Yet, when all has been said, "the soul has certain inalienable rights, and the first of these is love"; and where love is true and strong, I do not believe that any parent has a right to cross it save on account of some grave defect of moral character. "Gods and men" would justify a father who should refuse his daughter to a gambler or a drunkard, or a man of known evil life in any direction. She herself would doubtless live to be grateful; or if she died, it were better to die unstained by such an association. Let us consider the happier cases, in which the course of true love meets with no such formidable obstacles, where parents have consented and friends approved and all goes merry as a marriage bell.

Then let the betrothed pair beware lest love should become what a French cynic has called it," selfishness for two." Surely the influence of a great and holy joy should be to enlarge the heart and ennoble the life. Surely to be very happy should make one more tender to the sorrowful. There is a great temptation to lovers to withdraw themselves from other interests, to make the parents and brothers and sisters who have loved a girl all her life feel that they are no longer necessary to her; that her heart is gone from them while her presence is in their midst. But it would be a nobler love, and one that, to my thinking, would promise more for future happiness, which should only hold the old ties more nearly and dearly because of this new one dearer than them all; which would be sedulous to spare the home circle any slight, any sense of loss, beyond the inevitable one of parted presence. Love is the best gift of God, but it should be crowned with honor,-a sovereign who exalts his subjects, not a tyrant who debases them. If I were a man I would prefer to marry a girl who would be careful in no least thing to hurt or slight the home hearts she was leaving, who could afford to wait a little even for her happiness rather than grasp it with unseemly eagerness.

I am old fashioned, you think? No, even now I know of such a love in two young lovers for whom every wind blows good fortune, yet who pause on the threshold of the new, bright life to leave tender memories of their sweet thoughtfulness in the life behind them.

Complete. From "Ourselves and Our Neighbors." By permission of Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, successors to Roberts Brothers. Copyright by Roberts Brothers 1887.

MAX MÜLLER

(1823-1900)

RIEDRICH MAXIMILIAN MÜLLER, one of the most celebrated philologists of the nineteenth century, died in the closing year of the century, full of years and honors. He was born in Dessau, Germany, December 6th, 1823. His father was Wilhelm Müller, the well-known German poet, from whom no doubt he inherited the faculties which made him a great linguist. After studying at Leipsic, Berlin, and Paris, he settled in England, becoming a Professor at Oxford, and remaining there until his death. From 1868 to 1900 he was professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford, and by such works as "Chips from a German Workshop” he succeeded in popularizing the science of language as it never had been popularized before. The list of his learned works is a long one and his essays, contributed to the reviews and as yet uncollected, would make an important volume.

are.

LANGUAGE SCIENCE AND HISTORY

ITH the light which the study of the antiquity of language has shed on the past, the whole world has been changed. We know now not only what we are, but whence we We know our common Aryan home. We know what we carried away from it, and how our common intellectual inheritance has grown and grown from century to century till it has reached a wealth, unsurpassed anywhere, amounting in English alone to two hundred and fifty thousand words. What does it matter whether we know the exact latitude and longitude of that Aryan home, though among reasonable people there is, I believe, very little doubt as to its whereabouts “somewhere in Asia." The important point is that we know that there was such a home, and that we can trace the whole intellectual growth of the Aryan family back to roots which sprang from a common soil. And we can do this not by mere guesses only, or theoretically, but by facts, that is, historically. Take any word or thought that now vibrates through our mind, and we know now how it was first struck in countries far away, and in times so distant that hardly any chronology can

reach them.

If anywhere it is in language that we may say, We are what we have been. In language everything that is new is old, and everything that is old is new. That is true evolution, true historical continuity. A man who knows his language, and all that is implied by it, stands on a foundation of ages. He feels the past under his feet, and feels at home in the world of thought, a loyal citizen of the oldest and widest republic.

It is this historical knowledge of language, and not of language only, but of everything that has been handed down to us by an uninterrupted tradition from father to son, it is that kind of knowledge which I hold that our universities and schools should strive to maintain. It is the historical spirit with which they should try to inspire every new generation. As we trace the course of a mighty river back from valley to valley, as we mark its tributaries, and watch its meanderings till we reach its source, or, at all events, the watershed from which its sources spring, in the same manner the historical school has to trace every current of human knowledge from century to century back to its fountain head, if that is possible, or, at all events, as near to it as the remaining records of the past will allow. The true interest of all knowledge lies in its growth. The very mistakes of the past form the solid ground on which the truer knowledge of the present is founded. Would a mathematician be a mathematician who had not studied his Euclid? Would an astronomer be an astronomer who did not know the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, and had not worked his way through its errors to the truer views of Copernicus? Would a philosopher be a philosopher who had never grappled with Plato and Aristotle? Would a lawyer be a lawyer who had never heard of Roman law? There is but one key to the present-that is the past. There is but one way to understand the continuous growth of the human mind and to gain a firm grasp of what it has achieved in any department of knowledge—that is to watch its historical development.

