suming, though, as I think, erroneously assuming, that the Hebrews had no knowledge of a future life, has gone into a very elaborate argument to show that Moses must have had a divine Legation, attested by miracles. For he maintained that without the expectation of future rewards and punishments, nothing but a special and miraculous interposition could hold a people in the bonds of moral order. Doubtless the argument is just, whatever may be thought of the premises. What could keep in any bounds the swellings of ambition, pride, cruelty, luxury, and licentiousness, did not death interpose its dread barrier? It is commonly called "the king of terrors;" as if in that character it were to be deprecated. But its terrors are for those who most need them. And well is it, that that shadowy king stands in the path, and says to self-indulgence, "Remember!" and to oppression, "Beware!" - else were not the earth habitable.

But I wish to speak of this event in its widest relations to human improvement; not merely as a terror, but as every way a wisely appointed and good discipline.

Death is an epoch in our moral course. A youth at school is far more likely to be affected by the prospect of an approaching examination, than by his general responsibility. Then he is to answer for himself. Then his learning is to be brought to the test. Then his fidelity or neglect is distinctly to appear. Such is the coming hour of death to the moral learner. It brings the sense of obligation to a point from which there is no escape. It brings the great moral trial of life to a solemn issue. Doubtless there is a higher thought, a larger view, for the manhood of reason; but in this respect, most men are yet children, and need the discipline of children. Doubtless the moment that lies in the distance of a thousand years is to answer for the moment that is now passing; the whole vast future is bound to the present hour by the indissoluble

chain of cause and effect; but for creatures of our limited capacity that prospect is too general, and it seems expedient that there should be distinct steps in our progress; that manhood, for instance, should distinctly answer for youth, and age for manhood; and, in like manner, the immediate future life for the life that now is.

In

Again, the nearness of the event has its purpose. If any one should ask why the allotted term of man's existence on earth should be so brief, I still answer, that I see in this a wise ordination. The advancement of the world depends on the earlier vigor and flexibility of life. I say not upon young men and women, - for that seems to me one of the follies of our time, — but upon the age between twenty-five and sixty-five. After that, opinions usually become settled, habits fixed; and the world may not look for new ideas, innovating enterprises, nor the enthusiasm to prosecute them. ventions, reforms, are seldom to be seen in old age. Age has indeed its part to act; to guide the zeal and restrain the rashness of the young. Its experience and wisdom are to be respected; far more, I think, than they are at this day; but old men, generally, are not the working men of the world. What, then, is the ordinance that is to meet this condition of humanity? The scythe of death mows down the generations, that it may provide for a more vigorous growth. The axe that "is laid at the root," cuts away the aged trees, that younger and fairer ones may shoot up in their stead. The builder removes fixtures that he may prepare for improvements. Thus the world is continually recruited with fresh strength, and is pervaded with an imaginative and flexible enterprise; and thus its arts are advanced; its fields are cultivated with increasing skill; its houses are built on improved plans; its science and literature are constantly rising; and its religious systems are advancing to higher truths and wider ranges of vision. Death, then, grim and fearful as it is

Death is not

Yet further, the inevitableness of the coming change is a weighty element of its moral power. The certainty of it; the feeling that nothing can stay the event; that no hoard of gold, nor crown of honor, nor crowd of cares, nor pressure of engagements, nor thronging visions of coming prosperity, nor momentous crisis in affairs, can ward off the inevitable hour, how does that feeling penetrate through the whole of life, and sober, at times, the wildest levity, and subdue the haughtiest ambition! The Grecian Epaminondas, when told that a distinguished general had died while the battle was raging, exclaimed, "Ye gods! how can a man find time to die, at a moment like this!" But every man must find time to die! Ay, the man of blood, whose ruthless sword has cut down its thousands and ten thousands; who was deaf to the groans and pleadings of human misery; who has crushed ten thousand human hearts beneath his blood-stained car, Tamerlane or Alaric, Cæsar or Napoleon,

he has, in God's dread forbearance, found a time to kill; but he has also, in God's awful justice, found a time to die! And the private man, the man who dwells in the deepest seclusion; who lives hidden and shrouded from the public eye; who draws the veil of midnight around his deeds; that man still feels that an eye is upon him; he is obliged to confront the awful image of death; he cannot escape. "But I must die!" is a thought that steals upon many a worldly dream and many a silent rumination. He feels it, though no solemn message, as in the Egyptian feasts, take up the admonition and say, "Remember! thou must die!"

