Christ was in all things the Saviour: Saviour of individual souls; and Saviour of society, by lifting the souls that truly looked to Him into a fellowship of love where cach should strive to do his highest duty. Robertson died after much suffering of intensest pain in August, 1853, at the age of thirtyseven, and left a name that is now pleasant in the ears of all his countrymen.

Frederick Robertson has been ranked as the chief of English preachers by Dean Stanley, than whom. no man has been more careful to point out that the true spirit of Christianity is not the particular possession of any one part of the Christian world.

ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.

From a Photograph by Mr. S. A. Walker, 64, Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, London.

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, son of a Bishop of Norwich, was born in 1815, and was educated at Rugby under Dr. Arnold, whose friend he remained, and the history of whose life he told in 1844. From Rugby, Stanley went to Oxford with a scholarship at Balliol. He obtained the Newdegate Prize for an English Poem on the "Gipsies," the Ireland Scholarship, the English Essay Prize in 1839, and the English Essay and Theological Prizes in 1840, whenhaving graduated with a First Class in Classics in 1837-he was made Fellow of University College. For twelve years he was Tutor of his College, and it was during this time that he published his life of Arnold, a book widely read not only by the large body of intellectual men who had grateful recollections of Dr. Arnold's training, but by Englishmen of all ranks, who found in it a record of manly religion brought into relation with the vital questions of their day, a noble life set forth by one who was in fellowship with its best aspirations. The same true sympathy, at its best and deepest, has given a lasting charm to Mrs. Kingsley's full and faithful record of her husband's labours. In 1845-6, Mr. Stanley was Select Preacher at the University. In 1846 he published "Stories and Essays on the Apostolical Age," and in 1850 a Memoir of Bishop Stanley. From 1851

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to 1858 he was Canon of Canterbury, and published, besides other books, "Historical Memorials of Canterbury" in 1854. He travelled in the East, and applied his experience to illustrations of the Scripture in a volume published in 1855 upon Sinai and Palestine in connection with their History." In 1858 he was appointed Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford; he was appointed also to a Canonry of Christ Church, and became Dean of Westminster in 1863. In 1862 he accompanied the Prince of Wales to Palestine, and added to other published volumes of Sermons one of "Sermons preached in the East." In 1867 he published "Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey," and in 1876 he completed with a third volume a series of "Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church," of which the earlier volumes had appeared in 1863 and 1865.

We turn from Westminster to St. Paul's. An accomplished scholar, who shares with men of very different degrees of culture and forms of opinion a zeal for highest truth, and one of the foremost among living preachers, is Canon Liddon. Henry Parry Liddon, born in 1830, was of Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1850. From 1854 to 1859 he was Vice-Principal of the Theological College, Cuddesdon. In 1866 he was Bampton Lecturer, and he published in 1867 his eight Bampton Lectures on the "Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." In 1870 Dr. Liddon was made resident Canon of St. Paul's, in London, and Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis in the University of Oxford. In Church questions Dr. Liddon has inclined to agree with those whose bent is towards the support of authority but with the good churchmen of all forms of opinion he has been always most earnest in upholding a true spirit of religion. Canon Liddon's place is with the most eloquent and earnest of the younger generation of churchmen in the year 1877.

It

These pages do not complete the illustration of English Religion. It pervades our literature. is illustrated in every volume of this Library. Still writer after writer crowds upon the mind, and nothing can be said that shall not suggest how much has been left unsaid.

Still also the Englishmen of foremost genius look to the heart of life, and feel God present in His world. Mr. Carlyle has lived to urge men to be true, and to press forward to the mark of their high calling; to shake off that torpor of spirit which sees only as idle images and forms the daily incidents of a life that has nothing, and least of all its indolences, insignificant; man's inactivity being of all things one of the most momentous in its issues. He has awakened many a young mind over which the fatal drowsiness was stealing, and has sustained many an elder in life's labour. His words have been translated into deeds already through two generations of souls grateful to him for his sturdy help. Kingsley at Cambridge found Thomas Carlyle's. "French Revolution one of the books which beyond all others made him feel God in the world, and man's appointed duty.

Charles

The two English poets who had taken firmest hold upon their countrymen in the year 1850, when William

Wordsworth died, were Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, both vigorous still in 1877. In the year of the death of Wordsworth, each of these poets produced a book that struck the old true note.

