Therefore it is well and healthful for the soul that every man should breathe at times the pure atmosphere of the infinite and ideal, should lift up his eyes unto the hills from whence cometh his aid, should retire into the ideal world, and gaze upon the archetypal truth and beauty and goodness of which the actual world is but the dim reflection. Some must, and by natural vocation. will, consecrate themselves to the more direct and immediate service of these ideals. The man of science and the philosopher; the artist, whether poet, painter, sculptor, or musician; the priest or minister of religion,— these are, in a peculiar sense, the servants of the ideal. But they are only the representatives of our common humanity in that supreme service and consecration. And while these live habitually within the veil, in the inner sanctuary of the infinite, it is needful that they whose preoccupation with the world's business detains them in the outer courts of the finite world, if they would preserve their manhood and draw strength for life's casual duties, should sometimes enter too.

10. Dangers of moral idealism.-Yet we must never, in our devotion to the ideal and infinite, neglect the imperative claims of the actual finite world. We must always return—even the ministers of the ideal in art, in science, and in religion, must return-to the secular life, to the finite world and its relations. Nor must the vision of the infinite and ideal ever be allowed to distort our vision of the finite and actual. Emancipation from the 'cave' of the finite brings with it its own new danger: it tends to unfit man for the life of the 'cave.' Those who have lived in the upper air, and have seen the absolute Reality, are apt to be blinded by the darkness of the cave in which their fellows spend their lives, and, regarding all its concerns as shadowy and illusory, to lose their interest in them. They are apt, as Plato said, to be awkward and easily outwitted; for their souls sit loose

to this world, and dwell apart.

The peculiar temptation

of genius, moral, æsthetic, or intellectual; the peculiar temptation of those whose lives are spent habitually in the infinite relations, is to minimise the finite, and fail to see the infinite shining through it. Gazing at the stars, they are in danger of falling into the well. So it is that ' respectability' is often on a higher ethical plane than genius and saintship. Even Plato said that we must bring the travellers back to the cave, and force them to take their part in its life; idealist and transcendentalist though he was, he saw that most men must live in the cave. No service of the ideal will atone for unfaithfulness in the actual. "He that is unfaithful in that which is least is unfaithful also in much." The individual's duty is determined and defined by his station, or his place in the actual finite relations; and even his cultivation of the ideal must be regulated by the imperious claims of this moral station. We know how inexorably severe were Carlyle's judgments of self-condemnation for his failure in the little services of domestic piety; how, if these judgments were even in a measure true, his 'spectral' view of life, his preoccupation with the 'immensities and eternities,' shut out from his field of vision the duty that lay next him. Carlyle's uncorrupted moral insight finds in his genius, which was perhaps as much moral as intellectual in its quality, no excuse for shortcoming in the 'minor moralities' of life. Nor does the world's keen moral judgment find in the peculiar religious attainments of 'professing Christians' any excuse for such obvious moral defects as malice and ill-temper. such cases the severity of our judgment is apt to be intensified by the very height of the ideal to which the life professes its devotion. The highest and completest -the sanest-natures recognise most fully this claim of the actual, and most willingly surrender themselves to the burden of its fulfilment. In this meekness and lowliness of spirit Wordsworth sees the crown of Milton's virtue:

R

In

And Tennyson, in the Idylls of the King, sings in a like strain of the ideal life:

"And some among you held that if the King

Had seen the sight, he would have sworn the vow;
Not easily, seeing that the King must guard
That which he rules, and is but as the hind
To whom a space of land is given to plough,
Who may not wander from the allotted field
Before his work be done."

So must each man be content, king or subject, genius or day-labourer, to go forth unto his labour until the evening; for in this world each has his appointed task, and if he do it not, it will be left undone. Even if our duty be to consecrate ourselves, in science, in art, or in religion, to the peculiar service of the ideal the noblest service that life offers, and that which calls for the highest aptitudes-we still must not forget that, in respect of our duties in the actual, we stand on the common level. The priest, the artist, and the philosopher are also 'ordinary men,' and have no exemption from the common domestic, social, and civil duties. Such exemption would unfit them for their own great task-the discovery of life's ideal meaning, and its interpretation to their fellows. Nor must any man allow his excursions into the ideal world to dull the edge of his interest in the ordinary business of life. It is true that we all have need of leisure from the very finite occupations of life for such communion with the infinite; for in that communion the soul's best life is rooted, and it will wither if not well tended. The world of knowledge, of art, of religion, does claim us for itself, and our visits to it ought to be all the

more frequent because our actual world is apt to be so meagre and confined. But our acquaintance with the splendours of its many mansions must never breed in our souls contempt for the narrowness and the mean appointments of the house of our earthly pilgrimage. It is a danger and temptation neither unreal nor unfamiliar. Let us take two illustrations of it.

The artistic temper is apt to be impatient of the commonplaceness of its daily life; we are wont, indeed, to attribute to it a kind of practical irresponsibility. Led by visions of the beautiful into the romantic country of the imagination, the spirit is loath to return to the prosaic fields of ordinary daily duty. Its emotions are ideal, and seem to find no issue in action on the earthly plane; and more and more it comes to feel that there is no scope for such emotions in the actual world. The other world—the world of the imagination—is so much more interesting and exciting that, by comparison with it, the actual world of daily life, where duties lie, seems 'stale, flat, and unprofitable.' It is the Quixotic temper which we all know in childhood. Nothing will satisfy us but knight-errantry,—slaying giants, and rescuing fair ladies. The life of the Middle Ages would have suited us much better than that of the Nineteenth Century. It was so much more picturesque, there was so much more colour, the lights were brighter and the shadows deeper; life was romantic then. But, in reality, life is always the same; it presents always the same moral opportunities. The elementary realities do not change, the alphabet of human life is the same from age to age. The imagination is always apt to picture the Golden Age of life's great opportunities of action either in the past or in the future, while really, if we had eyes to see them, they are always in the present. The pattern of man's life may be very different in different ages, its colours may be brighter or more sombre; but its warp and woof, its inner texture, is always the same, and is wrought of the threads of good

and evil, virtue and vice, faithfulness and unfaithfulness to present duty.

Or take the saint' who, with his eye fixed on the Beyond, abstracts himself from this earthly life, either outwardly as in medieval Monasticism, or in the inner life, like many a modern Protestant, mingling with his fellows as if he were not of them, not in hypocrisy or pride, but in real rapt abstraction of spirit, afraid lest he soil his hands with this world's business and render them unfit for the uses of the heavenly commerce. Such a life not only misses the influence it might have exerted on the world, but proves itself unworthy of, and unfit for, the higher just in the measure that it fails in the lower duties. The peculiar human way to the ideal is through utter faithfulness in the actual; and the reason why we need to leave the actual at all is just that we may get the inspiration which will enable us to see the ideal in it. It requires an eye that has seen the ideal shining in its own proper strength, to detect it in the disappointing surroundings of the actual. In activity, not in passive contemplation, lies man's salvation. This is the life, Christian as distinguished from the Buddhistic; it is also modern, as distinguished from medieval, Christianity. The ideal must be found, after all, in the actual; the things unseen and eternal in the things which are seen and temporal; the infinitely true and beautiful and good in the finite relations of daily life. It is the function of the chosen servants of the ideal to open the eyes of their fellows, that they may see life even on this bank and shoal of time,' sub quâdam specie æternitatis; and thus to make the secular for them henceforth sacred, the commonplace infinitely interesting and significant.

11. The ethical supremacy of the moral ideal.— The supreme category of the moral life is the good, not as excluding, but as containing in itself, the beautiful and the true. To make either the true or the beautiful