Yet not with terror only, but with tenderness, does death touch the human heart, touches it with a gracious sympathy and sorrow. One may know the house where death has set his mark, long after the time. Traces are left in

Nor could it fulfil its high mission, if men departed from the world in families, in tribes, in generations. Then, indeed, were we spared the sorrows of bereavement, but at the expense of much that is most sacred in life. If families were dismissed from life together, they would inevitably become selfish, contracting their thoughts and affections within those domestic spheres in which all their destinies were bound up. If generations were mowed down at once, like the ripened harvests, then had there been no history of public deeds nor record of private worth. The invisible presence of virtue that now pervades and hallows the earth, that consecrates our dwellings and makes them far more than the abodes of life, would be withdrawn from the fellowship of men; and the signal lights of heroic example that are now shining through the ages would all go out in utter darkness. A working-day world, a utilitarian world, we should have; shut up to the cares and interests of the generation that is passing over it; not as now a world that is overspread with the mounds of departed nations, with the dust of buried empire, — the theatre of majestic history, the heritage of genius, the altar of holy martyrdom. The earth is no longer the mere material globe that at the beginning rolled round its parent sun: it is the tomb of generations, the monument of ages. From out of its hollow recesses and echoing caverns, what oracles come ! Upon its majestic brow, what names are written, Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome; the Goth, the Gaul, the Saxon, the Slavonic race, and races of

the old, the dateless, American time! The very dwellings, the cities of the world, have become monumental. Not present convenience, not bustling activity alone, but the sanctity of death makes them what they are. Their walls have echoed to joys and sorrows that have passed away. High, heroic hearts have throbbed within them, that beat no more; pain and patience have built altars in them to lowly resignation and prayer; the last sigh has ascended from them, and, as holy incense, consecrated them forever. Oh! not the present alone is here;

but the image of the majestic past stalks through the world, and casts its solemn mantle over the life of to-day! We live that we may garner up the treasures of humanity, and, adding to them the little that we can, transmit them to those that come after. survive, with whatever pain to ourselves, that virtue may not die. We guard the holy bequest. See we to it that it waste not nor dwindle in our hands!

We

Nay, in another respect, the grandeur of death imparts a reflected dignity to life. God puts honor on the being to whom He says, "Thou shalt die!". to whom He does not veil the event, as He does to animal natures, but unfolds the clear prospect. He, to whom the grandest achievement of courage and heroism should be proposed, could not be a mean creature. But every man is to meet the grandeur of death. In these mortal lists he stands, -ay, the youth, the child, the frailest spirit that ever was clothed with the habiliments of mortality; and he knows that he is

terious than any other that ever challenged mortal courage. The meanest man lives with that prospect before him. More than that which makes heroism sublime, it is his to encounter.

Yes, and in the bosom of death are powers greater than itself. I have seen them; I have seen them triumph when death was nearest and mightiest; and I believe in them, I believe in those inborn powers of life and immortality more than I believe in death. They will bear me up more than death will weigh me down. I live; and this living, conscious being which I am to-day is a greater wonder to me than it is that I should go on and on. How I came to be, astonishes me far more than how I should continue to be. And if I am to continue, if I am to live forever, I must have a realm fitted for such life. Eternity of being must have infinitude of space for its range. I would visit other worlds; and especially does the desire grow intenser, as the boundless splendors of the starry heavens are unfolded wider and wider. But I cannot go to them, I cannot skirt the coasts of Sirius and the Pleiades with this body. Then, some time, in God's good time, let it drop. Let my spirit wander free. this body drop; as when one leaves the vehicle that had borne him on a journey, to ascend some lofty mountain, — to lift his gaze to wider heavens and a vaster horizon. So let my spirit wander free-and far. Let it wander through the realm of infinite good; its range as unconfined as its nature; its faith, the faith of Christ; its hope, a hope full of

Let

I MUST now take up the great social problems to which I referred in my last lecture, Polytheism, Despotism, War, Slavery, and that problem which embraces them all: the Prevalence and Ministry of Error.

"A grim and fearful host of ills," it may be said, "to preside over the destiny of the human race; or if not to preside, to prevail, --to have darkened the world with fear, to have bound it in chains, to have torn it with violence, from the beginning; to have led the generations of men in mazes of darkness and wandering through all ages! How can such things have been ordained or permitted? How in any way could such things have been the agencies of a good and wise Providence?"