No doubt, it will be said, there is no time for all this in the hurry and flurry of our modern life. There are so many things to learn that students must be satisfied with results, without troubling themselves how these results were obtained by the labors of those who came before us. This really would mean that our modern teaching must confine itself to the surface, and keep aloof from what lies beneath. Knowledge must be what is called cut and dry, if it is to prove serviceable in the open market.

My experience is the very opposite. The cut-and-dry knowledge which is acquired from the study of manuals or from socalled crammers is very apt to share the fate of cut flowers. It makes a brilliant show for one evening, but it fades and leaves nothing behind. The only knowledge worth having, and which lasts us for life, must not be cut and dry, but, on the contrary, it should be living and growing knowledge, knowledge of which we know the beginning, the middle, and the end, knowledge of which we can produce the title deeds whenever they are called for. That knowledge may be small in appearance, but, remember, the knowledge required for life is really very small.

We learn, no doubt, a great many things, but what we are able to digest, what is converted in succum et sanguinem, into our very lifeblood, and gives us strength and fitness for practical life, is by no means so much as we imagine in our youth. There are certain things which we must know, as if they were part of ourselves. But there are many other things which we simply put into our pockets, which we can find there whenever we want them, but which we do not know as we must know, for instance, the grammar of a language. It is well to remember this distinction between what we know intuitively, and what we know by a certain effort of memory only, for our success in life depends greatly on this distinction on our knowing what we know, and knowing what we do not know, but what, nevertheless, we can find if wanted.

It has often been said that we only know thoroughly what we can teach, and it is equally true that we can only teach what we know thoroughly.

From "Some Lessons of Antiquity.»

IT

WOMEN IN MOHAMMED'S PARADISE

T HAS often been said that a religion must be false which teaches what the Koran teaches about a future life. I do not think so. In every religion we must make allowances for anthropomorphic imagery, nor would it be possible to describe the happiness of Paradise except in analogy with human happiness. Why, then, exclude the greatest human happiness, companionship with friends, of either sex, if sex there be in the next world? Why assume the pharisaical mien of contempt for what

has been our greatest blessing in this life, while yet we speak in very human imagery of the city of Holy Jerusalem, twelve thousand furlongs in length, in breadth and height, and the walls thereof one hundred and forty-four cubits, and the building of the wall of jasper and the city of pure gold, and the foundations of the wall garnished with all manner of precious stones, jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, chrysoprasus, jacinth, and amethyst? If such childish delights as that of women in certain so-called precious stones are admitted in the life to come, why should the higher joys of life be excluded from the joys of heaven? If Mohammed placed the loveliness of women above the loveliness of gold and amethyst, why should he be blamed for it? People seem to imagine that Mohammed knew no other joys of heaven, and represented Paradise as a kind of heavenly harem. Nothing can be more mistaken. In many

places when he speaks of Paradise the presence of women is not even mentioned, and where they are mentioned, they are generally mentioned as wives or friends. Thus we read, "Verily the fellows of Paradise upon that day shall be employed in enjoy. ment, they and their wives, in shade upon thrones, reclining; therein they shall have fruits, and they shall have what they may call for, Peace, a speech from the merciful God." Or, "For these shall enter Paradise, and shall not be wronged at all, gardens of Eden, which the Merciful has promised to his servants in the unseen; verily, this promise ever comes to pass. Is it so very wrong, then, that saints are believed to enter Paradise with their wives, as when we read, "O my servants, enter ye into paradise, ye and your wives, happy"?

In this and similar ways the pure happiness of the next life is described in the Koran, and if, in a few passages, not only wives but beautiful maidens also are mentioned among the joys of heaven, why should this rouse indignation? True, it shows a less spiritual conception of the life to come than a philosopher would sanction, but, however childish, there is nothing indelicate or impure in the description of the Houris.

The charge of sensuality is a very serious charge in the Western world, and it is difficult for us to make allowances for the different views on the subject among Oriental people. From our point of view, Mohammed himself would certainly be called a sensualist. He sanctioned polygamy, and he even allowed himself a larger number of wives and slaves than to his followers.