the nation? Hebrew political prophecy recognised but one original source of true

government, the Word of God. So far as the king or judge spoke that, he was a true ruler and to be obeyed; so far as he did not, he was a false ruler and unworthy of obedience. This, as we have said, is the older and nobler form of Mr. Carlyle's intellectualised "right of the nobler." But it was any thing but the classical view of national government. The nation being regarded as united by characteristics of organisation which permeated the whole body, national government early came to mean government wielded by the nation, as well as over the nation. The nation was to bestow, as well as obey, the authority of its government. Otherwise, the natural course of its destinies might have been disturbed and misdirected by some foreign power not in harmony with the genius of the race. How are these opposite conceptions of government to be reconciled? Thus: if the central power of the divine light is to be conceived as penetrating and transmuting, more or less effectually, all the common powers and characteristics which connect a nation, then the Word of God to that nation must be distributed, just as His gifts are distributed, over its surface; and it will be certain that no government can rule it so wisely and effectually as one that is kept in close connection with the national mind and heart. Intimate knowledge of, sympathy with, and constant access to the heart of the people governed, are more truly divine conditions of government than even superior wisdom without these qualifications. For divine government is a moulding influence, not compulsion, and must appeal to the mind with the natural authority of all its own highest experience, or it will never produce its best fruits. The "right of the nobler" to govern is indisputable where it is recognised; but if it be not intimately and heartily recognised, then it is not to those who thus fail to recognise it the right of the nobler at all; they do not acquiesce in it as having a claim over their consciences, but for other reasons. The actual government of God in man is but a touch, a sway, an impulse given at the very centre of our purposes and wishes; and so a national government that is not in constant and close intimacy with the nation's wishes, character, and habits, cannot wield over it the noblest influence. And it must often, like God's government itself, permit national sins and evils to ripen which it feels keenly, unless it can gain the true coöperation of the national will in exterminating them.

But it does not follow that a true national government ought to follow tardily in the wake of popular opinion, but that it ought to guide and control it. For the government should be the highest existing form of the national conscience and intellect, should be able to feel to the full the spiritual power

derived from the unity and freedom of the nation, and to direct the line of its further progress. If it cannot guide the nation right, it should at least refuse to guide it wrong: it should throw the responsibility on others. A deep belief on the part of the national government that every one of its acts is clothed with the authority of the nation, and will go to determine the question of national decay or national progress, should certainly give something of that distinctness of purpose to its government which the greater ancient statesmen had in higher degree than the modern. Yet Pericles, when he prayed that no unsuitable word might drop from his mouth in the assembly of the people, mainly felt the heavy responsibility of shaping the outward destiny of Athens; he could not have felt, at least in the degree in which one of our English statesmen might feel it, the responsibility of more or less forming the inner temper of the national character,-of giving it nobleness, sincerity, and fixity of purpose on the one hand; or, on the other, of multiplying the number of vacillating fancies and feverish excitements, or selfish impulses, which infest it.

We have now finished what has proved, we fear, a somewhat tedious discussion; yet it is scarcely possible to express how strongly we feel that not only the greatness of the English nation, but the future course of English theology and faith, depend on the relation between that faith and our national life and government. In other countries the fresh impulses of a new grasp of truth have often preceded a practical regeneration in the life of the people. In England this has been seldom the case. Truth does not gain a living hold on the life of our nation till its power is wanted in aid of some practical reform. The Reformation here was an administrative reform rather than a result of changed national conviction; when it had been completed, the new faith gathered force in aid of it, and arrested the return of the tide. Again, the religious movement which marked the Puritan Revolution grew as it were in the wake of the political conflict, being in great measure called into popular life by the need of a spiritual weapon equal to so rare an emergency. And so it may be again. We may find that the vulgar morality of a slipshod parliamentary government is becoming intolerable; that if the country is not to lose her place among the nations, some higher standard of political life must be raised and battled for. And then it will be suddenly found that our theology has been as dim and formal as our political morality, and that the two are vitally connected. In waiting for such a time, we are sometimes tempted to lament the decline since the period of Cromwell's protectorship; to speak as if the political faith of the nation were incapable of ever reaching the same level of strength and sin

cerity again. But Cromwell's age was one of almost abject reliance on the words and letter of Scripture; and the religion of the time was therefore necessarily narrow and Judaising, and unjust to the various culture handed down to us from the classical nations, and the habits of Saxon ancestors. It would be idle to expect that this phase of national faith could pass away, and be replaced by one resting on the broader foundations of the whole divine education of the ages which had gone before, without a long intervening period of vacillating opinion, external creeds, and dogmatic indifference, telling as much on the political as on the theological atmosphere. Still the springs of political faith remain. Dr. Newman used to preach that the English race, with all its great qualities, has no vivid sense of the supernatural. This may be in some sense true; but by the deep English love for that Order, political and social, the roots of which travel far and wide into the spiritual world, we have often already in our history been brought back to feel and know, as well as unconsciously obey, the Eternal Will in which the unity of the nation is centred; and by the same craving we may be brought to realise it as vividly, and less fanatically, again.

ART. X.-PLATO: HIS PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS.

Plato's Doctrine respecting the Rotation of the Earth, and Aristotle's Comment upon the Doctrine. By George Grote, Esq. London,

1860.

The Platonic Dialogues for English Readers. By William Whewell, D.D. London, 1859-60.

Platon's Sämmtliche Werke: übersetzt von Hieronymus Müller, mit Einleitungen begleitet von Karl Steinhart. 7 Bände. Leipzig, 1850-59.

It is curious that, in spite of the peculiar definiteness attaching to physical conceptions, there are as many undetermined questions respecting the kosmical mechanics of the ancients as respecting their ethics and metaphysics. There is no greater literary paradox than this, that writers trained in the Greek geometry, and thinking in the pure and simple lines of Greek imagination, should have transmitted to our hand treatises on the system of the universe, in which the relations of its primary bodies are gathered into no clear picture. To the wellknown question of the Oxford Examiner, "Does the earth move round the sun, or the sun round the earth?" a discreet desire