Now, in dealing with these questions, we must take along with us what has been already said upon the very grounds and principles of the human problem. Man, as a moral being, must of necessity be free; as a created being, he must be imperfect and ignorant; as a being whose destiny it is to improve, he must begin somewhere; nay, as a being, all whose knowledge and virtue are to be acquired, he must begin at a point where he has no virtue or knowledge; i. e., he must begin in infancy. Look, then, at this being, and consider what must be the inevitable laws of his development, and what the probable course of it. Do not ask why this or that could not have been hindered; but see that the principle of hindrance would be fatal to the system; that the demand for divine interference made by millions, irretrievably complicates, and, if lis

tened to, ruins all. See man, then, as he is and must be. Imperfect, ignorant, infantile, yet endowed with powerful energies and impulses, without which he would be nothing, — he is placed upon the earth to do what he pleases. Deprive him of the liberty to do so, and you unmake the man. Deprive him of his imperfection, his ignorance, his exposure to error, and you make him God. Or, yet once more: interfere with his free development by incessant miracles to ward off the evils into which he falls, and you break up the whole regular training on which that development depends. Take the case of any evil, any wrong, any misery that ever was inflicted, and consider it. The assassin's arm is raised to murder. Almighty power could arrest it; but then the agent would not be free. Two armies are about to rush into battle. Almighty power could in an instant chain these hosts like statues to the earth; but then they would not be free, would not be men.

I must desire you further to take it into the account, not only that some evils were likely to flow from such a constitution of things, but that these very evils which we are to consider were the natural, if not inevitable, developments of human ignorance and weakness; nay, and of the higher human sentiments, too, of the feelings of right and of religion. Not from some dark cavern are they let loose, like avenging furies, not from some fabled Pandora's box have they issued, but from the bosom of humanity; nor from any constitutional badness of na

ture, but from passions, from errors, from mistakes, from collisions, from circumstances necessarily attaching to this nature. I pray you to look more nearly into these evils than you do when you generalize and sum them up into one portentous and crushing mass of gratuitous calamity and wrong. Thus, error, for instance, religious error, superstition in many forms, could man escape it? Thus, again, in rude and lawless times, was not the governing hand likely to hold things with a strong grasp, to be despotic and oppressive? And when questions arose between nations, was it not natural that they should resort to physical force, i. e., to war? Could rude barbarians stand still to argue? Could they settle, could they understand, any code of international law? Was it not almost inevitable that they should fight? If the question was about a piece of land, or a fishery, was there anything else for them to do but to endeavor to push one another from the disputed possession? Supposing the parties to be honest, supposing

that each believed the thing in question to belong to him,―supposing there was no umpire to which they could appeal,

must not a natural sense of justice have led them to strive for their right? War is ordinarily the clash of opinions. "You have got that which is mine," one says; "you will not give it to me; you will not listen to my just claims for it; then I must take it from you." In fact, must not this, where the case arises, be the language of to-day? But, certainly, where neither right nor reason would be listened to, must not the party wronged, or conceiving himself to be wronged, enforce his claim with the strong arm, or else sit down, abused, crushed, robbed, and despoiled on every hand?

Doubtless there has been violence enough in the world which has had no such plea. I only wished to show that it is not all blank malignity nor wilful error which has filled the world with darkness and sorrow. And do you not

suppose, let me ask, that He who made the world foresaw all this? and are sin and pain agreeable to Infinite Benevolence? Must you not believe that God would have prevented them had there not been obstacles to prevention in the very nature of things and in the welfare of the beings he made?

-

It is of some such intrinsic obstacle, I think, that Plato speaks, under the name of "necessity," a something inevitably and inextricably interwoven with the constitution of things, and preventing the exclusion of evil and misery from the world. He appears to me obscurely to intimate, in a passage of the Timæus, that view of the origin of evil which I have endeavored plainly to set forth in these lectures as the true and only solution of that dark problem. His mind evidently had not settled upon any theory. Sometimes he speaks of a malignant being, next in power to God, as having introduced evil into the creation; sometimes of dark, intractable, obstinate matter as the source of evil; for these old ideas of Zoroaster seem to have pervaded all antiquity. But in the Timæus we find him speaking of “necessity" as some strong and apparently opposing power, "on which," to use the language of a learned commentator,*-"on which the divine energy was constantly exercised, not so much in directly overcoming as in controlling and directing it to the accomplishment of the Divine purposes. "But since,"

says Plato, "mind [i. e., the Supreme Mind] rules necessity by persuading her to bring to the best results the most of things as they are generated [or made], thus in this way, through necessity overcome by rational persuasion, this universe received its construction," or was fashioned into its present order.

"By rational persuasion," says Plato, i. e., not by irresistible coercion, but by a wise urging and turning of things that are unavoidably liable to evil to good

* Prof. Tayler Lewis on "Plato against the Atheists," p. 217.