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Mr. Browning's poem was entitled "Christmas Eve and Easter Day." He imagined himself on a rainy, gusty Christmas Eve taking shelter in the porch of a poor little chapel on the skirts of a common, Mount Zion,' with Love Lane at the back of it." From squalid alleys and outlying cottages in the gravel-pits, the poor and ignorant flocked to the chapel, and passed him, looking at him as they entered; at last he left the porch and entered too. Preacher and congregation were vulgar, ignorant, noisy; there was a hot smell in the place. He slept, and dreamed that he had flung out of it all, and found on the common outside a lull in the rain and wind, and the moon risen :

My mind was full of the scene I had left, That placid flock, that pastor vociferant, -How this outside was pure and different!"

How far better to worship God in presence of the immensities of nature! Let others seek God in the narrow shrine. Be this way his. Then the moon

cast a wondrous arch of light, and there was a vision of heavenly beauty filling his soul as he gazed with up-turned eyes :

"All at once I looked up with terror.
He was there.

He Himself with His human air,
On the narrow pathway, just before.
I saw the back of Him, no more.-

He had left the chapel, then, as I.

I forgot all about the sky.

No face: only the sight

Of a sweeping garment, vast and white,

With a hem that I could recognise.

I felt no terror, no surprise.

My mind filled with the cataract,

At one bound, of the mighty fact.

I remembered, He did say

Doubtless, that, to this world's end,

Where two or three should meet and pray,
He would be in the midst, their friend:
Certainly He was there with them.

And my pulses leaped for joy

Of the golden thought without alloy,

That I saw His very vesture's hem."

The dreamer pleaded in his dream that he might not be left of Christ for having despised the friends of Christ:

"Less or more,

I suppose that I spoke thus.
When, have mercy, Lord, on us!
The whole Face turned upon me full.
And I spread myself beneath it

As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it

In the cleansing sun, his wool,-
Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness
Some defiled, discoloured web-

So lay I, saturate with brightness.
And when the flood appeared to ebb,

Lo, I was walking, light and swift,
With my senses settling fast and steadying,
But my body caught up in the whirl and drift
Of the vesture's amplitude, still eddying
On, just before me, still to be followed,

As it carried me after with its motion."

So they crossed the world, and the dreamer was left upon the threshold of St. Peter's:

"Why sat I there on the threshold stone
Left till He return, alone,

Save for the garment's extreme fold
Abandoned still to bless my hold ?"

There also were gathered some to whom Christ entered. Errors of Rome are not so dark that no truth shines athwart them:

"Do these men praise Him? I will raise

My voice up to their point of praise!

I see the error, but above

The scope of error, see the love.

Oh, love of those first Christian days!”

Dwelling on love, and resolving to use intellect too, the dreamer was next carried in the motion of the robe to be left at the entrance-door of a lectureroom in a German university. Through the open door he had a glimpse of those who were waiting for the Christmas Eve discourse of the professor, on the Myth of Christ:

"And here when the Critic has done his best,
And the Pearl of Price, at reason's test,

Lay dust and ashes levigable

On the professor's lecture-table,"

The summary is,

"Go home and venerate the Myth

I thus have experimented with—
This Man, continue to adore him
Rather than all who went before him,
And all who ever followed after!'

Surely for this I may praise you, my brother;

Will you take the praise in tears or laughter?
That's one point gained: can I compass another?
Unlearned love was safe from spurning-

Can't we respect your loveless learning?”

Reflection followed in the dreamer's mind that pointed to a mild indifferentism. Then he found himself suddenly in the horrible storm again, and had lost his hold upon the vesture's hem, which he recovered only upon conviction that

"Needs must there be one way, our chief

Best way of worship: let me strive
To find it, and when found, contrive
My fellows also take their share!
This constitutes my earthly care:
God's is above it and distinct."

So the dream ends with an awaking in the little chapel in the spirit of Religion that leaves God to judge the hearts of men, unites itself in brotherhood to all who seek Him, and maintains the pure spirit

of charity without losing sense of the personal need of a definite belief and faith in Christ the Saviour.

Having associated this view of Christian brotherhood with the birth of Christ, the poet then looks to the immortality of man and judgment to come in the companion piece based upon Christ's resurrection, "Easter Day." "How very hard it is to be a Christian!" is the opening thought. On an Easter night he crossed the common by the chapel, questioning of faith, when in a vision the heavens changed, and the Judgment Day had come,

The stern voice of the Judge smote him. Love had been inextricably part of all that was about him in the world, and he had set aside His love whereof all came; forgetting Who, through love, died in the flesh for him. Then he prayed in the vision to the Love of God to give him hope :

"Be all the earth a wilderness!

Only let me go on, go on

Still hoping ever and anon

To reach one eve the Better Land.'
Then did the Form expand, expand-
I knew Him through the dread disguise,
As the whole God within his eyes
Embraced me."

The vision ended, and again there was the daily warfare of the world, again the sense how hard it is to be a Christian :

"But Easter-Day breaks! But
Christ rises! Mercy every way
Is infinite, and who can say?"

In the same year with Robert Browning's "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," appeared Alfred Tennyson's "In Memoriam."

Arthur Henry Hallam, son of Henry Hallam the historian, was born on the 1st of February, 1811; Alfred Tennyson in 1809. Arthur Hallam went to Eton between the years 1822 and 1827; was in Italy for eight months of the years 1827-28, and went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October, 1828. Alfred Tennyson entered to the same college early in 1829, and the friendship out of which the poem sprang was then begun. Arthur Hallam had a fine sense of literature, pure aspirations, and a

poet's nature; of which there is clear evidence in the verse included among the Memorials published after his death by his father. His health was delicate, and he was subject to sudden flushes of blood to the head. This gave habitual and marked contraction to his brow, which is a feature also in portraits of Michael Angelo :

"And over those ethereal eyes

The bar of Michael Angelo."

Arthur Hallam took his degree, and in January, 1832, left Cambridge. He read law for a time in a conveyancer's office; but when the health of another member of the household caused his family to leave England, he went to Germany with them, in August, 1833. He was at Vienna on the 15th of September, 1833, when a rush of blood to the head, more severe than usual, ended his life suddenly, in the twentythird year of his age. The body was brought to England, and buried in the church at Clevedon, Somerset, the home of his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton, of Clevedon Court. Had Arthur Hallam lived, he was to have been married to a sister of his friend's. His love for her is at the heart of two of his published poems, and in one of these is a reference to his delight in her harp-playing. He was often in holiday seasons at the Somersby Vicarage, in which his friend was born and bred, and there is reference to this in the eighty-ninth section of "In Memoriam," recalling the old happy days at Somersby.

The poem of faith in immortality, written In Memory of this parting of lives, is formed by a succession of little "swallow-flights of song," each complete in itself as the expression of one mood of thought or feeling, but all so arranged that they shall represent the rise of faith through a succession of thoughts circling upward, from the grave to God. There is also kept in view throughout the poem the course of time through a given period. The action, so to speak, extends from the winter of 1833 to the early spring of 1836. The significance of times and seasons is associated with the development of feeling from the blank of desolation to a large and cheerful trust in God's rule of the universe; in the future of man here and hereafter,-of each man, and of the whole human race.

The poem opens with a reference to Mr. Longfellow's "Ladder of St. Augustine," in which there is a stanza that expresses musically the main thought of "In Memoriam:'

"I held it truth, with him who sings

To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. But who shall so forecast the years And find in loss a gain to match? Or reach a hand thro' time to catch The far-off interest of tears?"

This rising towards higher things is the purpose of the poem indicated in its opening. It will seek to reach a hand through time towards the far-off interest

In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh sections the first mood of grief carries the mind to the ship that brings home for burial at Clevedon the body of the dead; and in the twelfth section there rises out of the same dwelling upon the dead form borne over the sea the cry, "Is this the end? Is this the end?"

Then begins the gradual transition to the answer to the question. First there is expression of the natural instinct of immortality. If the ship touched land, the passengers came to shore :

"And if along with these should come

The man I held as half-divine; Should strike a sudden hand in mine, And ask a thousand things of home;

I should not feel it to be strange."

Upon this first light suggestion that it is hard for us to conceive extinction of a noble soul, follows a natural image corresponding to the first admission of a thought allied to faith. There was a night of

storm:

"The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea;
And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world."

The arrival of the ship is in the seventeenth section, the burial at Clevedon in the eighteenth and nineteenth. Then follow notes of mourning love, and recollection of the years from 1829 to 1833:

"The path by which we twain did go,

Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,

From flower to flower, from snow to snow."

These sections develope the human sense of the abiding of love, and the relation of love to the higher life of man:

"I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;
"Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

Thus we are led to the first chiming of the Christmas bells across the poem. It is Christmas, 1833, little more than three months after the bereavement:

"This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wish'd no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again:

But they my troubled spirit rule,

For they controll'd me when a boy;

They bring me sorrow touch'd with joy,
The merry, merry bells of yule."

Transition is now through the sacred associations with the birth of Christ, that touch sorrow with joy, still upward to thought "of comfort clasped in truth revealed."

The grief was fresh; it was a sad Christmas Eve in the home; but the songs of the mourners rose in spiritual life until they attained the truths to which the poem is advancing:

"Our voices took a higher range;

Once more we sang: They do not die Nor lose their mortal sympathy, Nor change to us, although they change;

Rapt from the fickle and the frail

With gather'd power, yet the same, Pierces the keen seraphic flame From orb to orb, from veil to veil.'